For the Love of Lily

I have a cat named Lily. I am convinced that Lily is a little angel cat and she is one of my soul mates, a split-apart. We once had a cat that we loved dearly, Otto. Otto passed away far too soon and Kelsey and I were heartbroken. One afternoon I was in the back yard and I heard a tiny noise coming from Otto's grave site. I moved back the bushes and there sat the fluffiest calico kitten right in front of Otto's angel that we had to mark his resting place.
Without hesitation, we scooped her up and started trying to find her a new home. No luck. I was determined that we did not need another cat! Still no luck. Darn cat was just so cute but I was certain that she did not belong at our house. A few weeks passed and I had to make a week long trip to the beach.
The week that I was gone, Lily disappeared too. I issued the BOLO and had everyone searching. No Lily. The day I returned home from the beach, Lily returned home too. This happened several more times when I had to leave home. By now I was beginning to realize that Lily and I shared an undeniable connection. She goes about her days minding her own business unless I am sick or sad, then I have a kitty perched right beside me surely trying to heal my soul.
I thought that I built this bird feeder for my birds but Lily knew that I really built it for her to use on rainy days. If there is a drizzle in the air she heads straight for her home.
Now, if you ask my girls, they will tell you that Lily is spoiled rotten and gets away with anything. They are just jealous!

Happy Saturday on Sunday! Today we took off for the Flint River to look for rocks for our new project. We didn't come back with any rocks but I did come back with an adventure tucked in my back pocket.
So... I am going to combine my Happy Saturday with an Adventure Sunday. These flowers are sure to make you giggle. Maypops are one of my favorite flowers. They look like something that came straight from the Wonka candy factory.
We found so many turtle eggs. Sadly, a raccoon had dug these up and Jay said that we would not be able to save them. Fact: If you turn a turtle egg within the first 24 hours after it is laid, the embryo will drown. The happy side of this story is that the river was full of turtles.

Can you see the egg in the water?
We walked on these mussel beds. They made a happy crunch beneath your feet. (it was just the empty shells. No mussels were harmed in this walk.)
Look at the roots of this beautiful cypress tree. Isn't Mother Nature simply magical! We will be going back to look for more rocks on Tuesday. Happy, happy, happy.

birds and bees

The lantana is covered in butterflies.
the fiddle-heads look good enough to eat.
The begonias are sweet in pink.
The trees are a sea of white.

The sinks and toilets are all planted.
I have bird feeders and houses and baths in every corner of our garden.



And where do ALL of the birds want to eat? In this guys hat! The little fellows will swarm to eat out of my tin man's top. Just goes to show- you can lead a bird to water but you can't make him drink out of the fancy feeders that you paid good money for.

new chandeliers

Our newest chandeliers are in. We had the best sheets of vintage tin laying around and decided that they would make a fun light fixture. With a little bit of bending and prying and convincing Jay that I had not lost my mind , we ended up with 6 neat chandeliers.
The best part, we sold them before we could even hang them in the store.

Saturday just comes too quick!

I simply can't keep up with my list of happy happenings on Saturday. I make a blog and it seems like I turn around and it is Saturday again. Last week was NOT happy so I failed to post a "not so happy Saturday" blog. Back in April, I traveled to Italy and near the end of my trip I developed a incredible pain in my cheek that I attributed to volcanic ash sinus trouble. After numerous x-rays and lots of money with the doctor(all coming back clear) I decided to try the dentist for the second time. Turns out that I had a wisdom tooth that secretly pushed the neighboring nerve so hard that it died...and then abscessed...and really hurt. None of this showed up on any x-ray and I found myself begging the endodontist to just remove all of my teeth. Surely one of them was the culprit and dentures HAD to better than living with this pain. Lucky for me, we decided to drill the right tooth and 1 hour later I had a root canal! All of this led to a NOT so happy Saturday. As time heals all wounds, I am back this weekend feeling much better and full of happiness.

1. The itch has hit to travel again and the thought of time spent with my favorite travel companions makes me so happy. Hoping for the Elvis suite again.

2. pain killers

3. Mimosa trees. These trees get all covered with the best pink puff balls and just make me smile.

4. bluebirds. My bluebird family is back in the house and working on a new family for the summer.

5. fireflies. Fireflies are everywhere this year. They just light up my life.

6. My Dad. Thanks for being the Best.

7. People with a sense of humor. It just makes life so much more fun.

see ya soon.

packing it in

Now you would think that we would be masters of packing with all the pack-unpack that we do here at Alice and Jay. Jay loves to claim that he can't pack so I need to do the packing. Typical man! As we were driving home from our last road trip we passed these packing masters along the interstate. I will often turn a chair upside down to fit it in another chair but this is the first time I have ever seen it done with trucks!! Hats off to these guys.
We will be heading to a huge(funny how these auctions are like the fireworks stores along the interstate; world's largest, largest store south of the Mason-Dixon, and just probably the most humongous store on the planet!) and I mean HUGE auction tomorrow. We are hoping to come back with the most incredible trailer load EVER. I'll let you know how it goes.
Update on Oscar. Oscar is my baby red bird that hatched in my store garden. He didn't have a tail and I was concerned. Good news! Neiman-Marcus must have put tails on the half price rack because he is back in my garden and he has the prettiest tail and a head full of feathers. My friend, Geri, has a cardinal that has a bald head. I am going to tell Oscar to let him in on the feather sale.
Stay cool and be sure to go out in your yard right after dark. The fireflies are everywhere.

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Alice in Wonderland.

We believe at Alice and Jay!

