First a little MUSICA;

Now, because of our give-away, a little prayer for you …

And now a little kitty ~ Joe and I walked past this scene the other day and both of us said almost at the same time, “I want his life.”

Vanna would like his life too, but noooooo, she is about to be a very busy girl.  But really, I almost hate to do this post ~ I’m still luxuriating in the 4,500  BEAUTIFUL, WONDERFUL comments you’ve left in the last couple of posts!  I don’t want to paste over them! I don’t want them to disappear.  I want to keep them forever! THANK YOU WONDERFUL PEOPLE.♥ You have made

V E R Y   H A P P Y

I have to show you what the people who send out WILLARD provided me with for the first time. You can’t see it all here, but it’s actually a map of the whole world. As each WILLARD is opened, those pins start dropping into different parts of the world ~ and when they do, a window opens for just a moment showing the name of the person who has just opened her Willard, and where she lives. It is so mesmerizing I could barely get anything else done.  I saw names of my friends come down!  I wanted to call them and say, “I know what you’re doing!” I watched and applauded while pins dropped into Paris, Jerusalem, Africa, Hawaii, China, Kansas, Romania, Japan, Portugal, Turkey, New York, Dallas and Toronto, to name a few,  and I felt like we had this great big giant wonderful club.  I just went to look and they’re still coming down, one was just opened in New Brunswick!

Welcome to all the New Girlfriends, so happy to have you here! I have to tell you, you are in such good company because . . . 

Yes, it’s true. You don’t run into this most places you go, but here, it’s a guarantee!  Oops, I hear Vanna upstairs milling about, getting ready to come down and pull names for our Giveaways.  I think she’s about ready to make her grand entrance.  But before she gets here, I just want to make sure you all got your WILLARD?

 If you didn’t, be sure to check your spam folders, sometimes WILLARD takes a detour!  You can also try signing up again and we’ll see what happens for the next one (which I am already plotting) . . . or, get a cup of tea, and take yourself here, to read Willard. ♥

And now, with a little drum roll please, the adorable Queen of the Deep Dive, the wild, the wonderful, the wiry Miss Vanna, this time carrying her little dog “Toto,” which, I think you’ll agree, looks exactly like a lamb. Both are shrouded in the undeniable mist of a Fairy Tale.  Toto, splendid in pink satin ribbon, and Vanna, wearing lizard-green bathing attire and silver glitter ankle boot stilettos. Which she has just kicked off, having handed Toto over to me. SO, the stage, she is set.  Are we ready????

We are so ready.

I just looked up from kissing Toto, and Vanna is GONE, has taken the high dive into the vat filled to the brim with your names, and all I can see now is a deep, whirling-dervish vortex, left behind from the celebrated scissor kick Vanna is famous for. I yell into the black churning whirlpool, “Pull three winners, Vanna, get them from all over, don’t let them be touching each other down there!” (She says she thinks I was born in a barn, but I’m just making sure we do this right.) I see her working her way back up through the ticker tape melee of names. I hear the music …and try to be patient. She’s coming! Her long, shapely lizard arm has just surfaced, and there are three names in her hand. I think we are there Girlfriends. 

OK, this is really it. For our first prize, the lucky winner of a personalized copy of my brand new book, THE FAIRY TALE GIRL, PLUS AUTUMN from the Heart of the Home, PLUS my new 2016 Wall-Calendar, and the adorable handmade Fairy Tale Banner . . . Is . . . close your eyes, cross your fingers, because I hope this is YOU . . .  R A E   L A N G E !!!  

. . . at least for one lucky girl, and yes, better for one than for none!  Means we all still have a chance!  Don’t you agree? YES!!!

Because there is 

The second-prize winner of a delicious evening at home ~ Dinner and a Movie ~ a personalized copy of AUTUMN from the HEART of the HOME, PLUS, the MOST adorable movie IN the world AS we know it TODAY . . . IS . . . . MAMIE VL, who promises to share with her mom!

C O N G R A T U L A T I O N S    M A M I E ! !

If you aren’t Mamie, but would like to see this charming, funny, smart, feel-good movie anyway, Hobson’s Choice is available from AMAZON . . . you’ll want to watch it over and over, it’s definitely library material and the perfect item for a cozy fall evening.♥ 

AND STILL , THERE IS

. . .the ART BLOTTER, signed and totally messed up by yours truly in the quest of making art! Here you find terrible examples of penmanship, splotches of watercolor, a list of four-letter words rhyming with “told” to be used in a poem about Autumn, some trouble with my pen, and a fat, leggy purple bird created from a brush stroke.  The “lucky winner” has only a first name, so we’ll start with the letters in part of her email address which are: “BASBLEU” ~ is this you? And her name has two “n’s” in it . . . it’s you, DIANNE!

