Camping and Lawn Ornaments

I’m off this weekend camping with my family. My family tries to get together about every other year. We do a little bit of everything, and I am the one that scrapbooks our get togethers.

I love my family, we are close, but everyone in my family is a little weird. I am the most normal person in my family. Of course my family would disagree with that, but even their friends say I am the most normal (or the least weird).

One year my sister brought plastic flamingoes to our get together, and she took them everywhere! We went to Holiday World and Ronda (the flamingo) went with us. Ronda was also with us when we went to a play, Fiddler (Flamingo) on the roof. Abe Lincoln is holding Ronda. She even went out to dinner with us. Do you know how hard it is to scrapbook 40 pages with a d*%# flamingo in each picture?!

Well this year, my sister decided she wanted to bring more flamingoes and wanted us to bring some as well. We put our foot down! No more flamingoes! So, this year it is any tacky lawn ornament, and there is a contest on who can come up with the tackiest. I have been reading every ones post and they all say that they have the tackiest. It will be fun to see what everyone has come up with. We have 10 campsites, so I am expecting about 10-15 tacky lawn ornaments.

This is my tacky lawn ornament. I used vinyl for the lettering, and added rickrack and ribbons. People at work said it wasn’t tacky enough so it was stained brown and yellow. This is a before picture. It may not be the tackiest, but it sure is the grosses.

Here's hoping you all have a wonderful and memorable summer!

Everyone needs at least one in their lives.

The vacation from H*LL! Everyone needs at least one in their lives.

I just got back from visiting my sister down in Tennessee where they were having a heat wave. 113*F in the shade. My girls and I actually had a very good time despite the heat. We went shopping, out eating, and to the museums. All indoor activities. But this reminded us of the last time we went on vacation during a heat wave.

You know Murphy’s Law "If anything can go wrong, it will"

I rented a cabin at Wisconsin Dells off the internet. The picture looked nice, the location was great and the price was reasonable. It got 3 and a half stars. It should have been a nice, relaxing time for my 2 girls and myself. Ahh, let me tell you the real story.... We started off for what should have been a 6 ½ hour drive. Traffic, road construction, weather, and Chicago, turned our reasonable drive time into an 11 hour excursion. We finally get to our location at 8:00 at night - which meant we got to see what our cabin looked like. I now wish it was dark when we got there. Our cabin was about 2 feet away from the (over flowing) trash dumpsters. Not only did it reek, it had huge, biting horseflies.

The inside of the cabin had so many things wrong with it, it would take me another 2 days to list it all. Broken air conditioning, "sorry but the maintenance man has the weekend off and won’t be back until Monday" This was Saturday and we could only open the windows on the one side of the cabins, since the other side was next to the trash dumpsters! The cabins were about 3 feet apart, so that really didn’t do much good, and you could hear everything the family next door was talking about.

All the bedrooms with lumpy mattresses were on the side of the cabin where the dumpsters were located. The couch had coil springs poking out. We slept on the floor and prayed that nothing would crawl on us.

They did have TVs, but no cable or antenna which meant you couldn’t watch anything but the local weather channel, you know the one that has the robotic computer voice.

Their "own private beach" was an old boat dock. It did have sand going down to the dock, but the bottom of the ramp was covered by slimy sea weed.

The next day we tried to look for a hotel. All were booked, and we had to give the cabin owners 48 hour cancellation for the rest of the week. We decided to stay where we were.

We did have a good time away from the cabins. We road the Duck and did a horse and buggy ride with a guy who looked just like Ernest. Both tours stopped in the middle of nowhere so they could sell souvenirs. We had dead batteries in our cameras, so we bought some post cards.

Since this was our vacation from h*ll, this month’s free file is a set of Hot Stuff, the little devil. This file comes in GSD, AI, KNK, WPC, and SVG.

Please leave a comment on what kind of files you would like to see.