Expanding - a new shelf

As the gift shop grew, I needed a bigger place for storage. We were lucky, this house had a huge garage, so I designed the shelves I wanted and set to it with the radial saw. I love that thing!

Here's part of the new cabinet. I'd made the shelves the right size to store plastic bins for merchandise and three-ring binders for other projects. The plastic bin with the blue paper holds "T is for Tapir" t-shirts.

Here's the area inside, where I was moving some of the stuff out of. The tapestry on the wall is one of the Salasacan weavings I kept for myself after we sold the ones with tapirs and most of the non-tapir tapestries. I loved having these beautiful works of art to look at.

A few of the plastic bins ended up in the art room, at least temporarily.

The cat in the fern

Here's Elvis, the little cutie, demonstrating why my fern doesn't flourish. It used to be lush and beautiful, then it started to die. Go figure. I'm still not sure how she got on top of the shelf (where I'd put the fern out of harm's way), but then she is a cat, after all.

Snow in Palisade and a contortionist dog

The Palisade weather report today is about melting snow.

The view from my garden. I'm getting Spring Fever and am looking forward to turning the dead stalks into flowers again. That means most of them are probably going to have to be re-planted, but I look forward to it!

I liked this picture because the light on the snowy and wet branches glistens around the edges. Also, note the pale outline of the mountains wrapped in clouds. Nice.

Here's an unusual phantom cloud clinging to the Bookcliffs.

Indoors, Leila the Contortionist Dog is doing her thing - taking an upside-down nap.

Bright lizard, dark day

OMG! Remember the collection of toy animals I received yesterday for my first big foray into non-tapir retailing? Here's an early attempt to photograph one of the items, a big hollow plastic jungle runner lizard. It came out horribly here, very over-exposed, but I did get a better photo of it later for the gift shop.

Here's another marker of the day - Mount Garfield enshrouded in low clouds. I still believe you can blink your eyes and it's never the same twice.

Adventures in toyland

This is the first big shipment of items for the online gift shop. It was also my first serious foray into non-tapir items. Until today, the gift shop has been about tapirs. Then what happened is, some of our tapirs came in sets with 11 other animals, such as a rainforest tube of plastic animals. What was I going to do with the 11 other animals when my gift shop was about tapirs? I was starting to accumulate jaguars, monkeys, and other critters, so I decided maybe it was OK for the tapir to have some friends. I started a "Tapir's Friends" gift shop separate from the tapir store and once that started to work, I delved into a vendor's catalog and came up with even more friends. It was scary (and fun), and here they are. Now the work starts to get them all online and see what happens!