Making Fairy Gardens with Mom and Other Stuff I Did Last Week

I think I'm doing pretty good with my renewed blogging efforts, considering I'm coming back from a two year stint in no-blog land.

My mom was visiting until yesterday so instead of blogging, I was busy making fairy gardens, watching movies, shopping, looking at old pictures, and getting our eyebrows done at Ulta. In short...having a grand 'ole time with me mum.

So, busy week with no time for blogging and now I'm going to cram it all into one post and tell you about it. Go refill your coffee (or cocktail)...I'll wait.

Firstly, I mentioned we were looking through old pictures. My uncle had converted some old slides to digital a few years ago and my mom hadn't seen them. Here's one of them. That look on my chubby little baby face is the same look I have when I don't smile in selfies. Still, it's one of my new favorite pics of me and my mom.

Me and mom in 1965

Second, bus stations are unpredictable places. Mom comes in by bus because she doesn't drive anymore and it's only about a 3-1/2 hour ride (including a 30 minute stop about halfway). It's air-conditioned or heated and the seats are comfortable so she mostly reads or does puzzles.

The bus ride isn't bad. It's the bus stations that are a bit sketchy. Which is why I try to get there early so she doesn't have to hang around there alone.

Case in point - while my daughter and I were waiting for her bus to come in, an older guy asked us to watch his stuff while he went outside to smoke. He said he had been visiting his daughter and he was on his way to Phoenix to visit another family member. He didn't have any front teeth so it was hard to completely understand him. He wasn't asking for money, but he did mention he had spent all his money on clothes for his grandkids and that his daughter hadn't fed him.

I don't know if he was telling the truth or not, but I felt bad for him. It's a long bus ride from Vegas to Phoenix with no money in your pocket for food along the way. Plus, his bus didn't actually leave until the next day, so he was going to stay overnight at the bus station.

I gave him all the cash I had, which was only about $15. I'm a sucker for a sob story. Fred constantly brings up the time I gave away his cheeseburger to the Hamburgler as a reminder of my gullibility (Fair warning - I use the word "hubby" too often in that post. If you have an aversion to the term, I'd advise you not to read it.) There's also that time I gave my address to an inmate in Kentucky

But the bus station guy really did seem sincere. When I brought my mom back to the station a week later to go home, he wasn't there. I hope he got to Phoenix.

Then there was another guy (on the same day) who told us to like and subscribe to his YouTube channel (the name of which I don't remember). Good on him for making the marketing attempt, but I don't know what kind of channel it could be where the bus station demographic is his target audience.

So yeah. You never know who you're going to meet at the bus station.

In more upbeat news, when we got home, we made fairy gardens, drank wine, and watched the Country Music Awards. What homeless people? By the time he got to Phoenix, I was drinking.

A little Glen Campbell humor there.

Now on to fairy gardens. My mom is in a garden club and one of the members had made several little fairy gardens and my mom was enchanted with them and decided we each needed to make one.

Have you seen pictures of fairy gardens? They're basically miniature stuff that you make or buy and you set it up all cute in some moss or rocks or real dirt with plants, and because it's so cute and inviting, fairies will come and live there.

If no fairies show up, you can always buy some.

Either way, they're cute to put out on your patio or as a centerpiece or something. I love miniatures, so I was on board instantly and off to Hobby Lobby we went for supplies.

So here's some fairy garden pictures.

My daughter couldn't find a fairy she liked at Hobby Lobby, so she bought an ornament of a girl and then fashioned fairy wings from a silk autumn leaf. I raised a clever girl.

Is there poolside drink service in this fairy joint?

She used a basket as the base of her garden, and for the fairy house, she cut an opening in one of those round wicker balls (whose original purpose I don't know. I also don't know how to say that grammatically correct. ly.).

Do you see the little hammock inside it?

She made the chair from backyard twigs and a rock. For the table, she used a round wood trunk slice you buy at Hobby Lobby and glued twigs to the bottom.

My garden was a fairy campground because I wanted to use this little trailer and accessories my mom had bought me a couple years ago. I glued tiny ornaments to my tree so my fairies could be all festive.

See my fairy portal up there by the Christmas tree? And that sentence smacks of paganism.

How else will the fairies get to Fairy Springs without a portal door? Duh.

And what's a fairy campground without a fairy clothesline to dry the fairy wings?

Why yes, that IS a tiny toilet turned flower pot.

If I were a fairy, I'd never leave.