Thank You For Hearing Me Video

Life lessons in the blackberry patch

The last few days have been spent in the sleepy little town of Boston. Georgia, that is, not the Bean Town one. When I tell people , with my sweet southern drawl, that I was born and raised in Boston, I always get the same look. A puzzled look until I explain that it is in South Georgia. I used to think that growing up in a small town, and even worse, on a farm in a small town was so "small"!! Nothing to do , nowhere to go, not even that many people to stir up good gossip(although my Grandma Girlie and her sisters, Eva and Nellie, could burn a hole in that party line telephone!) I couldn't wait to move to the big city. I had no idea what the big city was but I was going to find it! So, here I sit in the even smaller town of Sasser, Ga some 40 odd years later thinking about the fun that we had these last few days on those old familiar dirt roads. Nowhere to go, nothing really important to do, and nobody to stir up a whole lot of gossip! We got up with the sun and watched it rise over a cotton field, we took a walk down a canopied dirt road, and we picked blackberries. My Lindsey and I love to pick blackberries. Not the hybrid thorn-less kind but the good ole prickly kind that taste so yummy. We discovered that there can be a lot of conversation that happens while you are searching for the perfect berry. Finding that perfect berry can be tricky too. Sometimes you have to sort through a lot of buggy and mushy berries before you find the one that is just right. There are also a whole bunch of stickers that you have to wade through to get to those plump black berries. The more stickers you encounter, the better you get at learning to avoid the stickers. And one of the most frustrating lessons is when you think that you have just picked the perfect berry and then, dang it, you DROP it! But, guess what, there is always another perfect berry right around the next bush. When your buckets are full and the sun is starting to set ,you can set out for home and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Our buckets were full; we made and ate 3 whole cobblers; and we are all the richer for our time spent on a dirt road in a small town in the middle of nowhere with the people that we love dearly. I hope that everyone can find their own berry patch and it tastes as good as ours did! Till tomorrow....

'Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond imagination. It is our light more than our darkness which scares us. We ask ourselves-who are we to be brilliant, beautiful, talented, and fabulous. But honestly, who are you to not be so?

You are a child of God, small games do not work in this world. For those around us to feel peace, it is not example to make ourselves small. We were born to express the glory of God that lives in us. It is not in some of us, it is in all of us. While we allow our light to shine, we unconsciously give permission for others to do the same. When we liberate ourselves from our own fears, simply our presence may liberate others.'

Marianne Williamson

happy saturday

happy list - two words - air conditioning

beating them off with a stick

We are back in Georgia and low and behold if it isn't still HOT. It was a great trip but it always feels so good to get back home. Now, I am sure that everyone knows our security guard, FIFE(some people call him Spence) by now. He is my Dad and he is 87 years young. He is the best part of our trips and we love having go with us. He is so easy going and willing to do anything we decide to do. He always makes friends along the way and this trip was no exception. This time we had to beat the ladies off with a stick! Every time we turned around he had another lady making googly eyes. All the ladies making googly eyes and my Mom rolling her eyes! We tried to get him to share his secret but he just gives us that sweet little grin and giggles. I came home with a BIG black book full of ladies phone numbers and addresses waiting to meet up with Spence on our next adventure.

stop by and see us

Whew. We have packed the trailer full and are on the way to Sasser. We started the day with a flat tire but thankfully we were staying in a hotel across from Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart never looked better than it did this morning in the pouring rain with a very flat tire. We have traveled from Indianapolis, Indiana to Springfield, Ohio picking up lots of great new things for the store and meeting new friends all along the way. We will be unpacking the trailer this weekend so we hope that you can stop by and see us next week. I am too tired to find any pictures tonight so I will leave you with a funny quote that I saw today, "There is a skinny person inside of me screaming to get out, but I can usually shut them up with a couple of cookies!"

Our personal assistant(my lovely daughter) looks thrilled to be up at 6 am. She would rather the early bird have all of the worms but we were the first ones out this morning and we got all of the BEST junk. Hopefully we will be able to have a few new things in the store by this Saturday.

In between our junking, my botanical roots(I actually have a degree in plant sciences) always seem to surface. We kept seeing these white feather looking things floating all around and could not figure out exactly what they were. Finally, I found this GIGANTIC dandelion. This thing was incredible. I am pretty sure that we could hear the Fantasia melodies as Jay took a breath and set the fairies free.

Then, I turned the corner and found the sweetest bed of lavender. It was full of busy bees and smelled so heavenly. We can't grow Lavender in Sasser so it is always a treat to find it growing.
A great day of junking followed with a prickly pear margarita and a great Midwestern sunset. See you tomorrow.

GPS - gettin' people stranded!

Does anyone else in America have a GPS that routinely gets them lost? And not only lost, but lost in the worst of situations. Today we found the ghetto section of Louisville, KY thanks to our GPS. We put in the exact address and when we were "arriving at destination" guess what?? we were in the middle of a back road on a one way street at an abandoned building. NOT FUN! GPS = getting people stranded, getting people screwed, getting people scared, ..... Lesson learned-there is nothing better than a good old fashioned ATLAS! Once we calmed Jay down a bit, we found our way back to the Interstate and ended up going through Cincinnati. Poor Jay, this may have been worse than being lost in Louisville. We did get to make a few stops today and found a handful of new and unusual treasures. Great ironstone, fun antique concrete planters, an apple butter copper pot, the best old green cupboard and lots more!
love this building in downtown Cincinnati. It looks like a giant apostrophe from the side.
Wouldn't this be a fun place to rent a room?
And as always, we have FIFE on patrol! My Dad is the best! He patrols the trailer while we fill it up and he always manages to make a friend or two. We will let you know what tomorrow brings.