Oh where do I start. June is flying by just like all the months of this crazy year have. David and I always seem to be busy, but we did take a little jaunt to the country again, but this time we were looking for home based shops selling antiques, birdhouses, lights made from unique things, and much, much more. It was Country Neighbor’s Springtime tour where you drive from house to house or shop to shop to find things you cannot possibly live without.

This was my favorite shop. We have come here several times and she always has something I would love to have. This time it was a framed piece of an old quilt in a very nice frame that I thought it would look good in my workshop.

This lady has lots of unique birdhouses and she makes jewelry out of found things and wind chimes from old colanders and metal utensils. We found a birdhouse we liked there.

This was a new shop on the tour the man who runs this makes the neatest flag wallhangers for different branches of the military. We got one for D avid to put in his office. I bought a rolling pin that makes designs on the crust of a pie when you roll it out.

We visited four or five shops, but the real reason we were out was to drive through the country once again. By now you know David and I love to drive down country roads we have never been before.

Where we find things Like this building. I had no idea this was a place.

An airport built to memoralize Virgil “Gus” Grissom, an astronaut who flew in space. Sadly, he lost his life in a fiery fire onboard one of the ships being readied to launch. We were proud of him here in Indiana. I’ve seen the space capsule he landed in at a state park. He was a hero who died too soon, but made space travel something Indiana youth could dream about.

Of course there are always the winding, wooded roads we drive along. We are always kind of sad when we get back into civilization.

David is getting ready to repair the door on a shed we have in the back yard. We bought that shed at the Home Show in Indianapolis the year we stopped running our store. The man we bought it from came to our house and built it and he told me he has been building them for years, but people don’t take care of theirs so they fall in disrepair. He told me people didn’t paint their new sheds and that is why. I told him he didn’t have to worry about our shed not getting painted because I love to paint. It’s been painted two or three times since we bought it. Anyway, back to the door. David needed some green pieces of lumber and I volunteered to paint them because, “I love to paint.” So Sunday after church and brunch at our IHOP, which, by the way has the best french toast, we came home and I started to paint. I could see right away that these boards were going to need more than one coat of paint so I set them in the sunshine to dry faster and gave them all two coats. Down through the years David has made fun of me when I paint. I do a great job, if I do say so myself, but I tend to wear the paint. I have several sets of painting clothes I wear that I don’t mind getting paint on. So just let these pictures tell the story.

Not attractive pictures at all. Accccckkkk! It’s not easy being green, but it shows you just how into my work I can get. So glad for those gloves, too. And we did end up with some fine painted boards. David could nail me up and no one would ever know! I’d fade right in.

So, I was sitting in a chair that evening, watching Escape to the Chateau, when I noticed a spider on my leg and jumped and yelped, but on a closer look I realized I had scared myself with a splotch of paint on my leg that looked like a spider! We had a good laugh about that, but there is another, even better st

A few weeks ago I noticed a tile had come loose in the bathroom. These tiles are only about an inch or less in size so they are pretty tiny. I carefully put the tile where I could show it to David in hopes he could replace it. Then a few days ago David told me he had put the tile in a drawer in our bathroom so we wouldn’t lose it. We went to the store this week and David bought special adhesive to fasten the tile back where it came from. Well, today David got the adhesive and the tile out and proceeded to replace the tile where I had shown it was missing. He tried and tried to fit that tile in the hole until it broke apart. That is when he noticed we had been saving a piece of soap! And he could not fit it into the hole because there actually wasn’t a hole there and the tile we in it. I am still laughing about this. I could hardly write this without bursting into laughter. This proved two things to me. The power of suggestion is very strong. When I suggested a tile was gone, David saw that it was gone and he saw a tile when I told him a piece of soap was one. And sometimes I wonder if David and I should be left alone to our own devices.

Not to say we have good imaginations, but on one our drives we saw this up ahead….

We were sure this was a giant Emu that was living wild on the backroads of Indiana.

As we got closer we saw that what we were looking at with awe, was a piece of driftwood shaped like a giant Emu. You won’t see this on the well traveled roads! And David and my motto should be “what happens on a country road, stays on a country road!”

As fast as June is going, I probably won’t see you here until July so Happy June, Happy Summer and may God bless all who read this. Bye.