I’ve been working on photos so I can get some beads listed on ArtFire. Doing glass can be so frustrating some times. Look at this gorgeous bead. Nice colors, huh?

 Well, I should have had my close up glasses on before I cored it, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of coring it. Air bubbles!!! Grrrr!

Here’s a couple of wonderful examples of why I love Dark Aurae so much. I’m still haunting Double Helix’s website in hopes they do another batch of it.

 A nice warm color, especially for this time of the year.

And more lovelies:

This one came out just gorgeous! It has purple iridescent shimmers.

And I had to try my hand at dragonflies. I think I’m going to keep these and try to make some beaded cuffs.

Meanderings today, all over the place.

This morning when I was giving Lukas a shower, I was thinking it would be so nice if I could just put him in an ultrasonic booth, push a button and he’d come out clean, just like in the Jetsons. That thought led me to thinking about complaining, and how so many people complain about things, myself included. That let me to my phone (a Blackberry) which says I have a message, and I can’t figure out how to get to the message, and how I wish I had an iPhone (was seriously thinking about it, a phone is only $200, but a minimal monthly plan is $70! No way!), which led me to thinking about happiness. Which led me to thinking that my happiness has to be based, not on a new phone or a new camera (yah, I want one of those too), but on doing things that I know will please God, because God and my faith in his promises is the only constant thing in my life that only I can take away.

As I mentioned in my last post, we went down to the farm yesterday and I bought a few things back. Here’s a quiz for you. This is something that poorer country people like my family used,

and this is something that more well-to-do people, like my grandma, used for the same purpose. Can you guess what they are?

A hint. When my brother saw the first pot, he explaimed, “I remember that, and sitting by the stove using it.” And my sister replied, “How did you rate? We had to use it upstairs.” (where it was colder, especially in the winter).

My sister told me that we only got to use it at night, otherwise we had to go outside...



to the outhouse.


Figure it out yet?

Another day down at the farm today, trying to get more stuff salvaged from the old house. So much of it was soaked from the rains they had down there last week. This will most likely be the last trip down, since the days are getting shorter and I can’t see to drive at night, and it’s 6 hours of driving time.

I went out and covered my dahlias. It’s going to get frosty tonight. I quick shot some photos this morning before I left.

Believe me, it looks much better in person.

Recently, my blog been deluged with anonymous comments selling everything from women to watches, so I’m switching comments prefs to word verification, which means if you want to leave a comment, you have to go through the hassle of typing in a couple of words that Google puts up.

Stupid spammers! Get a job!

What a dark week it’s been.

Tomorrow it will have been 9 months since David died. I miss him. Tears have been all too ready the past couple of weeks.

We’ve passed the autumn equinox now. 3 more months of increasingly dark and dreary days.

More goofy, unseasonable weather. Lots and lots of rain. We had 2 1/2 inches here, and further south, in the Mankato area they had 11 inches, and Owatonna is flooded. We’re used to hearing of flooding in early spring, but in the fall?!

Monday, if she makes it that long, I’m going to call the vet and see if I can get David’s cat in to have her put to sleep. She’s 20+ years old, and has a tumor on her side, and is having trouble with her breathing.

As I said, a dark week.

We went down to the farm this past weekend to try to get more stuff salvaged from the old house, which is slowly collapsing. My grandmother had to be put in a nursing home in the early 60s because of dementia, so her house had to be sold to cover the costs. My mom packed up everything and moved it to the house on our farm, which wasn’t being used, since by then she had remarried (my dad died in a farming accident when I was a baby).

When I was a little girl, I would go up into grandma’s attic and pluck away at her ukelin (I was quite surprised when I googled it and saw utube videos showing it being played with a bow). Well, that was one of the treasures we found. I opened the box and was relieved to see it looked in excellent condition, but when I got home and pulled it out of the box to show my boys, I saw that the strings had never been loosened when it was put in the box, and between that and the dampness, both ends have pulled up. I’m hoping that a friend who repairs guitars will be able to fix it.

I wonder about its history. I never saw grandma play it. I wonder if it was from her mom or dad.

ArtFire is running a really good deal right now for anyone who’s been thinking about setting up an online shop. If they reach their target of 20,000 sellers, you can get a Pro shop locked in at $5.95 a month, for life. Etsy is more well-known, but unlike Etsy, ArtFire doesn’t charge a listing or final fee. And also, the items you list don’t expire. They stay in your shop as long as you want them to.

