eye candy

Not really candy, even though it looks like it....... it's PASTA! 

~

Yup, I've been playing with my pasta again :) Actually, I've been working on more photos for my Zagg skins.

I'm really excited about how this one turned out. It really is pasta, and it's called "mother-in-law's tongue"!

I'm stepping into the "no comment" zone on that topic, because fortunately I've got a great mother-in-law - 

(you may talk amongst yourselves in the comment section if you need to make some colorful MIL anecdotes...)

but I have to admit, I think the name is hysterical, and I've seen different versions of it several times now!

I am aware that it IS Friday (HAPPY FRIDAY!!!) and normally I would be posting pics of my beloved Sandpoint,

but since I've been barely able to keep my teeth brushed since I posted those snowy white pics last Friday, 

(you think I jest, but oh, if you only knew!) I am giving Sandpoint a break. That lovely snow did get me through the week though, and this week as well. We had a few lovely cool days but it's back in the 100's again - OY VEY.

So now that the weekend is finally here I'm going to hide from the heat and hopefully finish these photos!

Just for fun, here are the lyrics from a song about pasta I used to *love* when the boys were little
It's called "Pasta" by Linda Arnold, from her Peppermint Wings CD. The chorus - below - was my FAVE:

"On Monday I eat manicotti, Tuesday tortellini,
Wednesday ravioli, Thursday fettuccine,
Friday cappelletti, Saturday lasagna........
On Sunday I forgetti - Oh yes, of course - spaghetti!"


(*note: no mention of mother-in-law tongue pasta...)


Have a GREAT weekend!
P.S. We're having tortellini for dinner tonight instead of cappelletti. I'm such a rebel! Heh :)

sandpoint snow

Ahhhhhh :) Please forgive me, but we've been suffering through a nasty heat wave this week, so for my Sandpoint Friday photos, I went directly to the SNOW! The first snow of the fall season, to be exact - the fall of 2004 that is.

I don't know how time flies that fast, because I remember it like it was maybe a year ago! We were so thrilled because it has been years and years since we had seen snow. It was raining, and all of the sudden the rain turned to snow, and we were like little kids - hardly able to get our sweatshirts on and run outside fast enough!

It wasn't a huge storm - only a few inches of snow - but enough to turn everything white and beautiful :) And it stuck around long enough for the kids to come home from school, and Daniel to come home from work, so we could all play around and have some fun! 

Of course, they said it was really WILD for them to look out the window during school and see snow start to fall!

Our back yard looked pretty wonderful to me :)

Ah, here are the Mouse and Daniel having some fun :)

one of my favorite little trees, looking so awesome all dressed in white

Look at that Mouse! He had just barely turned 9 years old!

........ and Davy was only 13 years old - gadzooks!

Ah, this is one of my favorite photos :)

Hey, no laughing - we had never made one before! I think he's cute :)

~

Well I feel *much* better now from having visited Sandpoint and from enjoying some snow. Time to gear up for the day and try not to be a weenie about the heat. As long as it's not 116 again :/ But I've got diet Coke on ice and I'm not afraid to use it. So HAPPY FRIDAY and ENJOY YOUR WEEKEND! And come on back if you need to chill :)

Sandpoint Sunset

Once again, here is your Friday photo of Sandpoint, Idaho. This was from on top of Baldy Mountain where we lived, looking west toward Washington. Happy Friday and have a wonderful weekend! Don't forget your porches!

Sandpoint Saturday

Sorry you didn't get your Sandpoint pics on Friday but I was busy coughing up a lung. 

Now here's where the Sandpoint story starts to get a wee bit messy. We had told the boys that if we moved to a rural area, of course they would be getting dirt bikes. I mean, come on. So here we are, on top of our mountain, and the bikes are delivered, and it's like Christmas four times over, and the boys are so excited they're peeing their pants, and they're riding all over the place, and the mountain sounds like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 

Well, we had a slight suspicion when only 3 out of a mountain full of neighbors came to welcome us when we moved in. But it wasn't until the Dirt Bike Incident as it has come to be known, that we found out for sure. Except for those 3 houses of genuinely nice people, all our neighbors were old farts who hated anyone moving up on THEIR mountain. And we had not only just done that, we had also broken the number one Unwritten Rule: if you insist on being here, DO NOT MAKE ANY NOISE. In other words, our old fart neighbors now hated our guts and didn't mind telling us so.

In an effort to patch things up I actually wrote out neighbor cards with our names and phone number on it, and after church the next day, we all marched around to every house and introduced ourselves to every single old fart. That's right, we painted smiles on our faces, knocked on their doors, lured them out of their dark holes into the daylight, and got into their faces and made them speak. Bless all my boys, they didn't even complain. It was comical that they were all so nice to us, though we did see a few spouses escape into other rooms and refuse to come out. Apparently the damage had been done. We had infiltrated their precious mountain, broke the Unwritten Rule, and would never belong. I let my dogs pee on their grass.

Aw, just wook at dat widdle Mousey. He onwy 8 yeaws owd.

