Save Stella's Legs

Sweet little Stella was in a bad accident and needs her wounds tended every day by the vet.  The stupid SUV driver who hit her is refusing to pay for any of the vet costs, and insurance won't cover them either.  Stella's human recently lost her business in the recession.
There is a Facebook page devoted to Stella, where you can find updates on her progress, as well as information about how to contribute goods to sell at fundraisers, and how to contribute directly to the vet.

Cutie-pie Stella before her accident:

Stella after her accident:

Why Not?

Scene: downtown Portland, Oregon, a bit earlier this year
Motivations(s): My Darling Daughter Bossie Girl seized the moment to have her pic taken with these costumed people.
Now, "Why?", you may ask, are these people dressed up?  Is there some sci fi festival?  Is there a parade?  Is this a promotional stunt for....ummmm......?????
No, my friends, they are dressed up, as they said, "just 'cause", and "just for fun". 
Conclusion: God, we love Portland!!!!

O.k., call me "Geek". But I prefer "Curious and Interested"

So its pretty well understood that I am the geek of this group.  Bossie Tammy recently kindly told me that I wasn't such a geek.  "You're just really curious about stuff...." she said.  Isn't she sweet?

Last weekend, as if to prove the geek stuff, I got all excited about some mollusks.  I know, I know.  But give me a sec to explain:
 - It wasn't just a geeky event.  It was a Rugged Event.  I was out in waders scrambling across fields and down streambanks and over beaver dams.
 - Several of us volunteers were surveying for and measuring some threatened native mussels that help keep streamwater clean for stuff like that yummy salmon you might have on your dinner plate.
 - The Xerces Society and the Johnson Creek Watershed Council are two environmental groups that really take action and accomplish things to improve the environment so that not only the animals but us people and our environment and economy right here in the city.
 - Here in Portland, Oregon, you can still find a stream that has salmon and beaver in it.  Right in the middle of the city.
 - Who knew there were freshwater mussles?  Did you???  Cool, right?  Right???  Ummm....o.k....

 Yesiree, folks, that is a Genu-wine real life, Oregon native freshwater mussel in my hand.

Now for the Bossy Stuff:
What causes do you most want to support?  Do you want to do something to help the environment?  Go find your local watershed council and see what activities they have going on.  Do you want to help kids?  Go find a mentoring program, or volunteer for special events now and then at a local children's museum. There are so many causes that need volunteers.
I bet you you can find some volunteer activities that are not just good deeds, but are also good fun.
Go for it! (Hint: I linked straight to the Volunteer Opportunities webpages for the organizations above.) :-)

But was it such an adventure, really? For this particular Bossie Girl, that is.

Love this photo from this year's Oregon Country Fair!
Words tend to fail me when I try to describe the fair's pure awesomeness.  Its sorta Renaissance Fair-like: in a wooded setting with a rather strong woodland-hippie-fairy theme.
Everywhere you turn is a colorful visual feast.

My favorite part: people are playing.  There are puppets, dress-up clothes, stilts, juggling balls, hula hoops, masks, crafts,  tee-hee - you should see the free-form hippy marching bands!  - singing, dancing, laughing, skipping, even.  All from the grown-ups as well as the children.  And all my Bossie Girls know how much I love it when adults let their inner children play.  So, while I do know that not positively Everyone In The Entire World will feel comfortable at the Country Fair, I tend to have a bit of a prejudiced view.  "Look at all this happiness and creativity and play!," I think.
                     "How could anyone not be into this?"

Of course, having been a child of hippies during the late '60's and early '70's in California, living in an ashram (sorta like a commune, but with more outward focus - look it up, silly! :-p) complete with a guru and an organic garden before anyone else in the country had even heard of tofu... well, lets just say that from when I first ever set foot in the Oregon Country Fair, I felt very happily right at home.  Even though by the first time I went we were all deep in the midst of the '80's (wasn't that the "greed is good" decade?), and my day to day life is far from a commune or ashram. Still, I was so instantly happy there.
So, I have to ask myself, what about trying out some of the happy festivities that other people love that are outside my "comfort area"?  What about, say, a rodeo?  I mean, I'm always going on about how people should try new things, right? I want to expand my experiences (especially fun ones) and appreciate more cultures, including all the subcultures right here in our own country.

