The Treasure Box!

Hey guys!

So today’s post is sort of second or maybe a third part to my rock posts. I never meant for it for have so many squeals but okay!

If you haven’t read either post, here’s the story behind it. I “used” to be obsessed with rocks when I was a kid. I have my own little collection that has been at my nana’s in a small corner of the living room but since the beginning of 2014, it’s been in my room. That’s the start of it, if you want to read more that one then you can click here. Last December, my papaw went through his drawers or something like that and found one of his collections of rocks. It was my early Christmas present and I’ve been treasuring it since I got it! I wrote about that too, here’s that link if you want to check it out too!

I’ve had his rocks in an old Velveeta box and since it doesn’t have a lid to it, I’ve kept them right next to my bed so I know where it was at all times. However, having all these rocks in such a place sort of takes up space and I always feel like somebody’s going to dump them all out on the floor so I wanted a better place for them.

A few months ago, I want to say early January, my dad gave me his cigar box because he had smoked all of the cigars that came inside it and asked if I wanted it. I said sure, not knowing what to do with it because I had enough boxes to last me a while! Anyways, it’s been around the same corner where my rock collection has been since I brought home. I felt bad for taking it and not being able to find something to store inside it until I had an idea.

To hopefully clean up my area as best as I could, I decided to experiment and see if my papaw’s rocks could fit inside this box. As you can see below, the box isn’t that big but there’s enough space that all of the larger rocks can fit and to me, that was great!

Everytime I do one of these posts about the rocks, I never count to see how many I have! I have no idea how many my papaw had in his collections. One of these days, I’ll count them and update this post with the correct amount. Anyways, I like the style of this box. Even though my papaw has his own cigar boxes and they’re not made of the same material as these, but they’re part of the family’s trait of collecting any and everything!

I didn’t just put the rocks inside of it though. It holds something very special to my family now. We had my papaw’s funeral service the second to last week of April and my dad was given the bullets from the miliary guys that saluted him and he passed out a bullet to all of us. My little bullet is inside of this box because I figured these are my special things from my papaw. And last week, something that I was given from my nana that isn’t pictured is a lone bag of his favorite peppermints and his clip that he used to close them all the time. Nobody really knows I have them in my box until after they read this post of course!

To end this, I decided to title this post “The Treasure Box” because I had posted a status and a sneak peek of the box on my Facebook and one of the aides I was around in school said they make the perfect treasure boxes. So she inspired this post in a way! Thanks Becky!

Do you have a special place for keepsakes? 

Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Bloglovin

My Childhood Oddity | Part 2

Hey guys!

Well, I have a treat for you!

In September of 2014, I wrote a little post about an old rock collection I used to have when I was a kid. My nana found the floral container I used to keep them in at her house. She couldn’t get the top off so I had to take it home for my dad to open and inside were these different rocks and one random sea shell that I must’ve stolen off the floor or something. I honestly have no clue why I would stick a shell in my jar but it’s in there!

I had a lot of fun going through my fairly large collection. I found out that I had a lot of smaller rocks than any of the bigger ones. I probably had better luck finding the smaller ones and that’s why I have so many of them! Well, after I did the pictures and wrote up the blog post about my little childhood oddity and I thought I was done talking about it. On December 4th, my mom came into my room and said my papaw was cleaning and he found a small box of his rock collection of when he was a kid! He gave them to me as an early Christmas present! I have a whole Velveeta box of rocks and it’s heavy as crap!! It’s a two foot job to lift up.

That night I decided to go through the box and see what all he had in his collection. I think, even at my age that rocks are pretty interesting. The ground that our houses, roads and feet rest on have always been here since the Earth was created. I think rocks are small gifts from Mother Earth herself. It doesn’t matter how much we continue to kill her with our destruction, she always gives us little natural gifts to help keep our sanity. My papaw said most of the rocks he collected are from the Rocky Mountains and some place else that I can’t remember, but it does explain some of their shapes and sizes. Quite a few don’t look like he dug them out of the backyard, which I don’t think is a bad thing either!

