A Trip to the Beach

Last week was the annual judges' conference. Which meant that there was no court for me. And no court means... beach week! Well, okay, beach extended weekend. But still, nice and relaxing! Mom and Dad have a time share in North Myrtle Beach, and, fortunately, they were more than willing to let me use the second bedroom for a few days. While it wasn't directly on the beach, it was across the road. You could still open the balcony door and listen to the surf. And here's our view of the ocean:

One of the great things about North Myrtle Beach is that the beachfront road area is soooo much calmer and quieter than Myrtle Beach itself (and it's maybe 5 miles up the shore, with much of the shopping and dining located on the king's highway). If our hotel had been on the shore road in Myrtle Beach, we would have had to deal with things like stoplights and cruising and inching forward a car's length at a time in the evenings. Instead, our road looks like this:

And that is probably why I could enjoy the sound of the ocean from our balcony despite being across the road!

Other things that I love about beach 'extended weekend':
1- visiting with my parents (of course!) and any other family members who happen to make it down. This year, my sister was there for two days, but my brother and sil were not able to make it.
2- yummy, yummy dining! If you visit the area and have never been to the Chesapeake House. YOU MUST GO. Seriously. Go.
3- outlet shopping. Wheee! I scored a new travel purse, and four (yes, I said 4) new pairs of shoes, all desperately needed. Oh yeah, and a new dress, some candles, my semi-annual stash of pantyhose (ick), and a few new shirts and a sweater. Love it, love it, love it!
4- walks on the beach. I didn't make it out early enough to get the freshest pickings, but I thought what I did find was pretty enough:

5- finally, there's the chance to get in some major stitch time, using the fabulous natural light coming in from the balcony window. I know, I know, this part would be much better with progress photos! Sorry. It's too dark to take the photos now, and I wanted to post while the mood was on me. I ended up taking Jenny Bean's Creation Sampler with me. It's about half finished. I'll post a photo next time around. I've also been inspired by all the patriotic pieces everyone has been sharing in blog world. I found a cute little freebie from The Sampler Girl over the weekend, and have almost finished stitching it. Ideally, I would do the finishing this weekend, but I think that I'm going to need to pay a visit to my favorite 'shop' (aka, Mom's house) before I can do that. I could back it with red felt, but I want some trim, and that, I do not have.

Til next time, keep creating and stay cool!

Progress in stitching, scrapping, and being annoyed by my cats!

I finally took a photo of my sampler progress! She's certainly a colorful little thing:

Rachel was definitely a big fan of birds, and I'm having a good time stitching them. But what was she thinking with those bright turqoise feet??? They are quite odd. I'm going to get a good chunk of stitchy time next week. I can't decide whether to just focus on pushing through on this sampler, or if I should switch over to something new. Hmmm... guess we'll see what kind of mood I'm in when I assemble my 'to do' bag Friday after work.

Speaking of work, there are days when it is a challenge to make it to work bright eyed and well put together. Those days typically go something like this: "Crash!" I am startled from a blissful slumber an hour before my alarm is due to go off. I stumble into the living room, no cats are in sight, but I do see my ottomon...

How did they manage to flip the thing completely on its back?!?! Flash forward a bit later in the morning. I pulled my clothes out for the day as I was brushing my teeth and laid them out on my bed. I quickly finished in the bathroom and came back to find this:

I must GENTLY remove Princess from my suit and then roll it with a lint brush to remove her little furs. Sigh. And then I come home from work, and I find Lucky, looking like all he needs to finish his day is a good strong drink and the channel changer:

Darned cats.

I also found some time since my last post to make a little more progress on my Egyptian album. After touring Dendera in the morning, we returned to our boat and sailed back to Luxor. It was late afternoon when we docked, and we headed over to Luxor Temple:


The first large courtyard of the temple was full of statues of Ramses II, all of varying sizes. Our guide explained to us the significance of the posture the pharoah was posed in. I'll be darned if I can remember the meanings now, though. I'll have to see if I can dig that up somewhere. Anyway, on the second page of this layout, you see photos of 3 things: a mosque, a painting of Christian apostles, and the cartouche of Ramses (yes, I can 'read' that it says Ramses. At least something stuck in my head!). The Christians and the Muslims took over the ancient Egyptians' place of worship and converted it for their own use. I saw a couple of other places where crosses had been carved inside of temples at some of the other sites we visited.

