Corrie Kinkel

A small pot of pansies that we bought just before I traveled to California has erupted in a big bunch of flowers! I have to deadhead them almost every day to keep it flowering! It is a joy to look at and I needed that because this week was all about rearranging a rack in our storeroom. Just before my trip we had to buy a new tumbler and everything was waiting until I was back to start altering things and deciding what we could do without and bring it to the recycle unit where we live.

Doska, most of the time Google translate adequately and for me German is no problem because my daughter has lived in Switzerland for more as 20 years. She married there and her husband and my grandkids are Swiss. Just before the start of the pandemic the family moved to the USA.

Hi Doska, I just see this now and it is an interesting subject. In the Netherlands you can make an appendix to your will with all your digital accounts. Your heirs, or a trustee that will execute your will, can deregister from all your accounts. However I don't know yet what I will do with all my accumulated supplies. Maybe one of my granddaughters will become interested, she has artistic potential and is following art classes but at this point is still to young. Hopefully I will live long enough that I can pass it to her one day. Otherwise I have no idea.

Well I can better answer this question before I forget to do so. Again I have no pictures of layouts about this topic, but I can write a short story. I have told before that I grew up in the postwar years in Rotterdam. That period was, certainly in the first years of my life, still a period of sparseness and hard working families. I luckily wasn't very picky about food, but disliked (or I should say hated) rice. Every time that came on the table I flatly refused to eat it and that always provoked a speech from my parents about the hunger they endured in the last year of the war where they had to eat tulip bulbs to stay alive! It has taken me more than 50 years to overcome my dislike of rice, nowadays I will eat it but it never will be a favorite of mine! The best memories about food I have of my dad baking pancakes or apple pie. He had learned backing from his older sister and liked to bake, which my mam didn't. My mam was born in the wrong era, had she lived now she probably would have made a nice career for herself and it wouldn't be that of a housewife! I think she was unhappy in that role, however she loved my dad.

When I was in California with my family I unintentionally happened to have a little card of Markus with me. I have a little backpack that I often use for a small trip or just for a walk to store a couple of things like my phone and sunglasses. I thought it was empty but Markus was in there and when I checked what the theme of the month May was, I decided to take a picture of the pool and a picture of Markus. I made a sort of holiday card out of it all with a couple of elements I have in my stash. Like Markus: enjoy!

Thank you Ann! The trick is to water very sparsely, the most common fault in watering a cactus is: you give them to much water. When in a pot or container you should let the soil dry out completely before giving them a drop. To this rule are some exemptions for certain species but that is normally on the label when you buy them. It is so funny to see her with her plants because my son, her uncle is also a great fan of cacti and he started with them when he was the same age as she is now. At 50 he still grows cacti but I'm not sure his wife loves those too.

I promised my granddaughter that I would make here a layout when I had overcome the jetlag and this is what I made for her. She loves plants, especially cacti and succulents, and she has quite a collection of them as mini plants. Besides that, green is her favorite color. I used the mask from Jessica Dunn for the May mask challenge on digital scrapbook and the papers (with blendmodes) and elements from cpjess Meadow bundle which I recently bought and some plant tubes. In the mean time I have transferred and ordered all my recent photos, so now I can start making a couple of layouts as intro pages for the photo album I'm going to make. Slowly I'm getting back into scrapping, it always takes some time to readjust to my normal routine at home.

N = Number of laps that you want to do

Well I am in too, hopefully I will have time enough to follow along. I want to make a photo album about my visit to California too but if I don’t take on other things at the same time it will be doable. It will be nice to get into scrapping again which I missed during my “holiday“ .

E = Enjoy pool life

Thank you Ann, but I visited Yosemite, which is doable from the San Francisco Bay area for a weekend. Yellowstone is on my wishlist, maybe some other time in the future; who knows.

This weekend we went to San Luis Obispo and highway 120 that we had to follow is the historic El Camino Royal. In the hills above San Luis Obispo we stayed in a cabin on a camping and because there is no light pollution, the night sky was so clear with the stars much more visible then at hone. I stood a long time outside looking at the sky! The next day we took a scenic route and came by Soda Lake an alkali wetland with a salt crust that was already used in earlier times by the indigenous people of the area. We followed a winding road along part of the San Andreas Vault and you can see the difference in the landscape where the vault runs through. Our next stop was at Daou vineyard where we had a tasting of their wines, that is my son in law and I, my daughter was driving and the girls are to young. The story of the vineyard and the explanation of their wines was very interesting and they served nice food to go with the wines as well.