I had to look through this website afterwards because I was really curious to know what kind of rocks they are! There were some differences in textures between both collections. Majority of them felt rough. Those need extra care because you never know if you will cut yourself on them sometimes. It can happen! He had a lot of bigger ones, like maybe four or five large ones and then one giant rock that to me looks likes a red turd that somehow turned into a rock. Is that too much information? There’s definitely a few shiny, crystal-like, granite ones in the box. Those are always my favorites, even if I don’t know what to call them! Out of all these special rocks, there were a few gravel rocks that were stuffed into the sides of the box. Just because “normal” looking doesn’t mean that they’re lame!

So what do you think? Did you ever collect rocks or something you thought was “cool” as a kid?

Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Bloglovin

The Aunts’ Collection Of Spoons.

Hello everybody and Happy Monday!

I hope everybody had a good weekend. I did! On Saturday, while my dad went on a bike ride I went to my grandparent’s house. I ate lunch and my nana and I had a lesson about computers and all that fun stuff! It’s a bit strange sometimes when we both teach each other things that we may not know yet. She’s been getting me more into making creations on Paint lately. I’ve been teaching her the rest. When we finished with that stuff, she fed me ice cream and after a half hour, we finally got started on figuring out her spoons. Well, they’re not exactly hers, more like Papaw’s aunts. Growing up, on my mom’s side of the family. My Papaw has four aunts that are kind of legendary. My nana thinks the spoons either belonged to Aunt Lula or Aunt Regina (Ra-gee-na) we don’t know which one at the moment.

I’ve honestly never seen these before. Anything that’s higher for me to see, then I hardly ever see it. One reason why I’m just now seeing them is because of the fact they were originally placed behind the kitchen door, collecting dust. So the weekend when my Aunt Laurie and her husband Mike came down, they were rearranging my nana’s office and she found the perfect place for them in her office. She had enough space for the shelf to hang and it’s actually pretty where it is now, because my nana has these small lit Christmas trees that she plugs into the wall and the different colored lights flicker against the spoons on the stand. It’s really cool! Well, the day I came over to help with her laundry, I took pictures around her house and I decided I wanted to write about them. The only problem we had been the fact we didn’t know where the spoons came from. We tried taking a couple off and reading what was written on them, but with the poor lighting in her office, you can’t do anything in there, especially read. No wonder when we used to have company my papaw would have his recliner moved into that room. It is the perfect room for napping.

This time around we took the stand and spoons into the kitchen, because we knew with both the light above and the light coming from the outside would be enough for us to see even the smallest of writing, but the trick was I had to figured how things were spelled. Some of the markings of the spoons were easy to figure out. Like the upper parts of the handles, those had very small but easily determined markings on it where you could figure out what the maker’s wanted everybody to know where they came from. There were two spoons that had easy handles, it was the whole point of making your brain work to figure it out. The first had a leaf and we were like, what the hell does the leaf mean? Once I looked at it, I thought it was pretty in the details and it did look familiar, but we couldn’t figure out until we read the inside of the actual spoon, were it said in plain writing “Canada” and it was like, “OH!” The leaf looked like the flag so I knew I knew the leaf somewhere. She actually three spoons like that! The other was the hardest of them all honestly. This one, had a beautiful decorated handle and inside of the spoon. A small picture of our first President, George Washington was at the top, while at the bottom had a small detailed markings of his hometown. It had something written at the very top that we never understood, but the bottom was my real problem no matter how many times we arranged it to get the light to reflect it so I could actually read what it said, at the last bit I finally found the comma and the letters “VA” standing for the state Virginia. That last second I finally got it, when she had it upside down (not kidding!) I read “Alexandria, VA” and it was best thing ever!

