St Patrick's Day Parade, Savannah, GA. 2006

"May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields,
And until we meet again,
May God hold you
In the palm of his hand."

Traditional Irish Blessing.

Since Wednesday is St. Patricks Day all of my blogs this week will have an Irish theme.

The ever gracious Mary @thelittleredhouse's Mosaic Monday meme starts off the week. Do head over there and visit all the other participants sharing their marvellous mosaics today.

In 2006 whilst visiting Hilton Head Island, SC. we decided, since we had never experienced one before, to head over to Savannah to watch the St Patrick's Day Parade, which apparently is the second largest in the United States.

I never knew there were so many shades of green!

Come back tomorrow when I'll be joining Cuisine Kathleen's 2nd Annual St. Patrick's Day Blog Crawl.

Oh! the weather outside is frightening...............

The weather here in our small corner of Normandy has been really strange these past few days.
Gales, lashing rain and cold with it, flooding in the fields and our garden ponds are overflowing. It's the sort of weather we expect... in January & February, not in November!!
On Friday we had to chauffeur (ORIGIN late 19th cent.(in the general sense [motorist] ): from French, literally ‘stoker’ (by association with steam engines), from chauffer ‘to heat.’—Oxford Dictionary ) Mr Ben to the "Salon de toilettage canin" for his 9.00 am appointment.

The weather turned very nasty as we left the house and soon we were driving through hail which quickly turned into a deluge of ice, very scary.

Don't be fooled by the greenery that you can see in the above mosaic, that's mistletoe which sadly has invaded our ancient apple tree. I'll be blogging more about that for Outdoor Wednesday.

By lunchtime the storm had blown away to be replaced by sunshine & blue skies.

My mosaics today are of trees in our back garden, now stripped of almost every last leaf due to the gales, I found the natural light to be quite amazing.

Please join me in visiting Mary @ The Little Red House for Mosaic Monday, I wonder how many Christmas Mosaics there'll be?

A village mosaic for Mary

Monday has rolled around again all too quickly, many of my friends will be celebrating Thanksgiving this week and Christmas is but a few short weeks away.
One good thing about Mondays is Mary's get together @the littleredhouse where like minded bloggers share their mosaics.
I'm sure there will be plenty of turkeys on display today but I don't have a single one!
Instead a delightful donkey who lives in my neighbour's garden and is a joy to visit when out on our daily walk around the village.

Thanks to Mary who generously shared her knowledge on how to make my mosaics bigger and for those friends who asked Ben last week what sort of camera the Mrs has now it is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 with a Leica lens.

à bien tôt
Maggie

A "TJ Maxx" kinda Mosaic Monday

It's almost time for Mosaic Monday hosted by the very talented Mary @ the little red house, please do go over and say "bonjour"to Mary and see all the great mosaics gathered there.

I created my top mosaic today using Picasa and the end mosaic using Photoscape which I think I prefer.

They are a tribute to Jackie @ "Jackie's Life in Surrey" who seems to have temporarily (I hope) left the blogger world due to a computer gremlin. Recently Jackie blogged about some things she had found at the U.K. equivalent of TJ Maxx - TK Maxx.

Those of us who live in mainland Europe don't even have TJ Maxx.

But! When I visit SC I always head to TJ's and other stores to buy the products that are either not available over here (you have such a great choice of "stuff" in the US) or which are available here but are a little pricey.
Call it my annual fix of "retail therapy"
Last month I bought so much "stuff", not just at TJ's (handbags, Christmas handtowels, Claire Burke candles, Portmeiron votives, Fall & Christmas items) but also Michaels, (Fall decorating items, scrapbooks & supplies) World Market, (napkins & napkin rings) Belk's, (Estee Lauder & clothing) Fresh Market (coffee) & Piggly Wiggly (Zatarans, Hefty bags, etc) and at the first yard sale I ever went to, (tablecloth, Easter decor s&p & more napkin rings) that Mr B insisted on shipping a large box of it home before we left.
Well, dear readers as you can see the box has landed!
O.K. so what if it cost $75 to ship it to France? It was still worth it!

Maggie