breakfast at the hotel

Early Saturday morning at the hotel, I had to get something (I don't even remember what) out of my car. When I went outside, I decided I had to go back inside and get my camera, so I could get a shot of this (click on the photos to enlarge them):

see him?? look close at the top of the fountain...

here he is closer-- after doing some Googling, I think it might be

a 'sharp-shinned hawk.' (maybe?? I really need to get a new bird book.) 

perhaps he was looking to have his breakfast at the fountain? 

I got too close to him, though, and scared him off. 

It was a long weekend, with way too little sleep, but it was a lot of fun. I might not have gotten much accomplished, but I met some really nice people, and shared lots of interesting stories. That's one of the great things about scrapbooking- it's all about preserving and sharing your stories and memories!

I got all my stuff back home on Sunday, and even unpacked it all already!! Everything is back in its place up in my craft room; now I just need to finish up the layouts I made while I was there. National Scrapbooking Day is this Saturday, so I think Saturday and Sunday might be scrapbooking days for me.  (after a trip to the Botanical Gardens Butterfly Exhibit on Saturday- more photo ops to practice using my new camera!)  And, I might even be ambitious and start a few more projects- there's lots of layout ideas rattling around up in my head.

I'll make sure to post pics of the layouts when I have them completely done! (or at least post what I have done at the end of the weekend, lol!)

so far... not so much.

so, this weekend I'm at a 3-day SB crop in Tucson. (granted, right now I'm not scrapping- I'm on my way to breakfast!) Here's a bit of my workspace- not a great picture, but it was kind of late last night, and I was tired- I'll take better pics today.  

 

It always takes me forEVER to get 'into' the creative mode when I attend something like this... there was a lot of time taken setting up my work area, a lot of socializing- since I met some of my online friends for the first time, which was very nice- a bit of scrappy shopping (of course, lol!), some scrapping, and some frustration.  So, the sum total of my creativity so far is one scrapbook layout (which still isn't quite done):

'front' page

a layout with photos of our visit to Montezuma Castle National Monument. (it still needs the journaling and the 'finishing touches' added to it)

interior pages

 I made a lot of math errors, glued things down in the wrong place multiple times, and wasted some paper, but finally got this to where I was satisfied with it at about 7 pm last night. So, this is my 9-hour layout! (not really, but this gives you an idea about how things went...)

Today and tomorrow will be better! I better get going!! :D

SB page: lunch in Tucson

yay, another completed scrapbook page! (and #2 of 50 in my 50-project challenge.) This page started out pretty simple in its arrangement, but like always, I made it take forever to complete. I really like it, though, which is a good thing, since I'm the one who made it, lol!

This page documents the day in February when we drove to Tucson to have lunch at Mi Nidito restaurant. We also did a very small bit of sightseeing while we were there, and went to Bach's Cactus Nursery (which I'm going to do an entire 2-page layout about, in addition to the photos I included here). The overall page layout is a grid, one of my favorites arrangements. The three large photos were printed at 3.5 x 5, and the other three spaces were built on top of 3.5 x 5 pieces of patterned paper. The plant photos were printed at 2x2, I think, then I trimmed them down a bit to fit better- the restaurant photos were printed at, maybe, 2x3? I think I trimmed them down, too, so the patterned paper would show  a bit more around the edges.

This photo doesn't look like anything much, but I wanted to include it to show the background cardstock I used for this page... no, it's not a Christmas layout. The holly pattern, while it's technically the 'front' of the paper, was used as the 'reverse' on this layout. I got this paper at the Bazzill warehouse sale a couple years ago- I don't scrap a lot of Christmas pages, but I really liked the color of the cardstock. So, I bought some of it anyway, knowing I was going to use the reverse. Nobody said that just because it has a pattern that you have to use that side of it! :D

Here's a close-up of the flower section: this section was sort of an accident- the green polka-dot paper wasn't quite 3.5 x 5, so I added another piece of patterned paper to it to make up the difference, then covered the seam with some (new) Prima washi tape. Necessity is the mother of invention they say, right? Sometimes in creative endeavors, too! And I actually like it better than if I had just used one piece of patterned paper- interesting how that works out, isn't it??

  

A close-up shot of the title / journaling block. I knew I had quite a bit that I wanted to write (I usually do, lol!), so I typed the journaling on my typewriter-- I could never write neatly enough to fit all of that onto this layout writing by hand. Unfortunately with this much journaling, most of the pattern on the yellow patterned paper is now hidden, as are the three pieces of colored washi tape I put on the lower right side of the space.

here's one of the photo blocks, embellished pretty simply with a journaling tab punch (edged with ink to make it stand out against the cardstock background) along the edge of the block, a stamped/cut-out word embellishment, and a bit of typed journaling glued right onto the photograph. (I was really intrigued by these mosaic decorations that were all over the neighborhood around the restaurant, so I googled 'mosaics in Tucson' to find out more information about them. Turns out they were made by students at an alternative high school and Tucson has won some awards for this program, which I think is very cool!! Thank goodness for the internet, right??)

A close-up of the title area: the tag is a Cosmo Cricket tag sticker I thought matched the colors, and the letter stickers are some of my stash of beloved Sassafras Lass supplies (I'm still sad that this company went out of business, and I sort of hoard my stash of their stuff). The baker's twine was arranged into the perfect loopy arrangement, then I carefully glued it into place with my fabric/ribbon adhesive. (see what I mean about it taking lots longer complete this page than it could have?? lol!)

