{Color} Brown

Well, it has taken a long time to get around to this post because I didn't get the post done on the weekend and then yesterday and today I have been fighting a flu bug.  I seem to be getting some better, so I am hoping that by tomorrow I feel OK again.

This flu thing has been going around. Mostly sore throat, headache, fever, etc.  It tends to only last a day or two.  Two of my kids had it previously, so I guess I must have caught it from them.

Anyway, I think that last Friday was my "brown" day.  The last of the color posts.

Without further ado...I introduce you to some of the brown in my world. (I think brown has to be, like, the ugliest color ever. It hardly even seems like a color.)

One of the first things I do every morning is fix my bed.  I often think of this {odd} advice my Mom gave me before I got married.  She said "Audrey, I just wish you would learn to fix your bed in the mornings.  And eat breakfast instead of skipping it."

Apparently I took her advice, because now I ALWAYS do those two things.

Our room has almost no brown in it, but our red silk sheets had seen their better days and at a Black Friday sale they had these micro-fiber sheets on sale.  They are really nice! Only, problem, they didn't have red or black sheets, so we ended up with brown. 

The thing is...once I get the whole bed fixed, you can hardly tell there are brown sheets under there. So its all good.

This is the ceiling fan in our living room. It's brown. But that is not what this story is about.

Nikki and I were sitting on the couch on Thursday night, looking through our respective "In Style" magazines, when I noticed it seemed really dark in the living room.  Turns out, two of the light bulbs were burned out.  I went and grabbed some light bulbs, got a stool, and climbed on up there to change them.  Apparently, I either forgot that the fan was whirring at a great rate of speed or else I just mis-calculated the distance to the fan. Either way, that fan hitting into my head at full speed did NOT feel good.  At all.  For days, I could feel the spot where the blade hit me. Thank God that He made our heads really hard! 

Our dirt road. It looked especially brown this morning because it had just rained.

The ferns are starting to lose a lot of their green color and turn to brown.  :-(

A brown shirt that was given to me by a client when they came back from a hunting trip to South Africa. I was touched that she thought of getting a gift for me.  I tried to wear this shirt today, but honestly, it is just too small for me and it kept riding up and showing off more of my stomach than I like to have people (even my kids) see.  So, I ended up changing.

Nikki had a birthday party to attend, so the boys and I dropped her off and then went to a few garage sales.  One garage sale was all kinds of OLD stuff. Nothing that I am really interested in, but I know that some of the stuff I am looking at is really cool, if I would just know what to do with it. I think of people like Jenny K and Rachel B and wonder just what great finds I am passing up.

Here are some pictures of "brown" things that were among the many items at this garage sale.

We walked out of there with something Kendall bought for a quarter. I can't even remember what it was. 

And then we went grocery shopping and picked Nikki up from the party and came home and had some supper and went to a high school football game.

And that was the end of the "brown" day.

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{Color} Orange

Orange just reminds me of that little knock-knock joke that my boys were really into telling for a while.

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Banana.

Banana who?

Banana.

Banana who?

Banana.

Banana who?

Orange.  Orange you glad I didn't say "Banana". 

Ha, ha, ha.  It got old really fast. Believe me.


Orange is such a bright and cheerful color.  I didn't think I had a lot of orange in my life, but when I started to actually watch for it, I saw quite a bit of it.

One of the first things in my morning...I journal (not every day, but about 1/2 of the time) in this little orange notebook that I picked up on sale at Wal-mart a while ago.

My daughter woke up and came to snuggle with me on my chair.  She is still wearing her orange wristband from our camping weekend. I have offered various times to cut it off, but she wants to keep it on.  (Plus, her little "Princess" tattoo is staying on pretty well, too!)

So, ever since I have seen this picture on Pinterest months ago, I have kind of wanted to arrange my books by color.  But it would take some time and secondly, I wasn't totally sure if color is how I want my books arranged. Wouldn't arrangement by subject make more sense??  Yet, this picture really appeals to me.

For orange day I thought I would at least gather all of my orange books together and take a picture for you.  First, my upstairs bookshelf.

And then downstairs

I didn't even attempt to go through the kids' books.

I had told Nikki that orange was the color for the day, so she came to me, all excited that she had found this bottle of "Off" with orange on the label.  I took a picture.  The angle of this picture makes her look hilarious.  We laughed about that together when we looked at the picture on my phone.

