Carla Dixon: Hanging out in Marysville

June 25th through July 1st, I visited my sister, Franny. I rode the Amtrak train to Everett where she picked me up and drove me to her home in Marysville. We try to get together a couple of times a year and both look forward to it. Our itinerary goes something like this: we get up, eat breakfast, drink a few cups of coffee, check email, talk about everything, and somewhere around 11:30am, shower, get dressed, then eat lunch. Around 12:30pm we are in the car heading out shopping. We like to go to thrift stores, value village, goodwill, crafts and the outlet mall and sometimes we even stop at a few garage sales.

This is Franny at one of her favorite stores that she had to show me.

This is me. We like to get some photos taken to document our time together.

I always take photos of the interesting things I see hanging around outside her house.

This is a bottle of Rum that I purchased in AZ for my sister. It had a cool looking cap which I took for being some special designer look. Franny liked it too, until we tried to open it. It wouldn't open, we fought with this cap for 5 days, nearly destroying the bottle. Finally we decided to take it to the liquor store to see if they could remove it. They had never seen anything like it. It was a child proof cap and needed a special device to remove it which would cost $50 to buy. Customers in the liquor store gave us some suggestions on how to remove the cap. So we returned home, went out to the garage with the bottle, screwdrivers, pliers, and garden shears and proceeded to get the cap off. You can see in the photo below that we succeeded.

I love these painted rocks we spied when we went for a walk in the neighborhood.

We met a very nice older man who told us everyone called him Grandpa, so we did too. He had a very interesting yard with lots of woodcrafted items that he had made. We were fascinated by the wonderful wood chains. The neighbors around him all had windmills and we loved his birdhouses. He used to have a business selling these woodcrafted items but now he just gives his birdhouses to friends. We quickly became friends with him and he gave each of us a birdhouse.