Wild Olive Tees Giveaway

http://www.wildolivetees.com

Check out Wild Olive. Go to their home page and read the reqs. for their latest giveaway. :)

I get 5 entries because I blogged about the giveaway and added their button to my sidebar. :)

Thanks for the giveaway Olive Tees. :O-)

Mignon

Somewhere in the Stratosphere

I like the design so much that I'm ready to make it again and design a necklace to match. I really like the versatility of this bracelet. This is a nice light weight and the links measure 1/4 of an inch across. I can step down a gauge to heavier gauge wire for a guy's bracelet. I'm totally leaning toward making about 10 of these and giving them out as Christmas presents to family this coming Christmas - I really like this one that much.

Now I wonder what band I was listening to when naming this fabulous little piece. :)
Shinedown anyone??

A Friend Is Having a Digital Giveway!!!

This is the coolest idea I have seen in awhile. You'll have to go to her website to get all the details, but do GO and ENTER!!! If you win, then you can even submit your own photo for her to do some magic with and convert to what looks like Polaroid and then she sends you the PDF file for you to use and reuse at will for your family and friends. As a matter of a fact, you could send the first card to B. for doing the giveaway and then one to me for telling you about it. It's win-win right???

Totally go check her blog out and add her to your follows. She amuses the heck out of me. :) The easiest is to pick your favorite card out and go from there. You know what, just go check it out and you can even see my comment on there if she approves it, lol.

http://simply-b.blogspot.com/2009/05/giveaway-digital-version.html

Mignon :)

New Hammered Earrings and More

I haven't forgotten about my 50 state tour, things just had to slow down awhile while recooping from the nerve block allergies. I'm finally posting a couple new sets of earrings to the shop. I'm in the process of working on a handmade sterling silver link chain. This will be the first chain I have made strictly from wire and pliers. I'll let you know how it turns out.

My little one completed kindergarten. He's officially in first grade. Yes, that is a tear...........I enjoy each stage of life I get to see him go through and miss each of the stages he has already completed. He's lost his second tooth and this one is a top front tooth, so he is officially Snaggle-Toothed now. ;) Why is it such a simple thing as one front top tooth coming out makes him look like he grew up all of a sudden. Where's my baby??? He told me this week that when he grew up that he was going to be a doctor and live in Florida at the beach no less. I promptly told him he wasn't moving to Florida without taking me with him, especially if he was living at the beach. :)

Kirstie Allie and Oprah and Jessica Simpson

Kirstie Allie's weight has gone up and gone down and back up again. Oprah's has done the same thing. They stress over it. They feel guilty over it.
Guess what I have learned from them other than society puts to much focus in present day for women to have 36-26-36 measurements and no it isn't to feel guilty that my measurements aren't what the media thinks they should be. It really is insane. Jessica Simpson put on a few pounds, was as beautiful as ever and instead of just saying she made a bad fashion choice by wearing some high waisted jeans, oh no, the media had to have a field day and say she was overweight - it wasn't a weight issue, it was an issue with the wrong pair of pants, period. Then the media asks why we have so many young stars who are anorexic - well gosh lets see how hard it is to figure out this one. If you aren't 36-26-36 then the media drags you and your weight all over magazine covers and gossip shows, so women being women, they starve themselves more afraid of being dragged across a cover as actually having meat on their bones than being on a cover being called too skinny. Being called too skinny in Hollywood is regretably a compliment.

So, what have I learned from Kirstie and Oprah and Jessica???? I have learned through watching Oprah for many years and seeing Kirstie and Jessica in movies and commercials and of course all three on magazines and in magazines..........well, in my close observation of the 3 of them,...no matter their weight, they are all 3 beautiful. They have made me feel currently better about myself, because guess what - I gained weight with the masters degree, the specialist degree, and totally gained weight with my injury. I am not in my weight zone, but you know what, I'm still as pretty as ever and why do I know............because Oprah, Kirstie, and Jessica are all beautiful regardless of their weight too. A woman doesn't lose her beauty because she gains weight. Health concerns heighten at a certain point, but if you are beautiful, then you are always beautiful, and all women are beautiful - tall, short, skinny, plump, curvy, dark, pale, with glasses, without glasses, limping or walking straight, straight as a board, in a wheelchair, one leg shorter than the other or both legs the same length, blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes, blond, brunette, red, black, blue, purple, silver, white, or gray, with chronic pain or without, gifted, talented, normal or above average, average.........it is insignificant because........