I signed up for the $7 a month for life when they first started up, and I’ve been very happy with them. I find it easier to list things on ArtFire than Etsy, and they have a lot of tools to help you promote your shops, which I really need to investigate and learn how to use.

There’s more info. here, http://www.artfire.com/groupdeal

Blahhhh, computer problems!!! It’s been going wonky for the past couple of weeks, and this a.m. couldn’t get it to start up. Finally wiped one of my drives and installed a new system. So now it’s getting everything re-installed and back the way I like it.

Scientists think that monkeys are so amazing for their tool using abilities. They should study ferrets.

I have a cabinet that is about 6 inches shorter than the room, so I put a couple of empty cat litter boxes back there to keep the ferrets from going back there and pooping (their natural instinct is to find a dark corner for relieving themselves).

The cabinet isn’t finished, so I have a 24” sheet of wood against it to keep the babies out of it, so there is a gap of a foot between the top of the wood sheet and the cabinet top. Chunk is severely challenged when it comes to limitations. He just HAS to find ways to get into things he’s not supposed to. And right now, getting into that cabinet is his main goal in life.

Hence, the use of the empty litter boxes to further his purpose in life. He pushes them out from the side of the cabinet and around to the front so he can use them to be able to climb into the cabinet.

Monkeys are so outclassed by ferrets.

Here is Chunk using a rubbermaid box as a launching pad. He would jump (and every jump he made ended in a belly flop at least a half a foot from the cabinet), then go back and get on the box for another attempt. Persistent little bugger.

This one looks like he’s going to make it, but he’s a good foot away from the cabinet yet.

Boom!

Yes, ferrets can be very focused if there’s something they want.

It was a long weekend, my nephews and 4 kids/grandkids came along with, and stayed overnight. Gets a bit hectic with 4 kids 10 and under! But the boys got my kitchen/family room ceiling sanded and 2 coats of paint put on. One more coat to go, and then that ceiling will be done. Sanding is just the pits, and I didn’t even do any of it. It leaves a fine dust over everything. I think Scott was ready to shoot me when I told him there were only 9 more ceilings to go. I hate popcorn ceilings!!! With a passion! They’re dirty and hard to clean or paint. So they are going, and I’m going to have just plain white ceilings, and hopefully, over time, I will get woodwork and ceiling borders put up.

Today they got a gate built by the hay barn, and fencing put up by it, so in the winter if the tractor or snowmobile won’t start, it’ll be a lot easier getting hay to the animals.

Winter, oh yuck!! I hate the thought of it. The days are getting shorter so quickly, and I’ve been getting more and more melancholic. Today I got some pork out of the freezer to have for the boys’ lunch, and it was dated 11/09, and it just hit me that David was still alive then.

Little things like that.

I’ve been working at getting beads ready to list on ArtFire, and here’s some of my favorites, bright, cheery and warm colors, except the last one:

Tomorrow’s Monday, so I get to play at the torch.

I got to play a little bit with some new Double Helix silver glasses last night.
I really like this one,

And this one I need to try reducing more. That’s what I did with the small bubbles, and they came out a lighter sea green, and maybe some striations.

This one I like too. Maybe I’ll get some of the reactions like Dark Aurae.

My sister was watching a ‘hoarding’ show last night, about a woman who had so many cats that she quit counting after 120.
Not to mention the smell, why would anyone want so many cats, and I was especially thinking that this morning as I was cleaning up the paw prints on my floor from the cat who jumped up on the cabinet I was staining.

It’s amazing how much damage one little ferret can do to a dozen orchids.

We were gone Saturday morning and when we got back, Chunk had use a small wooden box to jump up on the chair, and then onto one of my photography desk, spilled a vase of water, then went along the window sills into my orchids, every single one of them. Dirt all over my computer and glass desk.

Well, the upshot is that my glass desk is all nice and clean now.

Now talk about a kid in a candy store, Frantz had Double Helix’s new glass, Kalypso, in their store, so I had to order that, and then Double Helix posted a bunch of experimental glasses on their website this afternoon. Now I’ve got to get some beads sold to stay ahead of the game.

Dreary, cloudy day, with tons of mosquitoes. I’ve been trying to get out to do some planting and weeding, but even dousing myself with OFF, they’re still getting me. They’ve been just awful this year.

The heat this summer is just going on and on. Another 90° day today. This is really starting to get old.

There was a story on the news tonight about an airplane crash about 25-30 miles from here. Star Trib reported “The pilot, 32, and his male passenger, 34, died when the craft went down in a marshy area of Wright County. Witnesses say they'd been doing aerial stunts.”

