Tag: USAFA

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Beautiful Hot Air Balloons – Up & Away

Beautiful Hot Air Balloons – Up and Away at our Colorado Balloon Festival on Labor Day weekend 2013.  Annually balloonists from all over the world ascend from Memorial Park in Colorado Springs, and make a splash and dash into Prospect Lake with the Rocky Mountains in the Background!

It is a thrilling sight to see the crews fill the balloons, turn on the propane and ascend to the skies in front of Pikes Peak and Cheyenne Mountain. My children were young when the festival began; I recall getting up at dawn, taking a picnic breakfast and visiting the festival many, many times. So many eager pilots brought their balloons to attempt the splash and dash into Prospect Lake before they headed off on their adventure. This past year, I was invited to casually join a chase team to meet the balloon when it landed. We didn’t get to fly because it was too windy at 10 mph. I never realized it needed to be so calm for the balloons to fly successfully.

Sometimes the wind blows to the north and they fly over my home. It is so still in the morning, you can hear them turning on the propane burner, to keep the balloon up in their air. The styles and designs we’ve seen over the years are phenomenal. The Energizer Bunny comes to mind and recently a Happy Face flew the skies over Colorado Springs.

Being at Memorial Park is a thrill, but it is also nice to be at home and check them out through the windows in the warmth of the house. It’s pretty cold that early in the day – blankets, jackets and hats were a must when we went to the park.

To get a good view, it’s great to have your windows clean …. and many readers have Silhouette® shadings on their windows. It allows a filtered view and insulation simultaneously. Viewing balloons through the sheers is a special way to enjoy the outside and be warm inside. Because the light is so attractive, bugs tend to make their way into the side openings of shadings like Silhouettes®, Nantuckets™ and similar types of blinds. Our readers have requested a solution for the bug issue. So we invented our CamilyWand™ Sticky Bug Removal Tool™ to easily  and safely remove debris and bugs from the blinds, as well as removing lightweight items from other inaccessible places. Your shadings and homes will be more beautiful when you have and use our CamilyWand™.

We at Camily, LLC wish you a wonderful fall season, being safe and enjoying nature!

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Sweet Mothers Day Honors Moms, Sharing Love, Appreciation

Sweet Mothers Day Honors Moms, Sharing Love, Appreciation for our lives and relationships with our Moms! It’s a wonderful springtime celebration to share remembrances of our childhoods and happy memories.

Flowers are always nice to enjoy that day, or maybe a trip to a beautiful garden like Monet’s Giverny Garden near Paris shown here! There are so many gardens in Europe; it seems as though the weather is very conducive to growing colorful plants there. Springtime is beautiful with all the parks and gardens starting to blossom and grow.

Our Colorado weather brings hard frosts well into May, so we are patient if we want our plants to make it through those freezing nights. I do miss being able to have more spring plants, and truly enjoy the bulbs and perennials that will make it through the cold temperatures. It will be good to remember that next fall when bulb planting time arrives. Lilies of the Valley are a favorite of mine, remembering them from my childhood in Wisconsin Rapids. For decades, I’ve babied some here in a garden and now have a nice planting. The challenge is to keep the wildlife away – I have tricks that usually work. The lilies are about to bloom; so far the bell shaped flowers are where they belong!

I enjoy seeing all of the gardens through my windows  during the year. For heat, light control and view through, I have put Silhouette®, Pirouette®, Nantucket™ and Luminette® window shadings by Hunter Douglas throughout my home as my window treatments. Having those protections, especially while being able to see through the shadings is wonderful for me. The flowering crabs, lilacs, and forsythia are beautiful to see from inside my rooms as they put on their spring flowering show. And I’m able to have those other protections for my home while enjoying the views.

The long days of light draws to our views outside, providing us with energy – it does the same for little gnats and bugs too. They find their way into the side openings of the sheer fabrics and vanes, staying there until we remove them. We at Camily, LLC have invented and market  the CamilyWand™ Sticky Bug Removal Tool™ for that purpose, and have it available at our website or by phone from Lynn. It does a great job, as well as other removal or retrieval needs from inaccessible or hard to reach places in our homes or vehicles. Check it out, you’d be surprised with it’s versatility!

We at CamilyWand™ hope you enjoy your springtime and Mothers Day weekend as much as we will!

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Spring Beauty Evokes Peaceful Loving Thoughts

Spring beauty evokes peaceful, loving thoughts as we celebrate new beginnings in our lives and new growth outside.

