My Favorite Photos - July 2023

July seemed to fly by...most of spent working, though. So, I am happy to have had at least some quality time with family. The highlight of July was that my niece and her family moved back to Minnesota from North Carolina. 

We were able to have dinner, talk, and play games together in early July.

We've been having a lot of birds at our feeders. The grosbeaks love the seeds.

This is the male rose-breasted grosbeak. He's a lot more colorful than the female pictured above.

The wrens raised a brood of little ones. They have since fledged. I miss seeing the constant traffic and singing of the wrens each day.

We had many orioles this year and went through bottles of grape jelly. This one is a much darker orange than what we typically see.

This is another type of oriole we saw. It is still beautiful, just not as dark-orange as the other one. 

This wren caught a spider to bring back to the babies. The mother and father wren are such hard - and successful - foragers.

 We have a variety of woodpeckers here. This one is about mid-size compared to the other ones we see.

One of my favorite things to see here are deer. These two fawns somehow got into our fenced-in backyard. We found out that even as young as these two were, that fawns can easily scale a four-foot fence. 

This one was more curious and alert of the two fawns.

This fawn liked to eat more than the other one.

The mother was on the other side of the fence and had an eye on her babies until she walked around the corner and then along the fence line. She jumped into the east pasture and later on her two fawns joined her by jumping over the fence. 

This is one of the sunflowers that grew from a seed that fell from the birdfeeder. The birds now - a month later - are eating the seeds from it.

This is one of the dahlias that I grew this year from a root. It has bloomed quite a bit which I've enjoyed.

These little flowers come up every year by the back door. I need to cut the plant back throughout the summer and fall, otherwise it would take over the garden. 

We celebrated Olivia's 20 1/2 birthday in July. We still celebrate half birthdays. I don't think that will stop. 

We scaled back on the number of gifts, though, compared to past years. Two of the gifts we gave her was a Dala horse from Sweden and a silver Dala horse necklace. She really liked both gifts.

During July, we had a Girls & Dolls Tea Party at work. This is one of the dolls in a collection - a Swedish Easter Witch. Girls dress up around Easter as witches and paint their cheeks pink and put a lot of dots on their faces to represent freckles. 

Also at work is a collection of Charlotte Weibull dolls. These are two of them wearing the folk outfits from different provinces in Sweden.

Olivia entered ten projects in the county fair for her final year in 4-H. She received all blue ribbons and one reserve champion ribbon on the nautilus pictured below. It's a Diamond Dotz painting that turned out beautifully. She paid for the matting and framing which complement it nicely. 

Although she won a trip to the State Fair with this project, she decided not to go because it would be the same project area (Crafts) and with a similar project that she did last year (also a Diamond Dotz, but with a different image).

After the last day of the County Fair, we went to Dairy Queen - our traditional meal. A bittersweet meal knowing this is the last 4-H year and the last County Fair as a 4-H family.

When we came home from the County Fair, the mother deer was hiding behind a tree. She finally came out from behind the tree along with her two fawns. I love knowing that she feels safe here. She and the babies didn't rush away when they saw us. They watched us for a while and then walked off slowly. They know we are not a threat. 

My sister went to an art museum in late-July. This is one of the glass pieces in the collection.

This was a two-dimensional painting that looks three-dimensional. 

I liked this glass and metal piece. The shades of blue were beautiful.

This is a glass and cement piece. The inner part is cement and outer part is glass.

This glass piece I thought was a tube - like the kind that were outside of the Minnesota Orchestra building decades ago. It isn't. It's a solid piece with a light color of glass in the middle. It is probably about three inches wide from the front to the back. Every few steps I took past this piece, it would have a different look to it. 

These pairs look like regular-size pears, but they're not. They are about three feet tall. The subtle color on the side is from sprinkling powdered glass on the sculpture. 

At work, we have ten bluebird houses. This nest was placed well because it attracted two bluebird families. So we had ten bluebirds born this year! 

Here are some baby bluebirds later in the month. They fledged by the end of the month.

One of the projects I'm especially pleased with at work was creating four sensory kits and a box of fidgets for people with autism and sensory issues. These are all the items we purchased.

This is an example of a sensory kit that someone can check out from the museum while they are visiting. They bring it back when they are ready to go home. 

That wraps up July. I'm hoping that as the summer winds down that there will be more balance between family/home and work. Right now, it's out of balance which is challenging. 

My Favorite Photos - November 2022

This month I started a new position with a local museum to do their marketing/PR work. One of my favorite parts of the job is photographing items in the gift shop and the museum's artifacts. Below are Dala horse salt and pepper shakers.

This is a hand-carved tomte and pine tree.

This is one of 150 dolls that were donated to the museum. Each doll has an outfit that represents the clothing typical to a region in Sweden.

When I was taking the photos, my younger daughter was helping me. At the end of the session, I took photos of her. The first one she liked the best. 

