I WON A GIVEAWAY.....!!!

      You can't imagine my shock and surprise when I looked at LLYYNN'S BLOG  this morning to see
 who won her beautiful giveaway and saw MY NAME LISTED AS THE WINNER!!   I really have not won anything for years and I have been trying!!!   For those of you who don't know her, Lynn makes the most amazing jewelry findings and pendants from a variety of materials that are mind blowing!!   I have loved her work and admired it since I started to blog way back on Feb.13th...
   I would post a picture of the beautiful piece that I won if I knew How??!!!!  So please take a moment and go look for yourself.....I will try today to post the links to her blog and ETSY site where she sells her beautiful things.   I am trying to do a link....having trouble!!  Please look over to the right at the list of "MY BLOG LIST"  There is Lynn's blog...click there...sorry I'm so inept at this..c  ALSO LOOK AT:
LYNNDAVIS ETSY.COM  and check out her beautiful items in her ETSY SHOP

THE MISSION INN

For our anniversary, we went to The Mission Inn in Riverside, California.  This hotel is a jewel and one of the most beautiful places I have ever

 seen here in California.

I took over 200 photographs of it.   She is that photogenic!!

Hushed beauty on the inside

Della Robbia Plaques

surround the inside courtyard...

Every nook, every cranny is beautiful.   This is the inner courtyard which contains one of many restaurants on the property.  This hotel is as close to being in Europe as one can get here in California.

 Two parrots reside at the entryway into the hotel.

There have been two parrots since the opening

of the hotel......

The original parrots are shown here in a tile floor

that is on the entry to one of the many beautiful

restaurants.

Ironwork, Sconces, trompe l'oeil,  tiles...it has it all

in quality and quantity....

Tiles of every description...

Some rooms have these great balconies...

Fountains?   Oh yeah, we've got those..

One of the many of thousands of features in this beautiful, historic hotel.

Italy? ... Southern California Baby!

 the many stained glass windows

Another beautiful Tile Mural...

    The Mission Inn is located in Riverside, California.  From Long Beach it is about 57 miles east or an hours drive without traffic.   Riverside was famous in its heyday for orange groves and it was also a stop for trains. Many US presidents stayed at this hotel.   It has about seven different restaurants.  We had lunch in a pretty little outdoor one that featured delicious Italian food.  We then walked around the town and stopped in a delightful little museum,  a University of California museum of Photography and  saw countless other beautiful buildings including a church on every corner.  

As the sun was setting, we went back to the hotel for tea and dessert.  We found the most

 elegant and romantic spots in the hotel.  Plush velvet armchairs...Fine bone china tea service...Beautiful Linens...  You are treated like visiting royality here.  Impeccable service.   And the dessert I had was one of the best I've ever had and I have had a few in my time!   Worth every sinful, decadant bite.   Sorry, the lighting was so low the photo I took of it did

not turn out so great.  You will just have to trust me on this one...

We did not spend the night this time.  Can I now say that I wish we would have?  We did spend a night a few years ago.   It was heaven on earth.  You never have to leave the property.  They give tours and you get to see areas  that people just walking in cannot see.   Many weddings are held here in the most romantic little Chapel and the lucky bride and groom are able to have their photography done on the grounds..

 This hotel was nearly torn down.  At one point it was boarded up and left for ruin.  Someone with lots of money and a vision restored it.     

Next time you are in Southern California make it a point to see this beautiful hotel.  It is well worth the drive.  And make sure you spend the night...  I assure you, this place will blow your mind. 

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY CYNTHIA & DAVID

On April 22,1983 David and Cynthia were married in The Little Chapel of the West,  in Las Vegas, Nevada...and the rest is history....

and HER STORY...  

To my darling husband...Thank you for having me, saving me and making me a better person..

I love you with all my heart.... 

FINALLY I FOUND YOU...

  I have been searching for you...you were never to be found.   I have looked in nooks and crannies.
In dirty garages with dust motes floating and cobwebs dripping and smells smelling and grunge lurking.
 I know you were somewhere...but where?   How long must I search?   Other people have found you...
I've seen you with them but you were always just out of my reach.  And then suddenly, that Sunday
morning, turning the corner, there you were! I approached quickly, knowing how desireable you
are.          Everybody wants you...   But now you are mine!

I don't care that you are a little boy (Twiggy?)  and not a full blown woman...You have the characteristics

I craved.   The long slender neck.  The gentle curve of the shoulder.  And your skin!  Just the right

golden, color...the perfect amount  of crazing....Born in the 40's (one of my favorite decades!)