As we were wandering around the temple, the sun eventually set completely. This is the only temple we saw in the complete dark. It was nice to escape the extreme heat... not that it was actually cool or anything. And it was fun to soak up some nighttime atmosphere within the temple walls. I thought it was absolutely gorgeous, all lit up against the night sky.


The row of sphinxes that you see at the bottom right of the second page of this layout are the other end of the avenue that began at Karnak Temple. That's a lot of statues all lined up!

Luxor certainly did not become less busy during the night. Since its so hot during the day, the local population becomes more active during the cooler evening hours. We drove from the temple to a papyrus store/museum. We watched a demonstration of the process of making papyrus sheets, and I ended up buying several beautiful, hand painted pieces of art there. I'm sure no one will be surprised to learn that the piece I bought for myself was of Bastet, the cat god. I still haven't gotten it framed, but it's sitting at my parents' house right now, so I can't take a photo of it to share tonight.

Well, that's all for now. I hope everyone is enjoying their summer so far, and finding plenty of time to exercise their creative muscles!

A visit to Dendera and my secret life as Amelia Peabody

Hello, dear readers. When last I left you, I believe I was in the middle of creating my layouts about our visit to the town and temple of Dendera. We docked at Dendera in the night. There was a club, or bar, near our berth, and I could hear music coming from it late into the night. Our guide told us that the region was well known for its bananas, which are slightly smaller than the version that we have here in the US. I'm afraid I don't remember whether we actually ate any of the bananas, or how the taste compared to what we were used to.

The next morning, we debarked and boarded a bus for the temple. Although there has been a temple on this site for far longer, the current structure dates from the Greco-Roman period. Here's my temple layout:



As you can see, the temple is set in a fairly open space. The woman at the top of all of the columns is the goddess Hathor. Her face, along with most of the faces on all the carvings in this temple (and most of the other temples we visited), has been chiseled away, either by Christians or Muslims trying to eradicate worship of the ancient gods. I didn't include a photo that shows this in my layout, but much of the interior of the great hall was blackened from the soot of campfires from visitors once the temple fell into disuse as a place of worship. At the top of the right-hand page, you can see a photo of the temple ceiling, with original paint still plainly visible. The sky was covered in stars to imitate the night sky. Isn't it beautiful?

I put my journaling about our visit to the temple in the little pink envelope tucked under the photos of the Hathor columns:


I also added two of my favorite elements for a layout: glimmer misting and a flower and button cluster:

I should explain a little bit about what it was like to visit any of the temples in Egypt. It was hot anywhere you went, but as long as you were out in the open air, you would have a breeze. The air was never still. However, if you went into an enclosed space, there was simply no circulation, and the heat would become stifling. Add in the humidity of a few dozen tourists' breath, and MAYBE you can imagine how uncomfortable some of these temple interiors could be. I do not consider myself to be a heavy sweater, but in places like the Dendera crypt, the Valley of the Kings, and Abu Simbel, the back of my linen shirts would positively wet. Ugh.

Returning to our tour of Dendera temple, we made our way into the interior of the Dendera temple, where our guide Mohammed offered us the opportunity to climb into the crypt and view some artwork that vandals never discovered. One of the temple guards lifted the hatch to a hole in the ground and we descended a steep ladder down into the ground. Then we crawled through a low, narrow hole in the wall and found ourselves in a long hallway, covered in carvings, with a ceiling only about 6 1/2 feet tall. No air moved down there, so we were drenched in sweat. And the exit route was one-way, meaning people had to stop coming down before you could come back out. Stuffy and claustrophobic, and one of the funnest things I did during the trip! Why? Well because it fit in with my fantasy that I was reliving the adventures of Amelia Peabody!

