A hot mess

This is a picture of a cupcake doggy we picked up at a local grocery store to take to a friends house on New Years day when they asked if we would bring desert. It was meant as a joke because we thought it was the most hideous thing we had seen in a long time and was well worth the $4.99 it cost just to see the stunned look on the faces of our hosts...Joke was on us. It turned out that they actually liked the dog and thought it was cute... I had Steve take a picture of it in case I decided to submit it to the Cake Wrecks blog. So far I have not bothered. I chose to post it on my own blog as a visual metaphor of my computer skills. Just as this creation can only loosely be described as a cake or for that matter a dog... I can only be loosely described as computer literate. What we both are in fact is a hot mess, though neither of us can be fully responsible for being that way. Just as this Dog was left as you see it at the hands of another, so I have been rendered helpless by somebody not leaving the computer as they found it. I cannot upload my pictures from my camera and am left to troll my old photos for something usable. I cannot be sure, but what I think has happened is that my more computer literate Husband has monkeyed with the settings and now Picasa does not function for me like it once did. I have tried my patented method of clicking the mouse until something happens, but nothing has...I even resorted to calling Steve on each of his two cell phones, but you guessed it, he is not available right now... so... PLEASE STAND BY....

The Mokes

This block does not exist in the original Aloha Album. There is a trumpet vine block that I eliminated because though they are pretty, I don't have any real associations with them and Hawaii other than I drove past a nice one on my way to Zach's school from time to time. I modified the Diamond Head block for this one of the Moku Lua, the two islands that are just off shore of our favorite place in all of O'ahu, Bellows Beach. Now, of all the blocks in the quilt this will probably be the most special, not just because I designed it ( rather cobbled it together from other sources) but because Bellows was a special place for us. Sometimes we had the whole beach to ourselves. If surf was up we could ride our body boards for ages. I could see then why surfers are addicted to riding the waves, when you catch a wave just right and you are able to ride the crest...nothing else compares. Of course that only happened once for me, the waves big enough to do that are a little daunting and I wondered if it was the smartest thing I had ever done...probably not, but I am glad I did anyway. I will never forget it. I will also never forget a day when the sea was calm and we floated in the water bobbing and drifting in the gentle surf. While I lay stretched out in the sea I looked up and saw a rainbow over the open water. It was a moment of unrivaled beauty and peace. That's why we loved going out to Bellows so much, no matter what was on offer -adrenaline rushes, meditative soaks, or just walking along the beach it always put us back in balance. June is blessed to live a short walk from this very view!