I Like #306

 Welcome to another week of things to like!  On Saturday I went down to north Texas to celebrate a friend's 40th birthday.  It was just my sister, two more friends and me, and we had a great time- stayed in a cabin near a lake and just hung out the whole day playing board games, blowing bubbles, sitting in the hot tub.  The party was bubble themed, so I made a champagne cake for the birthday girl.  I'd never made one before.  It was quite tasty but did call for 6 egg whites.  It was just a super fun time!

I've been harvesting yummy cherry tomatoes from the garden, and then this week I picked two big jalapeños and two giant zuchinni.  Very exciting.  

I used a little bit of one of them to make my favorite garlic and parmesan broiled zuchinni slices

The flowers are still going strong, but it's getting very hot and not as rainy now, so things are looking a little wilty.  I worry we're in the time of year where everyone sort of limps along

In trying to put away some fabric that my sister's mother-in-law kindly destashed to me, I went down one of those studio clean-out rabbit holes on Sunday afternoon, everything got way worse before it got better, but I did get stuff put back away, and I love inheriting fabric and supplies that would otherwise be destined for the dump.

The pups are good,  I spent quite a bit of time this week working on a project with a June 30 deadline so there were lots of pictures of them "helping" 

I also finally got a blog post up this week about the show my mom and I have currently at the Pacific Northwest Quilt museum, so head over here to take a look at that!  I hope no one is too hot and that if it's summer where you are, the AC is working!

Life in the Mountain West at Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum

Earlier this summer my mom kindly traveled to the pacific northwest (on her way to Alaska) to hang the two person show she and I are currently having at the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum in LaConner, WA.  It runs through July 30, so if any of you who are traveling through Washington this summer, I encourage you to stop and see it.  There are two other exhibitions going on at the same time that also look fantastic.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see it in person but my mom sent me these pictures from the opening.  It's always so fun to see our work hanging together, and it's a great venue.

 

My mom in a dress she had printed based on a photo of one of her quilts!

I Like #305

Welcome to another week of things to like.  We've definitely entered true summer here-  starting to get hot, less rain, lots of sun, and still muggy.  But lots of good stuff to like.  Starting with Spooky!

And I've given up on making the bed without him, I just make it over him.

The garden is still blooming at a great pace, I cut this bunch of zinnias and the second bunch of dahlias this week.

Found this delightful frog in the garden after the rain the other day.  Spooky chased him but luckily there are lots of nooks and crannies in the garden so he escaped into one.

I also made my SAQA benefit auction quilt this week.  I'd been playing around with pom poms and decided to do some color shift ones for the quilt.  It was fun!  It's especially gratifying to trim them to the right shape (though kind of messy).

I thought they looked like dandelion seed heads, but then my friend said they looked like tribbles!  Which is way better.

Click on over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!
 

I Like #304

Today's prompt from LeeAnna is about Father's day and memories of our fathers.  I'm so very very lucky to still have and be very close to both of my parents and right now they are traveling through Alaska for several months.  

They just got finished driving the Dalton highway up from Fairbanks to north of the Arctic Circle and apparently it was very very beautiful but the road was very dusty dirty!

I have lots of fun memories of my dad. My mom and sister and I were all skiiers and my dad wasn't, but I remember at our ski races, he would put on a down vest and a pair of tennis shoes and hike up the ski run to the bottom of the race course so he could cheer for us.  And lest you think he was too sweet, I also have very vivid memories from times my mom was out of town of him running up and down the hallway between my room and my sister's room madly flipping our light switches on and off and singing "ITS TIME TO GET UP ITS TIME TO GET UP ITS TIME TO GET UP" to the tune of Reveille.  And of him hiking along with us in the high desert and gathering up the itchy scratchy petals of fourwing saltbush and throwing them at us by the handful.

We've still been getting tons of rain, and my flowers are doing the most amazing amazing things.  These are Dahlias I cut early in the week.

Along with some zinnias.