Well, the timing was indeed off, and I guess we really didn't belong on that mountain. At least not at that time. But for the time we were there, the boys so enjoyed those bikes. They made a track in our back acre through all the trees. My favorite memory was when Davy launched himself off a large root and ended up stuck IN a tree - bike and all! Hahaha :) They found some great trail rides off the mountain too. The Mouse became quite an expert at a young age, and has continued to love riding dirt bikes ever since. 

I often wonder who those old farts are tormenting now? Just as we were moving, they were trying to get everyone to agree on installing semi-permanent speed bumps all the way up the mountain road. All the young careless people, you see, were driving much too fast. Miserable old cusses. Come to think of it, they would have made great speed bumps themselves........  

sandpoint the town

Happy Sandpoint Friday :) 

Today we are visiting the actual town - a town so quaint it could have almost been named Mayberry. 

Even the local Radio Shack looks cool. How often does that happen?    

I really liked the town of Sandpoint, and now of course I wish I had taken a lot more pictures 

of some of our favorite places. I loved walking around the streets and visiting the different stores. 

The Main Stage Cafe (at the lovingly restored movie theater) had the thickest slices of pumpkin bread ever -  

you could grab a window seat and watch the town go by as you ate it. Oh yum... it was so amazingly good!

Pack River Potions, next door, had all kinds of wonderful handmade lotions. They would even customize it!

Snow River had All Things Ugg and had handmade items also. The owners were the nicest people ever.

In fact, just about everyone in Sandpoint was nice. One of the reasons it was so enjoyable to visit each store. 

This fun locally painted mural was outside the Potato Bar - an awesome restaurant - and the local Starbucks

more quaintness...

We came reeeeeelly close to purchasing Romeo's Pizza, which was such a cool place.

It stood across from a small city park where they had the most awesome Farmer's Market every Saturday.

Walker's Donuts

What can I say... I thought it was an omen. I thought it was written in the stars. I still think it probably was.

We actually DID buy Walker's Donuts. I think we owned it for maybe an hour before we chickened out.

The inspection terms were shaky and it's true - instead of being adventurous and jumping in, we weenied out :(

Such a great place - John helped me get all my antiques fixed up so nicely in here and the staff were awesome.

Plus there was an adorable little cafe attached to it on one side, and an amazing home decor store on the other!

Looking from the back side toward the town, this is the famous Coldwater Creek Bridge, 

where the first Coldwater Creek clothing store originated (and still is). Few people know their main headquarters 

are actually located in Sandpoint. There also happens to be a killer sandwich place in there too :)

The main city park and beach, located on the water's edge (yes, that's Lake Pend O'Reille out there).

I hope you enjoyed your tour of the town! Stay tuned for more Sandpoint next Friday!

Have an awesome weekend! xoxo 

scenic sandpoint

Peeeeeps! A day late (and always a dollar short), I am finally swooping in to publish my Friday post on Saturday. In other words, all the Sandpoint photos that were supposed to be available for your viewing pleasure yesterday, you may commence viewing today. For the last 3 days I've been a co-chaperone up in Big Bear for 28 girls, ages 14 to 18, out of who knows how many hundreds of boys & girls from the 7 LDS church's in our city. It was a joy, it was a blast and it was exhausting! I love those girls - they are all so different and all so awesome :) But now I'm back and it's time to see some beautiful Sandpoint pics before I officially put myself out of commission.

The photo you see above was taken as I was driving home from church one Sunday. There is really nothing that unusual about it, but the sky was so beautiful with the fluffy clouds against the bright blue background...... For me it was as much about the moment as it was about the beauty.     

The *adorable* photo of the two fawns above is NOT one of my photos. However I had to include it because it is so reminiscent of our back yard in Sandpoint and a very special occurrence that happened there one morning.

One morning not long after we had moved there, I woke up very early. The sun had barely started to rise, and I went into the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table where the bay window looked out upon the back yard. I could just start to make out the shapes of the wild flowers and trees. To my surprise, I even saw some cute, furry bunnies here and there, nibbling on grass. Then out of the corner of my eye, to my amazement, I saw a tiny fawn walk into view. It was the sweetest thing I had ever seen! Still young enough to have it's spots, it walked along nibbling grass with the bunnies. Then quietly and seemingly out of nowhere, came another fawn - a twin! - to join it's sibling in the misty morning grass. It was every bit as precious as the first. I knew their mother would be close by, carefully watching over them, but I never did catch a glimpse of her. I watched them with delight until they were gone as quietly as they came. It remains one of my very most favorite captured moments in time. 

One of my all time favorite photos - it's the road that leads up the mountain to our home at the top.

About half way up the mountain, if you looked to the left, you would see this amazing view. The little city of Sandpoint down below, on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille (pronounced 'pon-der-AY') - the largest and deepest lake in all of Idaho. In fact, the only access to Sandpoint, and northern Idaho, is by crossing Lake Pend Oreille by bridge. The next 3 photos below are similar views from a similar vantage point as fall arrives - note the trees changing and the snow starting to dust the mountains. And of course the sunsets were spectacular.