If you have never read about Miss Peabody, you really should. She is the heroine of a series of mystery novels set in early 20th century Egypt, during the height of the most romanticized period of Egyptian archaeology. The novels are written by Elizabeth Peters, and are always about the adventures of Amelia and her growing family as they search for ancient treasure and defeat the bad guy that threatens them. I've been reading these novels since I was in middle school, and they have been one of the big reasons that I was so anxious to visit Egypt in the first place. Amelia Peabody has a great love for crawling into low, dank underground spots to search for mummies, so the crypt in Dendera temple was the perfect place to wax a little nostalgic about my fictional heroine. And to make things even more delicious, consider this: Amelia's leading man is a tall, strong man, with a bit of a temper... just like my Alton! Hee hee. I don't think I even tried to explain to him that he was my Emerson on this vacation, but he really was. Swoon! Anyway, here's my layout about the crypt. The arrow is pointing straight to the hole we had to crawl through:

If you look up above the yellow paper where the title is, you may see some other papers poking out. Those are holding three photos that I tucked behind the paper because I wanted to include them without taking the focus away from that little hole we had to crawl through. There is a photo of Alton, who is looking rather creepy and mummy-like in the dim light, a photo of some of the pristine carvings, and finally, a photo of my foot, which I scraped up a bit crawling around underground:



The city of Dendera itself was filled with beautiful works of art. I took photos of some of it from the bus, and we actually stopped to snap photos of a few of the mosaics outside of the bus. The round mosaic you see here is the Egyptian zodiac. This mosaic is inspired by the zodiac carved in the upper reaches of Dendera temple. The long woman stretching across the lower photo is the goddess Mut, and her body is the sky, stretching above the earth.


On the home front, I know I keep promising more photos of my sampler. And one of these days, it's actually going to happen, I swear! Meanwhile, progress is being made. I had to take a little time off today over the lunch hour to meet up with the a/c guys at my apartment. This place has never been very good at keeping up when the temperatures soar, and with so many 90 plus days already this year, it's just exhausting to think of dealing with an overheated apartment all summer long. I can't tell yet whether things are really fixed, but it definitely seems better now that they've paid their visit. Here's Spike testing one of the living room vents to see if things have improved:

I told her it might actually be cooler if she didn't sit on top of the vent. She ignored me, of course. I hope everyone else is staying cool and getting lots of creative time. Til we meet again!

Sometimes I'm jealous

I'm sure my cats all have really rough lives. For example, check out this photo of Lucky, exhausted from a day of... well, napping, I suppose:

No wait, here we go. This is Lucky, working hard at flying? No, just stretching.

And then there's Princess holding a cardboard box down:

Please believe me when I say the other 3 cats are just as sorry. And some days I am completely jealous of them. Rotten little things.

Stitching on the sampler is coming along. I'll try to snap another photo in the morning when the lighting is better. And I'm about halfway through my next layout from my Egypt vacation. Next up is our visit to the temple at Dendera and my opportunity to channel Amelia Peabody (I'll explain all about it next post).

Hope everyone has a great weekend and stays cool!

Boarding the MS Miriam, and the misadventures of Gus the cat

When we left Karnak Temple, we drove over to the river and boarded the MS Miriam for the first time. We were welcomed on board with a cup a hyacinth tea while we waited for our room assignments. I discovered that I do not care for hyacinth tea, it is far too bitter for my tastes. Our room was small, but not too small. We had two twin beds, a desk, a table, and two chairs. We were on the topmost deck (not including the roof of the boat), and we had a large window that we could open if we chose. The bathroom was also small, but adequate. The biggest problem was that my "two-story man" as our guide referred to Alton, was so tall that he couldn't stand straight up in the shower without smashing his head into the ceiling.