The others were very interesting, the one we had trouble making out that first day, had some sort of house on top of the handle. It wasn’t like any other house though, it was craved out of the left over space. Looked like a little hunt on top of the spoon. Nana said it might be from the Philippines or some other islands. Well, when she let me read the inside of the spoon, it said “Manila, Pha” on it. So she was right, after looking over the next one and the one after that, we were kind of hoping to find ones we had in our heads, she hoped we had a England spoon and I hoped we had a Poland spoon. We didn’t find either one, which was fine. The Aunts definitely liked traveling over to Canada considering we had like six or seven of them. Five of which were doubles of the same ones we already had. Along with the Philippines spoon, there was also an Italy spoon too. It didn’t have any clues on it that could’ve made us know what it was at the start, but it did have the colors of their flag on it thought. On the US side though, we had a Michigan, Kentucky, and Niagara Falls. It was interesting not to find an Indiana spoon in the lineup but Kentucky and Michigan spoons instead! There was one more spoon that unfortunately didn’t have any good markings on it, telling us where it was from but it had a nice round marble like at the top of the handle, it was white and blue swirls. We still don’t know what it is. I tried to get some good pictures of them. If anybody in your families has a collection like this, I suggest you take the time to go through it. My nana and I actually enjoyed it.

The Kentucky and Canadian spoons

I wish the top came out better, we still don’t know where this one is from

Bloggers Do Collections Better!

Sorry for the lack of Bloggers Do It Better posts! Haven’t really had any ideas for the other prompts until I read about this one. I do collections a little bit different. Oh, who am I kidding? I do everything differently from the rest! For some it could be nail polishes and/or other beauty products. For me, it’s all about music. I am sucker for the real CDs than just downloading it off of Amazon or iTunes. The only advantage of downloading it online is not having any hassle with looking for a rap or metal albums without wondering if the swear words will be cut out or not. Because online they usually give you two options for that, but you go looking for an album of those two genres at Wal-Mart, you’re basically screwed. Trust me, I learned that the hard way. Want to know something a little bit more embarrassing. As kids we used to go to the library and a few times they’d have sales and they were actually saling CDs. I was shocked because I didn’t know they were saling those too. Well, at that time I was big into rap and she found 50 Cent’s first album and I bought it and took it home. I was so excited until I went and put it into my stereo to find that the bad words were cut out. So the majority of the record was disappointing for me but then we realized the library was owned by a church and put two and two together. I was screwed from the get-go I think.

When I was in the fourth grade, I remember taking out all of my CDs from their cases because before I didn’t know they made cases like the one I use to store of them now. I think I had over 40 CDs and I was pretty proud of myself for having so much. My first ever CD was the Backstreet Boys album and I only got that because my nana had bought me my first ever boombox. I was probably seven years old when I got them and that was like a big accomplishment back then because we didn’t have iPods, iPads, laptops, and cell phones that you store and listen to your favorite artists/bands. I grew an appreciation for them and did my best to make sure to be careful with how I handled them from day-to-day. When you do everything with your feet, putting up things like CDs can get pretty tricky. Sometimes if my dad gives me a CD he holds it the right way. He gets his fingers all around the edges and lifts it up and carries it that way. If he does it that way I have to grab it by the side and I hate doing that. I have my own special way of carrying and holding a CD. I put my pinky toe in between the hole in the middle and put my other toes around the sides and grip it that way. You should see how I drive with one in my foot! Especially coming around a tight corner. It’s not a pretty sight!

It is very difficult for me to like an entire album. I’ve always that problem, but since I’ve been getting into all kinds of genres the process isn’t as harsh as what it once was. It’s been pretty easy whether or not, an album is amazing or not. I have a pretty wide variety on all three of my music outlets (iPod, CDs, and Spotify) I used to say I wouldn’t get into rap, folk, metal, country and rock but yet I have. Surprisingly, in just this picture here I don’t have them categorized like I had my nana do with her case. You can see a Carrie Underwood, Lil Jon & The Eastside Boys (my first uncensored CD and it took me a year to open it up!), Pussycat Dolls, three Britney Spears albums (that gray one is hers!), and Natasha Bedingfield album. Some CDs were bought only by chance. That Natasha Bedingfield album being one of like three out of the whole thing! I mainly got the CDs from birthdays and Christmases. Once I got like seven CDs for my 13th birthday, it was a GOOD day! Because nowadays if you want that many songs you need a $100 iTunes gift card and even then do you have to figure out what all you want. Everytime I go to download songs out of a $15 gift card I usually get about 12 songs. I don’t see how that’s really fair of that much money.  Maybe I’m being greedy I don’t know, but nobody messes with me about my music and nobody will either.