I dress you up in one of my favorite old silk nightgowns... The hand embrodiered lace slips and 

slides gently over your delicate skin.  Of course it fits you...A perfect clothes horse.

I put you in the alcove with the Eastern exposure...Look at how the light hits

your contours.. A Burne- Jones Painting!!  

I put you in my Wedding Dress...Again...Perfect..

My Muse...My Galatea... My Jane Burden...

A Perfect  Model.

And now gentle reader...check out this hot woman-child in

the Beatnheart Boutique!!  We're right next door..

  Already I have been designing new things...

just for her.

I LOOKED OUT MY BEDROOM WINDOW....

and this is what I saw...

 ...Those six babies just clung to their mothers back.

AND LOOK WHO JUST SHOWED UP...PAPA!

so it appears that they live in a little family unit, with

the male sticking around or then again it could be 

another female...I am not an oppossum expert.. 

nor do I claim to be one..

       

I went outside to see where they went...It had been awhile since I

saw them.   And there they were...the whole little family, totally unafraid

of me ...showing no fear, bearing no teeth...and those tiny babies still

hanging on for dear life.. Creepy yet cute.   We get alot of wildlife

in our garden...amazing really for being in the middle of a major

city... I have seen many oppossums, raccoons, hawks...one morning

I opened the front curtains and there was a coyote in the front garden.

Mind you, we are not in the hills or canyons...We live surrounded

by two major freeways...

Hey just a little change of pace from all the usual beautiful fashion layouts,

art projects, delicious pictures of food, fabulous recipes you see in alot

of blogs... Yes, life in the big city here in southern California!!

PS....We had the most killer rainstorm last night.  This is very late in "the season" for us...It is

so wonderful to get the rain as our water tables are dangerously low....too many folks, too little

water.   So when we get rain it is reason for celebration...unless of course you live in the  hillsides

and burn areas...Oh California...what a complicated place you are...  I always tell people

we pay dearly for this wonderful weather .

THE BIGGEST BLIZZARD...PART FIVE

 I  looked out the window at the frozen corn stalks in the empty fields.  The old red barns.  The white clapboard farmhouses.   The grey silos.   All of the things that formed the images of my youth.  The cows in the fields, marching like soldiers in a line to the feeding troughs.   The long, lonely country roads, in the summer filled with wildflowers and birds and bees.   These are the things I will think of.  What will California be like.  Will there be fields, wildlife, blue skys... or will be it smoggy and busy and crowded.  I was used to the soft, gentle ways of the country... the smells of the new mown hay...clover...Lake Michigan always dominating the landscape for as far as the eye could see.  And the smell of that Lake always in the air.   That slight fishy smell.  not unpleasant.  not overbearing.  just enough to let you know that it was there, will always be there..... and in the summer its gentle waves and soft sandy beaches welcoming you and its chilly water cooling you down in the hot, humid midwestern summer... And what about the autumn?  The big elms and chestnut trees turning from green to bright orange, blazing in the sun.  Alive with color.  everywhere you looked.  The entire rolling hills of the countryside...Blazingly Beautiful. And the smell  of those leaves as they layed on the ground mingling with the soft rain, the gentle decaying of those leaves to feed the very ground that they layed upon.  Running through thoses leaves, shuffling them with your feet as you walked to school..Jumping, throwing, playing in those leaves....massive  piles of them that people burned.  the smell of that burning in the autumn...Your senses were alive in these seasons.  Always changing never remaining the same... and oh, the buds, the tiny green orbs protruding from those trees in Spring... the bursting from the ground tiny green shoots...Lily of the Valley...Lilacs...Peonies...and the smell of those flowers.  Burying your face in those lilacs bushes that grew by the swing that dad built for us..oh and those tiny wild strawberrries that grew wild in the fields near grandma's house.  And we'd go and pick those in the field behind her house...be careful of the old wells!!  little children fell into those old abandoned farm wells...grab the little girls hand and don't let her out of your sight... and then bringing those berries back to grandma as she was already baking those shortbreads, surrounded by dozens of screaming, happy cousins. The more the merrier!  She never seemed to mind, never shouted at as, never seemed cross...always cooking for a mob of aunts and uncles and cousins...Surrounded by family.  My dad's family...Grandma being the rock of that family and one of the women in my childhood who let me know that somewhere , someone was normal.   That normal was rosebushes, and amazing cooking and laughter...and love...And that Grandma who lived in the northern woods of Wisconsin farmland had that love and gave that love away and didn't hold it back.   and showed the little girl that it could exsist...its just too bad she lived so far away.  Maybe if that love and stability were closer to the little girl things might have been different.  And I thought of her and those memories of happier childhood days and I wondered would I ever see her again?
Would I get a hug in her ample apron covered bosom ever again...and that car that I was in that was driven by a stranger  was taking me farther and farther away from all those things that I knew.  Taking me to things unknown.  For better or worse...

