Fleur de Aleta

If you grew up in the greater New Orleans area, the above picture will make you smile and bring back happy childhood memories. At least, for me it does. First, it was on a truck for a company that makes King Cakes - Yummm.. But it's the bead dog that had me smiling. What do kids do with Mardi Gras beads after the parades are over? They make those bead dogs. We used to make them in a variety of shapes and sizes with long ears or long tails or short legs and multi-colored ears, etc. My brother and I used to have contest to see who could make the largest dog (some of the beads are tricky to turn into dogs). I asked the truck driver if it was OK for me to take the picture and he said, "Sure! If you go to the main office location they have a picture of the bead dog in really pretty colors." Cool :)

Penny learns a new trick - BANG Penny knows what the Bark Park is She has a cute yawn :) Having fun at the Bark Park

My husband created the below movies using his iPad....

New Orleans is known for its street signs. The names of the streets are on the corners in the cement, made of tile with blue lettering. There's a company that went around and took pictures of each letter of the alphabet from various street signs. The company used the pictures to create tiles and sells them individually or creates custom Christmas ornaments. The name of the company is nolatiles . Greg bought tiles that spelled out my name and then he created a sign. It's for my parking place in our garage :)

Yesterday was a difficult day. Beautiful, but difficult. I cried. I thought I could read what Mom wrote for Hollis' service, but I broke down and cried. My parents bought the urn for Hollis' ashes. It was a beautiful urn. They also had 8 smaller urns to share with the family members, which was thoughtful. Didi picked up Hollis' ashes. Then Mimi picked them up from Didi and brought them to my parents' home. Kevin went to my parents' home to put the ashes in the various urns. Mom said that she couldn't be in the same room, she had to leave while Kevin did that.... She said that Kevin had a difficult time doing so, but he had my Dad and Erica, Kevin's girlfriend, with him for support. They placed paper down so that if any of the ashes fell that they could roll the paper and use it to put in an urn. Kevin used a spoon and put some in each of the smaller ashes and he spilt some on the paper. Dad slapped Kevin on the shoulder and said, "Your Daddy...