Women are beautiful, period, end of discussion. God made each and everyone of us and we are all beautiful, so to those who disagree - well, deal with it.

Mignon

H1N1 Flu Information

I subscribe to quite a number of email subscriptions. I keep up with sales and special deals for clothing companies across the U.S., along with email subscriptions with various jewelry companies, local and national weather, twitter updates, facebook updates, blog updates, some blogs I actually follow via email subscription, plus a few recipe websites, and a few other various sites of interest send me emails.

I also subscribe to email updates made by .gov and by the CDC. Instead of having to wait for the latest news at one of the prescribed tv news times, I just check my email like I normally would and get an update on the latest with H1N1. For those of you who would like to do the same. Here's a couple .gov sites you can check out.

http://www.pandemicflu.gov (You can even follow them at Twitter. How about that for a move into the current century...pretty neat).

http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/pdf/airport_poster_for_print.pdf (great summary of what symptoms to look for and what to do if you suspect having the flu)

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly (this one is a bit on the scientific side, but you can choose which emails to get and when to get them).

Be aware that if you subscribe to get the emails daily, then you will get several a day, as often as there are updates. I was going to change to weekly, but I'll wait until after the flu issue is under control. I'm an asthmatic and I have to keep close tabs on anything related to to lungs and breathing. The main thing I am repeatedly reading is to use anti-microbial soap and wash hands thoroughly with water more often than usual. What people don't think about is gas pumps, doors at stores, grocery carts,etc., not to mention children still learn by touching and they like to touch all sorts of shelving and what not in stores. I already had some form of germ-x in the car for waterless handcleaning, but I'm ready to move up to having two ziplocks in my purse. One for antimicrobial wipes for grocery carts and one for throwing away the wipes when I cannot locate a trashcan. My purse is more like a girl scout's backpack any given day anyway between kid's meal toys, crayons, books, extra kleenex, germ-x bottles, clippers, multi-purpose hand tool that converts from a phillip's head to a flat head screwdriver to a bottle cork and I don't remember what else. So, what's a couple ziplocks and some wipes to help keep us from getting sick.

Happy Mom's Day :)

Happy Mom/Momma/Mommy's day to my friends and fellow readers from around the planet. I do hope you found peace and happiness today.
Today was a nice relaxing day. We did exactly what I ask.....which was quite nice. We had a picnic at the lake, rode around in the fishing boat (larger than one of those green metal boats but not big enough to put in big water), played with the kittens, watched my son play with his aunt and daddy while they ran around with foam dart shooters. We fished a bit, but with the number of people we had, it was more conducive to just ride around the lake considering it was quite toasty and typical for a Mississippi spring day in May. It was just a nice day. No one had to cook, no expensive meal at Outback this year, just a box of chicken from Popeyes with sides and Pop made a blackberry cobbler for dessert, which we ate at the lake under our reserved pavillion. Apparently, the lake is not a big thing for mother's day, as we were the only family there, and there were only 4 other people we saw the whole time we were at the lake. So, if this is typical of mother's day, then I totally want to plan on another picnic next year. We nearly had the lake to ourselves. Now, it was suppose to storm today, so folks may have made plans accordingly, but God gave us a little gift and held the storm off until late evening well after we had left the lake. I must say that it was one of the best days out of a handful of days that rate in the category of best since September 2007.

I am very thankful to be a Mommy. According to the doctors, it was impossible, but God had other plans and thus I have my golden child. :) I said a pray today and thanked God for blessing me with the best gift He could give me outside of His own son dying on the cross to save me from my sins. I am truly blessed to have this child I get to call my son. He makes the sunny days sunnier, the gray days lighter, and the darkest days are survived because this 45 pound child looks at me, smiles, and calls me Mommy. There are clearly many things wrong right now, but I am so blessed to have so many things to be right.

So, in a paraphrased version of what the wee one calls me.........

Mommy Mignon :)

More of the Flower Tour

Another one of my 'habits' is shooting shots of my flowers, trees, and bushes. I enjoy chasing sunsets to shoot shots of the sun too. I have one really cool one of the sun going down over the ocean. I'll have to see if I can find that one. It turned out great and was predominantly orange. It's certainly past time for me to buy a roll of black and white film and shoot a roll of my son. Then, of course, you can change color pics into black and whites with your computer nowadays, but there's just something about pulling out my vintage Canon and shooting shots with it.