As soon as I heard a witness describe how they had been sitting on their porch watching the ‘free airshow’ it hit me, it was probably the same guy who was doing the acrobats over the refuge last summer. We stood out there for 20-30 min. watching him, and I wrote about it here, http://greyhavenart.blogspot.com/2009/09/9209.html.

Here’s a photo of his plane that they showed on the news,

And here’s a photo I took last year of the plane by our place,

Sure looks like the same plane.

The bad thing about it is his passenger was getting married Saturday.

I’ve been off on a old/new tangent, coring beads. I bought a coring machine a couple of years ago, but had a hard time getting them to turn out OK (caps on evenly, and not breaking the bead). I’ve decided I have this $200 machine sitting gathering dust, I really need to learn how to use it. So far out of 8 beads, I’ve only broken 2.

Here’s some of my successes:

Want to know the secret to a soft, silky butt? Take a nice big, heavy bucket of manure to the neighbor, and have a hydraulic hose right underneath the tractor seat split from the pressure. My goodness, hydraulic fluid was shooting 2 feet into the air, after it bounced off my butt. Even after a hot shower with lots of soap, I still feel oily.

Blast it! I have GOT to take better notes when I’m doing new color combinations.

Here’s this really neat bead, with honey and fire shimmers, and I’ll be darned if I know what glasses I used. GRRR!!!

Having a very non-productive day, 6 Pandora beads made, and not one worth selling. :(
Maybe I’ll go shopping...

One more day of this horrid weather. Tomorrow a cool front moves in, and we’ll say goodbye to the 90s. What a crazy year, but then I’ve been saying that for years now.

It’s been too hot to work on the torch too much, so I’ve dug out my coring equipment to try my hand at that again. I started out with copper and brass, since that’s a bit cheaper than sterling silver.

I really like the copper and brass layers on the 2nd bead. Need to make more of those with some different glass for the plunges.

I did one with sterling silver, and wasn’t really happy with the gaps between the flare of the silver and the bead. So I went onto Etsy and searched for silver cored Pandora beads because I wanted to see what others’ looked like. It was pretty shocking to see all of the $2.99 ‘sterling silver’ cored beads there. I wish people would remember that you get what you pay for. A month ago, a lampworker who is also a supplier posted an email she had gotten from someone (from China) trying to sell her coring rivets. Yup, stamped 925 for sterling silver, made of white copper (an alloy of copper and nickel).

And that’s not even considering the ‘handmade’ aspect of these beads. Not surprisingly, these shops don’t give any details about the production of the beads. Nothing about their ‘studio’ (or more likely, factory in China), or even if they’re been annealed. But this is Etsy’s fault. I would have no gripe with these beads if they were sold as supplies. But they’re being sold as handmade by the seller. This has been a big problem with Etsy, and it just doesn’t seem they care enough to stop it.

ArtFire, on the other hand, now has an option where you can be certified handmade. Sure, a person could still slip under the wire by lying, but you at least have to go through a proving process to get the certificate.

OK, enough of my ranting.

Oh, and Peaches is getting rather close to her 9th life. She jumped up on my computer desk this morning and knocked my keyboard on the floor. Batteries and keys went flying. I still haven’t found the door for the batteries, and my space bar isn’t working all that well. Grrrr!

It’s 7:10 a.m. and NBC News is STILL covering the story about the flight attendant who had a tizzy fit on a JetBlue airplane. 10 minutes for this story. This is news?!?

Listing beads, listening to music. Never in Your Wildest Dreams, Tina Turner and Barry White. I first heard it when David and I and the boys went out west, driving along the Columbia River. I thought it was the sexiest song I’d ever heard, with Barry White’s deep rumbling voice.

I miss David. Our life together seems so far, far away.

I’ve gotten a handle on my gardens now, so tonight I went out and took some photos.

Here’s a couple of photos taken before my trip,

And here’s what it looks like now (ignore the grass, the starter is out on the lawnmower),

Still lots of weeding and wacking to go yet...

And here’s my latest acquisition, a pool, fountain and a fogger (I love the fogger!),

She went poop!!! Yippee! (Read my last post). Yup, pretty pathetic. What an exciting life I have.

Well, Peaches is on her 9th life (she’s the one from my last post, about sleeping on the garage door and getting stuck between it and the garage frame when Christian shut the garage door).

