Happy Easter

Hope you are all having a lovely Easter.

Our Jack Rabbits seem happy hopping through the vineyard.  Maybe they are searching for eggs?

This little bunny looks like he's pretty happy too!

Weekly Bird in the hand

The things I am grateful for this week:

• Crafthaus, a social community for craft and art practitioners, named me as one of their featured artists this week!  I am delighted.  And they selected one of my new aluminum bangles - the one shown above.  While I have been creating with metal clay for a while, my aluminum work is relatively new and thus it is especially exciting to be recognised for that work too.  Here are the links: Crafthaus home page and here is my Crafthaus page.  They have also put this photo on their front page slot too!  
• Singing - it's been a busy week for singing with Easter week.  I have so enjoyed it and head back to the cathedral in an hour for a long service this evening
• Bella.  Our friend's dog, Bella who we looked after for 4 weeks, went home on Thursday. She has been a lovely companion - and especially loved running around the vineyard!  She was delight and fun friend.

I hope you have had a lot to be grateful for this week too.  A couple of people contacted me last week and said they were thinking of starting a "weekly gratitude" blog post too.  Maybe we should make this a movement and get a big group of us all showing our gratitude...we could link through to each other....so if you have something that you are grateful for this week, why not blog about it and share it!

Happy Easter to you all!

Break out of your shell!

It's time to break out of your shell!

I've mentioned before that we have lots of birdhouses on our property but my favorite is the bluebird nesting box that has a little camera installed in it, linked through to a small television.  Through the camera we can watch the whole nest building, egg laying, hatching, feeding etc processes of bluebirds - day and night - and hear them too.  It's fascinating to see all the different stages - but also a little sad on some occasions.

I highly recommend getting one of these birdhouse cameras.  You'll love it. But from all the birds we've watched, one always sticks in my head.  One year I was watching this newly hatched bluebird and he just had this bit of egg shell on his head and it wouldn't seem to come off. It was just like the cartoons and he looked so sweet.  Sorry the photo below showing him isn't very clear.  He wriggled around but his little shell "hat" just stuck on him.  I think eventually he got it off when mummy came back to the nesting box.

In honor of this special little bird, I made some "break out of your shell" earrings.  Suitable for shy people who want to break out of their shell, Easter egg lovers, bird lovers and more!  Yes, little feet sticking out of egg shells!

Hope they make you smile like my little birdie did in the nest box!

 

These are #17 in my month of earrings challenge.  Time to create more ear threads instead of just dangly ear wires!

Sunday's spotlight - Happy Easter

By guest blogger Pete

Happy Easter to you all. I have always thought that Easter is the most glorious of the Christian Festivals - the one that gives true meaning to everything that went before it and comes after it.

I am writing this a few days before Easter sitting in the sun after a lovely walk through the sun dappled hills of the Glen Ellen Regional Park. Everything was so fresh and the spring wild flowers so abundant and colourful. The grasses were splattered with hazes of blues, yellows, and whites. Both coming and going we saw a Pileated woodpecker hard at work. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me so I can't offer you a photograph of this hard-working fellow. The 50 minute walk was followed by a refreshing cup of coffee sitting in the shade at an outside table.


By the time you read this Pam and I will have been back in the UK for a few days. With the onslaught of the dreaded jet lag I somehow don't anticipate being so relaxed and rested as I am sitting here and writing this. Perhaps the day will come when someone will come across a cure that will stop the "body clock" from going haywire. I usually feel that mine has a broken main spring.


Yesterday saw the four of us go into San Francsico to visit the new "California Academy of Sciences". This building is situated in one of my favourite parts of SF: namely the Golden Gate Park. One year we went there on my birthday and. hard though it may be for the 49ers to accept this, the temperature rose above 100 degrees.


We walked through the park sweltering in the heat with feet making the sort of protest that only feet are capable are making. Eventually we came across what could have been fountain but was probably a paddling pool and the 4 of us took off our shoes and socks and for quite sometime luxuriated in the coolness of the water on our feet. I digress though - what I wanted to do was to recommend a visit to the California Academy of Sciences to anyone visiting San Francisco or living in that area. It's well worth the time and effort trying to find your way both into and also out of the park (let alone parking your car). That's where I took the attached photos.

Bye for now.

Enjoy your Easter.