Happy Turkey Day!

Gobble till ya wobble!

Ermahgerd!  Mershed perderders!!!!!

Try not to kill each other on Black Friday, eh?  See you in a few days!

A Room with a View

Was visiting someone at the hospital in mid-November and they happened to have an amazing view of Hyannis Harbor and Lewis Bay.  The body of water in front is Lewis Bay.  Egg Island is on the left and in the center is the opening to Nantucket Sound.

One of the high speed ferries pulling into the harbor from Nantucket.  The other ferry is already in port.

It was one of those very bright days so hard to get a good pic.

Trees almost bare now.

 After we left the hospital, we drove down to the water so I could get a couple quick pics from there. I used to be so familiar with Hyannis 'back in the day' but now I don't know how to get anywhere!

I really need to get down there more to take pics. I just have a real bias against going to Hyannis because the traffic is so horrible.  Plus not knowing my way around.  But I will get down there again. After all, I need to beach comb their beaches too!

Holiday Crafts 2015

I had a bunch of balls leftover from last year so I put this together one weekend.

Also been meaning to try melted crayons inside a glass ball.  The tutorial I first looked at said to break the crayons into 1/2" pieces.  Well, those won't melt.  I had to shave and thinly slice the crayons to get them to melt.  And once they start to melt and run all over, they run together extremely quickly.  This was supposed to just be blue, purple and green.  Can't see the purple.

This is another ball in blue, light blue and light green.  I was trying to cover up an alcohol ink failure (I first started out w/ alcohol ink and it looked awful).

Here's another alcohol ink failure ball that I did with purple crayons since the purple ink didn't totally wash out.

This was to be red, pink, orange and yellow and an example of how they all ran together.  

Another one I wanted to try was glass etching cream with see through stars.  I had to punch the stars out of paper and glue them on, which was fine.  The trouble was with the cream.  My first coat wasn't left on long enough and nothing happened.  I had to wash the first layer of it off which now got the star paper all wet.  I covered the ball with more cream, but it didn't etch at all evenly.  And some of the acid went through the paper and frosted the see through parts.  

The only ball that came out good was the one where I used a glass engraver.  The other side says 'peace'.  I used a stencil and then had to free hand it to thicken the letters.  I'm keeping this one but my stepdaughter wants the other 5 and she's welcome to them!

Started this one at the end of October and finished a couple of weeks later.  I saved the white snowflakes for last, thinking they'd go quickly.  They did not.  But it came out pretty good anyway. This one's not for sale.  I just need to find wall space to hang it this season!

Saw this project on Pinterest and checked out the instructions, mostly to get what kind of paint to use and download the free pattern.  You can get them HERE.  Pretty easy to do, you just can't be real heavy handed when spraying the blue paint or else it'll drip and also be opaque.

Looks nice with a candle.  So much easier than drilling holes in bottles!

Pleased to see so many new, plastic shaped ornaments in the craft stores.  This jar is sweet.  Just remove the lid, glue in your scene, put lid back on.  Boom.  I added the puff paint snow on the outside.

Night Sky Shots

There was a fairly large solar storm a couple of weeks ago which meant the Northern Lights were going to be very active and allegedly visible down here.  I have street lights across from me, and they are on the north side of the street, so it's really hard to see the stars from the front yard.  In the back yard, the north sky is obstructed by trees.  I am pleased with this photo, as it shows the trees and stars very well.  

I was following the Aurora Alerts site, HERE, and saw that it was going to be very active around 6:30 pm and reaching almost all the way down here.  So I went down to the beach, pointed the camera north and started shooting, leaving the aperture open for 30-90 seconds.  

It's funny but standing there on the beach it was so dark I had to use a flashlight, but the light pollution you couldn't see with the naked eye lit up the sky anyway.

I didn't see a thing.  When I got back and downloaded this, I noticed the green tint to the sky.  The jury is still out whether or not that's the aurora or light pollution.

Not sure why the boathouse is lit up electric green, or the trim on the house.

Then one early morning...like WAY early morning (for me)...I took the dogs out and couldn't believe the tiny sliver of moon that was showing.  It was about 5:30 and the sky was actually a really pretty shade of blue because the sky was getting light.  But I didn't feel like dragging the tripod outside when I was still half asleep so I had to free hand it.  It's a bit blurry but hey, no glasses, no coffee and sleepy.

Red Oak

There's a large oak tree on the side of my driveway that turns a gorgeous shade of red.

It was a beautiful day; this was the day I went to Town Neck.  I shot these around 8:15 AM.

My neighbour's burning bush.  Love these too.

Down the street

Well at least we got some foliage!

A Warm Day at the Beach

After our freezing weather, it got super warm so I stopped by Town Neck on my way home from Sandwich.  I was comfy in a tshirt and shorts.  It's still in bad shape from the storms but the town is spending in excess of $2 million to obtain sand that the Army Corp of Engineers (ACOE) will dredge from the Canal.  Not sure when that work is going to start. 

Not much glass at all, but I did find this rather large operculum, which is pretty.

I think I found Scusset Beach's missing rocks.

Whoo hoo!  Got one!  Note the teensy mussel shell right below the glass.

We really do have the coolest rocks.

Oh boy a second piece!  That was it for today, just 2.

 Some cormorants on the rocks just off shore.

This is a small residential area on the beach and the homeowners are currently embroiled in a huge fight with the town over the sand issue.  In a nutshell, the ACOE was willing to put the dredged sand in front of the houses in exchange for permanent easement over the property to the beach.  The majority of the homeowners balked, so the town decided to pay to have the sand put on the public portion of the beach.  Now the homeowners are accusing Sandwich of doing that for spite, and filed a lawsuit against the town.  So come the next big storm, esp. if we have a high tide at the time of the storm, these houses are going to probably flood.  That berm will wash away, along with the rolls of erosion control stuff.

 This will more than likely be the first casualty this winter.  

After I left the beach I went to the marsh side of the parking lot.  That's boardwalk.