Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary...

...How does my garden grow?

With cucumbers and red peppers and roma tomatoes all in a row...oh wait...what are those weird orange things? HABANERO PEPPERS!! AH!!

So, I found out the hard way that the weird looking orange peppers were Habanero peppers. My family was over, and I didn't know what these peppers were (I did not buy Habanero peppers). They were supposed to be Mexi-bell peppers. My mom decided to try a little piece, and she liked it. She and Sung suggested that we some to the potatoes and veggies we were grilling. So I took a couple peppers, sliced them up, and put them in the veggies. I had rinsed my hands, and rubbed my itchy nose...A few minutes later...MY NOSE IS BURNING! It was literally burning! After washing my nose with soap and water, soaking it in water, milk, and finally lemon juice, my nose quit burning.

I was almost able to finish my dinner when...now my finger started burning under my wedding rings. I take off my rings, thinking they got some pepper juices stuck under them. Well, the rest of my fingers start burning on both hands. I couldn't be around anything even remotely warm without them burning more (ex. holding hands, walking out in the hot humid air, touching my fingers to each other, yeah...etc...). Again, I dipped my hands in cups of milk (what a waste I know), dabbed lemon juice all over them...nothing. Finally, after the fam left, we got some alcohol wipes (had no rubbing alcohol) and wrapped them all around my fingers--I looked like a burn victim! Didn't help much, so we squirt aloe vera AND hand sanitizer(thinking of alcohol again). If I kept my hands good and soaked in the stuff they were okay, but still couldn't move them without them burning. I finally went to bed with my hands dosed in aloe vera and hand sanitizer sitting on a paper towel. LOL

Luckily I woke up the next morning with only a phantom burn on the tips of my fingers. Stupid me did not go with her instincts to say "These look like Habanero peppers, maybe they really are even though I didn't buy them..." Oh well, we live---we learn. And, we enjoy the non-hot fruits of our harvest. We have had sooo many roma tomatoes and cucumbers popping up! It's been awesome!

On a side note and more recently, I have been doing more cards. Tried a technique with dryer sheets...SO COOL! Here they are Elisa!

This one has glitter all on the dryer sheet.

This one is without glitter. Doesn't it look like that homemade paper?!

Recent Projects

I recently inherited my sister, Elisa's stamp collection. She can't fit it in her apartment in Connecticut, and I CAN fit it in my big empty house. And so, my new stress relief and/or "I wanna be productive" activity is making cards and etc...

The next couple cards, I used a "grid" technique that I saw online. Oh, on the next one the "Happy Birthday" was embossed on there, so it's kind of mettalic-y.

You can't tell, but the cake's dots have glitter on them as do the "ribbons" on the cake. The background on this one was made into a grid, so it kind of has a quilted effect.

YAY for hobbies!

A much needed vacation!

As many of you know, for about the last 6 months Sung has worked 7 days a week. Two full time jobs and one part-time job. He loves what he does, but sometimes I have to force him to take it easy...

So this weekend we went to Highlands, NC with Kami and Amel. They've been a few times, but it was a first for us. We had a BLAST!

We went hiking! First we hiked up to Whiteside. It was BEAUTIFUL!

My attempt at taking pictures of the mountainous foliage...my camera did not like to focus correctly!

We were at 4930 feet above sea level at the top of the mountain!

Look behind them...

We also went to a cool waterfall spot close by where we were staying.

There was a place called Sunset Rock that was a popular place to go in the evenings. We went two of our evenings there. The town we were staying in was just in that valley below us!

I discovered the silhouette pictures and had fun!

On our way back, we went to the highest point in the Smokey Mountains, Clingman's Dome! We had to hike up about a half mile to get to the top. They had a kind of raised platform thing to look out and take pics. Unfortunately, we got there in the middle of a cloud, so there wasn't too much of a view. Oh yeah, it was at an altitude of 6,643 feet!

Some of the high mountain foliage! The spots on the leaves are because the acid in the rain is so bad it's eating away at the plants and trees on the mountain.

Trees dying because of acid rain.

Lastly, Sung and Amel had a lot of fun when we passed by a dam on the Ochoe River, and when we found matching t-shirts, we couldn't resist taking a picture on the way back!