I had never been on a cruise before. What a fabulous place to initiate myself into the wonders of cruising! That day, we started what became the basic routine for the next week: sight seeing in the morning, relaxing on board and admiring the scenery in the afternoon, and sometimes additional sightseeing in the late evening. We would eat nearly every meal in the dining room below, and relax in the lounge chairs on the top deck during the late afternoon. When it was too hot, we would simply stay in our cabin, napping or watching the scenery from the cool comfort of our little room.

Here's the layout I made about our cruise ship:

I used mostly Webster's Pages product on this page. I hid my journaling underneath the large photo. That little bit you see sticking out is a journaling card that slides out from underneath. The journaling is basically a description of our room and the method used for docking each night. If you look at the smaller photo, you will see three ships stacking up against each other at the shoreline. Every night, this is what we would do. I think the most I saw stacked together at once was 6 ships. In order to get to shore, you would walk through the lobbies of each successive boat til you reached the dock. What an efficient way to get the maximum number of boats docked in one location!

I had been thinking about creating one of those flag titles that have been so popular recently, and this is my first try. I used some corrugated flags from Jillibean Soup and distressed them with a little gesso and Glimmer Glam:

And I added some extra flowers with pearl accents to the flowers that were already on the WP paper, as well as some WP tulle:

Once we were all settled with our cabins, the boat headed downriver (that's north on the Nile) towards Dendera. Apparently, the north is somewhat more hostile towards Americans (or Europeans, or both) than the south, so we had a mounted machine gun and two armed guards on board our boat during this part of our trip. I could have gotten photos of the men and their guns if I'd been willing to pay a little bribe, but I wasn't. You'd think that having an armed escort would be incredibly unsettling, but it wasn't. At least, not for me. I took tons, and tons, and tons of photos of what we saw as the riverbanks slid past us. This two page layout includes photos of some of the things we saw as we headed north:

We never ran out of things to look at during our Nile cruise. Tired as I might be, I found it hard to nap when I could be sitting at the window, or on the upper deck, watching this beautiful country slip by. Five times a day, the air would be filled with the sounds of the muzzerains calling the Muslim faithful to prayer. It's hard to describe the call: it was kind of deep and buzzing. Very exotic sounding to this little southern gal!

On a completely different subject...

My boyfriend has two beautiful white cats living in his apartment in Durham. They are indoor cats, although, when he lived in New Jersey, he would allow them outside for a few hours at a time on nice days. They have never been outside since moving to North Carolina. Never, that is, until Sunday, when I got woken up by a phone call from Alton early Sunday morning. "I can't find Gus," he said. He realized the little guy was gone when Gus didn't wake him up crying for food that morning, and figured the cat must have darted outside sometime the evening before. To make matters worse, he was leaving for a week long business trip in just a few minutes. Can there be any worse feeling than knowing that a loved pet is out on his own, and you can't even be around to look for him?

Over the space of the next 3 days, I drove up to help look, and two of his brothers came over at various times to search as well. I put signs up all over the complex. But no Gus. Finally, I made arrangements to come in late for work on Wednesday morning and drove up to Durham late on Tuesday to spend the night and hunt for Gus in the park behind the complex. It was my hope that either I'd find him there at night, or that he'd turn up at Alton's door the next morning looking for breakfast. After unloading my car and scarfing down a quick dinner, I headed out on my search. And what did I see as I turned the corner, but the little guy himself, white fur glowing against the night-dark bushes! He was incredibly filthy, and furious with me for daring to pick him up and tote him to the apartment, but otherwise seemed none the worse for wear. Alton and I both suspect that the dumb cat had the time of his life wandering around outside for 3 nights straight, and that we were the only ones foolish enough to think that it was a bad thing that he was loose! Alton says Gus is now so grounded that he can't even LOOK at the outdoors anymore. I'm just left wondering yet again how such small things can create such big places in our hearts.

And I leave you with the following, possibly useful, bit of info... I've heard several people complaining about problems posting to others' blogs this week. I have also heard that clearing your caches and deleting your cookies will solve the problem. I can't promise that it will work, but it can't hurt to try, right?

