A Day on Garland Street

Here we are, the Dilly 
Dally 
Dollies, well some of us. There are a lot of us roaming around you know.








Today we are visiting the Garland District Shops...
 in Spokane.


We went to the Ruby Slipper Shoe Store, The Tin Man Artworks.... shops named to honor Judy "Garland" in the Wizard of Oz. (The Street is named Garland, if you recall.)


We also went to the Discovery Store, ( a great cause to thrift for.) Destiny Floral, Book Traders, Elegant Peasant, Clock Works and the Milk Bottle (Mary Lou's) Cafe and Ice Cream place.  Then we rounded the corner and went down the hill on Monroe Street to visit The Bag Lady. (An antique store.)






Walking past the Rocket Bakery window we met some shoes and a dog, which belonged to some smiling faces in the window....  a couple of guys just sippin' coffee, watching the world go by.  We, at the moment, were the world.



We had a great time and definitely recommend this excursion route for an outing, if you are the type to dilly-dally around a bit like us. 

We enjoyed the creative clutter.... even made some friends. Some of us felt right at home you know.



We also took turns being elegant.....fancy furs and beautiful jewels were all around us. 








And also a lot of book!  Some of us will be reading a lot in the next month or so.


And we played with toys of all kinds and variation, puppets, dolls and wind up marvels that spit fire.

We imagined all sorts of things










Who could ask for more?

We encountered a lot of beautiful people on this chilly and rainy type of day and we shopped till we dropped.



Jilly finally said, "I'm tired."

                                                          This is not Jill...
                                            ...but she is pretty cool. 

Sick of Religion?

"Take two verses and call the doctrine in the morning."
GB

Note fron Maryjaneielu

found... stashed in a drawer.. a small piece of paper with pencil scribblings!  I thought to myself, woah.. this is from MJ..... it could be lost or something.  I better post it before is is lost forever....
 It reads:

"When there are bats in your belfrey that fleet,
When your "comprenea vous" line is cut,
When there is nobody home in the top of your dome,
Then your heads not ahead, it's a nut!"

(If I remember correctly, her mother taught her that!  And to think , she then taught me....  )

Love ya MJ!

Funny Photo

Someone gave me a card with this photo on it and I thought it was really great.. I mean, what a kid, what a pose!    Is he cute or what?  Kinda like a little Mr. Bean or something...

Must be for Tam...

: )

This Spud's for You!

Time for Tea

I have been learning about tea.

Believe it or not I even got Geo to attend a class 101 on tea with me!

We learned all kinds of things.  The funny thing was that a few weeks after this class I was invited to a in home tea party  deal where we learned a lot of the same things.  Geo didn't go on that one though...it was  just a bunch of us girls.

Probably the most rmarkable thing for me wa learning that all tea come from the same TEA plant. Green, white black it's all the same just harvested at different times, that and how to select tea that is whole not the "sweepings and fannings."  It was a very interesting class and I highly recommend it... taken at the Taste and See Tea House on the south hill in Spokane.  We tried about 20 different kinds of tea that day.  The little tea party was interesting too... similar information... but it was a sales oriented presentation moreso than the class was.

Another interesting thing was how to decaffinate your tea....
You do this simply by letting it steep for a few seconds, pouring tha t off and then brewing the bag the full amount of time.  The caffiene comes out very quickly, so when you do this you essentially remove the caffeine from the tea.  And one more thing.. that Herbal tea... has no tea in it at all.. if it really is herbal.   

Those are my friend Deb's tea pots in the photo.  Aren't they pretty?
These are some of her dolls....

Just us girls!------>

Guinea Pig Day

A Gift From a Friend

Here is a cool gift  that a friend brought me from Isreal....

Crazy Cool Sign Collection...

I am starting a new blog for my Crazy Cool Sign Collection.  Cool Signs photos will now be posted there...  Check the links.

Lisa

Happy Valentine's Day Signs

Why Signs?

They are interesting.  Today I found several...
I love the Dog and Car wash one.  Which do you like?

Be sure to scroll back and see the one with Obama and McCain....

More Signs 2

More Signs

Freedom

Driving one night, I saw a sign on a building that said Freedom Clinic.  It was a handwritten sign, posted on a barred up run-down building.   Caught my attention, and I could not believe my eyes.  Didn;t look like freedom at all to me... looked like a prison.... and I vowed to come back and take a photo because I did not have my camera with me then.

But how important is taking pictures of oddities like that?  Not very, uunless of course you are making it a hobby or something like that.... anyhow, I forgot, until I started this new hobby... and we were driving past.  I made it a point to get a photo of that place. 

It has a new sign now , "Patriot Clinic." The Freedom Clinic one had more UMPH! 

The home made signs for this place were, and are amazing.  Even this photo has an open sign, (hand writtens...It read, Now Open."   but they are, at the time of this photo, closed.   


 I understand the bars... it is a clinic and there are lawbreakers around, but the visual of it all was just ironic...

The Patriot Clinic... is now what teh sign reads instead.  Just the same, I do not thinnk that this is exactly the kind of freedom our founding Father's had in mind when they established the United States of America.....


FREEDOM...

I now have two in my curious collection!




Seriously.. this is not what freedom is meant to look like.  It looks like this when you live in a society that rejects the laws of God, one where people will steal and harm others for their own personal gain.

Not a high tech clinic here, not very large... maybe the last vestige of true freedom left...

You know,
making your own signs... one person helping another out of sheer goodwill, expecting nothing in return.   Bortherly love.  Love of fellow man and country...some call it patriotism.

We can still see the bars on the windows ....still visible, not invisble... use to be indivisable... but now some are outside looking in and some are inside looking out....

Wondering what exactly happened to create a wall.

Bars.... lines of separation....
not stealth electronic surveillance, satellite security systems.... where once they hung but stars.

What a different world we would live in if we could just do what is right,
be sorry for our sin, and love .... love even the perfect laws of God.  But we through them out of schools and courtrooms, tamble them underneath our feet and instead,we put up walls and barriers... thinking we are free....

How dumb!

A New Hobby... First of the Collection

I have a new hobby, one more hobby to my list of many.  My new hobby is taking pictures of signs.

But not just any signs.  The criteria for a photo is that I must find it unusual or amusing or it must have some meaning for the signs of the times that we live in.

Here is the story behind the first one in my collection.

Painted on a an old run down building in one of the poorest parts of our city, Hillyard, it is a black and white piece of two men, one black, one white.... painted on an old run down factory looking type of building... Maybe a warehouse.  You can see it from Market St. I was impressed that graffittiers finally put up something that looked like real art, and vowed to photograph it; but not soon enough....apparently, for eventually... (sometime into the election of the one that won the presidency,) someone graffittied on the artwork.  I assume it wasn't the person who put the artwork up, but who knows?  I would love to have a before and after snap shot of it, but all I have now is an "after"....


Passing by it at least a hundred times more since it was graffittied,  always vowing to take the photo... I finally did, and thus began my new hobby of documenting the Signs of My Times... and other Curious Oddities.

Here is the first of my collection:

Look past the graffitti and appreciate the art.

Now when you are done with that, we can talk about the graffitti....

Note O' De Day