Bees on Blossoms & Around the Yard

My week outside in a nutshell. =) And what a great week it has been, too!

I don't have much to say today. Enjoy the pictures of lavender, dogwoods, cherry blossoms, various other beautiful plants, and bees. These are some of my favorite shots from this month, I do think.

Hope you all have a great week! ♥

Apple Blossom Blankets

I could float up to one of these blossoms and snuggle in for the night there, pulling a petal over my legs like a fragrant sleeping bag if I were a fairy. I bet it would be such a relaxing night spent in an apple blossom, gently rocked into sleep by the warm night breeze, tucked in and kissed goodnight by the bees. If I could shrink myself to such a small size, I would adore traveling around all the blossoms and flowers of Spring like that just to see it from a different level.

...My camera would have to shrink, too, though.

What would you go and see if you could be very small?  Where would you travel to? What would you do that you could only do if you were tiny?

Have a good weekend! ♥

Petals of Blue and White on a String

 My necklace is finished! All 26 inches of it! It came out much bigger than anticipated, but that's because I doubled the pattern, then decided I wasn't going to count the stitches between the flowers. I wanted it to be unique, and I wanted it to sort of be my own, not just another of the same necklaces I've made before. I also changed the flowers, giving the smaller and bigger ones more and less petals. Three is the least amount of petals I have for a flower, and five is the greatest. While making the five-petal big flowers, I wished I had some thread in baby pink -- then I could have made cherry blossoms! What a darling necklace that would have made....I may try to find some thread in that color. Soon.

And you all get to see my cabinet of goodies. Books, music, teapots, bottles, candles, Sherlock Holmes~ ♥ I adore Holmes.

Happy Saturday and have a wonderful weekend! ♥

Storms rolled in today, and it started raining on the lake. Not a good day for fishing.

It's still raining right now, but at least the severe part of the storm has moved on.

Time to sleep.

The Floating Lake Islands of Fairy Folk

On the lake, there are plenty of stumps sticking up as one creeps in closer to the shore. Just beneath the surface of the water, if you look hard enough, you can see whole fallen trees submerged beneath the (currently) pollen-laden waters. Branches stick up at random intervals, vanishing into the depths and making one wonder just how deep some areas of the lake really are.

My favorite things, though, are the stumps. Surely they are the vacation homes of fairies!

Laden with moss and various other forms of sweet, delicate life, they are islands of emerald green in a sea of reflection. When my kayak bumped up against a stump, the ball of moss split, hanging on to the stump by some invisible ties. I would have felt horrible if that wonderful blob of moss fell into the water, but I was seeking refuse from the insanely powerful wind that insisted on pushing my kayak at speeds I did not wish to travel backwards. Silky spiderwebs adorn some of the taller stumps, most often more than one -- little communities of eight-legged neighbors.

We were only out on the lake a few hours today since we were quite excited to get to church tonight and didn't want to smell like fish and worms. So I passed the camera off to my little sister, who took the last three shots of the stumps above while I helped catch this:

I caught five of those. The rest on the upper left are my mom's. =3

One word: yum. ♥

Severe storms are supposed to come tomorrow, ones that could spawn tornadoes. Right now the storms are in Mississippi, I believe. Got some time yet...to sleep.

Goodnight, lovelies! I'm tired. =D

And On Monday...We Went Fishing!

{The Dogwoods are starting to bloom! Spring is here for certain now!}

{Magnolia~ These are blooming at school, too. My college campus is quite lovely!}

My mom has been fishing ever since she can remember. She is a very outdoorsy woman. She often says she would be very happy living in a small cabin deep in the woods of Maine, living off the land and being totally self-sufficient.

I'm more than positive that those particular genes were passed down to me.

While I am far from being as talented in fishing as she is, I adore sitting on the lake in a kayak, keeping my eyes glued to the bobber far out in the distance, waiting for it to jiggle from the hungry lips of some fishy so that I can set the hook and reel in a prize! It is so relaxing, and I love to do something my mom enjoys with her. It's our us time and I love that we have so much in common.

The first cove we parked our banana-yellow kayaks in is where my mom caught a bass and two sunfish. Determined to do the same, I cast my line between and around just about every stump my arm could shoot my line to....But to no avail. We even went quite far back in the stumps where it may have been possible to stand in the water in some places and impossible to do that in others, and still the only thing I managed to snag was underwater stumps and branches (affectionately referred to as "Wood Bass"), and then the poor above-water stumps that were their own littler terrariums of moss and plant life. I lost several worms (AND HOOKS) to the aforementioned fishing abominations.

AND THEN...we moved.

We have several fishing spots on this lake, so we paddled north of the cove we had settled in and stopped back at the first fishing spot we have ever tried on this lake.

I cast my line into the center of a circle of stumps, and near instantly I got a bite! As I worked my little arms off to reel the monster in, my mom was bouncing in her kayak quite happily. (Before we got here, my attitude toward catching anything had...diminished, and I resorted to singing songs to try and "charm" the fish out of the water. Not really, but my mom's reactions to my tunes made me laugh. I sang a modified version of "Come Little Children" from the movie Hocus Pocus, hereby known as "Come Little Fishies" that was quite funny. My mom told me that wasn't a good song. I'd scare the fish, so I changed and sang Finding Nemo's "Just Keep Swimming." In the first cove, neither charmed anything, but when I started catching fish in the other cove, I sang Come Little Fishies in joy.) ANYWAY, I reeled in a big, fat sunfish. He was ice cold, like he had been parked deep, deep down in the iciest levels of the lake, and he was perhaps the biggest sunfish we had ever seen on that lake. 

So then it started. 

We caught four more nice, huge sunfish in that exact same spot, one my mom had a hard time wrapping her hand around to get the hook out of his mouth.

We floated around for a while longer, even moved from our winning hole when we were pretty sure we had cleaned it out of all possible fishies, then laughed and joked and paddled back to shore where we carried both kayaks back to our truck at the same time, catch in tow.

On our way home, we didn't even listen to any music. We were so relaxed, and I fell asleep that night rather quickly.

I had a great time. If I could go fishing every day, I would.

Hope everyone had as wonderful a Monday as I did! Even if you didn't, you had breath coming in and out of your lungs, and you were alive, so, to me, that is a good day. =)

Have a great Tuesday now, dear people! ♥