Busy June post

I'm back and this is loaded with pictures.  Busy June indeed!  Started off crazy and is just now settling and it's the end of the month! First I'll start off with the other 2 mouse ears that I did for my Granddaughter and Daughter-in-law.  I didn't want my Son to feel left out so I whipped up a mickey head pin in camo to wear on his hat.  He was less than impressed.

Headband #3

Headband #4

Manly Mickey ears

Day one of vacation had us at Disneyland and of course Katlyn and I took a selfie while on the tram (with our ears of course)

Day 1 vacation

Lines were long since our vacation coincided with Grad Night which apparently runs during the day as well, who knew!

Happy family time

The weather was wonderful though so we just smiled and enjoyed ourselves.

Christopher and Katlyn in Toon Town

Katlyn and Brooke

Day 2 we were at California Adventure, still lines because again Grad Night but still great weather!

Day 2 - Brooke and I on Heimlich's ride 

Always in a line

That's Brooke and Alysha's car (top right)

All four sets of ears held up beautifully even being stuffed into backpacks during rides throughout the 2 days.

Parade time at California Adventure

Day 3 we headed to Universal Studios and Harry Potter!!  So much happiness there!  Brooke got picked in the wand ceremony so that was special for her and here she is learning some spells with her new wand.

The wand chooses the wizard...

Katlyn and I got passes because he price for 1 day vs. lots of day was reasonable, so we will be venturing back soon.

Day 3 - At Hogwarts 

Day 4 is Magic Mountain.  Fortunately the closest to home and opened the latest so there was sleeping in time because let me just say I was dragging!  Disneyland is about 90 minutes away so that's a lot of traveling as well as walking.  My Fitbit was very happy with my steps!

Superman

I can honestly say I am officially too old for Magic Mountain!  While I love roller coasters, some were just a bit jarring to my poor head and the hike around the park is insane!

Day 4 - bye-bye Magic Mountain (forever)

Day 5 of vacation was the road trip up North.  I drove, Katlyn and the dogs slept!  

Sure they get to sleep

Saturday the Balloon Festival which normally runs right over the house made a change and the balloons went in the opposite direction which I was pretty bummed about.  Got this guy when he was getting air.  It was pretty windy so I thinking that's the reason for the changes.  Sunday I didn't even hear them going up so they may have been grounded with the wind.

Cute Bee Balloon

Katlyn and Christopher went to Beerfest

screenshot of Katlyn's snapchat

The rest of vacation was hanging out with my Grandkids and just enjoying not walking 10's of thousands of steps!

Kasyn is a nut

We watched movies and I worked on Kasyn's Eater of Yarns blanket.

Eater of Yarns

Tuesday was Brooke's 9th birthday (yikes!) and she wanted to spend it at the beach so off we went.

my birthday girl enjoying her day

Kasyn loved the beach as well

Birthday dinner at Applebee's (Brooke's favorite)

Kasyn's ketchup face

Then cake and presents at her other Grandparents house

I can't believe she's 9 already

Home Wednesday!  Worked on my temperature blanket a bit after unpacking and getting laundry done for work.

Temp blanket

Whew!  Busy busy!  All of this plus packing offices at work for the big move in July.  Crazy month and I'm not going to freakout that I will be unemployed around September....sigh.

Rambling and pictures

Alrighty...here's a few things I felt like typing up.  Mostly rambling I think and pictures.

Got the baby blanket completed for my Niece.  Here it is with the border, I do love the colors.

All Done

Just a picture of my dog being a dork.

how we hangout

I needed a new work tote but haven't really found one that it the proper size.  Well a trip to JoAnn's found me in the tote aisle and I found a great size that I could spruce up!  The bag is black and I found some adorable bee charms while getting in line so I grabbed them up along with the tote. I worked up a trim in yellow cotton yarn, stitched it around the top of the tote and added a bee! 

froggy?

black bag with animals....yikes

bee addition

I would definitely get more crocheting done if I stopped reading so much, but I can't seem to stop and my Kindle has entirely too many unread books for me to ever catch up on!  Now I normally buy my books for my Kindle because it just makes it easier for storage and I carry my Kindle everywhere, but when the price of a book is too ridiculous in Kindle version I will get it in print.  This is my newest.  I haven't read it yet because its a trilogy and this is only the 1st of the series, but since I love the authors past series (This Man) and it was out when I went to Target so I picked it up.  Now I just have to wait until November and February for the other 2! 

