I love little scrapbooking trinkets, papers, and doodads. Every few months the local scrapbook store has a fabulous garage sale. A group of friends & I have made an event of it. Get up early to get a good spot in line, plunder & pillage, then go to lunch and compare our loot. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor ice deters us. We've stood in line through it all.
Over the last couple years, I've built up a
great stash of stamps, embellishments, tools and even magazines. But now I confess: I don't do scrapbooks! (I mentioned this once and a horrified hush fell over the line of chattering ladies.) I think I just love the buying of these
cute items at dirt cheap prices. The papers are so pretty; the brads, buttons, stamps, so nifty. Fifty cents here; a dollar there. Friends, you can fill up a bag of wondrous Creative Possibilities for under $20!!
I get together with the aforementioned pirates and we make cards for our Sunday School class and for the Blue Star Moms. I do occasionally make cards on my own and
of course I intend to make lots &
lots of cards and have them on hand ready for any and every occasion. :) I've also done a few ATC's (Artists Trading Cards). I really like those. They're like mini works of art. See? my collecting is not for nought.
So yesterday was the quarterly pillage party and guess what COOL thing I found??
A tin of assorted chipboard crowns! (If you know me, you know I love crowns.) For a whopping 50 cents! Heck, the little tin was worth that.
I already had this paper, so I'm going to make a card for the ladies in my group & enclose a crown that she can embellish for herself. This is one little treasure I must share with my fellow scrap-queens. I firmly believe every woman is an empress at heart!
I didn't know what this was until I got up close to it. I've never seen tiny fungus clusters like this before.
And saving the best for last...I went to take a close up of this bud and saw something on the leaves. I thought it was a grasshopper & was afraid it would leap out at me, so I didn't get too close. Later, looking closer at the picture, I saw that's not a grasshopper - there are 3, um, things, insects of some kind having a clandestine meeting. They're creepy & alien looking. Ewwww.
The next day we had a big ol' thunderstorm; both the bud and the aliens were all gone.
I really don't have anything stirring around anyway; just a string of minutiae. (That's what Facebook is for, haha). Oh stop me before I go on a FB rant. I'll save that for another day. 
Yes, it really is a piece of beam from the Twin Towers. Now resting peacefully in the park of a small Oklahoma farm community.
I took my sister to see the Oklahoma National Memorial in Oklahoma City, the site of the Murrah Building bombing . Just two weeks after the bombing, I was in OKC on business and decided to see if I could find the building. Of course the immediate area was fenced off and I had to park a couple blocks away. The building was not in view, I still hadn't seen it. I'll never forget walking down the street and turning a corner. I was slammed. Pictures on tv and in the papers can't convey the reality of such horror.
Where devastation stood is now a place of solemn beauty. It has to be the most symbolically rich memorial in the nation.The Gates of Time stand guard at either end of the street which ran in front of the building. On one is inscribed "9:01" The other is inscribed "9:03". They denote the time between innocence and the end of it on April 19, 1995.
In between the gates, where the street ran in front of the building, is a black reflecting pool
The most haunting thing of all is The Field of Empty Chairs; 168 "floating" chairs on the grassy lawn where the building itself stood. At night, the bases are lit.
Each chair represents a person who died in the bombing. They're arranged in rows according to which floor the person was on. The saddest of all are the little chairs. They represent children.
It's a very moving place. Across the street is a church, and a statue of Jesus, his back to the memorial. At his feet is a simple inscription, the shortest verse in the Bible: "And Jesus wept."
There's a huge American Elm, known as The Survivor's Tree. It lived through the blast and still thrives. Now surrounded by a courtyard inscribed "The spirit of this city and this nation will not be defeated; our deeply rooted faith sustains us."
You can't take flash pictures inside, but it was the outside that interested me anyway.
Interesting decoration on the door. There were 6-8 of these, all with different carvings.
The grounds are beautifully landscaped; lots of flowers, many other statues. The butterflys in the picture below were carrying on a courtin' dance, lemme tell ya!
This is my favorite shot because it appeals to my sense of fantasy. I could picture a little hobbit-like creature living here. (I think it was some kind disguised pump station, but no matter - I like my version better.
Our main purpose for visiting the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve was to see the bison (buffalo) herd. A few years ago, a small herd of 300 was introduced to the preserve in an attempt to restore the mighty plains buffalo to a semblance of their former glory. (Well, there was probably some conservation / scientific type reason, but I won't try to explain it here. If you want to know more, do an internet search on the subject & you'll find a lot of good info.)
My sister is enamored by all things western, as in, anything west of the Mississippi. Her all time favorite tv show is Little House on the Prairie, so I knew she'd love this little excursion to the real prairie. We packed a lunch, gassed up the car and off we went to hunt buffalo, our weapons of choice being Nikon & Sony. 
We saw a herd of .... regular cows.
We saw a real Longhorn. Rather menacing looking.
And we saw the most spectacular sunset ever. Oh my gosh, it was gorgeous. Sunset on the Prairie. Equally beautiful was the moonrise. It looked like a huge, hot pink-orange ball sitting on the horizon. That alone was worth the trip.
Oh, the Bison, you ask? The herd that has increased from 300 to 2,500? The ones you almost always see somewhere along the Bison Loop with it's many warning signs to be cautious... I've been there before & seen them. They are magnificent. 
The "Eat More Chikin" cows.
We're going to start our adventure at the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve! 39,000 beautiful acres of rolling hills and grasslands (but not as tall as the name implies), protected by the Nature Conservancy.
It probably seems boring, as most of us consider grandeur to only be found in the mountains, but this is area is truly beautiful in it's peaceful simplicity.
A prairie pond.
The big Oklahoma sky.
A prairie cemetery road (we had to turn around somewhere.)