BON CHANCE

(From here.)

Picture Bow Holder

Good morning!  I hope that you are having a great week so far.  Please go check out my latest review and giveaway at Tatertots and Jello.

Today, I want to show you a cute little project that I have in my daughter’s room.

This is an easy project that anyone can do.  It would look great in most rooms including a bathroom, entry way, laundry room, master bedroom or daughters, room!

You will need….

a picture frame (or multiple)

ribbon

staple nail gun

I used 3 frames like this one.

Then cut some ribbon.

Staple it to the back of the frame.

Cut another piece of ribbon and tie it into a bow over the other ribbon.

Like this.

Then hang then it from a nail or screw.

I have three in a row in my daughter’s room.

This is how it looks.

    

          

This is a really EASY project that anyone can do!  I feel like is adds so much to her room.  It is so cute and girly!!!

You can do this with any frame and any ribbon.

What do you think?

Have a great day!!!

Bonnie :)

I am linking to these parties.

Don’t forget that TODAY is your last day for a FREE MEMBERSHIP.

UNDERWATER

The Underwater Project from The Underwater Project on Vimeo.

Sometimes what I work on really gets me down. 

This video buoyed me up. 

(Again, the experience is way better if you watch the HD video at Vimeo.)

(Photo from here.)

How Much Do You Spend on Cleaners??? Last Chance For a FREE MEMBERSHIP

I hope that you all had a great weekend.  I did!  Today, we celebrated my daughters 5th Birthday and my husband’s Grandparents 50th Wedding Anniversary!  We are all wiped out so I will post my weekly pictures later on this week.

In this post, I want to first of all THANK everyone that has bought Shaklee from me!!!  I am very appreciative of all business but even more than that,  I LOVE helping people!!!  I LOVE getting emails from you telling me how much that you love the products.  I love hearing how these products helped with your child’s allergies or autism, or your child’s skin rash went away, that you lost weight from our Cinch line and how now you are SAVING money by switching cleaners.

That is what Shaklee is all about, creating healthier lives, and they have been doing that for over 50 years now!  That is a long time in the business world.  That also shows something about this company……GREAT PRODUCTS!!!!!

Our mission at Shaklee is to provide a healthier life for everyone and a better life for anyone. We do it by making natural products that are so exceptional, you just have to tell your friends. Every product that goes into every Shaklee bottle is designed to improve health, work without compromise, and be gentle on the planet. That’s the short answer. 

Today, I also wanted to remind you about our JUNE special…..FREE MEMBERSHIP with a 50 PV order.  (PV = point value and the points show up in the cart.)  A Get Clean Starter Kit qualifies!!!

By ordering the GET CLEAN STARTER KIT today, you will receive a FREE MEMBERSHIP!!!

This membership fee is regularly $19.95.  It is a LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP and you will ALWAYS receive 15% OFF your orders and all order will be shipped right to your door.  Plus, you can order ALL products online.

I always recommend that you start with that kit because it has everything that you will need to clean your house.   I started with that kit and LOVE it!!!  Click HERE to see what the kit includes.

Most of you have seen my giveaways on other blogs, so you have seen their results. 

YES, these products WORK!!!!

I have told you over and over again how safe these products are for your family.

YES, these products are SAFE!!!!

I have even told you how CHEAP these products are.

YES, these products are CHEAP …………..but,

I know that is the REASON that some of you are NOT SWITCHING YET! 

I know because people have told me that they think they are expensive….BUT they are not understanding how  concentrated cleaner works.

So, I am going to de-bunk the myth that these are too expensive right NOW!!!

Please check out this Cost Comparison Sheet to SEE FOR YOURSELF THAT YOU WILL BE SAVING LOTS OF MONEY BY SWITCHING TO THE SHAKLEE’S GET CLEAN LINE.

Get Clean Cost Comparison 2009 -- MN

This chart is a reason alone to switch!  I know that it helped me make my decision!