Pretty wrapping paper with orange flowers. Nikki has an upcoming birthday party to attend, so we wrapped the present for her little friend in this cheery wrapping paper.

Speaking of gifts...this is part of a gift I got for a friend of mine who has an upcoming birthday.  Plus, this is like, the BEST candy ever!!  Seriously. Don't even argue.

A brown and orange hand-made potholder that I picked up at a garage sale a while ago.  I like it.  We had some yummy Taco Soup for supper (so easy, healthy, cheap and yummy!!), along with rolls.

This was one of the toppings for the Taco Soup. Along with sour cream.  Why does "Taco Soup" need to be capitalized?  I don't know. It just does.

The dishes (two of them happened to be orange) that were left in the sink overnight. (Picture taken Wed. morning)  On Tuesday, not long before I hurried out the door to a meeting, a picnic for one of my clients and then our Bible study/community group, I realized that I had forgotten to make a snack for community group.  I quickly mixed up some brownines in my (favorite) orange bowl, baked them, and then, since they weren't cooled enough to put the frosting on, I grabbed my can of frosting and some sprinkles and just took the whole thing with me.  I had to wait to frost them till I got to community group.  Wow! Did I feel put together or what?  NOT.  Especially since I was home all day up to this point and could have made brownies at any point and they would have had plenty of time to cool.  Duh!

Tonight I played softball.  Two games, in fact.  We are in the championships/tournament stage right now, so our team played at 6 o'clock, won that game, and then played again at about 9:45.  We lost our second game, but it was close.  The "orange" team was playing in one of the other fields.   I have had so much fun playing softball this year! 

I didn't get into bed until a little before 11 and then it took me a little to fall asleep, because I was still kind of wound up from the close ball game.  The rest of the story: The next morning I overslept. By about an hour.  And had to RUSH myself and the kids out the door. Still was late for work. I did not get fired.  End of story.

As a re-cap:

We have done all of the primary colors (as in, the colors in an 8-crayon pack) except one.  The ones we have done are:  Orange, Green, Yellow, Purple, Black, Blue, Red, and one extra that is not in that pack...Pink.  All that is left is brown.

Tomorrow's color:  Brown (probably the most uninteresting color of them all, which is why it got pushed to last.  Poor brown.)

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{Color} Purple

Isn't there a book called "The Color Purple"?  Or a movie? Or a Broadway show? Or something.

Just a minute. Let me Google it.

Ok. It is a novel. And a musical. And a movie.  When I read through the synopsis of the plot on Wikipedia, the story seemed really familiar to me.  Maybe I read that book once?  Or not.  Who knows.

Before I digress any further...

Pictures from my "purple" day.  Purple was my favorite color for many years.  Probably from early teens until my mid twenties, when all of a sudden, I realized that whenever someone asked me what my favorite color was, I said "Purple", kind of automatically. But it really wasn't anymore.  Red had somewhere along the way usurped purple as my favorite.  This was also around the same time that I realized that for years I had been saying that "I loved weddings" and then pretty much every wedding I went to I didn't love.  I found them boring.  And all so similar.  I came to terms with the fact that I actually didn't like weddings, after all.  And that fact remains to this day.  (I also am not a big fan of babies or puppies.  Just judge me now. Once and for all, and get it over with.)

That's part of growing older, isn't it?  You change.  You realize one day that something you used to believe, you don't anymore. Or something you thought you knew about yourself, you're no longer so sure about.

That is part of what purple represents to me.  Since you asked.  ;-)

Apparently, though, it is still one of my best-est colors, because a while ago my friend Morgan mentioned to me that it seems like I wear purple a lot.  I said "No, I really don't" but after that I started thinking about it every time I wore purple, and she was right. I DO wear purple a lot. 

Just for your viewing pleasure, I collected all of the purple (or purple striped) shirts in my closet and took a picture.

Behold:

Two sweaters...one long sleeved shirt...one vest...three t-shirts...three dressy tops.  All shades of purple.  As with most of the clothing in my closet, I can tell you the flaws of each of these pieces.  Too short.  Too tight. Too long. Doesn't go with much.  Doesn't quite look like me. This is a problem I have. I am highly critical of my clothing and of the body on which the clothing goes.  So I generally avoid wearing approximately 80% of the stuff in my closet.  Maybe I need to go on that "What not to wear" show and get me some quality pieces of clothing.