Flying to Luxor and stitching peek

Sheesh! Have I really gone over a month without posting on here? Ugh. Where does the time go? There's been a lot going on here recently. So much that I'm not going to try to put it all in one post. Instead, I'll just have to promise myself not to wait so long before I update again. Today, I'm going to share some layouts and stories about our first day in Luxor, and share a little about my progress on my reproduction sampler. Then tomorrow, I hope to blog about Gus the cat's misadventures and our Nile cruise ship.

We left Cairo early in the morning for our flight to Luxor. Security was verrry different from what we experience here in the US. Having the metal detector go off didn't necessarily mean that you were going to be searched, and our tour guide distributed boarding passes at random. I ended up with a pass for someone named "Osama"! The flight was a little warm, but short. And the airport toilets made me thankful that I'd followed my guidebook's recommendation to bring my own toilet paper! As we walked out of the airport, Alton caught sight of a sign at the airport that he thought was kind of funny. So naturally, we have a picture of it that I have included in this tag:

"Smile You are in Luxor International Airport" the sign says. Who smiles because they are in a particular airport? Really, the sign was kind of funny. Here's the entire layout I made, documenting my impressions of the city of Luxor:

After the filth and dirt of Cairo, the cleanliness of Luxor was striking. And I was amused to see a few buildings that were strongly reminiscent of the Mos Eisley spaceport in Star Wars. I guess I now know where Speilberg got his architectural inspiration!
From the airport, we drove straight to the Karnak Temple complex. This place was huge! As we approached we crossed a bridge that went over an avenue of sphinxes that stretches from Karnak Temple to Luxor Temple. In ancient times, you could walk the sphinx lined avenue for two miles to travel between the two temples. Here's my layout showing what some of the excavated avenue looks like now:

I colored the flowers on the layout with some glimmer mist. I wanted to capture some of the brightness and heat of the day in this layout. Because, let me tell you, Luxor is where we began to experience the REAL heat! I didn't check on the temperature every day, but I suspect that we were in the triple digits from the time we arrived til the time we returned to Cairo. The hottest temperature that we discussed during our time in southern Egypt was 113 degrees. Think about walking around a hot desert in that heat! Anyway, here's a closeup of the flowers I colored:

I made a two page layout to show some of what we saw inside the temple complex. I regret the decision to splash ink across the layout. But I do not regret it so much that I am going to redo the pages. The horizontal photo shows the view from the entrance to the complex, and the remainder of the photos are from various locations inside the complex. It was such a huge space! And do you see the obelisk in one of the bottom photos? Originally, there were two obelisks standing there. If you are familiar with the obelisk in Paris, France known as "La Madeleine," then you have seen the mate to the one pictured in my layout.


One of the things that I had most been looking forward to seeing at the Karnak Temple was the hall of giant columns. I was familiar with the location mainly through my readings of Elizabeth Peter's "Amelia Peabody" series. There are a couple of scenes in her novels where her heroine or a member of her family finds themselves wandering through that forest of stone columns, either attempting to spy on others within the hall, or trying to evade a nefarious villain. I love those books, and I was thrilled to no end to get to see how truly easy it would be to stand behind one of those columns and be completely unknown to persons just a few feet away! Alton caught a photo of me standing against one of those columns, and I used it to make this layout to express the awe I felt standing in that space:

In other news, I have been working on my reproduction sampler whenever I get the chance these days. I have decided to stitch my piece on 40 count "straw" hand-dyed linen from Weeks Dye Works. The original is stitched on a much coarser count of linen, but I wanted to shrink my piece down from the original, giant size of the finished design. I am using mostly NPI silks, with a couple of Au Ver a Soie silks and one Belle Soie added to the mix. She used a lot of colors in her sampler, some of them for less than 10 stitches! I don't know how you feel when you first start a piece, but for me, there's always this sense that I'm holding my breath, waiting to see if I've completely botched it with my fabric or fiber selection. The good news on this piece is that the colors of the flower border just sing on this piece of fabric. The bad news is, the photo I am going to leave you with doesn't do justice to piece itself.