My sister did something really unique with her fairy garden. She turned it into sort of a memento garden. She had some things she collected over the years, like little stone animals and charms, so she put them around as decorations. For the house, she used a log cabin Christmas ornament. I love how it turned out!

Oh, how I love this!

She's showing a bit of thigh there. Frisky little fairy.

The thing about fairy gardens is that guys don't get it. My sister texted pictures of our gardens to her husband and his only comment was, "How come your fairy is the only one that looks suggestive?"

After that, we dubbed my sister's garden Frisky Springs.

That little book charm next to her fairy is something we got at Disneyland back in the 60's. When you open it, there's tiny pictures of Disneyland inside. Anyone remember those?

So that was fairy garden night. The next couple nights, mom and I watched some movies. We watched Cross Creek, a movie based on the memoirs of Marjorie Kinnan, who was the author of The Yearling. It was nominated for Oscars or something in 1983. I never heard of it, but then, I was busy graduating high school and gettin' the hell out of dodge so I guess I was a bit otherwise occupied in 1983.

Anyway, it was a charming movie. Then we saw The Beautiful Fantastic, also on Amazon Prime. It was quirky and slow-moving and I adored it.

We also saw two "old people who find love again" movies, in which the main actress is befriended by a younger man (not the love interest) who somehow teaches her something about life. I can't remember the names of them, but they were both pretty good. Wait...one was Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. Actually, she didn't find love again in that one (spoiler alert), but there was a young man friend.

I should totally write movie reviews.

The point is...it was good times watching movies with me' mum.

At some point during mom's visit, I did get this picture of her, me, and my daughter Rachael, which I love because we all have the same nose. I have always disliked my nose and wished it were thinner but looking at this picture, I realize it was passed down to me from a beautiful person and I passed it on to a beautiful person, so...it's not so bad.

Three generations of noses. I love how only the Millennial knows where to look for the selfie.

To wrap up the week (and I actually left a few things out because the fairy pictures took a really long time to crop, resize and load), after I saw my mom off at the bus station, my daughter wanted to make sugar cookies. While we were opening the wine and getting ready to mix the cookies, our doorbell rang and it was our neighbor from the street adjacent to ours.

He had left his front door open and his parrot flew out and he thought it flew into our yard and wanted to go in the backyard and check.

I felt for him because back when I was first married to husband #1, we had just got a cockatiel and the same thing happened to us. Stupid birds.

We lived in an apartment at the time and there was an alley behind us, then houses behind that. Our cockatiel, Bogie, flew out the front door towards the houses, so I went knocking on people's doors trying to track him down. I had no luck, but when I went through the alley to go back to our apartment, I spotted him up in a tree that was in someone's yard, but growing right up against the back fence so I could get to it from the alley. I called and called to him and he wouldn't come down, so I had to run back to the apartment, grab a stepstool and his cage, then run back to the alley. I used the stepstool to help me climb up on the fence (bird cage in one hand) and raised my other hand as high as I could with my finger outstretched, hoping he'd come to me.

He did, just as calm as can be, with nary a thought about the bother and time he had cost me. That's birds for you.

But back to my neighbor. I understood how he felt, is my point. We let him check our backyard but there was no sign of his bird, whom he calls Muffin, by the way. He left his number in case we have any Muffin sightings.

It's important you know how much I want to say "giggity" right now.

Speaking of muffins, one thing I meant to tell you is that while my mom was here, I took her to Ulta so we could get our eyebrows shaped and she proceeded to confess to the eyebrow-shaping girl that she was going bald "down there".  My mom being the one going bald, not the eyebrow girl.

I can't wait till I'm 80, have no filter, and can confess things like that to strangers.

And also...does that happen when you get older? You lose hair in the nether regions? The statement definitely caught the eyebrow girl off guard.

Do you have eyebrow issues? I do. Or I used to. They were a mess. Now they look all shaped and nice. I was instructed to leave my eyebrows to a professional. I can totally do that, at only about $22 for a brow wax and shape.

If you need eyebrow advice, I highly recommend a visit to the Benefits Brow Bar inside Ulta. I had no idea there were so many eyebrow products. Which is why mine looked so god-awful, I suppose. I have to find a before picture for you to appreciate it. That picture up there of our noses is an after picture.

That's all I have for you today. I gotta go because Fred and I are supposed to go dinner at a friend's house and I need to put their wine and cheese in a pretty gift bag or something.

Signed,
Frisky Brows