Early signs of Spring...

Spring hangs her infant blossoms on the trees,

Rock'd in the cradle of the western breeze.

                                              --WILLIAM COWPER

Good morning friends! I hope that this finds you well and thinking of Spring, as I am. We have had warm weather for the past few days, so I took advantage of that by doing some yard clean-up. While out there, I took some early Spring photos of some scenes below The Perch.

First leaves on the crab apple tree...



Buds on the plum tree, and the greening

of the grass...

Daffodils in full bloom...

White hellebore planted in the shade garden.

These start blooming in late Winter, and continue

blooming up until the weather gets really hot...

Daylilies starting to peek out of the soil...

Angelique tulips popping up. I start tulips in pots

because the moles and voles in these parts tend

to devour tulip bulbs...

Getting ready to start some dahlias.

 I cut up cheap mini blinds from the dollar

store for plant stakes, write the plant info on

them in pencil, and when I transfer the plants

to the garden, the stakes go with them. I find

that they will last for years, and pencil works

better than markers. Plus, they are so

much cheaper than the "real" plant stakes

that you purchase. (I have this thing about

being able to identify all the plants in my garden.

So what if in Winter all you see is a bunch of

white plant stakes sticking out of the soil?!)...

Well, I had my root canal on Monday, and aside from a headache that didn't end until this morning, my tooth and I are doing well! Hope you are too! Thanks for coming by.

Savannah...a quick post...

Well, this morning I go for my charming root canal (yes, the tooth is still having fits with cold sensitivity), so I thought I would quickly just say hello.

On our return trip from Florida, last week, we spent two days in Savannah, GA. We stayed at a KOA campground just south of the City, and took one day to do the tour. I had been before, but my husband had not.

The weather was cold all week, even in Florida, but on the day we did the tour it actually reached 70 outside, so all was good. The second day was freezing, so we just went for a drive.

I did not actually take pictures, but here are just a couple that I took in City Market to send to my granddaughter, as she loves horses.

I hope that you have a great day!

The 90th birthday party and some celebration ideas...

Greetings from The Perch! Well, we are finally back in NC, having returned on Thursday from the festivities in Florida. Below are a few pictures from the week.

Packed and ready to leave home with auto hooked up to motor home...

The party was last Saturday, and went really well. After appetizers and drinks, we served a Honey Baked Ham along with a fried turkey, cooked by my son-in-law, Shawn. Side dishes were made by various members of the family.

Before serving the cake, this is what we did. Remember the tags that I had sent out with the invitations (you can see them here)? Well, I had directed those invited to write down a few memories of time spent with my dad and return them to me. I tied them with ribbons that matched the Legacy Book (you can see it here). I took out the tags and told my dad that we were going to have a little fun with him and play a game in which he was the only contestant. The name of the game was "Just what do people REALLY think about you, and who said WHAT?!"  I read the tags one-by-one, leaving out any names and identifying information, and asked him to guess who wrote the comments on each tag. Now, you have to know my dad to appreciate this. He is as sharp as a tack and can remember every joke that he ever heard since about 1930. Would you believe that out of about 20 tags, he guessed 18!

Here are the tags...



...and here I am reading them to Dad...

The next day I put all the tags in the pockets of the Legacy Book for him.

Here is the cake, which was a delicious

Hazelnut Cream Cake made by the bakery

in Publix (a wonderful grocery store in the

South)...

And the blowing out of the candles...

This is the first time that the complete four generations of our family were together in almost forever, as my brother's whole family came out from Seattle and NY.

The oldest and youngest members of

the family, Dad and my newest grandson,

Jason...



Something that I put together the last week before we left is this little book called "Roaring Twenties". During my quest for party ideas, I came across a website called The People History, website here. The owner of this site has done a wonderful job of amassing a wealth of information on previous decades, and provides all kinds of facts on the fashions, homes, appliances, etc., of each. So, I printed out a bunch of the pages and pasted them into the little booklet shown below. If you click to enlarge you can see what kinds of things you will see on the website. Also, for $1.95 they will customize a summary of the highlights of the year of the person's birth, and personalize the top of it as you wish. They then send it to you in a PDF format for you to print out.  I used this for the first two pages of the book, also shown below.

When I was preparing for this party, I had pinned various ideas to one of my Pinterest boards. I am showing these pictures because there had been a lot of re-pins of the 90th birthday party ideas that I found. Those of you trying to plan a birthday party for a senior know how hard it is to come up with some suitable ideas. It's not like we can use a Star Wars or Miss Kitty theme now, is it? I gave this book to Dad along with the Legacy Book. (Sorry for the bad photography, but I took these in the motor home where the lighting was not great.)

For the part of the book below, I did a search on eBay

under "newspaper 1923", found headlines of the year

in old newspapers that were for sale, copied and pasted them

into a Word document, adjusted the sizes to be similar,

and pasted them into the book. (I hope this was not illegal,

as they were only for this book and I will not profit by this!)

A good time was had by all at the party! To protect the innocent (!!), I did not show photos of all who attended, but we had about 20 people.

Thanks for spending some time with me. Time to go out and do some yard clean-up...nice weather is finally here for a few days!

Eleven Days of Sharing with Friends, Day 11

Hello to all. Well, here is the last day of my picture-posting. I hope that my life will return to its normal schedule shortly. In the meantime, though it may be Winter, we are thinking of warmer weather, so here are some beach photos, though they were actually taken of children in studios (maybe because it was still Winter!!).

This little boy is yours!

Eleven Days of Sharing with Friends, Day 10

Hello! Because it's still Winter, here is a picture of some Winter children photos that I have.

And this little girl is for you...

And here is the reverse of this photo. Sometimes the photographers' logos are as beautiful as their photographs...

Stay warm!