This was another attempt on my part a few years ago to “get musical” – but it was a lot cheaper than the $200 guitar mistake.  Same results though:  a couple of hours of nerve-tangling experimentation followed by surrender.  I am just NOT wired for music.  And I am very jealous of folks who are.  Maybe one of them will give me 50 cents for this harmonica when we have our garage sale. P.S.  I have been careful to keep this hidden from my own kids!!  I have enough headaches as it is….

I found these t-shirts in a box of “keepsakes” some months ago and I put them aside because they do have sentimental value and I wanted to figure out a way to keep them.  But now there’s this ginormous clothing drive happening at our church and they are sending the clothes to Kosovo and Honduras.  I’ve decided that much better than these shirts rotting in some box for years in my own possession would be imagining them on the backs of some brothers in Kosovo or Honduras!  These shirts will get to see the world!  And they’ll have a real purpose again.…

These are some art supplies I found mixed in with my water-damaged artwork from a few weeks back.  I set them aside to give them to the art teacher at school.  I’ve never seen her use scratchboard before, but it’s expensive stuff, so maybe she’ll be happy to have some donated. If you’re not familiar with scratchboard, I should explain.  It is a sheet of paper about the weight of posterboard which is coated with a layer of fine chalk and then overlaid with black ink.  So a picture is created by scratching away the black ink.  Therefore, you are…

I put question marks in the title because who even uses cassette tapes anymore?  But I don’t want to just chuck them in a landfill, so I will put them in the garage sale and see what happens. Actually, I wrote the above a couple of days ago and I have taken a second look inside this box.  Most of these belong in a landfill, buried under coffee grinds and used paper tissues and tin cans.  I couldn’t even put the box down on the carpet to take a picture, because I realized that the bottom of the box is…

Found these posters and decided I’d give them to my former student, David – the one I gave the cap to a week or so ago.  He’s into all things Scotland and I told him I would keep an eye open for other Scottish things I could send his way.

These are some of the ceramics I painted as a kid.  But I can’t think of a good reason to keep them.  And who would want them?  Especially this time of year? Actually, now that I have a clear webcam, I might start offering some of these things on Facebook more often.  Some of my students will take anything!  I’ll let you know what happens to them.

I turned 43 this week.  As it turned out, not my best birthday ever, but we had some good family time around the dinner table, and really, who could want anything more?  I took a bit of my birthday money and got myself a better webcam because I was tired of posting dark, blurry pictures on this blog.  It was a splurge, but the rest of the money is going into the Haiti fund.  I figure that some day we might be doing a lot of skyping with friends and family back home and then it might be something that…

It’s been hard getting back in the habit of writing after taking nearly a week off.  The recent illness and busy-ness broke my stride! But I think there’s more than loss of momentum at play here.  I’ve been a bit down lately.  Ever since my car bit the dust, it seems like one thing after another is sneaking up to sucker punch me in the back of the head.  I never see them coming! Oh, none of these recent hassles is life threatening and most I can’t really discuss here for one reason or another, but they’ve got me down as they have…

I stopped by the mechanic’s place last night and said my final farewells to THAT CAR.  I had to clean out some stuff before I have it towed away somewhere.  I am hoping to get a couple hundred dollars out of it when I do – and maybe when I add that to the tax refund, I’ll be able to afford something that will last at least a year or two without any major repair costs.  It makes me nervous to commit – especially since the last time I did not choose wisely.  (What was I thinking when I bought an older…

It has been at least a week since I’ve updated this blog with info about my Throws, Gives and Sells.  I haven’t been writing about it, but I have been DOING it.  Nothing too big or exciting here, sad to say.  I was just trying to survive this past week and not much else.  I got run down and sickly just as our final week of play practice got underway.  And there were all sorts of last minute things to be done regarding props and concessions for intermission and t-shirts for the cast, etc.  Dress rehearsal was scary, but the…