A new series to read

Ok as a geek and the Mother of a geek, we quite enjoy our anime.  Dragonball Z has always been a favorite and now Funko is coming out with DBZ characters!  Really do I need these little collections hanging around the house for me to dust off?  No, probably not, but dang....they are wicked cool!  I only ordered Vegeta for myself and Piccolo for Katlyn, so not too bad and really only brings my Funko collection up to 2, so not bad at all!

Vegeta

My Sister's friend's Daughter requested a floppy bunny ear hat from me in a thick yarn.  I ordered the yarn, Bernat's Baby Blanket and when it arrived I got to work.  It's terribly bulky to work with and after working up 8 rounds I'm not happy with it at all.  I'm going to rip it out and a rework it. 

hooking while watching Shark Week

I got this idea to make myself a bow ring, so I grabbed a couple of bon-bons and a hook and started working. 

the base

Sat at the table and played with some flowers too and got a bow ring and a flower ring done.  

Roman and Kevin help out

Katlyn and Julie both wanted a flower ring so I had them pick out colors and made them each one. 

Katlyn's

Julie's

Oh wait, I needed one as well!  

mine

Then I though of another easy ring idea, buttons!  

button usage

different view

So now I have loads of ring ideas and if I could just put my Kindle down for a bit, I might be able to get them worked up!

On Sunday Katlyn and Julie left for Santa Rosa so I did housecleaning and while dusting decided my vase of branches needed some repairs.  Cats and branches don't always mix well.  Pulled out broken bits and tightened loose flowers and added a couple of new branches to replace the broken ones.  Added a few more flowers and it now looking lovely again.  I thought I had pictures of the finished product, but I think I just did a snapchat with Katlyn and well those pictures disappear after a few seconds.  I will have to get another shot.

repairing branches

Sunday evening I had Summerslam to watch and got working with some wool to see about a felted ring.  Not too sure about the results, well I'm sure that the felting process is cumbersome and didn't shrink enough for me, so back to the drawing board. 

Summerslam and felting

Oh and now we are at the end.  I guess that's all of my rambling for the time being.  Best get back to work!

Listening to:  Love In An Elevator by Aerosmith

180

Skipped October

Ok trying this again.  Yesterday I started this post and did all of the proper placing of photos and their titles and typed a whole mess of fantastic information and even saved a couple of times and then the next thing I know *poof* all gone and not to be found again!!  I really have no idea what happened but I was too frustrated to work it out yesterday so I shall once again attempt to get this done today!

Now where to start since I have skipped out of October all together.  Not much happened I suppose.  There was Disneyland, crocheting, rain and a road trip.  Those were probably the highlights, so let's get to it!

Disneyland is up first.  Katlyn and I went after they had decorated for Halloween because we never got there for it last year.  We had a blast (of course, it is Disneyland after all)  The weather was prefect and we actually got to ride Radiator Springs Racers finally!

Packed up for the day.

Pumpkin Mickey's everywhere.

On with a bit of crocheting.  I decided to get working on Christmas gifts and started a hat for my Nephew and then stumbled upon this pattern and dropped the hat in favor of scarf making!  Yay for Christmas gifts! Now let me say that the pattern is ridiculously simple and is forgivable in any errors and even states that errors are no big deal.  Ok fine...I made a mistake early on and just went with the flow, considering it really wasn't going to effect the finished scarf.   By the second mistake it was just too much for me to take.  I had somehow twisted it up causing it not to lay properly.  I made this discovery while working on it at the tattoo shop with Christopher.  I was not amused considering I was well over the half way point.  I frogged the whole thing while sitting there and restarted.  I would LOVE to say that I proceeded happily along and it is now complete, but HA fat chance of that!  Frogged again on the road trip home, but now have it under control and nearly complete!  Whew!

looks great scrunched up, showing no errors!

