Wordless Wednesday: Costco Invaded by Bears!

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Blue Monday: New Doll Blues

Blue Monday is hosted weekly by Smiling Sally.
To see more offerings, or to participate yourself, please head on over to her blog.

Last weekend the Austin Doll Collectors Society held their annual show and sale, and M and I managed to get ourselves together in time to get there for an hour or so, on Saturday afternoon. October has been an incredibly busy month for us and I thought we might have to give it a miss this year. But somehow we found the time, and I'm really glad we did because I found this little sweetie to bring home with me:

8 inches of cuteness!

She's an 8-inch compo Vogue Doll (an early version of what would later become the Ginny doll), probably from the mid- to late 1940s. A little before my time -- the dolls I remember from my childhood were all hard plastic -- and a very welcome addition to my Ginny collection, as I don't have very many of these earlier dolls.

Here's a shot of her from the back:

Flip side also cute

She seems to be mostly original -- no obvious repainting, and the wig doesn't appear to be a replacement.  Her outfit (which is a lovely blue and white) looks original too, although it's not tagged (it's not uncommon for the clothing from this period to be untagged) and is just beginning to show its age. But it's clean and seems to be holding up pretty well.

The composition is in pretty good shape, too. She has a few minor cracks and a bit of crazing, but only about as much as you usually find in dolls from this era.  Here's a closeup:

She said "Take me home with you."

Isn't she a pretty girl?

Unconscious Mutterings - Week 613

Thought today might be a good day for some mutterings, so here we go with Week number 613 from LunaNiña:

1. Family :: Manson (Looks like I've been watching way too much true crime TV!)
2. Leather :: Joan Jett
3. Chunky :: Bridgett Jones
4. Shaking :: Elvis
5. Suffering :: Johnnie Ray (Yeah, he was before MY time, too. Really.)
   
   
   
6. Pockets :: Captain Kangaroo
7. Loose :: ...as a goose; ...lips sink ships; Fabian Forte
   
   
   
8. Show :: biz
9. Vest :: cousins (Vest is one of my family names.)
10. Finale :: all she wrote

Blue Monday: Butterfly Watch

Blue Monday is hosted weekly by Smiling Sally.
To see more offerings, or to participate yourself, please head on over to her blog.

Wow, can you believe September is almost over? I find that very hard to accept. Not that it's my favorite month -- it definitely is not that. I'm not really fond of the month. Probably because it's my birth month (yet another year older, sigh), but also because it marks the official end of my favorite time of year and the official beginning of autumn. Not that I don't like the fall; but if fall is here, that also means winter is right around the corner. And that's something I don't even like to think about. Especially after the winter we had last year. Brrrrrr!

OK, enough of that. How did I get off on winter? What I really meant to say is: Wow, we actually had some rain last week! And over the weekend, we were inundated with just about every kind of insect you can think of. Including dozens of butterflies! For a while on Saturday I was playing hide-and-seek with a huge Tiger Swallowtail that was flitting around our sage bushes. Every time I managed to get the camera aimed and focused, the lovely butterfly would flutter off to another branch, and I'd end up with another blurry peekaboo shot much like this:

Hiding in the blossoms

But after many tries, I finally managed to get a couple of decent shots. This isn't the best, but it does allow you to see the lovely blue spots on its lower wings:

I believe the blue spots mean this was a female

And this was my favorite: wings spread, with a bright blue Texas sky in the background:

Tiger Swallowtail in Texas Sage bush