My Nebraska Trip Scrapbook

For those of you who have just now entered the scene of this blog, you may want to catch up with this journey by reading this post first.  In a nutshell, I just got back from visiting a friend in Nebraska that I haven’t seen for 20 years.  It was full of great memories…

How, oh, how, do I condense this experience into one post???

A while ago I used to scrapbook.  I don’t do it much these days, as this blog has become my journal and pictorial  memory album.  But, I decided today to do a bit of a condensed virtual “scrapbook” post of my trip.

Here we go.

First of all, meet my friend Kerry Lea.

I’m grateful that a 20-year gap in a face-to-face visit didn’t alter our friendship.  We just picked up where we left off, and after 7 days of solid visiting, we never seemed to lack for topics of conversations.  It was a joy and blessing to be with her again.  {Incidentally, these pictures were snapped the very last night I was there at about 10:30 p.m. We  I realized we didn’t have one picture of us together that we I  liked.  So, KL’s husband snapped these for us in all the rooms we had worked together in.  There was much (much!) laughter involved…}

Kerry Lea’s life journey has taken her to this beautiful picturesque home in the country in Nebraska.

Since she and I last visited together, she has also added a husband and 5 kids to her life.  {And yes, there is a set of twins in the mix.}

The first item on the casual “to do” list when I arrived was to prepare for their youngest daughter’s 6th birthday party.  Being the mom of 3 boys, and having never actually  put on a birthday party (will my boys be scarred for life?…) this was all new to me.  The banners, games, goodie buckets, and attire were all based on a “horse” theme.  Cute.  So cute.  And, my, 9 little girls are quite quiet!

Kl and her husbnad have just put an addition on to their beautiful old farmhouse, and asked me to come help decorate it.  Unfortunately, I arrived before the builders had finished, so we were only able to talk decorating about most of it.  We did do some organizing here though:

The Craft Room:  KL is a very talented quilter and has a beautiful selection of fabrics and vintage linens.  She showed me a method of folding fabric over comic book backer boards so that the fabric is all neat and the same size.  (You can find a tutorial on it here.)

We also worked on some behind-the-door storage in her new pantry.  She had an awesome collection of old sturdy oak(?) drawers that we used for shelves.  We had so much fun laying out the design and mixing some of her special vintage things on to the shelves.  I took a kazillion pictures, but {sadly} somehow only got these home with me…

 

And our final project was completed at the 11th hour…on my last day there.  The new downstairs “Schoolhouse themed” bathroom…

I was just plotting and planning how I was going to do a whole post tomorrow on the details of this little powder room.  But, lo and behold, somehow I didn’t get those pictures transferred over to my memory card either…  This is the ONLY one I got home with!  You’ll have to take my word for it.  It was neat.

Of course there were also many other unpictured memories that I don’t want to forget.  Like:  tasting Nebraska runza, Happy Hour Half-Price strawberry smoothies at Sonic, shopping at Hobby Lobby, garage sales with vintage treasures,  the most comfortable $5.00 flip flops from Walmart,  reading “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”, french press coffee, jasmine rice from a rice cooker {I need to get one of those!}, singing harmony in church, high school drama plays,  vanilla rooibos tea, sitting on the back porch, and late night chats.

Thank you, Kerry-lea {and your dear family}, for the  memories.

But, along with these memories, I treasure even more ~

your friendship.

Love to you…