368 Photos of Stonehenge?

My hubby went to England two years ago and had a great time. He took my little Nikon Coolpix camera with him and really enjoyed the freedom of having a small camera in his pocket. He usually carries around a big backpack with his fancy dancy Nikon D60 SLR camera, but this time he wanted to be a bit less weighed down.
I have to admit, he did take some beautiful pictures, even if he did get carried away a bit. Actually that's not quite accurate. He got carried away a lot. For instance, he took 368 pictures of Stonehenge. And almost all of them were good shots.


I can almost imagine him jogging along the walk, snapping shots every 3 seconds to get the complete anthology.
I made the mistake a few days ago, of asking him whatever came of those several thousand pictures he took in the UK.
"I just dumped them on the computer." he replied.
I asked him if he had any plans for them and he thought for a few moments, then shrugged his shoulders (which I"ve learned in a lifetime of marriage means "not me honey, but how about you?").
So just for a laugh, I started to go through the huge file titled "Stones".
I've been having a lot of fun with a program called Storymaker Plus, that let's me easily make up fast 12 x 12 pages, for my scrapbooks and I made a few for Stonehenge, uploaded them to Costco, and then presented them to him as a surprise.
They turned out great and he was very suitably impressed.
Is anyone else out there doing 12 x 12 collages at Costco?

An On-line store? ?

I was sitting in my living room (the coldest room in my house) with 3 of my crafty friends. We were sipping our way through an iced bottle of apple cider, complaining about the politics going on, in a few craft fairs we all sold at, when something very unusual happened. The hubby joined the conversation.

Now I will admit I hadn't even noticed him enter the room. Usually when my friends are over, he is hidden away downstairs, but now, here he was, talking with the girls.

We were all so flabergasted, that none of us actually heard what he had said. We sat there awkwardly, silently staring at him, until he spoke again. "Well, why not. It won't cost you very much, not if you go together on it. What have you got to lose?"
"Sweetie" my best friend Julie spoke up, thank goodness. We've known her forever and she's always had him wrapped around her finger. "I'm sorry but, I missed the first thing you said." Delivered with her best "oh gosh, silly me" look, my husband repeated himself happily.
"I said why don't you open an on-line store? You girls are always messaging each other anyways. Why not use your computers to run a store? I know a guy who sells homemade fishing lures on the internet. . ."
And with that the crowd took over and somewhere in the middle of the store conversation, I looked over and noticed that he was no longer in the room. I do wish I knew how he slips in and out so quietly. By the time the cider was gone, we'd talked the life out of the store idea and moved onto something a bit more plausible, something that didn't involve a huge learning curve. With kids, grandkids, real jobs and craft work, none of us have the time to take on something as complicated as setting up an online store.
But you know, now that everyone is gone and I look at my summer's project, a large pile of really nice bamboo scarves (isn't it incredible that they can make yarn out of something as hard as bamboo - and it's a naturally renewable resource) I'm starting to wonder if this internet store idea just might fly.
Has anyone else made an on-line store?

Burn that coffee for me!

I am sitting here pondering the prose in my blog, feeling moderately uncomfortable about the spelling errors and syntax problems that I have let slip in and yet not feeling poorly enough to push the edit button and repair them.

I see the errors as indicators of character, akin to the stress marks people put on fake antiques, whipping them with motorcycle chains and kicking them with cork boots, to make them look old, rather than new. I look old and let me tell you it isn't all that it is cracked up to be. Given my choice, I would prefer to resemble the furniture, before the motorcycle chains, but then that is a subject for a different rant.

I was also thinking about Starbucks coffee, as I sip at a big yellow mug full of Tim Hortons coffee. I was thinking about how the people who roast the coffee beans for Starbucks must feel everyday. Could there be any job satisfaction roasting the coffee beans for Starbucks. Get up every morning, take the bus to the coffee bean roasterium and load up the roaster dealy bop with the finest coffee beans. Well, maybe not the finest, because apparently, those are the beans made from beans that have been ingested by some animal, pigs I think, then harvested from the poop, roasted and then savoured, by some flake who thinks drinking roast pig poop is the way to drink coffee.

Anyway, there he is roasting away with the almost best coffee beans. When they look really good, he takes some out, grinds them up on the spot and makes a cup of coffee to test the flavour. MMMMmmmmm this is good coffee . . . it is even good enough for Tim Hortons, it is so good. OK! Turn up the oven and roast those beans another 2 hours and they will be burned enough for Starbucks coffee.

What Starbucks does to innocent, wholesome, coffee beans is criminal. There ought to be a law against making great coffee beans into burned up Starbucks shrivel beans! There is so much wrong with the world, it would be so simple to make one thing at least, right. Starbucks, turn down the heat! Pull those beans out of the roaster when they look like coffee! Do this and Starbucks could make a cup of java almost as good as Tim Hortons coffee. Well, almost as good.