Did you check out how much it costs to make a GALLON of window cleaner?  LESS THAT 1 CENT!!!!   That’s CRAZY!

I also have to be honest,  when I do laundry and wash my dishes, I use even LESS than they recommend and it still does the job!  So I save even more money that way!

I SAVE hundreds of dollars each year by using these products, plus I am keeping the chemicals out of my home and helping our planet!

I wrote this post because I know so many of you are on top of the fence debating to switch and I wanted to educate you on how much you will be saving by switching brands. With the tough economy right now, I know people are looking for ways their family can save money and I want to help make a difference!  Plus, these products are safer for your family too!!!

You'd have to spend more than $3,400 to get the same amount of clean found in the Get Clean Starter Kit!

And, when you purchase the Get Clean Starter Kit you also make a positive impact on the planet:

• Keep 108 pounds of packaging waste from landfills.
• Eliminate 248 pounds of greenhouse gas.

Remember, there is ONLY a COUPLE OF DAYS LEFT to get the FREE MEMBERSHIP!!!!

If you want another great special email me at donahuewellness@hotmail.com!

Whether you are welcoming a new baby or pet into your home, avoiding chemical products, trying to improve your family’s health and wellness, helping allergies,  helping keep our planet safe or just wanting to save money,  this all-inclusive Get Clean Starter Kit  will get you started on a cleaner, safer, greener home that saves you money!

Remember, this special only last until JUNE 30th, so hurry and order today!

Click here to visit my site or order the kit.

What did you think about the chart????

Bonnie :)

For questions about ordering or additional specials, email me at donahuewellness@hotmail.com

Halfpenny Home visits the I make fun stuff market in Ipswich

This was the lovely message left for us by Anna today. We're really glad you like our stuff Anna, we love it too!

What a lovely day for a craft and vintage market! The bunting was out and so was the sun in Ipswich today. The Saint's Market was organised by the I make fun stuff people and Loveone who have a very lovely shop in St. Peter's Street.
Loveone were hosting the cream tea parties today, we had 'two to go' and very nice they were too - thanks to Peter and Tracy Ranger for tipping us off! I've been email and blog buddies with Tracy since January but had we hadn't properly met until today and it was such a treat to finally get together as they are usually so busy looking after The Gedgrave Flock - we have their yarn at Halfpenny Home as it is so soft, shiny and beautiful to knit with (can't you tell we're big fans).
We had a little time to play hangman...
make pom pom ribbon bracelets...
and enjoy some refreshments...
before we packed it all back into the trunks ready for Adam to take us back to Halfpenny Home.

Thank you so much Pixieannie for all the giggles, hope the ride back home on your new bike wasn't too wobbly - your basket was very full! Thanks to Adam for putting up with us all and helping pack and unpack and finally, thank you for the lovely button doodles Beth. Nic x

SUNDAY POETRY: "AT THE FISHHOUSES"

(Credit: Little_DogPhotography at Flickr.) 

AT THE FISHHOUSES 
by Elizabeth Bishop 

Although it is a cold evening,

down by one of the fishhouses

an old man sits netting,

his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,

a dark purple-brown,

and his shuttle worn and polished.

The air smells so strong of codfish

it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.

The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs

and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up

to storerooms in the gables

for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.

All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,

swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,

is opaque, but the silver of the benches,

the lobster pots, and masts, scattered

among the wild jagged rocks,

is of an apparent translucence

like the small old buildings with an emerald moss

growing on their shoreward walls.

The big fish tubs are completely lined

with layers of beautiful herring scales

and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered

with creamy iridescent coats of mail,

with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Up on the little slope behind the houses,

set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,

is an ancient wooden capstan,

cracked, with two long bleached handles

and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,

where the ironwork has rusted.

The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.

He was a friend of my grandfather.

We talk of the decline in the population

and of codfish and herring

while he waits for a herring boat to come in.

There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.