Mignon :)

I Have an Addiction :)

I don't know when it started exactly...
I guess in my childhood. Both sets of my loving grandparents had vegetable gardens. There were larger or even multiple gardens when they and I were all younger and as they aged, then the gardens became one and the one became a bit smaller, but still a garden all the same. Then from as long as I can remember and probably before I could walk there were pecans to pick up and we used 5 gallon buckets as far back as when the buckets were still larger than I was. Grandma would sometimes provide me with an empty ice cream bucket for the blackberry picking, but she could have just as well sent me with the 5 gallon bucket for the blackberry expeditions as I ate much more than ever ended up in the bucket. Fresh from the vine blackberries are as much a part of me as running barefoot frome early spring to late fall and through most of the temperate winter inside the house, well until we moved into this old drafty 150 year old house about a decade ago. The drafts rather curtailed my barefooted ways and now of course with my foot injury the doctor is adamant about me wearing shoes all the time. Can you imagine? I mean yeah, I love designer shoes as well as anyone else from around the world, but for a southerner to be told to wear shoes as much as possible, well that's just about like a southerner being told not to fry chicken, and to not fix cornbread and baby lima beans to go with it, and we certainly cannot have fried chicken, cornbread, and baby lima beans without a tall glass of sweeeeeeeet tea with real sugar. Of course the irony is that I don't actually fry anything, which confuses the heck out of my Mississippi friends who have decided I must be an imposter because what true-blood Mississipian doesn't fry???

What is my addiction, you ask?? Well, not only did my grandparents have various flowering trees and such, my maternal grandfather liked to have a few rosebushes and I can still remember him planting the rose bushes some 30 or so years ago and he told me that this one particular rose bush was mine - that he was planting it for me right outside the sunporch. I'm not sure if it was then or much younger when I got to help plant various vegetables by dropping seeds in holes that one grandparent or another had dug a hole for and they must have been really patient with the goal being more of teaching me about growing things more so than speed of planting as you and I both know that getting a two or three year old to meticulously drop seeds in dug holes is about the equivalence of herding cats.

So, for as long as I can remember I have loved plants of all kinds. I love the itchy leaves of tomato plants, love tasting honeysuckle every summer, cannot eat watermelon without remembering my late paternal grandfather who had a bumper crop one year when my sister was too small to rember, but she and I had two watermelons a day that summer. I'm not even biased for or against wildflowers and clovers, as long as they don't take over the yard. The hub. tends to leave me a patch of clover growing in the back of our property. Then there are my roses and the row of crepe myrtle trees among various bulbs, bushes, trees, and such that we slowly keep adding to our little two acres. When I was still in high school, my hubby who was then my boyfriend told me he wanted to create a huge flower garden for me one day. I thought it was nice gesture, but didn't give it much thought. Well, the lilies start at the mailbox and the crepe myrtles line the drive, daffodils cover the front hill through late winter and phlox take over the hill in early spring, the antique climbing rose bush our aunt gave us covers about a 15 to 20 feet section of fencing, another climbing rose bush grows through one of the crepe myrtles, the mock dogwood bush is starting to grow and maybe it will get a good bit of height this year....then, there are the wild sunflowers that get to be about 8 - 10 feet tall every fall in the wildflower bed. They were in beautiful bloom the September we had a wedding for my bestfriend here.

One of my addictions, if you will, is plants from hostas to crepe myrtles to invasive tallow trees and even the three friends as I have named them - there's two old oaks and a box elder in a row that relatively divide the two acres into two sections. We hung tree faces on them a few years ago and even before we gave them the faces, they were already named the three friends. And of course, my addiction includes lots and lots of flowers. I love our Iris garden that blooms from early spring into summer. They're absolutely stunning. So, I thought I'd share some photos of the yard. There's lots of work that needs to be done that hasn't as the husband has been doing most of the maintenance by himself, especially the last few years with me busy first on completing that last degree and then the last 18 months or so have been something else. However, I have complete and utter faith that I willb be back out in my flowerbeds covered in dirt smudges wearing my straw hat and knee pads - it will just take some time.

Do share your flowers with me as well. I love them all. I love my clover patch just as much as I love the Italians the hub. bought me for Valentines a few years back. As much as I love roses, I tell him to buy me the whole bush instead of a bouquet of cut roses. So, I tend to get whole plants or trees instead of bought bouquets and then my bouquets tend to come from the yard, which is fine by me. :)

Mignon

How Does One Find My Auctions One Might Ask....