THE BIGGEST BLIZZARD...PART FOUR

I shut my eyes and listened to the sound of the wheels of the car as they were spinning through the crunching, slippery, blinding snow.  There weren't many cars on the road, only the few who had to
be there.   Those who had to make it to work or had business in Milwaukee or had to go to the airport or those who were escaping the frigid, grey, dull and uninspiring surroundings.   I was in this car.  I was with the boy I loved.  I was leaving, leaving behind the pain and misery of those last eighteen years....
   I scanned my mind and looked back on it all...  Was it all bad... was that all that there was?   Where were the grown-ups who were suppose to help the lost child.  Where was the guidance and nuturing and words of encouragement...  My parents were too wrapped up in their problems..  my mother was  certainly in a world of pain herself..  How could she help me when she couldn't even help herself.   She was a lost child as well with no one to guide her.   She married a man she probably once loved but mostly she married a man to escape the hell of her own childhood home.  No one helped her either..  The blind leading the blind leading the blind.   Generations of lost,  lonely, abused women.
    My mother was drowning in a sea of self-hate. wounded and crippled without any means of freeing herself from all that pain..  so she drank.   and she took pills.   and she passed out.    and she fought with the man she thought she loved so long ago and no one could pull her out of the deep, deep hole that she fell into and was still falling into and the long dark deep hole did not have any light or any way out. She just kept falling deeper and deeper.  And so her family fell into that hole with her and did their best to hide it from the rest of the world and tried and tried to make things normal in a place where normal didn't have a chance.   A place where everyones' bright, shiny faces were hidden behind a mask, one after another after another until this midwestern family no longer knew who they were or what they were meant to be
 and so this family lived around this woman's moods... stormy, dark moods...violent manical moods.. never ever knowing what was to come next..what they were going to see when they came home from school at 3:15.   Would she be happy.
 Would there be a dinner?   Or  Would she be in a dirty, cigarette burned bathrobe , lying on the floor unconscious...would the little girl have to take care of her and get her off that floor and put the butt out in the ashtray and clean up the spilled drink and shake her to bring her out of it ?    Would she have to endure this alone while the rest of the family were  at their jobs and didn't get home until later.  Or would she be so guilt ridden from the day before that she would lavish the little girl with sweets and special treats and undivided attention...Always a roller coaster of emotions..always doubt and fear...always never knowing what would come next...but always knowing it would not be good.... I thought of these things as that car went down the interstate with a man that I did not know as he steered it toward freedom with the boy that I loved who was my knight in wire-rimmed glasses, long hair and green wool army coat.

HAPPY, HAPPY EASTER TO ALL...HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEKEND AND SEE YOU ON MONDAY....CYNTHIA

THE BIGGEST BLIZZARD IN THE LAST 20 YEARS...part three

    I pulled off my mittens, crusty and frozen solid from all my tears.  I settled in tentatively.  I thought of all of the years of the nuns telling us not to get in a car with strangers.  Of my parents repeating this to make sure it hit home.  And here I was.  In a car with a man I knew nothing about who was driving us supposivley to Chicago, The Big City, a city I have been only a few times.  There was nothing to do but try and relax and enjoy the warmth that now enveloped me. My decision had already been made and now this was the consequence.  Jim and the man talked easily.   About the weather, serving in the army, the state of the country.   Their chattering helped me to settle in as the fear I had subsided.   This was it...I was on my way to California and there was really no turning back now.   I shut my eyes and thought of my parents...of the state I left them in..no, no..I couldn't think of them now.  I had to block that from my mind and not allow myself to think of that...I was leaving a home of much sorrow and sadness...a home that didn't always nurture a young girl.   A home that had its share of fighting and anger and grief and pain..A home that more times than not had left me with a burning, empty, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach as I tried to shove down what was going on in it...     The truth was I couldn't handle it anymore.      I had done my best.  But now I finally realized that the problems in my  home were not my problems but my parents problem...I couldn't save them anymore..I couldn't be the little clown that made them laugh and distracted them from the truth of what was going on in that home.  I could have spent the rest of my life trying to save them, but now it was my turn to try and save myself, whatever part of myself that was left worth saving..because truth be told I didn't have a single, solitary idea of who I was, what I was worth or if I was even worth saving.  Because all I ever learned was how to pretend..how to lie...how to cheat...and how to act as if everything was ok when it was not.   You see, this wasn't leaving home.  It was an escape.