effigy

Oh Lovely! Applause...specially love the name of your castle..."Turkish Tea Tower"...only you Joy

forget not:
Mousewire Moat & Gapclaw Gate

wow. yeah i'm pretty impressed. wow. loving the little metal mexican guy...

gwen, please note that this new castle is a peace-loving castle. there is not cannonry, and our "fleet" consists of only one ship. however, in case of emergency we do have fiery incense spears that are able to be lit and launched at advancing enemies if we feel that our peace-loving boundaries have been menacingly violated.

in fact, any of you are welcome to come stay in the "aosept suite" (second tier) as our honored guests. it features a fireplace and a state-of-the-art clinique mirror.

ok. i tried to put up incense spears but my zen garden's sand was too shallow for them to stay standing...
aosept..ha! i scoff! i'm a renu all-in-one girl now!
i do love the cocktail umbrellas...makes me want to visit your castle for vacation..

i build one at work. pictures will come this afternoon.

an aside:

joy and joy's aunt's unofficial but experientially and repeatedly proven (therefore scientifically authoritative) findings about aosept and disposable contact lenses

nowadays when you go in to the eye doctor they pretty much always encourage disposable lenses, rarely let you get regular soft daily wear, and practically never consent to hard contacts.

obviously, there is some validity to some of their arguments for cleanliness and so forth. however, the fact is that the industry is making contacts thinner and less durable and more susceptible to dirt's effects than ever before. and they give you "special" cleaner now so that your contacts will magically get NOT as clean as they would have with your regular old stuff. that way your contacts degenerate sooner, you HAVE to replace disposable ones every two weeks, just like they tell you, etc.

BUT.

much of it is a money-making, job-securing ruse. which hey, that's capitalism and economics. fine. but i as a consumer am a capitalist and i have to worry about economy on occasion myself. so.

tip:
buy the disposables. technically, they're a better deal than the soft daily wear; and it's nice to have backups immediately available when you lose or tear one. so. buy them. get your two-year supply. but here's the deal. DON'T BUY/USE THE RECOMMENDED DISPOSABLE CLEANER/RINSE/STORAGE SYSTEM. stick with your preferred old ways with the soft daily wear cleaner/rinse/storage system. you can make a pair of disposables last for literally months and months using renu or aosept faithfully, when otherwise they'd last only the predicted couple of weeks with the "recommended" methods/substances.

signed,
joy m'carnan
"just try to see it my way. it worked for me!"

One of these days I am going to find out how Joy manages not only to write pages for blogs, but also builds "Castles" Rather than spout off, "a Brit's home IS his castle," I'll take the thrown down gaunlet. Prepare yourselves...Chateau Gouge is coming...

hmmmm.....this may have to turn into an all out architechtural war....

on the contact thing, i just got sick of hauling 3 different things of various kinds of solution with me plus the little aosept container everytime i traveled somewhere. now i just throw one bottle in and i'm good to go. i get the disposables that you change 4 times a year or when you lose one swimming and life is good.

I'm impressed that you've chosen to build your monument on the rock of Tolkein. That's good real estate!

i'm an aosept girl myself. (although i must say that the prices are OUTrageous for all that stuff in germany. therefore, i do my best to get it imported whenever someone decides to make a trip to the states.)

i have the disposable kind which you're supposed to change every 4 months; however, because i use aosept, one pair can last a year.

i've never sat down to figure it out, but i think that it might be better to get disposable daily lenses. because i sure pay a fortune for all of those cleaners and solutions that i use. (i don't like carrying them around either, gwen!)