Happy Birthday, Puppy the Cat!

Happy 13th or 14th birthday, Puppy! :)

First World Market Shopping Trip!

As I mentioned yesterday, over the weekend, my mom and I went shopping and I went to World Market for the first time! It was so so fun :)

I was a little tired from other shopping at eating all this at Maggiano’s:

I have shopped online at World Market before, and my awesome friend Janis has gotten me some cool gifts from there, but this was my first time at the store and I loved it.

Inside the store:

Here are some things I loved…  (sorry for blurry photos! I got a new phone and I’m getting the hang of using its camera.)

All the knobs!

The Anthropologie-esque blankets:

Chalkboard jars! (And just lots of jars in general) :)

These cool chalkboard labels that seem like they could be used for all kinds of fun…and could be easy to DIY:

This seems boring, but I loved their fun colored swag kit/cords for hanging/paper lanterns! Why not have fun cords to go with your fun shades?

I realized that place card holders would be an excellent addition to my “party box” to use for labeling dishes and appetizers:

And I enjoyed their variety of organizational trolleys. I don’t know where I’d put them yet but they seem like they’d be so so cool in a craft room…or really anywhere.

Of course there was much more, but these were my personal highlights. I feel like I am the last person who hadn’t yet been to World Market. Is that true? Do you love it there, too? What are your favorite random things there?

HomeGoods Shopping

My mom and I had a pretty fun and hilarious day together over the weekend that involved a trip to HomeGoods, a few different Marshalls stores, a nice meal at Maggiano’s, and my first ever trip to World Market. :)

Here are some of the HomeGoods/Marshalls highlights:

We loved all these patterned accent chairs, especially the blue ones :) If only I had a place for them.

They had a pretty good selection of knobs this time…I especially loved these “mercury glass” ones. I don’t have a “need” for them now…but if they had been on clearance, I would have bought all of them! (If someone else wouldn’t have beat me to it, that is!)

I thought this 2-tier tray in the garden department would make a great addition to a craft room…or anywhere you want some cool looking storage/organization.

I love to look at their throw quilts/blankets, though I usually don’t consider buying them because I could make them myself.  Since I’m really trying to get the living room “done”, though, some of these really tempted me!

I did end up taking home this blue ceramic goldfish (blue goldfish?) Not that I need another blue goldfish in my home…but it was just too perfect! I will get a better (i.e. non-phone) picture of it sometime when I get it displayed somewhere! :)

My first World Market experience is coming up next!

Done any good shopping lately?

Baby Cardinal Follow-Up

I thought you might want a little closure on my baby cardinal adventure.

I knew the parents and the babies were making themselves right at home when I checked on them the day after I posted about them last and the babies wanted me to feed them:

I checked on them every day, but I tried not to be too invasive. I was working so hard to keep my animals away from them, I didn’t want to be a hypocrite and bother them too much myself!

They were fine and chirpy and the parents definitely kept feeding them and doing their best to distract all of us away from the nest.   Here’s Momma Cardinal. (I’m sad I didn’t have my bigger zoom lens on to get a better picture of her.)

Within just a few days, it was amazing to see how big the little cardinals had gotten! This picture was taken on June 2, just 2 days after the hungry picture above.

Big and fluffy, right? And perched right there on the edge of the nest like a big bird! :)  And I loved how he would look at me and turn his head to follow me as I tried to see him from different angles.

This was the last day I saw him/her.  Mom and Dad are gone, too, so I hope that’s a good sign. :) There were 3 baby birds originally, but I only saw this big guy grow up. One of his siblings was dead in the nest, and I don’t know what happened to the third.  I read that cardinals leave their nests and learn to fly relatively early, so I hope he/she got out there and into the big wide world safely!

Now I can go back to doing normal things in my life and not continually fret about “my” baby cardinals. :)

Happy Seven and a Half Birthday, Shadow!

Shadow gave me quite the scare last night by wandering out of our yard and not returning until sometime in the morning. Thankfully he’s back and he’s fine and hopefully he didn’t get into too much trouble while he was away.