Here's a link to my home page on Ebay. It shows feedback etc. and you can click the link to see what I am currently selling.

http://myworld.ebay.com/tmkm1994



Mignon :)

More auctions :)

In this set, you will see a man's casual dress shirt, size large. The hubby's arms are a size medium, but his neck, from doing those football weightlifting neck-strengthening exercises in high school, is a size large. So, this totally brand new shirt with tags didn't fit him and got slipped into a closet somewhere. Bye bye brand new shirt with a retail price of $45. Starting bid is $7.99 and a buy it now price for $20 as some folks like to just buy and be done. I like being able to have a choice.

Two photos are of a junior's size 13 very much in style plaid, sleeveless dress ready for summer. I bought it about the same time as those khaki pants below..... The dress is also NWT and the starting price is $7.99 with a buy it now price of
$20. The retail price of the dress is $30. Very good deal.

One photo is of khaki slacks by Liz Claiborne, NWT. I bought these and then was blessed with getting pregnant for my one and only and never made it back into this size, wah. Oh well, going going gone. These pants retailed for $45 and I paid $15.30 for them on sale. They are the wrinkle-free and stain resistant, size 14. Now that I'm getting rid of them, then watch me be a 14 by the end of summer, that would be funny and totally an excuse to go shopping. :) Starting bid is $7.99.

There's also a auction lot for some ladies/juniors pajama shorts, size large. Starting bid is $2.25. One pair of pajama bottoms is by Joe Boxer with a fantastic smiley face on them. :)

So, feel welcome to pass the word on that Mignon, the jewelry designer, finally feels well enough to do spring cleaning, which will probably take all summer, lol, via selling items on Ebay.

Mignon

Hi! I'm back :)

It has taken awhile for me to adjust to the nerve block, but it has offered some relief. Doc seems very pleased and he's planning the best course of action to better help me with the pain. It just takes several weeks to get scheduled to see him again....

Now, in the last week or so since I've started feeling better from getting over the allergic reactions, I have decided to start selling on Ebay. What better way to clean up than to get rid of things that I don't use, wear, or need and make a little money in the process. I tried two auctions last week and they both sold. I have about 8 or so auctions going at the moment and I'm going to share some photos here, so if you see something that interest you, then please check it out further. In effect, if you bid, then you will be helping me clean my house and this is a good thing. I bought most of my son's school clothes from Ebay last spring for the currently almost ended school year and I made a serious deal. I paid $91, including shipping for over $1600 worth of EUC (excellent used condition) designer clothes. It was a 3 foot by 3 foot box slam full of clothes for my one and only wee one. It was literally a wardrobe. I hope to do that again this summer for the upcoming school year.

In the photos you will see: a men's suit that doesn't appear to have ever been worn, dry cleaned, given as a gift to my husband, but he already has enough suits, and me being the frugal me and the me who needs to unload things we don't need, use, or wear......well, I'm selling it. The starting price for what I am assuming to be about a $250 to $300 suit as I know what we paid for my husband's other suits........ is $25 plus shipping and insurance is included in the shipping price. I did add a buy it now option for $120 and price between the starting price and the buy it now price is just a great bargain for a fabulous suit.

Then, the denim shortalls is a part of a clothing lot that were my son's, size 3T. Included in the lot is an Osh Kosh T-shirt and a 49er's tank that looks new. Starting price is $5.50

In another picture you will see some great gowns that are a medium and I'm so not a medium right now, especially after the injury!!!!! So, favorites or not, they are so going going gone! Starting bid is $3.99 and one is Victoria's Secret.

There are two photos: one with a navy Osh Kosh t-shirt and the second with a heaping pile of shorts - these two photos are of another lot of clothes that were the wee one's when he was younger. It is an auction lot of 31 items. The starting price is $5.50.

I am such a packrat and it is time to unload many items that have accumulated while I was in grad. school. Who knows I may like selling on Ebay so much that I keep it up even after I have cleaned out the house. :) You never know. Buying clothes for growing children on Ebay just makes too much sense. I am watching an auction right now for something for our son and if I win, then I'll have to share it with you on here as I think it will be a great win!!!! I have to wait 3 more days to see if I win or not! Argh! Yeah, yeah, patience is a virtue. I love a good auction. I have such fun at antique auctions, so this is a lot of fun for me. :) Of course Etsy has just spoiled me forever and I am quite accustomed to shooting photos, cropping, editing, proper lighting, yadda yadda by now. I have the makings for a photo box. Once I get it made, then I'll share that with you too as my fellow Etsians and Ebayers will love it!

Mignon