Had a Ball!

Hubby and I support the Marine helicopter squadron HMM-163 and they are kind enough to invite us to their Marine Ball when they are in town. The ball was on Saturday, so we got to play dress up for an evening. Here are the great looking (and young!) Marines in the color guard


and hubby and I in our finery

Hmm - I think I need to change my soccer tan before the next ball and hubby needs to get a lot more sleep! It was a fun night and we met a lot of wonderful and incredibly courteous Marines!

Beautiful larimar!

I made this necklace for a local customer and hope she likes it. Her request was "larimar and chunky". After much searching and bidding on ebay I got some nice larimar strands - rondelles and nuggets. The larimar nuggets came from one of my favorite suppliers (she has some gorgeous gemstones if you're looking!) Szarka of Magpie Gemstones. She blogged me too! Anyway I tried a few different designs and finally mixed them up and added some chunky sterling cubes to create this design.



Next to share is a fluorite duo - necklace and earrings. The fluorite is just beautiful in both! The earrings are already in my Etsy store and the necklace will be listed later today.

Gads it's hot!

It's still hot and dry in San Diego. You probably already have heard about the fires north of us. Thankfully we've been spared so far this fire season. But for those who live in SoCal - don't be nonchalant - get your property prepped (looks like LOTS of people up on LA/Montecito did NOT pay attention to the fires we had down here last year and 4 years ago - I kept seeing houses with brush right up to their fence - absolutely no thinning of the brush, palm trees with tons of dead fronds hanging down - those go up like a torch when hit by an ember - saw that happen in the last Camp Pendleton fire a month or so ago), make sure your insurance is up-to-date and that you have replacement value, don't throw lighted objects out of your car windows (i.e. cigarettes!), don't create sparks near dry areas, and so on and so forth!

For some of the fire happenings up in LA try these links: http://www.abc7.com or http://www.cbs2.com

I'm going to get some bulbs planted in between cool down and water breaks since they are sprouting in the bags. Hopefully we'll get some cool weather so they don't just dry up and die once I get them in the ground.

Pretties from some Californians!

Ok - so I went looking for Etsy items from fellow CCCOE team members that would work in my treasury and found these lovelies ...