this little life of mine

Sepia Scenes: Railroad #30daysofcreativity

30 Days of Creativity: Day 39

 

Teaser Tuesday: Where She Went by Gayle Forman

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

•Grab your current read
•Open to a random page
•Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
•BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
•Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

 
This week I'm finishing up Where She Went by Gayle Forman. It's the sequel to If I Stay, which was one of my favourite books last year. This is an awesome book, too, the story being told this time from Adam's POV. The cover is lovely, too; I love the girl's face, like she's looking back to the past and forward to the future at the same time. Here are my teasers:

Little pinpricks fire-cracker up and down my body. Just calm down, I tell myself. You just make her nervous, showing up all out of the blue like that. Still I'm flattered that I matter - even if it's just enough to scare her.

Earthbox Garden Week 10 #30days of creativity

30 Days of Creativity: Day 27

Sorry I missed my garden update last week. I took the pictures and everything, but my computer is running really slow lately (or the internet is running really slow lately, I don't know), and getting the pictures ready for posting was taking a couple more hours than I was willing to spend. And whatever and blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, here's what the garden is up to this week:

 

Everything seems to be growing like crazy all of a sudden! The tomato plants are huge and both have little green tomatoes on them:

 
 

Both the pepper plants have little baby peppers on them, too:

 
 
 

And the squash plants?!? Dang! We really should've put just one plant each in a box instead of two.  They're ginormous, and both of them have blossoms and squash on them. There's really only one zucchini squash that looks good enough to make it; the others are kinda withered and dying. There's a couple yellow squash, but I'm not sure if they'll make it or not. The good news is, I saw a couple bees buzzing around the blossoms, so hopefully they'll get pollinated and we'll have squash!

 
 
 

2011 Atascadero Wine Festival

Mom and I haven't been to the Atascadero Wine Festival in a couple years, so we were shocked when we went today and saw how ginormous the event has become!

Or, how big the glasses have gotten! Check out the difference between the previous Atascadero Wine Festival glass and the one we got today:

Dang! That's a BIG GLASS!!!

Anyway, there were 80 wineries scheduled to be here - and I think they all made it; I didn't see a single empty table like I have at other wine tasting events! - as well as food vendors and artists and, as usual, The Mighty Croon Dogs provided the rockin' entertainment. The weather was perfect: sunny and warm, but not too hot. I think it helped they moved the festival to the late afternoon/early evening instead of the middle of the day when it's 110 degrees!

Mom and I decided to only try wines from wineries we'd never heard of, and luckily there were plenty of new wineries to choose from. We hit Aron Hill, Bargetto Winery, Rockin' R Winery, Laraneta and Carriage Vineyards (who also had olive oil and vinegars that were quite good, too!), Tarrica, Le Vigne Winery, Blue Belly Estate, Still Water Vineyards, Althea Estates, Ambyth Estate, Edward Sellers, and Graveyard Vineyards, and in the end we did end up visiting old favourites Peachy Canyon and Ranchita Canyon. 

 
 

 

For lunch we had the ahi tacos from Pier 46 (yummy, but I really wasn't expecting the ahi to be, um, raw, or the tacos to be so wee), a tri tip sandwich from Cal Terra, and dessert was an amazingly delicious chocolate fudge cake pop from SallyFace Cakepops.

Later we walked around the lake and waited for all the drunk idiots  other festival-goers to leave before heading home. In the past the festival has allowed free admission to the Charles Paddock Zoo, which is something I always look forward to, however, this year the zoo was closed, so I didn't get to do that. I don't know if it was because the festival was held later, or because it's gotten so big they didn't want all the loud, obnoxious drunks the large crowds bothering the animals, but it was a disappointment. I'll just have to go another time. 

Teaser Tuesday: America Pacifica by Anna North

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

•Grab your current read 

•Open to a random page 

•Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

•BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

•Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This week I'm reading America Pacifica by Anna North. It's a dark, dystopian novel which I thought was a YA, but I think I may be completely wrong about that. This book is a little harsher than ones I normally read in that there's a LOT of foul language and implied sexual situations. It's very well written, though, and the story is interesting, so I've been able to overlook the numerous f-bombs (and the odd c-word, which really surprised me and totally threw me right out of the book for a few moments) and other gross language to get through it. Anyway, here are my teasers:

He was wearing his trench coat, and she noticed now how tall he was, how there was something regal in his slender head, his beaky nose, the way his shoulders leaned back away from his chest. She saw how he could pass for a Manhattanville executive, someone who assumed good things were due to him in life. Both of his coat sleeves were full, and she wondered if he'd been conning her earlier, if he'd somehow faked his amputation just to see what she would do. Then he held his right hand out. 

 

See It Sunday: Old Timer

30 Days of Creativity: Day 19.

The Wineman Hotel sign downtown SLO.

Stelina La Queena #30daysofcreativity

Steelhead fish statue painted by Sue Palmer
 

Photo Friday: Building #30daysofcreativity

 
Chicago, 2009

Sepia Scenes: Under the Pier #30daysofcreativity

30 Days of Creativity: Day 15

 

Teaser Tuesday: Fang by James Patterson

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

•Grab your current read
•Open to a random page
•Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
•BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
•Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

 
This week I'm reading Fang by James Patterson. This was a rare find at Buckets of Books in Atascadero: a hard-cover version of a new release!! I snatched it up, despite the fact that it was a bit more expensive than the paperbacks I usually buy there. Both my mom and I have been really enjoying the Maximum Ride series by James Patterson (Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports is a BIG exception; that book sucked to the point that if that had been the first book in the series, we would never have picked up another one! I sincerely hope James sacked the guy who wrote that piece of garbage!), and have been lucky enough to find all the books pretty much in order at BofB on a fairly regular basis.

Anyway, here's the teaser from page 94:

"For example, wouldn't one of your boys love" - he reached to his side and slid a cloudy jar into view of the camera - "a brand new pair of these?"

He picked up the container so the camera could focus on it.