In honor of "purple" day, I wore one of these shirts.

I love this shirt, which I just bought at Rue21 for like, literally, $2.  Two problems...it is a tad long so I have to kind of bunch it up around my stomach...and it is a bit tight across the stomach so you can see my little muffin top. Which makes me super self-conscious and bugs the tar out of me!!  Right about now, you are thinking that maybe I need to attend some sort of classes to learn to accept my body. And you would probably be right.  It is one of my many issues.  Let's not try to narrow this down to being my biggest or only problem!

I also own this purple skirt that I bought a long time ago and have yet to wear. It still has the tags on it.

It is a shiny/slippery sort of material, but a super pretty color and I love the flower details along the bottom.

But every time I tried it on I feel like it makes me look "poufy" and my butt is sticking out behind me like a semi trailer.  I tried it on for the kids and asked them if it made my butt look big.  Yeah, I'm a classy Mom like that.  They all said "No" and I feel like they were sincere.  So I thought maybe I will give it another whirl this winter.  With my black boots and some grey tights, maybe?  When I told the kids that is what I was thinking of wearing it with, Derrick said that he thinks it looks weird when grown-up women wear tights and boots.  Maybe I should get a new fashion-consulting team?? Its just that the ones I have are free. And super honest.

I checked to see how many pairs of purple earrings I have.  It is three.  I wore the purple hoops with my outfit yesterday.

And now, lest you think that all I did yesterday was collect purple clothing out of my closet, go through my jewelry, and parade around the house in my poufy purple skirt...I will set you straight.

I also spent a couple of hours organizing my kids outgrown clothing so that I can sell it.  I got all of the boys clothing done yesterday and now I can sell my remaining 3T stuff and all of my 4T and 5T.  The girls pile looks more daunting, so I have not started on that yet.

I found this purple and yellow sweatshirt in with the boys' stuff. If you live in Wisconsin, it is practically a crime to be a Minnesota Vikings fan, yet we have one or two of them in our house.  Shhh! Don't tell the neighbors. People have had their houses TP'd for lesser crimes than this.  (just kidding. totally.)

Bee-balms. With a bee on them.  How fitting.  These flowers are really pretty, but they are almost over for the season. I have been noticing that the wildflowers are few and far between these days. I think that the nights are getting too cold for them to survive.  That makes me sad.  Have I mentioned how much I love summer and hot weather?  Well, now I am mentioning it again.

I had noticed these beautiful purple flowers growing in the ditch by our local animal park/zoo when I drove by in the morning.  I tried to photograph them while whizzing by at 50 miles per hour. That did not work out. At all. As a matter of fact, there was not one iota of purple on the picture I took.

But what did work out is that we were invited to the annual employee picnic at the park tonight (I do bookwork for the company) and so I got a second chance to photograph these flowers. Aren't they gorgeous?  The picture above this one is of a flower pot that they have sitting right outside their gift shop door at the park. So pretty too!

Other random purple:

Nicole's life jacket that she has used all summer.   Now hanging on the deck railing along with those beach towels that we might still need if we get a hot day around here.

A juicy plum.  Its what we had for our fruit at lunchtime.  Well, we didn't just have one to share. We had four of them...one for each of us.

My water bottle. This pretty much goes everywhere with me. Years ago I started drinking lots of water (and also going to the bathroom more often!) and it has become such a habit. I am constantly taking my water bottle with me and sipping from it in between whatever else I am doing. In fact, it is here beside me as I type this blog post.

My bike and Nikki's bike. Nikki JUST learned to ride without training wheels about a week or two ago and now she is cruising all around. I am so proud of her!  Especially considering the fact that it probably took me a YEAR to ride my bike.  But maybe that had something to do with my trainer. It was my older brother, Loren, and one of his many methods of teaching me to ride bike was to put a toy dumptruck in the middle of our gravel driveway, and then push me towards it.  I was supposed to learn to steer that way.  Not to mention, our driveway was downhill and pretty short and led straight to the road.  We laugh about it today, but seriously??? Where were my parents when this was going on???

Our bikes always seem to collect in our front yard. All 4 (or something 5) of them.  I don't know why this always happens.  It just gives that red-neck appearance to a place when you drive in and see the bikes just scattered in the front yard.  But, maybe that fits us.  Who knows?