Start of Riley's hat.

Just a photo of a chicken, because well everyone needs to see a fabulous metal chicken while reading a blog! 

metal chicken!

Bees are a favorite of mine, I save them from drowning in the pool during the summer.  (true story!)  I had a blast at the San Francisco Zoo because they had a huge beehive that you could see into, fascinating creatures I tell you!  Anyway I digress.  Katlyn has introduced me to Yogcast videos on YouTube!  They play Minecraft and other games and record videos for the games and holy hell, these guys and girls are hysterical!  Anyway we were watching them playing Minecraft and they had a whole new thing going on with bees and trees.  So many bees it was funny!  I had downloaded a little bee pattern awhile ago and dug it out to whip up a bee for Katlyn. She found it amusing and the bee found a place in the bottom of the TV.

bee butt

Rained one whole day, yay, my car got a bath!

So Christmas projects...yep as usual I have more then one going on at a time.  Oh yes and Riley's hat has not pattern so I shall be making it up as I go after the beanie base is complete!  Always a good thing to challenge myself during the holidays!

project bag overflowing!

And again found another project to start, at least it's another Christmas present!  This time flowers are involved and again not pattern for the scarf.  I am using a couple of patterns for the flowers though.  

Tea and flower making

The flowers are fun to make, I'm using 3 different patterns and many different yarns to create the size differences and different textures.  I think this maybe fabulous when it's done!

flower production continues 

reading and flower making

stacking up!

Nine flowers done so far, just have to figure out the total needed to get the look I want and then they will be attached to a base.  If the whole thing fails, Katlyn loves the flowers so I fix them to a barrette so she can wear them in her hair or on a hat!  there will be no flower waste in my house!

9 done!

Went up to North for my vacation and on Saturday spent time with Christopher while he was getting line work done on the other half of his leg.  This was his second session and his third will be next week spent getting some fill in done.  This was my view for about 5 hours on Saturday, because right after Christopher was done Katlyn had an appointment with Nate.  Good thing I brought my crochet bag with me! 

Christopher getting his leg inked

Katlyn was next.

Pumpkin carving requires pumpkin, Safeway was selling these green and pretty gross looking "fancy" pumpkins along with the regular orange one.  Just couldn't bring myself to go green on a pumpkin!  We got plain old orange ones!

a "fancy" pumpkin

Navi all snuggled into the car seat

Thursday night pumpkin carving time.  Christopher opened up Brooke's pumpkin for her to clean out, she was less then thrilled!  She did pretty good but didn't want to touch the stringy bits.  I helped her with it and got it cleaned out and she started drawing.

using a spoon

Chris and his giant pumpkin

Brooke did the drawing all by herself and I did the carving for her.

Chris working on his

Christopher didn't know what he wanted to do, so I suggested a Minecraft pumpkin and after bit of googling this is what he drew up.  Turned out great! 

Minecraft pumpkin

Road trip home was uneventful, just cruised along with me crocheting while Katlyn drove and Katlyn playing Pokemon while I drove all the while we listening to podcasts of either Hat Films or The YogPod with the dogs sleeping in the backseat!

hookin' on the road

Getting home to the cats after a week is always interesting.  My Sister and Mother took care of them while we were gone but they just did drop-ins so that meant that Stein had a lot of alone time, never a good thing with that cat as he is quite the demon cat of the family!  I Stein proofed things that I could, moved my fish and my plants out of the living room and closed both bedroom doors so I could limit the damage he could do while he was bored.  I did not count on him DESTROYING my poor little bee!  Psycho cat!

poor bee

So there it is, my little story about my missing month!  Totally nothing exciting like I said...oh wait I did come home with bronchitis so YAY me!  Will get on my projects for a more interesting post next time, which hopefully will be sooner then December!

Listening to:  Rocket by Def Leppard