I hope the finished piece will look as pretty as the beginning does! Ooh, I just looked out the window, and it is black as night out there, even though it's only 3pm. I think that's my sign that it's time to get off the computer. Happy creating everyone!

Visiting the Sphinx and a rough finish to the day

Hello, blogland. I'm posting here safe and sound from my apartment in Robeson County. While so many are suffering from loss and devastation after Saturday's storms, the only after affect for me are the mystery shingles scattered across my yard. My thoughts and prayers go out to those who were so much less fortunate.

I wanted to share a few more layouts and stories from my Egyptian vacation. After our exciting camel ride, we headed over to the Sphinx. Again, words kind of escape me. It's just so amazing to see such iconic sites in person. I was able to wander into the temple area just in front of the Sphinx's feet, but I never figured out how to get any closer than that. I did discover the dangers of allowing friendly Egyptians to 'show' you great places to take photos (that you were already heading towards all by yourself). If you let them engage you and they can manage to show you where to take the picture, you're gonna have to tip them. Ugh. That was definitely one of the more trying aspects of the trip. Anyway, I was feeling a little 'artsy' with this layout, so I experimented with placing the photo in an unusual location. (and I played with my Glimmer Mists, always a happy thing) I like how it turned out:

As we walked back to the bus, I told Alton that I was starting to feel pretty bad. I had been drinking as much water as I could make myself, but it was hot, hot, hot, and I guess it was too much for me. Poor Alton had to beg a plastic bag off our fellow tourists, and, yurk!, up came all that icky water. Bleh. I was pretty miserable at that point. And embarassed. And terrified that I was going to get sick every day of the entire trip (spoiler alert: I did NOT vomit again after this first day, thank goodness).

Our bus took us from the Giza plains to Saqqara, where earlier step pyramids had been built. We started our visit in a mastaba, and were admiring some of the carvings on the walls when I started to feel nauseous again. One of the 'guides' tried to convince me to puke on the floor of the mastaba. He indicated that they could just cover it up with sand. What a ridiculous idea! I couldn't decide if he was trying to be nice, or if he was going to try to charge me some outrageous fine if I actually did it, but it seemed like an incredibly disrespectful idea to me. So back to the bus I went for another round with the plastic bag, my new best friend. I stayed in the back trying to stay cool-ish and dozing a bit. Alton and the others got to climb inside of one of the step pyramids (hence my regret on passing up on the opportunity earlier in the day). I remained in the bus, feeling miserable during the visit to Memphis, and then when everyone went to lunch, I STILL kept my seat. Alton brought me a coke from lunch, and that was all I had until late in the evening. I did manage to make it off the bus for the tour of the rug factory (I shared that layout a month or two ago), but I was soooo glad when we finally arrived back at the hotel and I could stumble up to our genuinely COOL room.

Needless to say, I did not take many photos from the rest of that day. Instead, I borrowed an image that Alton took of a statue that I did see from the bus window, to create my layout about everything I missed that day:


I have one more layout from that long, miserable ride in the bus. As we were leaving Memphis, I saw these two cute little children waving at us. They were standing in front of some date plants that were drying in the sun. I thought they would make a sweet little photo. Just as I snapped the shutter, I realized that the little boy was, erm, flashing us! I was torn between laughing and being utterly offended. So I added a little modesty dot to the photo, and made a layout to tell the story:

I'm not sure what that behavior was about. Later in the tour, others, including Alton, saw another young man engaging in the same behavior. I don't know if it was a reaction to our cameras, or to our non-Egyptianness. It was one of the few examples of ugly behavior that I witnessed on our trip.

Hmm, I have shared two somewhat icky stories/layouts today. I don't think I have any more stories like this for the entire rest of my Egypt vacation. They just happened to have both occurred on the same day of the trip, and hence, to be told together.

Happy crafting, everyone, and stay safe!