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Friday, November 30,
2007 Okay, probably just a quick entry. Here's a pearl necklace listed on eBay (ending soon, actually)…
CLICKABLE PHOTOS
And a bunch of earrings (some of which are already sold)…
Aside from my Well, I looked at my listings today and see that it's time
to post new stuff. I have a handful of
items ready to be photographed, but I should be able to make more stuff
tonight and tomorrow too. I wonder
what I'm in the mood to create. Oh, Sharon Peters
posted some funny YouTube links in Lampwork
Etc today. I jotted
them down and added a couple other ones, but don't recall which are which… Make sure your volume is on for these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqiw-Kqtlr0&feature=bz302 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=964uCtgsDoE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYuX1rFOMvM&feature=bz303 And I LOVELOVELOVE Ocicats! J I'll never have any, of course, because I take in everyone else's strays. Ha!
Well, I'd better get going now. Sharks are on at Wow, so much time has passed and so many thoughts were
thunk. I don't know where to begin! Family Had a nice (but short) visit with family out past House Grabbed a book quickly as I headed off to watch hockey practice
last night. Feng Shui. Got me all excited to continue my journey
toward streamlining my house and life.
The book actually had a section that pertains directly to one of my
big problems… stuff I want to get rid of but is still too good to just throw
in the garbage. So what do I do with
it? I keep it and store it in a stack
for "things to eventually sell or consign". Ugh!
That just makes more clutter!
So I am putting all that stuff in boxes and having GoodWill do a
pick-up. My time is probably worth
more money than I'd get from listing too many things on eBay and/or going to
a consignment shop, etc. anyway. Cleaning progress: Computer files are included. I made a new folder called
"2008". I am moving over and
properly naming anything that is keep-worthy.
Everything else is getting deleted.
Yay! I'm also getting rid of paperwork from my office desk. So, in deleting files I feel I really don't NEED, I see that I
not only have a lot of files that I am deleting but that it also means I
spent time CREATING these files that I don't really need. If I stop wasting my time with unnecessary
tasks (even if they Musing Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788-1860): The 19th-century German
philosopher is renowned for his pessimistic view of life as defined by
needless suffering and the primacy of human desire over the intellect. But he
saw the possibility for salvation from this miserable existence through
ascetic living, an appreciation of art, and charity for fellow man
("loving kindness", in his words). The two enemies of human
happiness are "pain and boredom", he wrote. The symptom of
unhappiness is the pursuit of wealth, he believed. Jewelry Here are the latest additions to my listings (clickable, as
always):
And then these are one's Mon made:
Whoops! Time to
go. I'll show more tomorrow! TTYL Family Oh man! I made a schedule
to try to find time to go visit grandma, but between hockey, work, school,
and the kids' custody with their dad… there's not one single free day. Eek! Speaking of hockey, I didn't tell you how it went for Mon's
girls' team at the Oh look… a whole week... and then some. Ick! But there WERE some great days in there. I'm just sorry I wasn't able to get to the
blog any sooner. This week (or weekend), I will go on the roof or somewhere
thereabouts and try to block off other options of where the rain is getting
into the house. The living room is
still leaking… BADLY. L Food Conversation At this VERY moment, I'm eating a heavenly salad. Man, it makes me want to make some salads
at home. I don't live in a household
of big salad eaters, but oh well. It's
not always about everyone else (well, it really is, but I can pretend once in
awhile that it's all about me). This
one seems relatively simple. Let me
try to analyze it: Lettuce cut up into pretty small pieces. Looks like a Romaine. A sparsity (is that a word?) of even
smaller pieces of chicken. A nice
oriental dressing, and then a sprinkling of crunchy noodles and sesame seads
on top. Voila! That's do-able. Y'know, one thing that I really liked about the Paleo way of
eating is the simplicity of the meals.
The foods weren't over-processed… actually, they weren't processed at
all. I'm a believer in the benefit of
eating foods in as close to their natural state as possible. It's a tough feat, at times, though… in
this day and age… and with our current lifestyles (and the predilection of
others in the household). But I think
one of the keys (if not THE key) is preparation… or preparation and
planning. I think if I could have
certain staples prepared and on-hand, too, that would help. Like have several "lots" of
cooked beef, so I can whip up a variety of things for the family without too
much time involved (tacos, nachos, enchiladas, chili, etc). Jewelry Last Saturday, Alex and I went to BABE (Bay Area Bead
Extravaganza, bead show). And then I
went again (albeit briefly) on Sunday with Laura B. Got some cool stuff, met some cool people,
saw some amazing things, coveted a bit, and enjoyed the company of my
friends. Here's a bracelet (currently on eBay) that I made with Lampwork
beads
And anyone familiar with the going rate of sterling silver these
days will understand the price tag I had to put on this baby. Ugh! I also listed these two (again, clickable photos):
I have two necklaces and a pair of earrings to list, but I'm a
little short of time at the moment.