Yesterday I took her to the vet because the night before, she was vomiting, and yesterday was lethargic and not at all interested in eating. They took an X-ray, and she has a bowel obstruction. When the vet told me how much surgery would cost, I had to say no. I haven’t yet met a cat that I would spend $1,000 on, even though some of them I’ve loved dearly. So they hooked her up to an IV and kept her overnight. Today I ran away from home because I didn’t want to get a phone call telling me she had taken a turn for the worst.

I went shopping...

...and when I got home, Christian said they had called and said she was looking better, and to call back at 5 to see how she was. So at 5 I called, and they said I could pick her up, she was much better and was eating, and not vomiting. No pooping yet, but at least no vomiting. So now she’s home, wandering around the house, trying to get outside, sitting in the window and salivating over the birds at my birdbath, but still no poop.

And some people would think my life is boring, when the highlight of my day will be to see my cat take a poop.

My new bull came yesterday. His name is Dex, and he is 7/8 Dexter and 1/8 Jersey. I’m hoping to breed him to my Jerseys and get more dual purpose cows. Dexters are an old breed from Ireland, and are a small dual purpose breed (beef/dairy). Jerseys are a dairy breed, and I just don’t do much milking anymore (too hard on the back), and on top of that the Jerseys have been so genetically built up that they’re very susceptible to milk fever (when the cow gives birth, the demand for milk literally pulls the calcium from the body, which shuts down the organs), and I’m tired of dealing with that. The less drama in my life right now, the better.

Oh, talk about drama! Peaches, the blond cat that I’ve shown here on my blog, lost at least half of her 9 lives the other night. She was sleeping on top of the garage door when Christian closed it. He thought he heard something, so he went and unplugged the pool pump, went back and tried opening it, heard some more noise, stepped outside and looked up, and there was Peaches, with her head between the garage door and the frame of the house. He raced back to the garage door opener and opened it, she dropped to the garage apron and laid there. He picked her up, head lolling, and bought her into the house. He said he thought he had broken her neck, but then she started to revive and kick and scratch him. He set her down, and she ran off, a little uncoordinated. He got her and bought her into my bedroom and told me what had happened. I held her for a while, and the only thing wrong with her was the she was swallowing a little loud. By the next morning, she was back to normal, and right now she’s laying on my studio floor talking to me.

Anyway, back to my bull. He’s just about 1 year old, so he should be very capable of breeding Daisy May (this spring’s heifer calf) next year.

This is Daisy May, with Dex checking her out.

And here is Fries, checking Dex out (Fries will be going bye-bye in October. Yummm, ribeye steaks... apologies to any vegetarians reading this).

And here is a photo of Dex’s grandsire (Shelbo Miniature Cattle). Yes, that’s a full-grown bull. He’s a purebred, so Dex won’t be that small.

How can so many weeds grow in a bare three weeks?!?! This the time of the year that I absolutely detest Minnesota. It's so muggy and hot, you step outside and you're drenched with sweat, and if you don't want to be covered in mosquito bites, you have to practically bathe in Off, which I'm not too crazy about. I wish I were back in Oregon... cool ocean breezes and no mosquitoes or horse flies.

Our last night on the road :( We should be home tomorrow.

 I'm not looking forward to coming back. It's all going to come crashing down. I really need to be careful and not let everything suck me back down into a rut where I just come to a standstill and just give up. I hate having to struggle so. I've been trying to soak up every good feeling from this trip that I can, just to help me through those rough spots.

Even with all of the bad things that happen on these trips, they are so worth it. There is always something new over the next rise or around the next bend. On occasion, it's been a terrifying, stomach turning downhill 7% grade road, but usually it's something that just soothes my soul, gorgeous snow-capped mountains, open ocean vistas, beautiful horses in a pasture, rolling golden wheat fields, an old abandoned house out on the prairie, herds of cattle, a lone pronghorn antelope, a small gift shop/expresso/nursery in a tiny town on a back road (my RV kitchen sink has an orchid, 3 fuschias, 2 cactus plants, a Lewisia plant, an Azalea snippet from Oregon, a wild strawberry plant from California, and a tiny desert plant from Nevada).

And my favorite thing to watch for, a roadside ditch or embankment with unusual rocks. I have rocks in my bays from every state we've gone through except for North Dakota, which is why going up some of these mountain highways on the way home I'm crawling at a grand 25mph. LOL, coming over one mountain pass in Idaho a couple of days ago, I was happy to see 25mph speed limit for trucks. Usually they're 55, except in Wyoming, where the speed limits on some of those switchbacks is 65mph. I remember the first time David and I saw that, we just looked at each other in disbelief.