9/20/09

Not much new on the Wacko's story. She targeted another lampworker from Oregon, which doesn't have a state sales tax, but that didn't stop her from reporting her to the Oregon revenue department for tax evasion. What a wacko!!! How can you evade paying a tax that doesn't exist?!?!

Her target was Nancy of Simply Lampwork. She makes lovely floral beads.

We went back down to the farm yesterday to get some more cleaning done. We started in the old farmhouse, which the raccoons have been tearing up for the last 10 years. It was pretty depressing, and disgusting when I saw the fresh raccoon poop on the box of letters that Grandma had kept. I threw away the ones that couldn't be salvaged and put the rest in a box, which I started going through last night. Most of them were Christmas cards, wedding invitations, etc. (lovely handwriting on some of them), and one was a letter to Grandma expressing condolences on my Dad's death (he was killed in a farming accident when I was a baby). That one I had to call my sister and read it to her. She was 9 when he died. But then I started hitting paydirt. Oh, I was calling my sister every 2 minutes. It's a good thing we're not long distance anymore! There were letters from 2 of grandma's brothers who moved out west in the early 1900s to Limon, Colorado. In one William talks about getting $.75 a bushel for wheat, and $1100 for 29 of the best beef he'd raised.

The real find was in a thick package (just a little background, my great-grandparents on my Dad's side, Christian and Johanette Schmidt, came here from Germany in the 1880s. My grandmother was 2 years old at the time). In the package were letters written to him from relatives still in Germany, all written in German, which of course, I can't read. There's a young man at the Kingdom Hall who can read and write German, so I gave him a couple of letters to see if he could decipher them. If he can't I'm going to call the Historical Society and see if they can recommend something. It would be so neat to know what these letters say. Look at the date on this one, 1892.
Pretty neat!

I purchased a tutorial from a very talented lampworker last night, Amy of AK Designs. She makes lovely beads with a whispy effect, and she wrote a tutorial on how to do them. So Friday night, I made a couple. Unfortunately, my propane ran out while making the second one, so that one's not finished. Here they are:

So I'm off to the torch with a new tank of propane and try to make some more.