Its time for me to go find, say, a picnic organized by the local country music radio station or something.  Hmmmm......
Time to ask my Bossie Girls for their opinions.  I'm sure they will be willing to give them.

You can see even more amazing images of the Oregon Country Fair at their website.
Here are just a few favs that I took a couple years back:

Ladies' Old Fashioned Tea Party

Yes folks, we did throw an old-fashioned tea party!
For an extra special tea party, the Bossie Girls say:

• A small-ish group works well for this.  When everyone can fit around the table, we can all hear each other chat and laugh.  This is excellent Bonding Time With Your Bossies!
• Make sure to have some dress-up clothes on hand for this!  It gives it a sense of occasion and play, and not everyone has a tea-party-ish hat.  
• Next time, Bossie Ms. Pip here will make sure to have extra dress-up clothes on hand.  As it was, we had fun with the collection of vintage aprons, table cloths, and scarves that I had picked up on Craigslist.  (For a great price, of course!)
• Make it a potluck if you do not have time to prepare goodies.
• If you can manage to have some cookies baking when your guests arrive, they will be very happy about it.  I promise!  Trader Joe's cookies are Very Yummy... just in case no one has time to bake.  You can heat them up in the oven to make them warm and spread the yummy smell throughout the house.   Mmmmmmmmmm.......
• If your group is up for it, feel free to spike the tea.  Its medicinal.  Of course it is!  You may, of course, feel Plenty Festive Enough with straight tea.
• Google how to read tea leaves!  Then, tell everyone what you learned.  Everyone can read their own, taking turns 'round the table.
• Ask people to tell stories about tea parties from other times.
• A tea set With Attitude can add to the occasion:

                               

Bossie Girlfriend Points for Bossie Ms. Hattie

A gazillion Bossie Girlfriend points to Miss Hattie, who, after joining me in seeing my only daughter graduate from high school and go off to the senior all-night party, get this:
     Showed up at my house with champagne and sympathy and proceeded to tell me how wonderful my daughter was. What a Pal!  What a Pal!

Found, via Meetup: Best Salsa Dancing Venue Ever!

Meetup.com is an awesome website!  If you are new in a town, or bored in your same-'ol town, or just want to add some variety to your life, meetup.com could be a great source of Fun and Adventure.
How cool is this: outdoor salsa dancing at a Cuban-owned winery.  There was, of course, a wine tasting. :-) The sun came in and out while a band played. Dozens of us danced on a big round patio alongside a water fountain and lavender.  

DH deserves all the credit for making this Adventure happen.  Ms. Pippin here was getting cranky about our infrequent dancing.  DH was sympathetic, being the avid salsero (salsa aficionado) that he is.  The problem is, most salsa events start so late at night, and we are, ahem, Feeling Old when we try to dance too late.  Well, folks, this may not be a long-term solution to our problem, but if we keep up this level of creativity and initiative, we may find more salsa events that match our schedules.

Salsa Dancer and Teacher Extraordinaire, George Caceres organized the Meetup (and gets credit for the photos). You can find some of his classes here. 
Cubanismo Vinyards is Outside of Salem, Oregon.  Mauricio, the owner, is very friendly.  My favorite wines were the rosados (rosés).  There will be lessons and dancing there again on June 19th and  July 17th.  

Ladies' Spring Tea Party

Another fun idea: Send off spring with a tea party!  (The old fashioned kind.  No politics here.)  The Bossies are planning this year's tea party.  Here is a picture from last year's success:

Spring hats, gloves, vintage aprons and tablecloths, flowers, tea, scones...  Perhaps we had a smidgen more cocktails in our tea cups than actual tea...  Bossie Kristy studied up on how to read tea leaves and we all took turns trying to read the leaves in the bottom of our cups.  By the end of the party we were all singing gospel music together.  Two of the Bossies were so inspired, they started a community choir soon after!

Community organizing or not, this is a super fun idea for a party.  Especially when you have a bunch of people with indeterminate schedules.  You can have 25 people or 5 people; its fun either way.  Just ask them to bring tea and little tea-party type snackies.  Cucumber sandwiches, anyone?