Here's a close-up of more of the small details that I kept adding to the page-- these details 'make' the page, in my opinion, but they also made the page take a lot longer than it might have otherwise taken! There's a few different types of stickers here (Jillibean soup brand, as well as October Afternoon, I think), and I added 3-D foam tape to give them extra dimension. You can also see here that I added some glitter glue to the striped paper to make it a bit more interesting. (there really wasn't much else I could do to decorate that space, since the photos covered most of the paper). 

One last close-up view of one of the stamped embellishments: I stamped the word onto white cardstock with chalk ink, trimmed around the stamped image, then attached it to the page with 3-D foam tape. A nice detail, even if it did take a bit of time to do! (I've seen people do this on their SB layouts for years, but never did it myself till now- I quite like how it turned out, and I'm definitely going to do more of it.)

photo heavy post- last weekend's food and garden tourism

A week ago Saturday, Tom and I headed south to Tucson, for lunch. Yes, lunch! (and a bit of sightseeing, in addition to eating.) It was a beautiful day for a drive, and we headed out early...

our destination

We got to the restaurant  in South Tucson at about 10:30 am to wait
for their 11:00 lunch opening. And we were not the first people there- it was a good thing we left home early!

The restaurant is 'Mi Nidito' which means 'My Little Nest' in Spanish;
it's been serving food in Tucson since 1952, and was featured
on the Travel Channel show Man vs. Food.

We waited with some very nice people out front of the restaurant, and got a booth when the restaurant opened... our waitress asked, 'do you need a menu?' (apparently they get a lot of regulars who know what they're going to order!) Us, now, we needed some time to check out the offerings on the menu, so we could narrow it down. The couple in the booth behind us didn't need menus; they ordered straightaway, and were giving us a bit of advice about what was good. In talking to them, we found out that was because they've eaten lunch at Mi Nidito every Saturday for the past 20 years! Now that is definitely a ringing endorsement! One of the restaurant's other 'claims to fame' is one of their previous customers: former President Bill Clinton- they even have the President's booth marked in the restaurant! (and no, we didn't sit in it... lol!)

Our table: we had no idea we were going to get this much food!!

The food was delicious, and the portions were quite generous: we brought home plenty of leftovers!  We got a Tostada with chiles as an appetizer (which is sort of like a Mexican pizza), I got chicken enchiladas with red sauce, and Tom got a beef chimichanga. The chimichanga (which was the size of a pillow, lol!) was made with their house specialty: a shredded beef called birria. Birria is brisket which is slow cooked with chiles and spices, then shredded. Neither of us could place the flavors in the shredded beef, but luckily we happened to see the television show episode again last week- turns out that the 'secret ingredient' in the shredded beef is pickling spices, which gives it a really complex, mellow flavor! The food was all delicious, and we'll definitely be eating there again.

After we ate lunch, we headed back north to do some sightseeing at a cactus nursery we'd heard about from some friends who live in Tucson. (On the way, we saw an estate sale, so we stopped for a quick look. Turns out it's a recurring sale, and there was so much stuff that a quick look wasn't possible- so I'll save that one for another time, lol!)

The cactus nursery was total visual overload-- I definitely want to go back again, and maybe bring at least few plants back home with me. I'd love to have (at least) one of everything, but we don't have nearly enough room! For now, I'll have to settle for admiring the plants in the photos and post just a few of the many pictures I took to give you an idea of the scope of the place:

one of the (huge) cacti right at the main entrance-
I don't know what kind it is, but I'd love one!

 The property is on approximately 10 acres, and contains rows and rows of nursery plants and greenhouses for propagating cacti- check this out!  (and don't forget, you can click on any of the photos to make it larger.)

one of the many propagation houses on the property

I can't even begin to imagine how many hundreds of plants are in this greenhouse, let alone in all of the greenhouses on the property- there had to be at least 10 or 15 greenhouses altogether (the actual number is 24, according to their website). Looking at the pots in these houses closer, it's even more amazing to contemplate:

teeny, tiny baby cacti

Some of these cacti are so very tiny that you can't even see any of the plants themselves; all you can see are the feathery cactus spines. I had to add in the quarter when I took the photo just to add a sense of scale to the picture.

I don't even know what kind of cacti this is, but I
thought it was really cute, since it was so tiny!

As we wandered around on the property, we came upon a 'cacti compost heap' of sorts. We both would love to figure out some way to bring this impressive Saguaro skeleton home with us... unfortunately our family room isn't big enough for it, nor was it for sale (and even if it had been, I'm sure we couldn't have afforded it, lol). But wouldn't it make a striking accent piece in a room, preferably with a spotlight on it?!?

A view from the nursery's property off to the east. These are either the Santa Catalina mountains or the Rincon Mountains- I'm not sure which. (geography was never my strong suit.) Regardless of what mountain range it is, it's a gorgeous view. That's one of the things I love most about living in the desert, the expansive vistas and the fact that you can see around you for miles.

A really cool looking aloe plant in the main greenhouse!! he looks kinda mean,
doesn't he?!? I definitely would love to have one of these for our backyard!

a close-up of the individual flowers in the aloe flower cluster-
I bet the hummingbirds would love it, too!

A view of their main display garden... cacti can definitely make
an eye-catching presentation when you landscape with them!

A few (very large) containers in the display garden area. 

a sea of Golden Barrel Cacti in the main greenhouse area

I have tons more photos from the nursery- we were only there for a couple hours, but I took close to 100 photos in that time. This place was amazing, and we probably didn't even see half of it in the time we were there! If you want more info about it, you can Google it: Bach's Cactus Nursery. Since they don't ship plants, they don't have too much of a website, but if you click on this link: Danger Garden blog post about Bach's nursery you can read a very nice blog post written by a gardener /  blogger that contains many more photos of the place. (and I'll post more of my cacti photos soon!)