He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,

from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,

the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water’s edge, at the place

where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp

descending into the water, thin silver

tree trunks are laid horizontally

across the gray stones, down and down

at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

element bearable to no mortal,

to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly

I have seen here evening after evening.

He was curious about me. He was interested in music;

like me a believer in total immersion,

so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.

I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

He stood up in the water and regarded me

steadily, moving his head a little.

Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge

almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug

as if it were against his better judgment.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,

the dignified tall firs begin.

Bluish, associating with their shadows,

a million Christmas trees stand

waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended

above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,

slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,

icily free above the stones,

above the stones and then the world.

If you should dip your hand in,

your wrist would ache immediately,

your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn

as if the water were a transmutation of fire

that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

(Photo by Malene Thyssen, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

In my humble opinion this is simply one of the best poems ever written. 

The long middle section of DEEP BLUE HOME takes place mostly in Newfoundland, with its extinct cod fishery and pilot whale "fishery," its capelin fishery, and the wonderful seabirds of Cape Saint Mary's. Elizabeth Bishop's poem reminds me of that world.

The poem also reminds me of Pete, the harbor seal from Monterey, a friendly guy who visited divers up close and personal back in the 1980s. (Does he still?) I liked him so much I made a sincere effort to cut him into every single film I ever made, no matter how long a stretch it might be to have, say, a California harbor seal appear in a film about coral reefs. I still remember his cameo lived on videotape #113 in my stock footage library. Lori, if you're reading this, you might remember that too.

RANDOM EXCERPT: BIOLUMINESCENCE

Photo by Phil Hart. And, by the way, well worth a visit to his website for his explanation of the complex factors that led to this photograph. Plus more really beautiful images of bioluminescence.

I wrote about bioluminescence, the brilliant aurora stirred by motion in the nighttime sea, in THE FRAGILE EDGE. Here's an excerpt:

The light show we observe near the surface, at least as we understand it, is produced largely by the dinoflagellates—those unicellular plants possessing microscopic whiplike tails that enable them to move, however slightly, this way and that. Large creatures such as you or me or a spinner dolphin will activate billions of these bioluminescent plants as we move through the surface layer of the nighttime waters. Even small zooplankton, for instance, the predatory krill traveling on their swimmerets, will find themselves spotlighted.

As to why plants in the sea produce bioluminescence, a hypothesis known as the burglar alarm theory postulates that the chemical production of light acts as a visual siren: the plants turn on their lights when their predators (for example, krill) are in motion, illuminating them so that their predators (for example, lanternfish) can catch the krill and eat them first.

Tricksy.

You can read a classic science paper on the phenomenon: 
Mark V. Abrahams and Linda D. Townsend. Bioluminescence in Dinoflagellates: A Test of the Burglar Alarm Hypothesis (pdf). Ecology, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 258-260

Photo from here.

More about bioluminescence from THE FRAGILE EDGE, an excerpt about sailing the Pacific one stormy winter:

In the trough between the swells, an incandescent waterfall of radiance tumbled from the wave breaking directly ahead. Time and again, we sailed into this cascade, which outlined the bow of the sailboat in a vibrating aura of electric blue and electric green. Behind us, our wake writhed like an aquamarine serpent before fading from view over the precipice of the receding wave.

Most nights schools of dolphins—generally common dolphins (Delphinus delphis)—arrived seemingly out of nowhere to ride our bow-wave. Alone on watch in the open-air cockpit, I would glimpse a streak of blueish-green heading towards the bow, looking for all the world like a torpedo until it porpoised through the surface to breathe. The first streak was invariably followed by others, sometimes dozens, all racing across the beam, carving glowing turns before settling into bow-riding position: on their sides, tail flukes nearly touching the bow as it hobby-horsed through the swells. No matter how violent the action of the bow, the dolphins held fast in their position, their bodies outlined in the pulsing blue light of an underwater St. Elmo’s fire. 