Today on his birthday (really his adoption day), he celebrated by sleeping in one of his favorite spots…up against the drywall in our hallway.

He was tired enough (probably from his escapades out in the neighborhood) to actually let me take some pictures of him.

And here’s just a picture of goofy Grounder and slow, tired Shadow. This is what it looks like a lot around here. :)

Happy birthday, Shadow!

Baby Cardinals!

I know I have other things to write about, but I’m distracted by the baby cardinals living next to my kitchen door.

They are in a honeysuckle bush (? is it a bush? a vine? just a plant?) that’s really right next to our kitchen door.

Their nest was previously very well hidden in the honeysuckle, but after a bad storm the other night, I found the nest had tipped over some and all the babies were on the ground!  I tried putting their nest back upright (and securing it with a second piece of trellis! ha! I am not a nest-builder.), but after mom and dad came to feed the babies, I found that the nest had been tipped the other way and 2 of the 3 babies had fallen again.  Luckily there was a nest “next door” in the bush, just a few inches away, so I moved the remainder of their nest and the babies to that old nest. Momma and Papa Cardinal don’t seem to mind, and so far everything seems peachy. They’re not quite as hidden as they were before, so I hope everything stays good.  (I’ve also “built” a little barrier of garbage cans and an old door to keep Grounder away from them!)

Here are the babies in their new-ish nest after I saved them for the 2nd time yesterday.

Three cute/ugly little babies.

I was able to get one picture of the eggs before they hatched, too!

Again, their first nest was super well hidden (and of course, I didn’t want to panic Momma and Papa by being too invasive).  In the above picture, I zoomed in on the computer to find the eggs. Here’s the picture without lots of cropping.

Isn’t it nearly impossible to see the eggs? They’re in the lower left corner.

Besides the headache of trying to keep Grounder away from the nest, it’s been fun seeing Momma and Papa Cardinal try to distract me and the dogs.

I’ve never gotten to see cardinals so up close before!  Generally they do a good job of distracting Grounder, too.  He'll sit for hours, absolutely focused and watch some point in the trees (like doggie TV) that I can only assume is a parent cardinal taunting him. It’s pretty great.

I’m happy I was (so far) able to help these little guys along and that their parents are on board with the change of address.  Here’s hoping they actually make it to flying!  Has any wildlife been distracting you lately?

New Toy: Holga Lens for DSLR

We all have fun playing with the fun filters on Instagram and similar programs, so when, during my daily immersion in the internet one day, I found a plastic Holga lens to fit on a DSLR, I thought it might be a fun thing to play with.

I got the blue version :) because I love blue and because I didn’t really care if it looked a little nutty on my camera (there is a black version, as well as lots of other colors!). It’s a toy lens after all!

Before I got it, I read some reviews, so I was prepared to mess around with manual settings to be able to actually take pictures.  (Thanks, Shoot Fly Shoot, for teaching me how to mess with those!) 

Puppy the cat in the yard

Shadow the dog

Flowering bush

Siberian Wallflowers

The opening on the camera side of the lens is the tiniest hole ever, and the whole thing is plastic, so there are no aperture settings.  You adjust the brightness or darkness of the picture with shutter speed and ISO settings, and even then, it pretty much only works outside. :)  The day I took these pictures was sort of overcast. I can’t wait to get to try it when there’s some cool bright spots and shadows.

Here are some pictures where I was changing up the settings.

1/50 sec, ISO 800

1/15 sec, ISO 800

1/50 sec, ISO 800

1/25 sec, ISO  800

There’s a “focus ring” on the lens…I put it in quotes because it’s pretty primitive :) and really, the point of this lens is that it’s a toy lens, so I wasn’t too worried if the pictures were really in focus or not. I did notice when I took some flower close-ups it looked better when I had the lens set to “portrait” or whatever on the focus ring. The whole thing’s plastic, so I did have to be really careful when I was adjusting anything, for fear that it might pop off the camera! :)

I definitely want to keep playing with this lens and having fun with it. What do you think? Like the pictures? Would you want to play around with a lens like this?

Bigger pictures on Flickr.