I hope you enjoyed the color purple.  I know I did.

Tomorrow's color:  Orange

And then we only have one color left after that.  Can you guess what it is?

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{Color} Black

I am a big fan of black. 

For one, black clothing is generally slimming.  And that is always a good thing!  I think that I probably own no less than 20 pieces of black clothing. Maybe more.

As you know, our washing machine was broken down for about a week (don't blame Jeremy...he was on top of the situation...he was just waiting for a part).  This led to a discussion with my extended family about how long I could go without doing laundry.  I said that I think I could go three months without doing laundry, given the amount of clothing that I have.

I did have to re-think that, though, because while I may have enough of shirts, I am pretty sure I wouldn't have enough of pants/skirts.  Or underwear.  But the point was...I have a lot of clothing!  Now I am almost curious enough to see how long I actually could go that I would want to try it. But not QUITE curious enough.

Black goes with anything. We've heard that all of our lives, right?  And it really does. It is a basic neutral. 

My "black" day was this past Saturday...the day of the county fair.  I didn't get as many pictures as I would have wanted to, but I will share with you what I have.

My huband (wearing his black sweatshirt) and his buddy Mike.  This was actually Friday night, around the campfire, but I figured it was close enough to mid-night that it could count for Saturday!

Saturday morning I took Derrick to his football practice.  He is doing a 6 or 7 week football program this fall.  I am excited for him!  The colors of the Hayward Hurricanes are black and gold.  This is some of the high-schoolers teaching the little kids about football.

When we got to the fair around 2 PM, they were just starting what they call "Poor Man's Racing".  They have this little race track and all of the cars are old beaters and they race around there. But, unlike a normal race, if a car spins out or gets turned around, they don't throw the caution flag. They just keep on racing. And bumping and banging.  It is actually quite entertaining to watch.  I kind of wonder if they just take their cars directly to the scrap pile when they are done, because some of them look completely unrepairable. To me, at least.  Here is a black beater of some sort.  Getting ready to start the race.

We were at the fair for almost 8 hours.  Because, if you are going to pay $13 each for 5 family members to get into the fair, then you better make it worth your while. At least to my way of thinking.  It rained 3 different times during those 8 hours.  During one of the heavier rains, Kendall and Nikki and I spent quite a bit of time walking around in the animal barns and checking out the exhibits.

Here are some black cows.  I wanted the kids to touch a cow, but they weren't up for it. Kendall thought they would kick him.  I thought that was highly unlikely if they were lying down, but whatever. I didn't push the issue.

A black and white sow with her little piggies, including the little black runt of the littler.  He was climbing over the others just to get some milk.  Those little pigs were so cute! Seriously.  Plus, having grown up on a pig farm, I am kind of nostalgic about pigs.  << Now, that was an awkward sentence if I ever saw one.

My sister Debbie was at the fair with her two little girls.  I noticed Sherra's cute little black skirt and thought I would take a picture.  That baby Jenna just smiles and smiles and smiles. Even when no one is smiling back at her!  Debbie must be such a great Mom that her kids can't help but smile.  That's my theory, anyway. I told her that she always makes mothering look so easy.  Especially compared to her older sister. (me)

Kendall, for all of his otherwise dare-devil ways, is kind of a chicken when it comes to do carnival rides.  Here he is, riding the carousel (on a black and red horse that he choose to ride) with Nikki. Afterwards, he reported that this ride was VERY boring!  Ya think??

And my last, but certainly not least, "black" picture is of this (name unknown) lady.  She was wearing mostly black, but what captured my attention was her hair-do. I don't know how well you can see it on here, but it was an elaborate bee-hive/bun/poufy sort of up-do.  Nothing against her, but I am pretty sure that hair-style is from the eighties. Or before.  I kind of wanted her to just stand there so I could stare for a while and try to figure out just exactly how she got it to stay up like that. Lots of hair pins is what I am thinking.

And...I know these pictures are not black.  They are most decidedly in the brown category. But I just wanted to show you what I wore to the fair.