Common dolphins were not the only cetaceans we encountered in the course of these bioluminescent nights. We also came upon migrating gray whales headed for their breeding lagoons on the western coast of the Baja Peninsula. Their bioluminescent wakes mimicked the wakes of boats. If conditions were right, when the whales blew, the plugs of water covering their blowholes flared into faint, blue-green mists of luminous organisms, as if the behemoths were exhaling pixie dust.

Photo by Jed Sundwall, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

~♥ My Porch ♥~

I ♥ my front porch!  I have so many fond memories of sitting on my dear Gram's front porch that I always dreamed of having a porch of my own.

I ♥ porch swings!

I wish you were able to sit on my porch with me...oh the wonderful things we could talk about!

Thanks for stopping by,

♥ Kim

THE JELLYFISH NEBULA

(Image Credit & Copyright: Bob Franke)

From APOD:

Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in this alluring, false-color, telescopic view. Flanked by two bright stars, Mu and Eta Geminorum, at the foot of a celestial twin, the Jellyfish Nebula is the brighter arcing ridge of emission with dangling tentacles below and right of center. In fact, the cosmic jellyfish is seen to be part of bubble-shaped supernova remnant IC 443, the expanding debris cloud from a massive star that exploded. Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago. Like its cousin in astrophysical waters the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, IC 443 is known to harbor a neutron star, the remnant of the collapsed stellar core. Emission nebula Sharpless 249 fills the field at the upper left. The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away. At that distance, this image would be about 300 light-years across. The color scheme used in the narrowband composite was made popular in Hubble Space Telescope images, mapping emission from oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur atoms to blue, green and red colors.

My Powder Room Makeover

That was a before and after picture of my downstairs powder room.   I decorated this bathroom for CHEAP!!!

I not totally done with it, but I am happy for now. 

One of the things that I still want to do is to add molding around the mirror.  Do you think that I should go white or black???

I guess that I will start off with  my curtain and rod.

I actually made this curtain with fabric that I already had……FREE!  The rod was brand new from the Goodwill for $5.  (It is originally from Target.)

Here is a better look.

 

I got this holdback on Clearance from Wal-Mart for like $7 (and it came in a pack of 2, so I get to use another on some where else.)

 

These rings were a little more than I wanted to spend….they were $10 from Linens n Things.  I really wanted the big rings!

  

This wall clock was only 5 bucks from a garage sale.

I got these flowers for $3- GS.

Because we save some much on decorating our house by finding EVERYTHING from garage sales, over the winter, we splurged and  got granite in here and the kitchen.  I had to say that I am loving it.

This artwork was only $3 from a GS.

 

I bought this tot stool from a GS for $2 and I painted the top black.  (It was a light oak color.)

We bought all of our hardware on ebay for half price.  They were under $2 each!

   

I bought this mirror for 1 dollar!!!!  Where you ask?  A Garage Sale of course!!!

I accessories are from Aldi special purchase.  Once a year, they had great bathroom deals.  I got a light fixture, towel ring,  towel bar,  tp holder and towel hook for $40.  I also used the kit here.

Here is a picture of the tp holder, nice huh?

 

I got that lamp for $3.

This soap dispenser was from the Goodwill for like $3.

 

This is the light that came with the house, but I think that I will be changing it soon.

 

Here is the before. 

Here is the after.  Oh yeah, before I forget, I  My husband painted this room Capilano Bridge from Benjamin Moore.

I hope that you like it.  You don’t have to spend a lot of money to decorate.

I hope that you have a great day!

Bonnie :)

I am linking to some of these parties.

If you have been thinking about joining Shaklee to receive 15% OFF on ALL orders, now is the time because in June your membership ($19.95 value) can be waived with a 50 PV (point value) order.  A Get Clean Starter Kit qualifies you.  Also, if you email me first, I can let you know about other ways to save even more on this order.  Click here for more details.