This last photo is an off-shoot of Lake Pend Oreille located behind one of the main streets of town - so pretty.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend everyone! xoxo

sandpoint

Alrighty then. I get it. My readers aren't into Apartment Therapy like I am. I can live with that. I have to admit, it took me a while to get it. Especially because a lot of it isn't my personal style. But should you need resources aplenty, at least now you know where to start. And it was a good thing for me to catch up on while it hurt to move my neck, and I was stuck in my jammies with dirty hair, and I couldn't go anywhere since I was attached to a heating pad, and I smelled like a eucalyptus tree from one of those icy hot patches. It's a good life and I love it.

So... Sandpoint, Idaho. Nearly 6 years ago, we sold our favorite forever house (above), and moved 1400 miles way up to northern Idaho's panhandle, to a quaint little town called Sandpoint. Sandpoint lies one hour north of Couer 'd Alene and an hour south of Canada. Let me tell you, there's a reason they call it God's Country - it's the most beautiful scenery you can imagine. I won't go into all the reasons we moved because there are many, but it turned out to be a rocky, rocky road. We did end up making the trek all the way back here to California. But I don't want to jump ahead of myself. Not a day goes by when I don't think of Sandpoint, and there is much to tell. 

Now is the first time - 6 years later - I've been able to start looking at ALL of these photos. I've kept out a few of my favorites - some I've even shared here already - but the majority of them have been too hard for me to view. That needs to stop though. I've decided that every Friday I'll take you on a little journey with me to Sandpoint, so I can revisit that time and everything that was so awesome about it, and I can also share it with all of you too.  

This is the house we bought - 14 Riverview Circle

It was located a mile up a windy road, on a few acres of land at the top of the mountain.

The is the back of the house - and following are a few photos of our "back yard"

First photo. We had literally just arrived after 2 days of driving - I don't think we had even been in the house yet! 

Me in the back with Angel and Luna :) I was sooo happy to be there, but I think we were all freaking just a little!

Have a great weekend everyone! And stay tuned for more Sandpoint next Friday...

Sandpoint Snow

This is one of my favorite photos. The first time it snowed up in Sandpoint Idaho, way up at the top of the Idaho panhandle by Canada, where we lived on top of a mountain, John and I reacted as if we were kids. It had been cold and raining, the boys were all at school, and we were in different part of the house. We must have looked out the windows at the same time though, and realized the rain had suddenly turned to snow. I hardly believed my eyes at first. I still remember the smile of wonder on my face. We instantly pulled on sweatshirts and ran outside to greet the falling powder. It was a magical moment I'll never forget.

I'll be back ASAP - my hard drive crashed and it's given me much distress! But I have lots to share - stay tuned!

Reflection: Autumn in Sandpoint, Idaho

Around this time of year, I find myself reflecting back on the three very short months we lived in Sandpoint Idaho. Now, that is a reeeeeeeeealy long story in and of itself, so I will spare you the details. We've been back in California for four years now and Sandpoint seems like a dream sequence. 

Sandpoint is in northern Idaho, waaaaaaaay up at the top of the pan handle on Lake Pend O'Reille, about an hour south of Canada. Yes. That Canada. I had never seen such scenic beauty in my entire life as I did in northern Idaho. I'm not sure I ever will again (okay the Swiss Alps came close). It is only now, four years later, that I have finally been able to start looking at my photographs. As comforting as it was to come back to California and the people we love and left behind, it was excruciating to leave Sandpoint. We just closed our front door, and drove away.

So. Anyway. Autumn is my very, very, very, most favorite season. And let me just say that California STINKS at Autumn. At least where I live. Case in point: we are at the end of October and it's still in the 90's. The poor trees try so hard to do what they were meant to do - to turn into breathtaking, brilliant reds and yellows - to put on a fashion show like only nature can. And it's just sad to watch. I feel like posting apology notes on each and every tree. Oh sure, we'll have our autumn all right. It will last for about 48 hours sometime in November before we get some ridiculous heat spell and find ourselves once again putting up Christmas decorations in the blazing sun. But my jaded views of life in California is yet another fun topic you can look forward to another time. Back to Sandpoint.

 

When the temperature started dropping, and the trees in Sandpoint started turning all kinds of fiery colors, I felt like I was living in a painting. Around every curve and down every road there were more and more paintings to experience. I found myself pulling off the road a LOT. For the first time in my life, it wasn't just a picture I was looking at. I was IN it. Even now I can hear water lazily lapping, coots quacking, leaves rustling. Twilight silent and calm, smoke appearing up above the trees from chimneys here and there, sunsets making the yellows and reds glow orange and pink like magic. Ah, Sandpoint.

 

Then on Halloween day the most amazing thing happened. SNOW! Real snow. The kind that comes from the sky when you least expect it and you think this can't possibly be real because I can't even remember the last time I experienced snow and I don't even know what to do except dance around in it and thank God for it and feel like a kid opening the best Christmas present ever and smile until my cheeks hurt and take pictures so that moment in time is captured forever and ever and ever and ever.