Sander Siouxzan Perry and her Rescued Greyhounds Astra and Jet...(siblings) at her very Fabulous Perryland...

Ruby Montana and Susan "Q" Able at Daveys Last Night...

Ruby's Girls on Xmas Morning at The Sands...Dusty Springfield and Gina Lola Bridgetta...in their Xmas Sweaters..

We're all Still in The Spirit of Things at The Coral Sands!!!

The Newest Acquistion to The Coral Sands Fine Arts Program...

Red Tree With Bicycle License Plates...Dusty Springfield Ruby's little dog too...

Merry Xmas All of You Sanders Out There...
Peace, Love, Dove you Croutons!!!
xoRuby, Lola and lil' Dusty...

Lois Rainwater Found Her Color Wheel Very Last Minute on This...Xmas Eve...Shes got just a few Balls...She Loves The Yiddish Cowgirl Suite and intends

to return annually.
Lois found this dress from the on line Frippery Store that Chandor and Zollie represent...
She's ready for Gregg Rapp's Xmas Eve Cocktail Party and then Spencers for Dinner. Yum.
A Very Merry Xmas to All Sanders Everywhere...Ruby Loves You.
xoxo

Sander and Lifelong Friend of Ruby's Living in Denver...Ruth Warren.

Sander Ginny Ruffner's Garden Under Snow of the last few days in Seattle...Wow

Ruby Has Caught Another Sander Red Handed Eating The Xmas Candy Off The Tree...

Here Sander Connie Turner slurps down another Candy Cane...This Tree will be bare by Xmas Morning...

This Is A Distraction We Just Don't Need...

I am fatigued by this issue...
I am flabbergasted by this choice...
I want to give our Man Obama a Chance to find Common Ground...
I want to Look at a Larger Picture
I want to believe his interest is in building bridges...
It is not a "policy difference" it is dehumanizing to the GLBT community...
I want to continue my thought of HOPE not DOPE or NOPE...
Gertrude Stein said "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense"...if she only knew what today would bring...

Sander Jamie Kabler Sent In This Marvelous Photo He Took This Morning of The Palm Springs Swim Center...Dig all of the Snow that Fell Just Yesterday..

Thank you, Jamie, for sending in this winning pic from your early a.m. swim!!!

Sharing a Xmas Card

Xmas Just Won't Be The Same Without You...Love and Kisses,
Ruby Doobyxoxoxo

Here The Overtons Demonstrate What We Do At The Sands in a Snowdrift...or a Rainstorm....Lotsa Games...TV and Booze...I promise you won't Be Bored!

You Go Girl! The Coral Sands Has Your Back and Thinks You Kennedys are Extremely Game...Despite Tragedy Still Willing To Serve This Wonderful Country

Sander Dot Nugent of Tuscon has been in Palm Springs in the Liberace Suite Madly Wrapping Gifts...One just Might be Yours....

The Showlanders are At It Again Ruby May Have Created The Spam Carving Contest...But These two Are Single Handedly Responsible For Chicken/Ham Medley

Sander Gretchen Sorenson of Seattle Sent this Reminder That The Coral Sands Tipped 50,000 Blog Visitors in the last day....Thank you Sanders...

The Jimersons and their flocked Tree in The Howdy Doody Goes to Bali Suite...I Think They Got Into The Eggnog a Little Early...

Pauline Jimerson is famous for making her own eggnog and bottling it...everyone prays in This Resort,
(The Fabulous Coral Sands Inn)that she has made enough to last the entire season...It looks like they are using some of the early reserves pretty hardily. Nothing like that "under the tree" feeling..." I keep telling them..."He's in Bali!"

Sanders Madge and Billy McClintock Got Down for Jamie Kabler's Cocktail Dance Last Night...

Madge bought this dress late yesterday afternoon at Revival's Annual sale...$7.95...Scored it just in Time to Throw it on and head to Monte Vista for some Sugar Cookies and Vodka...that helped "complete" her "outfit"...Obviously Billy had his "outfit" designed for the party well in advance of the date...The McClintocks are going on a hike today in Joshua Tree...They are just leaving now...

Biff and Irene Showlander are just in from Bakersfield and Have redone The Poodle Room for Their Xmas Holiday at The Sands...

Irene is famous for her Pigs in a Blanket and Pocket Spams...What's the difference...it's all in the "LOOK"...You'll see them Poolside on the 24th...They are in charge of all hors dovers...Lovely...Do you like the new drapes?

Things Are Looking Festive as Xmas Approaches at The Sands...These Sanders are Headed To Daveys Hideaway for The King Crab Legs...Yum

Rubys Grand Godson Teddy Bear Holcomb...Its His First Xmas....

What a little cutie...My first Grand Godson...