These two, though, capture her spirit more - her laugh and mannerisms. 

I took some photos of Cooper on the first day that it snowed in November. This is one of them. He is looking out at the tree and watching the birds.

On the 18th, we celebrated Olivia's anniversary of her adoption day. She found a restaurant near her college that we all enjoyed. Her anniversary is actually on the 17th, but she had a class field trip for her Humanities class that was meeting on the 17th. So, the 18th it was for our annual anniversary dinner.

On the 23rd, Olivia, Sophia, and Nessa (one of Sophia's roommates) came home for Thanksgiving. On the 23rd, we celebrated Nessa's birthday by going to a new arts organization in Wisconsin. She hadn't been to Wisconsin, so that was another bonus "gift." 

The picture above and below were in the gallery.

We continued exploring Osceola, Wisconsin, by going to an antique store. None of us had been there, so it was fun to explore a new place.

For Nessa's birthday, I made lasagna. I made some changes to my mom's recipe - like adding more mushrooms, spices, and fresh mozzarella.

I made a Toll House Chocolate Chip Pie (instead of a birthday cake). Danny (the dog) is hoping the pie is for him. 

On the 24th, we celebrated Thanksgiving. There were 14 people total. We had both a turkey and ham, plus a lot of side dishes. We had three different pies for dessert.

On Thanksgiving, my sister brought slides that my parents took. There were quite a few I had never seen before, so that was nice to see them. My brother, sister, two nephews, and I watched the slides. For some of them, we could share details that the others did not know. 

Below is my sister (on the left) and me (on the right) with my mom and dad. There's a plant to the left in the photo. It's fake. That plant traveled from the house in Minneapolis (pictured below) to the one in Plymouth. They had it for decades.

My sister explained the significance of this photo. For my parents' entire marriage, my mom wanted a real Christmas tree. My dad didn't want one because of the mess that real trees can leave in a home. Well, one year, my parents went out to get a real tree. My mom looks so happy by the tree. Another slide after this one showed my dad using a saw to cut it down. This photo would have been taken after we graduated from high school. New traditions once all the kids leave the home...I know this all too well now that Sophia and Olivia are both at college.

Another photo I never saw was this one of my sister (on the left) and me (on the right) in front of one of our elementary schools. This is the second elementary school I attended in Minneapolis - Hamilton was Kindergarten and first grade, and Loring was second grade. 

Once we moved to Plymouth, I had three more elementary schools: Cedar Island (third and fourth grades), Fair Oaks (fifth grade), and Edgewood (sixth grade). It was insane. There were yearly school border changes because the suburbs were changing and boundaries needed to be changed. 

I loved seeing this photo of (L to R): me holding my brother, my sister, and our dog, Corgi.

My mom used to sew all of our Halloween costumes. This one was my favorite one - a kangaroo. It's not the clearest pictures, so the little joey in my kangaroo pouch isn't as visible as I hoped it would be.

Getting in the holiday spirit, my handmade stocking was made by Grandma Olive (she had made my stocking during the summer of 1966 - either before or shortly after my birth in June. She died in August. So, this was an extra-special stocking). My mom made matching stockings for my sister and brother using the same concept as mine. 

This is a better picture of my stocking. I would have been about four or five years old in this picture.

If this doesn't give kids nightmares, I don't know what would. The Santa that visited us at a friend of my grandma's home wore a mask. I swear that mask doesn't even have openings for the eyes. It would have to, but it sure doesn't look like it.  

Apparently, we are either in shock or fascinated by this masked Santa. Actually, now that I look at the picture, I'm wondering if this was supposed to be St. Nicholas since he is using a cane. 

Fear set into my brother. It's probably St. Nicholas/Santa's lack of eyes in the mask. Apparently, the mask isn't bothering my sister or me. 

This is our first Christmas in our new home in Plymouth in 1974. I'm in the middle with the curlers under my mom's hair bonnet. 

So those are some of the 200+ slides we looked at on Thanksgiving this year. 

On the day after Thanksgiving, Sophia, Nessa, and I went to Feed My Starving Children to pack food. We were at a table with about eight other people. This was a hard-working group of volunteers who ended up packing 26 boxes of food for children in El Salvador. We have packed food on the day after Thanksgiving for three years now and have really enjoyed doing this. It's a meaningful way to share our time and give children who are hungry or starving healthy meals.

After packing food, we went to Momo Sushi - our traditional meal two years in a row now. We had a bento lunch box with a variety of food which we all enjoyed. 

The sunset that night was beautiful. This is the end of the sunset, so the colors are not as vibrant at they were 15-25 minutes earlier that evening.

On November 26th, we celebrated the anniversary of Sophia's adoption day. It's hard to believe that we adopted her 21 years ago. (For Olivia it was 19 years ago on the 17th.)