Week 16 and I have arrived safely in California and of course it was fantastic to see them all standing at the airport to welcome me! At home there were 2 exited dogs to greet me as well. In the first weekend we got to see some of the flowers in bloom on the meadows. It wasn't quite the superbloom of last year, but nevertheless still pretty impressive to me. I took a lot of photos and I have no doubt that those will come to good use in the months to come.

Week 19 marks the end of my stay with my family. I have enjoyed being there and taking part in their daily lives as well as going on some weekendtrips together. I spend some quality time alone with each of my granddaughters, which we both cherished. I even did some volunteer work in the class of my youngest granddaughter where they could use some help with the bookinterviews! The children had to tell about a book that they had read and they had to answer some questions about it. I got a list of questions to ask depending on the kind of book and I was very impressed how eloquent most of them were! Now I'm slowly adjusting back at home where my husband is glad that I came back in one piece😉.

My week 18 is about Yosemite National Park where we stayed for the weekend. It is very imposing with the granite rocks and the waterfalls. It was still early in the season, so there were no crowds, but we have had all kinds of weather, including snow! At first it started to rain in the afternoon and when we were having diner the rain became snow. The temperatures dropped below zero and the snow blanketed the roads, which were closed to all traffic. Only one road stayed open and we had to use that one to drive to the camping where we had a cabin. It meant we had to take a detour of over an hour to get there in the dark on winding roads; luckily my daughter had rented a 4-wheel drive because of the weather predictions! The next morning there was a layer of approximate 5 cm of snow but is was sunny and the park rangers had cleared the roads with snow ploughs. When driving along a road we could see some cars that were stuck there and the people in them had been evacuated by the rangers; they had a busy night! It was quite an adventure in conditions that doesn't exists in the Netherlands.

Oops Michele I hope there will be a solution to your problem. Because I am away and don’t have my laptop with me I hope it will restart when I got home in a couple of days. I like this new font and although I probably don’t will participate in this challenge I shall certainly use later on. When coming home I have so much to do, after sleeping off the jetlag I have to install all the goodies of the birthday sale. I have downloaded the zip files on my iPad and have to transfer them to my pc where I can open them finally! The next step will be making the missing layouts for the P52 project, watch the last masterclass, go through all my photos and select which of them I want to use for making a photo album! When all that is done I will resume making layouts for all the different challenges. I admit I am starting to miss you all. Hopefully I see you at the Q&A coming Sunday if I can stay awake that is.

S = Swim

B = Backyard pool

Ann, Christina, I love both your pages. At the moment I am still in California and I just checked in to see what the new month brings. I am pretty much occupied here with all kind of things. Made a lot of flower photos, visited interesting places, enjoyed family time and helped with book interviews in the class of my youngest granddaughter! Coming weekend we will be going to Yosemite National Park and on Tuesday I will be flying home. So end of next week after my jet lag I am back in the Campus, albeit a bit sad after saying farewell to my dearests. See you all soon!

P = Primrose

I have no photos of pets because we never had one. When I grew up I lived in postwar Rotterdam and in the new apartment building where we lived it was forbidden to have animals (cats and dogs mostly). Once I had a hamster but that wasn't a great succes either. Later when I was married my husband wanted to have an aquarium with some fish and we had that for a couple of years. One summer we went for a holiday and couldn't find someone to feed the fish. So we dropped them in the little pond we had in the garden fully convinced they would not survive in the "wild"! To the delight of the children they survived and had made babies! They stayed there and we had many offspring over the years until the one day a grey heron had discovered there was a nice meal to be had in our garden. Both of our children are allergic to cats and dogs and nobody had ever heard of a labradoodle in those days. Luckily my daughter has overcome her allergies and there are 2 dogs in her family which my granddaughters love very much. I enjoy them when I visit there and it was quite funny when I visited last year the dogs suddenly realized that I had come and they went a bit crazy to great me and begged for a cuddle and a treat. I think they will do something similar when I arrive on Tuesday! I haven't time to search for some photos or supplies for this theme but wanted to tell my story anyway.

Thank you Sue! I had thought about those options but hadn't time enough to do so. This last week has been a bit crazy with all that I had to take care of. There came some unexpected problems, like a tumble dryer that went brook as well. Maybe I'll take a look at it when I'm back. At least I'm happy with my color scheme.

Ann I didn't noticed it and apparently my spelling checker overlooked it too. So thanks and I'll rectify.

Thank you Bonnie and may a meeting be possible in the future. I would be over the moon if that came to be......

J = Jade plant - Crassula Ovata