Make Your Reservations Now...Where The Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day...Ruby is Standing By...

The Gangster of Love Visits The Sands...Stacey Belle Wilson

It's Beginning To Look Alot Like Xmas...

Rebecca, Bethany, Ruby and Junior at ginny Ruffners Opening...

Tom Perry is Doing Amazingly Well...Thank you for All Your calls Love and Concern...There is Still a Long Way to Go With His Therapy...

Keep those cards and prayers going for our Tom Perry.
He still have weeks of Therapy.

Farewell Odetta...another Angel is Called

Odetta, Freedom's Voice, Dies at 77

Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the
strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights
movement, died on Tuesday. She was 77.

Thanksgiving Night at The Ever Festive Coral Sands Inn...Roaring Fire....Beautiful Evening

Ruby Montana and V. Junior O'Keefe...Thanksgiving night at The Coral Sands...

The Poodle Room by Bethany Ryals...In the Armoire

The Only Loyal Sander That Gets Up For This reward of Sunrise Would Have to Be Bethany Ryals...

Isn't she wonderful? Isn't she Marvelous? Our Wonderful Coral Sands Inn...Thanks, Bethany

Loyal Sander Stella Bennett Graced Poolside all Week at The Sands...Hello Stella...We miss you...

Sanders Mary Milliron, John Bennett and Stella Bennett Having a Moonlight Dinner at The Sands...

Spaghetti and Meatballs were on their menu. The all American Family.

In Honor of World Aids Day The Coral Sands Wears The Red Ribbon

Ginny Had a Very Sucessful show...What a Genius...

Ginny Ruffner Artist in Residence at The Coral Sands...Works by Ginny Below...

Ginny Ruffner Artist in Residence (at least for 4 days)