Maybe tonight. Mon has started wire-wrapping.
She's still working with copper (mostly because I ran out of Am I a Snob? I was perusing eBay today and I ran across an auction that
interested me. It was for four blown
hollow beads. The price was extremely
low, and normally that's the kind of thing I'd jump on in a heartbeat. But then I read those dreaded words:
"Made in Opinions I want to use the "h" word, but I think maybe that's a
little strong. I sincerely dislike
J***** on eBay. They are (apparently)
one of those (Chinese?) companies that find cool Lampwork designs, copy them,
mass-produce them without attention to detail, don't anneal them, and then
sell them under the pretense of handcrafted, properly annealed artisan
beads. I'm not saying there isn't a
place for mass-produced cheap beads, but call a spade a spade, y'know? And, just so's you know, I do my
research. I have ordered from both them
and from A***** H******* as part of my responsibility to having an informed
opinion. The bead sets were claimed to
be the ones shown, they weren't. They
were claimed to be cleaned of bead release, they weren't. Since several of them broke in half, I'm
also doubting their claim that they are properly kiln-annealed. As to the claim of being designed by these
studios, give me a break. Ugh! And while I'm here in opinion-land, let me reiterate that there
are several boro artists I will no longer buy from. Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. I will NOT let it happen that second
time. Don't freakin' over-saturate
your auction photos unless you specifically want a bad reputation in the
field. Yeah, you may not care how many
customers you lose 'cause you'll always be able to pick up new, unsuspecting
dupes, but the rest of us know who you are and are ashamed to be associated
in the same field. Tsk tsk Neat Stuff Pointed
Out to Me By Other Internet People Totally
awesome mural! (çclick there) This mural was unveiled last week at the Cochrane Ranche House.
Each tile is 1 foot square, is it's own individual picture and each is by a
different artist. All of them together form this huge mural. You can click on
each of the tiles to see them in detail. Check out the horse's eye. Lazy
Cat (çclick there) Not
Lazy Cats (çclick there) Hilarious Cats on Treadmills In the News I tell ya, I can't fathom a 7.7 earthquake. And yet, there was just one in Yesterday I heard that more Veterans committed suicide in 2005
than all U.S. Soldiers had been killed in the And just so you don't think all news is bad news, here is some
good news in the news: An Albuquerque hospital
and several of its surgeons donated life-saving surgery to a Kosovo toddler.
Now, the 2-year-old and her mom are heading home. Hey,
here's one that's serendipitous (because I purchased from them a few months
ago): Poor Ugandan women who were living on the streets begging for food,
have now turned their lives around after joining BeadForLife, a small Colorado-based
nonprofit group dedicated to eliminating poverty through handcrafts. In
a beautiful story, an unnamed 'friend' gives $100 million to the struggling
old industrial city of A
surfer in The
producers of MythBusters said they plan to present Julian Shaw with
merchandise in a "hero pack" to honor his good deed." The
14-year-old punk rocker used what he had learned from the TV series
MythBusters to save a 54-year-old from a freight train (link). Okay,
off to do other things now. Will try
to talk more soon! My family thinks I'm kidding when I say that making dinner is
the bane of my existence. Okay, maybe
it's a SLIGHT exaggeration. It's still quite the PITA. It's not even the fact that I work a full-time office job, take
two kids to two different schools, pick up two kids from two different
schools, take said kids to hockey about 8 times a week in various forms, have
to do the grocery shopping, the pan scrubbing Look at it like this: Here are all the choices in the world of items to make for
dinner…
Beautiful! Except that's not how my family eats or how I can make dinner. So… let's whittle away at the ideal dinner plan a little bit. First, we have to factor in that my budget is limited. That
removes some of our choices.
Then we consider my cooking time is limited. More choices gone.
Now we have: Monica doesn't like meat, Mike doesn't like gravy
or vegetables, Gabe doesn't like cheese, etc.
More choices gone.
I am overweight and very concerned about not eating foods that
are non-nutritious. This cuts the
options further.
By the time I have found something that is relatively inexpensive,
doesn't take hours to cook, fits everyone's individual taste peculiatrities,
and isn't overly unhealthy… I tell ya! I'm so sick of
our staples: spaghetti, chili, hamburgers, chicken teriyaki… ugh! What am I to do? Just
make what I want and let the chips fall where they may? Okay, so I make enchiladas… Gabe won't eat
them. I'm supposed to let a 15-year
old boy miss dinner? Or I make
Shepherd's Pie. Mike won't eat
that. So he either goes without dinner
that night or spends money (which we can ill afford) going to get something
he "can" eat. Maybe instead of "meals", I can just stock the fridge
with individual foods from the main food groups and just let everyone fend
for themselves for the most part. I
can cook chicken, beef, or fish and they can pick and choose what they want
to accompany it. Let's see, if I did
that, it might look something like this:
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