But then this amazing giant dinnerplate dahlia really opened up.  She's 8.5" across with the most gorgeous curling petals and colr range.  I was going to leave her in the garden, but we have severe weather forecast for tonight (hail, thunderstorms, and tornados), so I went ahead and cut the few more that were open in the garden so at least they wouldn't get hail damaged.  Now they're brightening my office.

The pups are good-earlier this week they were trying to help a lot while I was sewing.  And late last week I spent a few days at a conference here in OKC, but I did get a chance to go for a short hike early on Saturday with Cash and Brett before we got rained out.

Fingers crossed we don't have damage from tonight's storms, and click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

 

I Like #303

 Welcome to another week of things to like!  The best thing about this week is my wonderful sister!  She came up to visit with the kids this weekend and we had a blast.  We did some fun crafts and went to the local aquatic center for swimming and water slides, and played games together.  My sister helped me re-arrange my living room (so happy about that!!!) and then because she's wonderful, she cleaned my living room windows and sliding glass door.  Wowza!!  It was just really nice to be with her and the kids!

The pups are ok-  they like snuggling on the new-to-me couch my sister gave me.

The first dahlia of the year is blooming in my garden.  So lovely!

My  squash plant is growing,  hopefully later this year I'll have zuchini!

Here's my sister snuggling with spooky on my porch,  he really has no sense of personal space.  I love the wacky face he's making!

Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

I Like #302

 This was really a wonderful wonderful week.  My friend Carolyn was here visiting from New Zealand.  She and I became good friends in college, but hadn't seen each other apart from Zooms since 2003 (way to make me feel old).  She's also very good friends with a friend of mine here, another geologist from OU.  Carolyn came and Brett and I spent about 5 days with her, some here in OKC and some down in the Wichita mountains.  It was really wonderful.  I haven't laughed this much in I don't know how long.

We started on Friday afternoon at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History.  It's a great museum, full of wonderful fossils and other exhibits, but the best part is that Brett organized some vertebrate and invertebrate paleontologists from the Department of Geology to give us a backstage tour.  It was so amazing to see all their wonderful specimen rooms and museum storage and collections and all the fantastic fossils!!  The three of us are very nerdy, and the fossils were very cool.

We left for the Wichita National Wildlife Refuge on Saturday morning and had great hiking all weekend.  We got rained on a little bit, and then on Sunday it poured for a couple hours in the middle of the day during which we went on a search for the Meers Fault, but by and large it was really great.  The wildflowers were just gorgeous, better than I've ever seen them.  We saw lots of wildlife, only a couple of ticks, and stayed at a lovely airbnb with a wonderful screened in porch and good air conditioning.

We did the Charon Gardens hike (one of my favorites) on Saturday, and saw a wonderful eastern collared lizard.  They're so colorful!

Since Carolyn and Brett are both geologists we learned and talked a lot about the rocks of the area, and made a little side stop to see these diabase dikes,  where the black diabase (black stripes in the foreground and up the cliff face) intruded into the granite.  Apparently in this case, in some places the diabase intruded before the granite had fully cooled so the diabase could sort of blob off (like in a lava lamp).  Very cool.

On Tuesday we went to the OKC Bombing Memorial and Museum.  I'd never been to the museum, it was a wonderful museum, but very moving and sad.

We'd taken Carolyn to a pretty hole-in-the-wall-but-super-delicious bbq place down in the Wichitas, so on our last night we skewed widely in the other direction and had drinks and appetizers at Tellers, a restaurant in the lobby of the gorgeous historic First National Bank building.  It's filled with wonderful art deco details outside and in.  It makes me feel fancy just walking in.

And we wrapped up her trip with a OKC Dodgers baseball team.  It was fun, relaxing and they won!

It was just such fun to get to see her and have a wonderful long weekend with the three of us.  So much laughing!  

I hope there has been some laughing in your week!  Click on over to LeeAnna for more things to like!