Hope you Enjoy it!  I know it’s going to a good home. ♥

I’ll be emailing all you lucky winners to ask for your addresses so I can send your prizes.  Prize number one will go out to RAE as soon as THE FAIRY TALE GIRL arrives.

If this was not your lucky day (at least in this one teensy respect which cannot possibly count in the scheme of things) never fear, for we shall strike again another day.  Until then, back to our regularly scheduled programming.  Love you ALL for being here and taking part, in my eyes, you’re a room full of winners.♥

So ~ I thought I’d tell you a little story to cheer you up and hopefully help most of you forget we even had a drawing!  It’s about the town of Barnstable across the water from us on Cape Cod  — I heard this on the local news a couple of days ago ~ it was funny so I wrote it down to tell you. Barnstable residents are trying to close down the sky-diving school at the Barnstable airport. They are unhappy because the newbie skydivers, experiencing their very first dives, are screaming profanities from the moment they leave the plane, all the way down, and the townspeople don’t like it.  I can definitely see both sides of this story. I wouldn’t like it either . . . and I would hate to hear what I would holler on my first sky dive.

Makes my hands clammy just to think of it. Luckily that will never happen in this lifetime so all are safe from me.

Next, fyi, I’ve been asked several times if we have the Prayer for a Little Home in a print, and yes, I’m happy to say, we do, and this is it . . . you can read about it HERE , just scroll down to the middle of the page and you’ll see it there . . . xoxo

Have I taken your mind off it yet?

Well, here’s a little show and tell: Remember these Legacy boxes I wrote about sometime back? (If not click on that link and you can read the story). Those are two of them above, I have branched out into four now.

You need to read the story, but I like to save little bits of ephemera, cute things I find along the way, all kinds of things, a champagne cork with the date on it, gift cards, a bottle of wax-covered ink, bookplates, bits of this and that that catch my eye and seem special.

There’s everything from postage stamps to seed packages and even a few vintage things I find in antique stores.  All wrapped in tissue and tucked away for the future. So someday someone will find them, like treasure. Gifts for unknown persons in the future. 

Well, I found something new to put in one of my boxes.  This is the outside of it . . . dated 1906, and written to someone (Miss Augusta Andersson) in Boston from someone in Babylon (if Google is correct) which is (says G.) in Iraq.

When you open the card, this is what you find inside.  They just don’t make ’em like they used to! See the feet and the hand?  The sender wrote in spidery handwriting all around the face of the scary clown. A little bit of history.

He is missing one of his arms . . . but to think he has survived for 109 years!

I wanted you to see his feet.  So into the “legacy” box he goes.  For future discovery ~ for show and tell in the year 2115.

At the end of this week I send the manuscript for MARTHA’S VINEYARD, ISLE of DREAMS to my copy editor for the official spell check!  Musica I just finished figuring out the chapters.  It’s almost done.  Next, I start painting for it! I love it Girlfriends, I really do. You are going to love Martha’s Vineyard in the 1980s!

And I am having a dinner party on Thursday night!  So the cleaning has continued, only now with a vengeance. Just like starting over. 🙂

Everything had to come down and get washed!  Most of my dishes can go into the dishwasher, but things like the hand-painted glasses above, I wash by hand so I don’t loose the cute red stripes.

There is NO BETTER WAY to get your house clean than by inviting your friends to mull around in it for an entire evening! It’s a win-win!

So here’s the hutch, all washed and sparkling . . . v. proud of it. (My dad, aka Blogdaddy, took the doors off these cupboards for me the very first week we moved into this house, maybe even the very first day.)

And the whole time I was working the birds were going wild at the feeders outside my kitchen windows.  I call this our fish tank, because we can just watch these guys for hours!

My tomatoes are ripening, there are flowers from the garden in the vases . . . this is dawn, the porch light was on and I took the picture because liked the way it was illuminating the post outside.

I even made brownies, so you know things are getting back to normal! Now I am on my way to figure out the menu for our party!  Something I can make-ahead, I’ve already decided that much ~ I don’t want to miss a moment with our friends, feels like a long time since I’ve done this!

With l♥ve from me, and Vanna and Toto, and Joe and Jack and Girl Kitty too.  Thank you for EVERYTHING, Girlfriends.  You make life so much fun!  Have a wonderful day, and night, and so forth and so on forever and ever. XOXO