Japan Quake Appeal

An Etsy acquaintance, Rita from Surfing Silver, is participating in a wonderful raffle going on right now.  To enter to win one of Rita's beautiful pieces of jewelry, pictured above, you must make a donation to an organization helping to give relief to the devastation caused by the Japan earthquake and tsunami. 

  

To learn which organizations to donate to and how to enter, please go to this blog post jojoebi.blogspot.com/2011/03/mothers-day-love.html.   The deadline is April 4th. 

The woman running the raffle is a Etsy artist from Japan.  While on jojoebi.blogspot, be sure to also click on the Japan Quake Appeal button.

Will you plant a garden?

We usually have a garden, but not this year.   Besides time flying by at lightening speed, the garden needs a serious boost of fertilizer.  We were going to plant a cover crop last fall, but that did not happen.  We are looking at putting in a spring cover crop, but need to move quickly on that too!.   So this year we will be visiting the local farmers markets to buy produce.  There are quite a few in our area so it should be fun.

The painting below was inspired by a photo in a seed catalog.  It took me much longer than I would have liked, but I finished it, something I seem to have trouble with these days.   It's not listed in my Etsy shop yet, but it will be soon.  

 

Seeing this bowl reminds me that Buddy, our yellow lab, ate a fair amount of our tomato harvest a few years ago.   We had left tomatoes on a tray on the breakfast counter one Monday after picking quite a few on a Sunday, NEVER thinking he would eat them.   We had so many we were both taking them to work to share with co-workers.   When my husband came home Monday night to find the tray empty he was a little put-out at me, thinking that I had taken ALL of the tomatoes to work.   When I came home and saw the tomatoes were gone, I asked where they were.  He made some comment about me taking them to work.  When I told him that I had not done that, we looked at each other and then at Buddy, lying on the floor sleeping.  And we had the same thought and both headed for Buddy's bed.  Sure enough, there were lots of tomato seeds dried on his bed.  We went back to the counter and there was no sign of any "disturbance".  A further inspection of the living room rug (oriental) revealed a few tomato seeds.  So this is what I imagine took place that day . . . he smelled them (? although I thought he liked chocolate much more) and put his front feet up on the counter to check it out, grabbed a tomato got down and ate the tomato on the living room rug.  Since that was so good, he went back for more but not wanting Darla to bother him, he starting taking them into the other room where his bed is.  He had about 15 tomatoes, but he didn't get sick.   Now NOTHING in the way of food or anything every having had food in it is left on the counter.

Blessings,

Colleen