Hey! I Thought it was Spring!!

I was driving into the garage and noticed my snowdrops emerging from the melting snow:

They are looking a little sad after having a ton of snow on them, but they will be able to photosynthesize and make food for next year’s flowers. That’s more than I can say about my poor birch tree; the top broke off and it’s looking pretty beat up. I might give it a year to see what it can do, if anything, to recover. It was my little patch of Michigan here in Colorado. When I was a kid, birch forests were everywhere in Michigan, before the birch borer came to town. They are one of my favorite trees, fragile babies that they are. The tree service people are working from sunup to sundown trying to take care of the snow casualties. It’s striking out on the eastern plains; you can see for miles and there are NO trees unless there is a stream or a house. Late Spring snows and early Autumn snows are hard on the landscape plants; throw in 40 mph winds and it’s a matter of when it happens, not if. I’m grateful that it rained for at least 12 hours before it started snowing. It could have been so much worse!

We’ve had this picture since Halloween, but haven’t used it yet:

This shirt bewilders me. Why someone would be so excited about Custer South Dakota that they would buy or wear this shirt and carry it two states away to Colorado! I just did a quick Google search, and I could be excited to visit the Jewel Cave National Monument and the Black Hills State Park located near Custer. But, I’ve seen Mount Rushmore and have the t-shirt to prove it—and no, it’s not this shirt! I don’t think I could carry off that freaky ruffled collar.

I was interested in these old wooden boxes, with the nice lids and dovetail details:

There were piles of plain ones, but I thought you would like to see the old decals that someone slapped on them, probably in the 1960s or ’70s. I flipped a box over to see if it had a mark:

Shaklee, a name from the multi-level marketing distributor business tree (think Tupperware, Amway, etc.) started back in the 1950s. Since these boxes were made in Taiwan, they’ve been bouncing around for a while. Maybe you were supposed to store your vitamins and protein powders in them. I sure wasn’t interested for $6, even if I have a few decals of my own to use up.

I’m including my copy of this picture just to prove a point:

Kathy and I were separated at birth; I’m positive! It doesn’t matter that I’m years older and that she was born in Italy! We went to ARC on different days, and we both took a picture of this shelf! I laughed when I saw her picture last week. Here’s a link so you can read the accompanying commentary if you missed it. I just shudder to think of the house where all of these lived with god knows what else. Clowns and bears if I had to make a guess.

I was mesmerized by the body language of this amateurish sculpture:

Hey! Buy a clue, clownboy! She looks like she would rather kiss your horse! I honestly don’t know why her hand is on her belly, nausea? I do recognize the hand on his shoulder trying to give him a stiff arm so she can escape. This was gone the next time I went to ARC; maybe she shoved him right off the shelf.

There was quite a bit of bad statuary on view that week:

I think Basset Hounds are adorable and still think this is bad. At first glance I thought that he was wearing a sweater with all the stipes and straight lines painted on him. He has the saddest eyes because he knows that his nostrils are the weirdest thing about him. Why are they white? He needs to go to a good home and get a complete new paint job by someone who as an iota of artistic talent. This is just pitiful. OMG, I just noticed his white toenails. They painted a million dots on his muzzle for whiskers, and couldn’t outline his toenails?

I give this an A for creativity:

and a B- for execution. Why aren’t there crayons all the way across the top of the canvas, since the colors run all the way across? I’m not impressed with using shipping tape to attach the crayons, either. A glue gun can be your friend! On the other hand, maybe the crayons were glued on, and when this picture got handled roughly at the thrift store and a quarter of the crayons fell off, the backroom sorters got out their tape. If so, I revise my grading and will give you an A. I love the little robot and his red umbrella!

Well, that’s it for this week—short and not-so-sweet. I did get enough pictures for an Easter post next week. It will seem like old times, sigh. I’m hoping that we will be shopping together sooner rather than later! I’m up for some garage saling. You don’t know what you have till it’s gone!