Finding Fun

As Pacific Northwesterners know, you can't let the rain stop you.  Go PLAY in the rain!

My little niece is so exuberant and fun.  I love the look on her face in this photo.  And the fact that I am airborne.
The scrapbooking  materials are primarily from a kit from  Personal Scrapper.

Yummy happy holiday lemonade out of lemons

Ah, the holidays. Oh, the joys and the miseries of dealing with our loved ones. Have you found yourself complaining to a friend about an upcoming family event? You just know that Aunt So-and-So is going to make a snotty remark about your children. Uncle so and so will get drunk. Your brother's new girlfriend is too perfectly skinny and far along on her career and just knows it. Grandma will say something racist. Your nephew will sneeze without covering his mouth. Do you have this sort of list of things that drive you crazy that you just KNOW are going to happen and you just HATE dealing with? Does your friend that you've been complaining/kvetching/whining/moaning/"oh, yeah, well, listen to this one..." with - does she or he have this sort of list too??????

Bossy Girls to the rescue with a way to make this FUN: Have a race!

1. Write up a list of all those awful things that your relatives do. Your friend does the same.

2. Decide to have a race to:

--- see who can check the most things off within a certain amount of time

--- or compete to see who can check the most things off

--- or set up the race in any way that makes you happy!

3. Set up a scoring system if you want to get really really into this. Perhaps you can get extra points if a family member does their dreaded (now highly anticipated) thing more than once.

3. Arrange to check in with each other either as things happen, or every hour, or once a day, or? via text message or phone call or? to see if you are "winning". See? Now you are actually looking FOWARD to witnessing these awful behaviors. Now, when your sister does that annoying thing that used to make you cringe, you will think, "AHA! Chhhheck that off my list! I'm gonna win win win!

4. Whoever wins has to take the other out to lunch, or cook the other dinner, or treat the other to an afternoon out for a manicure, or?

Giving credit where credit is due: your head bossy girl over here read this beautiful idea in an Oprah magazine many many moons ago. I do not remember the year or the issue, let alone the author. If anyone knows this, please let me know in a comment so credit can be given. :-)

Halloween at the Lone Fir Cemetery

Why be normal, especially on Halloween? Forget bobbing for apples or drinking pumpkin beer in a bar. And our kids are too old for trick or treating. Some of us Bossy Girls enthusiastically volunteered at the Lone Fir Cemetery's Tour of Untimely Departures. The oldest cemetery in Portland has a tour every Halloween with actors at several graves portraying the people buried there. How cool is that?

The cemetery is everything you imagine a cemetery should look like, especially for Halloween: huge trees, elaborate tombstones, moss, falling leaves...

I ended up an actress myself for a while, being in the right place at the right time when the tour groups were getting backed up waiting for the ones in front. "Slow them down over there!" one of the organizers said. "Over there?" I asked, "I know that tombstone and that story." So I went and improvised portraying Mary Alice Oberly, who was buried there. Actually, she used to be buried there, but her sister was so mortified that Alice's male "customers" had paid for such an elaborate and large tombstone, that she had the epitaph erased and Alice's body moved to another cemetery. Ooh, I just love to play a bad girl! Now I really wish I knew all about what Mary Alice Oberly was really like.

Bossy Girls say: Step outside the box for holiday activities! Google away and you may be surprised to find out what activities are happening where you live. (I know, I know, we can't all live in fabbity-fab Portland Oregon, but I'm sure there are some cool things happening elsewhere, too.) Volunteer somewhere. Research old traditions and incorporate them when you throw a party at your own house. Make it a potluck if you are broke! What else can you think of?

Another Reason to NOT Buy a Wishblade.

It seemed like a no brainer. Pay $400 or so up front for a machine that will cut any font on your computer, in almost any size, plus any image file you can find. That compared to $50 - $100 for a traditional cutting machine followed by $50 to $100 or more for each and every metal alphabet die set, plus more $ for each image.

Especially when Xyron announced that the Wishblade cutting machine is now Mac compatible. (Well, they certainly exagerated about that, but that is another story, and its a bit better now...also, I hear that other company's cutters - like the Silhouette, Pazzles, and CraftRobo - have better software and customer support.)