My new cowboy hat and some cowboy boots that I found at Ragstock for $20.00.  Ever since I was a teenager and visited Guymon, Oklahoma and Perryton, TX with my Dad, I have LOVED the west and especially loved the whole cowboy/cowgirl look.  I often feel like I should live out west, but I am stuck here in Northern WI.  Where it is cold. And where nobody wears cowboy gear.  ;-( 

Anyway, I decided "Enough with that!"  I am going to wear my cowgirl stuff to the county fair, even if I am out of place.  And boy, was I ever. I think I was the ONLY woman there who wore a cowboy hat. I ran into a guy from my softball team and he said to me "Hey, I didn't know you had a little bit of redneck in you!!"  I didn't say it, but I was thinking "Dude! This isn't redneck.  This is cowgirl. You want to see redneck, you just walk around with me a little and I'll show you redneck!"

Jeremy looked at me and said "I would have never dreamt I would see you wearing that outfit."  The kids declared that they were not going to walk around with me if I dressed like a cowgirl, but if they thought that would deter me, they were wrong.  Plus, they didn't follow through on their threat anyway!

We had a good day at the fair, despite the rain, and I was glad we went. 

(I could write about carnival workers for another few paragraphs, but I think you all probably already have your thoughts about them, so you can just think those thoughts and we'll call it good!)

Gotta run...Firewood to deliver.

Tomorrow's color:  Purple  (One of my fav's)

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{Color} Green

One thing I realized as I was photographing green today.  There are MANY shades of green.  Some of them so different that I hardly know if they can all be called green.

I guess I think of the basic color green like the crayon in the Crayola 8 pack.  Which I think is pretty similar to the color of grass.  But wow! There are a lot of different variations and shades of that.  I didn't probably photograph a lot of "true green", because I didn't see a lot of that today.

But...this picture might come the closest.

We live in the middle of the woods.  Literally.  The color green surrounds me so much (in the summertime) that I barely notice it.  Its like green is the backdrop and then any other color is something you would notice.

But, whenever it is wintertime and then I look at a picture of the woods in the summertime, I realize how much I love all of the green that is around here when the trees are leafed out.

This is a beautiful pine tree that is on the edge of our lawn.  Also, across the road from our house is a "pine plantation", which is just rows and rows of pine trees.  They are really pretty.

Am I the only one who LOVES to find things from my childhood and then use them in my own home? I think there are others who can relate. So, when I found this set of 4 "vintage" Tupperware cups at a garage sale (for a dollar, I think)...I snatched them up. It makes me happy to have my children using the same cups that I used as a child.

I went grocery shopping today and I was going to photograph everything I bought that was green.  But I think that this lettuce was about the only thing.  Plus, by the time I got done shopping with all three children and was trying to get ready to go camping, I was not so much in the mood to sort and organize all of the possible green items in the grocery bags I brought home. Have I mentioned that I pretty much hate grocery shopping? 

Green towel on the top of one of my overflowing laundry baskets. My washing machine has been broke down for close to a week and the laundry is SO piling up!!

This is a lime-green Sponge Bob ball that belongs to the boys.  It must have just been lying around in the living room, so I threw it into the little bin with their cars (and a stray football)

Derrick...wearing a green shirt and "playing his time".  The kids are allowed a 1/2 hour of electronics per day and Derrick usually spends his playing the Play Station 2.  He always wants to save his time till the end of the day, instead of using it first thing. My other two kids...not so much.

I had already shown you this shirt (that I recently purchased at Kohl's) a week or two ago. I literally looked through my closet for green shirts, and I noticed that almost everything I own is more of a blue/green or a teal than a true green. This is probably the closest I come to having anything green to wear. This shirt is more true green than it appears in this picture.

I wore this cami today...underneath a sweater.  Again, it is more of a blue/green color.

And I wore these feather earrings (a gift from my dear friend Becky) along with the above outfit.  I still smile to myself when I remember Beth Goodrich saying that these small feather earrings could be the "gateway earrings" into wearing larger feathers in the future.  It was SO dang funny when she said that!!

My green Pampered Chef knife that I use all.the.time. Here, I had just got done cutting up strawberries. I love this knife.  It stays so sharp.  Plus, pretty much all my other knives are crap, so maybe that makes this one stand out more!

Derrick...sitting around the campfire at our campsite...with his green can of "Morning Mist" or whatever the off brand of Sprite is called around here!

I feel like I didn't quite do green justice today, but I photographed what I could.  Green is a pretty color...in all its various shades!

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