In the Palm Springs area, Ginny's art can be seen at Imago's Studio Gallery 11/29/08 @ 5 -8p.m. by Regina Hackett is the Art Critic for The Seattle P.I. When 39-year-old artist Ginny Ruffner was in a coma from a car crash in North Carolina that should have killed her, doctors tried to prepare her friends and family for the worst. She might not wake up at all. Should she wake, she wasn't going to be able to walk, talk or take care of herself. As far as making art was concerned, it was over. Nobody survives a head injury as massive as hers without brain damage, and the damage could easily be permanent. In a similar situation, most people lose hope. The people surrounding Ruffner, however, weren't most people. Her mother and father, Carolyn and Al Martin, of Fort Mill, S.C., were by Ginny's bedside at the hospital in Charlotte, N.C. every day. "My parents were wonderful," says Ginny, "and so were my brother Al and my sisters Kay and Melinda." Her wide circle of friends, particularly those from the Pacific Northwest, visited often. Still, the doctors had little confidence that she would be able to create art again. Five months after the uninsured teenage driver lost control of her car and plowed head-on into her lane, Ruffner opened her eyes She was back. As an artist of international standing in the contemporary glass movement, she had thousands of people around the world cheering her on. After the relief, however, doubt set in. How much of the original person could be left after such an accident? Where is spirit stored, and can a head injury kill creativity? The answer wasn't long in coming. Although she couldn't speak, see clearly or move the left side of her body, she gestured to an alphabet board. By pointing at the letters she delivered a message to the doctor who had ordered her restrained at night to keep her from rolling out of bed. "Untie me," she spelled out, "or I'm calling the AMA." When informed that her studio had been dismantled in Seattle, she used the spelling board again, "I need my studio." Her brother, Greenville, S.C. lawyer, Al Martin Jr. and his wife Laura, made the long trip to Seattle and found her former studio was still for rent. They moved everything back in there for her. Inside her damaged body, her intelligence, humor, courage and imagination were intact. The artist was still there too. She'd need it all to recover. Today, at 53, she can walk, talk and leave women half her age trailing behind her in workouts at the gym. Her lovely Southern voice remains a brittle shadow of itself, but it's getting stronger each year. "Thank God I wasn't an opera singer," she says. In her view, she was lifted off the ground by a tornado of a disaster, but she pulled herself out of it, found her feet as a person and artist, and continues to be delighted by the world. "I'm a lemonade from lemons kind of person," she likes to say. She also likes to say that her glass is never less than half full. Remember that tornado? She not only accepted it, she made it bloom. On June 25, "Creativity: The Flowering Tornado, Art by Ginny Ruffner" opens at Tacoma's Museum of Glass. The exhibit that debuted in 2003 at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts features a pop-up book full of illustrated, self-help adages. Instead of a one-off eccentricity, the book represents the heart of Ruffner's aesthetic. Clichés aren't corny to her and never were. She began her career, after all, as a lampwork artist. Lampwork is the back door to the glass revolution. Hobbyists are usually the ones who heat rods of glass with a small torch, making paperweights, necklaces and those cute little glass baubles of horses, angels, pets, hearts and flowers, the kind of thing found standing on doilies in homey display cases. Ruffner was trained at the University of Georgia as a painter, graduating with an M.F.A. in 1975. Glass was just gaining ground as a contemporary movement, and it drew her almost immediately. Glass blowers were the big deal, and they were nearly all men. Following her instincts, she sidestepped the men and focused on the humble form of lampwork. When she began, she was the only serious artist concentrating on it. Thanks to her, lampwork is now common and unchallenged in art circles. Her gift is the ability to consider a corny thing through the radiant prism of her imagination. In her hands, what is stale becomes animate and full of complication. She doesn't bring high art and low kitsch together. She simply doesn't think in those terms. For her, Picasso and somebody's cookie-baking great grandmother can be inspirations on the same level. In her sculptures, pop-psychology insights share illustrated pride of place with Juan Mirò's black and red patterning, Paul Klee's wandering lines, Picasso's heads and all manner of circus toys. Lowbrow has many highbrow adherents these days, but Ruffner's samplings are entirely devoid of irony. In her aesthetic, any x can equal any y, and the jet stream of creativity courses through both the rare and the commonplace. At dinner at Dale Chihuly's in the late 1980s, he pointed out that she was the first to claim Seattle had become the "Manhattan of glass art." People pounced on the phrase and used it without attribution. "That's fine," she replied. "They like it, they can have it. You don't need the water when you've got the well." That confidence still marks everything she does. Ruffner's sculptures in glass are the visual equivalent of break dancing. They have a clattery rhythm, a blooming garden sense of color and a fantastic kind of Mobius-strip fluidity. Interconnected webs of multicolored tubes curl and cave in on themselves, drunk on their own high spirits and sprouting appendages: apples, peaches pumpkin pies; hands, eyes, hearts, flower petals and leaves; wine bottles, chunks of cheese and flying fish. After her accident, she began to produce stage sets for her sculptures, and then the sculptures became stage sets. Today, glass is just one tool in her box. Recent sculptures are sometimes bronze. They have a sense of animal life about them, like overgrown dogs with glass tongues lolling out. She also uses steel, as in, steel jaws ready to snap. There are rose petals that really are rose petals, and outer space flowers that really are glass. Art historian Vicki Halper noted that once Ruffner's visual vocabulary becomes familiar, "we can almost construct sentences out of her sculptures." Pencils, said Halper, "stand for art, wings for transcendence, hearts for feeling, tornadoes for creativity, fruit for bounty, webs for interconnectedness, and the Old Masters for inspiration." Ruffner's work is down home and sophisticated. Even after decades of postmodern high / low conjunctions, her lack of snobbery makes her rare. It can still raises hackles, especially in those of critics who remain appalled by her lack of irony. About her "Mind Garden" installation at the Seattle Art Museum in 2000, one critic wrote that it was "flat-footed and literal." Never flat-footed. No one is so light in her use of allusions. What Tom Robbins once wrote about angels is true of Ruffner, that they can fly because they take themselves lightly. Her art invites us to do the same. We can leave out prejudices against the literal at the door, because she brings blooming physicality to the literal and gives it abundant new life.

K-Rube and Dancing Late Nights in the Kitchen at The Sands is Standard Fair...Here Ruby Montana and Junior Okeefe as captured by Siouxzan Perry...

Ruby Montanas Provides Bicylces for Guests...Here Sander Susan Q Able demonstrates the Freedom of cycling in Palm Springs

Sunrise at Ruby Montana's Coral Sands Inn today...through Rubys favorite desert tree her Palo Verde

Sunrise at The Sands Apres Thanksgiving....Beautiful...Photo Credit Bethany Ryals...

Banana Gramming Sanders

Sanders Bethany Ryals and Rebecca Chekouras Enjoying a Thanksgiving Toast!!!

Sanders Thanksgiving feast Daveys Hideaway...

Thanksgiving Day 2009 Bonnie Raitt and Willie Nelson...at Second glance Ginny Ruffner and Ruby Montana

Sometimes what Seems Like Bad Luck is Really Good Luck...

Meet This Lucky Turkey Chick named Trevor who thinks he;s a duck. The Three day old bird has been fitted with webbed slippers to try to straighten out his deformed toes.
He has been helped by vets who found the conventional treatment of putting the curled up toes in splints did not work.
He has been spared the chop for this particular misery.

The Coral Sands wishes Sanders everywhere a very Happy Thanksgiving...Ruby will be having Turkey Day at Daveys Hideaway with 14 others around 2p.m. Wonderful day unfolding. Guests are all in the pool after a beautiful rainstorm. We love the smell of fresh rain at The Sands.