THEN, the rest of my family upgraded to the Tiger version of Mac's operating system, and I had to wait for months to upgrade, all because Xyron's Wishblade software, Create and Cut, was not compatible with Tiger. Turns out, there were a ton of PC users out there who were equally unhappy because they had upgraded to Vista before they knew that Xyron had not done the same for Creat and Cut. You couldn't even buy a new PC with any other operating system than Vista or a Mac without Tiger. People were stuck waiting, their Wishblades untouched.

Moral of Story: If you buy this kind of cutting machine, you are stuck in the upgrade race. You know what its like; it happens with all your electronics. how long before the entire machine is obsolete? And how many times will you be unable to use it? If this is not a problem for you, then go for it and get one. You could use your rubber and acrylic stamps and/or a Coluzzle to make letters and shapes when you can't use the machine.
If you no longer like the idea of buying an electronic cutter:

Bossy Girl's Advice: Go find all those people who just bought Silhouettes/Wishblades etc (and Cricuts too, but more about that below) and are selling all their metal dies for cheap (Craigslist is one good place to look). You will have cutting tools that will still be functional for your grandkids. By then, our designs may have gone out of and come back into fashion!

Still, its pretty cool to be able to cut any font that's on your computer, right? Especially when you consider all the designs to be found in dingbat fonts (you know, the picture fonts.)

So:

Step 1. Find a Cricut on Craigslist (about $100 to $150 around here, more for the larger one).

Step 2. go to http://www.craftedge.com/products/products.html for $90 software that lets you use your Cricut to cut ANY font on your computer, plus any svg files. AND, its both PC and Mac compatible. Its called Sure Cuts A Lot (SCAL) and its made by Craft Edge. In case you have heard bad things about it: I hear it had some problems at the very, very beginning when it was first released, but that the bugs have been worked out. You could spend less than $200 for both the Cricut and SCAL.

Step 3. Continue to keep an eye out for those metal dies on sale for cheap, in case of electronic obsoleteness.

Step 4. Oh, ok... go ahead and buy some of those Cricut cartridges, just 'cause the designs are so darned cute on some of them! Ebay is the cheapest source for that I have seen.

This solution is way cheaper than buying a new Silhouette or Wishblade.

Another quick note: according to Provocraft (the maker of the Cricut) using SCAL will invalidate your warranty. Of course they say that; they want to sell cartridges. Who cares? The warranty is only for a year, anyway. And yes, this is perfectly ethical. Independent software companies have been making software as add-ons for things they didn't create for years now, and it has been deemed legal.

From my cousin:

"I'm not bossy. I just suffer from indecision paralysis less than others."

I love it! Might I suggest, though, that the term "bossy" be embraced, and her quote be considered one of "bossy"'s many awesome definitions.

I'm loving Donna Downey's new fabric items made for scrapbookers. And entire hour long video work shops about layering fabric and paper. That's gotta have some great ideas. I'll try one and post again about how it was.

More vintage fabrics! I gave up on finding information on the internet about dating fabric, and headed to the library. Now its off to the bookstore today.
You know, I would have thought the web would have tons of info on this. If anyone knows a good site, please let me know! I am a sponge ready to learn!!!

Getting ready to post some of my first vintage fabrics to my Ebay store, and they aren't just fabric; they are vintage dish towels with some of the coolest designs, mostly travel souvenirs. I'm hoping scrapbookers and mixed media artists will be as interested in these as quilters and collectors will. Just take a sneak peak close up look at how cool:

Perhaps I am crazy? Having been working on organizing, gathering info on, and scanning my mother's side of the family's photos for MANY years already, not to mention some of my Dad's side:
I have taken on my biological father's side of the family - and they are just about as messy as my mother's side: mostly loose and in boxes. With auntie's help, thank goodness.
How do we end up the Keepers of the Family Stories & Photos? I'm not sure, but I know most of the other family members appreciate it. Show some interest in family history and genealogy, and voila, you assigned the task! Ok, ok, and be willing! The secret to success: to know that you do not have to do it all at once. It could take years. Decades even. But once they are digitized, you can easily get copies to multiple family members. That makes there chances of preservation so much greater.

Fearless and outrageous, even in work out clothes.