The sky is blue, the grass is green, birds are chirping and in North America it is becoming warmer – all signs of wonderful new beginnings. Flowers that grow in ponds, like lotus blossoms and water lilies have always held fascination for me. The gorgeous blossoms reflected in the water are doubly beautiful.

During my college years at the University of Wisconsin, in my interior design curriculum, I studied textile design, where we created designs and then printed them on fabrics. Our focus was on design ideas from Greco-Roman times in the Mediterranean area of the world. We used many themes, and my favorite ones were the Lotus and Pomegranate blossoms. We would pick portions of the plants flowers and use them as inspiration to make our textile designs – possibly using the lotus blossom centers repetitively in creative ways, forming a design.

I always enjoy gardens and especially those with ponds. In the Midwest, water lilies are almost wild in some areas. In Colorado, we have some in private ponds and have beautiful water displays at the Denver Botanical Gardens. This lotus image is from a Denver friend, Dick Gentry, taken at Krabi on his recent Bali and Thailand trip.

Some readers are able to see their flowering water plants through their windows of their homes. If they have certain window shadings, such as Hunter Douglas Silhouettes® and Nantuckets™, they are able to see their gardens and views through the sheers of the products, while maintaining good insulation and partial privacy. Many other products on the market offer similar attributes. I hope to have a water garden one day, and know I’ll enjoy it throughout the day, preserving my view with my Silhouette® shadings while protecting my heating and cooling at the same time.

The gorgeous Silhouette® and Nanucket™ Hunter Douglas shadings  have open sides, helping create their wonderful insulation. Lucky owners of these products find that debris and bugs collect in between the sheers, in the vane openings, over time. Many other window shading products have the same issue. To solve that problem, we invented and market CamilyWand™Sticky Bug Removal Tool™. It simply, easily and safely removes the pesky critters with its sticky CamilyTip on the end of the extension pole. Our readers rave about it and are so pleased they own a product that helps preserve their investments and views of their ponds, landscapes, gardens, golf courses, mountains and many other special vistas.

Camily, LLC wishes you a wonderful spring and the holiday, enjoying the outdoors!

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Springtime graduations, Weddings, Family Trips and other Celebrations bring Wonderful Reunions

Our graduation and wedding time of year is here and it seems like everyone is involved in varied family gatherings. We’re anticipating all of the parties and festivities that accompany these life events. Many of us are traveling to celebrate or are entertaining with parties in our homes.

In Colorado Springs, we have the annual United States Air Force Academy graduations in May. This year it is happening on the Wednesday after Memorial day, May 29th. The community witnesses the Air Force Thunderbirds flying overhead as they practice their show on the days before graduation and for the show on graduation day. It is pretty impressive to see the jets flying in their precision moves right over our homes. It feels and sounds almost like we can reach out to them, they fly so low. It’s always a fun May ritual to anticipate even if we aren’t at the stadium witnessing the show first hand.

As we move toward these celebratory times, it’s important to get our homes ready for the festivities. Many of us have bought gorgeous Silhouette® window shadings by Hunter Douglas for our windows. As a long time interior designer, I’ve been continually selling them for more than 20 years. They are beautiful, a great insulator from both heat and cold, and offer a unique opportunity to allow you to see a filtered view to your outdoor world. You’re able to see the ground or ocean, the trees or buildings, the mountains and sky while your shadings are covering your windows, providing insulation, privacy and preserving your views.

While you’re controlling the light as it enters your homes, the light is transformed many different ways during the day. It becomes iridescent, due to the gorgeous fabrics,  especially in the dusk hours when the sun is setting low on the horizon. Many of us are drawn to that magical time of day. Bugs are attracted to the shadings as well and enter the tubular vane openings from the side. They get trapped inside the openings, and cannot find their way out.

We knew there had to be a professional way to remove the debris and bugs from the Silhouettes® and other similar shadings like Luminettes®, Vignettes®, Pirouettes®, Nantuckets™, Solera®, Shangri-La and Illusions. When we found no suitable, safe method, we decided to invent our CamilyWand Sticky Bug Removal Tool™ for the purpose of grabbing bugs and debris from the inside of those shadings, reaching webs and dirt from high areas like beams, fans and crown moldings, or picking up light weight items from inaccessible places. We now manufacture our CamilyWand™ and ship to North America, Europe and Australia.

Clients are pleased and grateful that we have provided them with a safe way to preserve their view and protect their investment. We wanted our clients to be pleased with their purchase of the distinctive Silhouette® product family and felt we were serving them well by offering a quality, inexpensive product to keep their shadings beautiful.

We hope you will enjoy these wonderful springtime rites that we are experiencing now in your homes. Have a great rest of our springtime!