Today started out so grey and gloomy, but the sun peeked out this afternoon. I soaked it up! My cardinals (yes, they’re mine! I claim ownership!!) came back to the feeder today, and hung around long enough for me to change the battery in my camera and put the long lens on. Should have seen me fumbling for the battery charger one handed, hanging onto the camera with the other, and all the time watching the bird on the feeder.


I’ve got some pretty beads to show tonight. When I look at the photos, I find myself thinking I sure hope they look this good to others. I can’t see the beads myself unless I use 4.00 reading glasses, so when I look at them to list them, I’m not all that impressed with them, but when I look at the photos, my reaction is, wow! I need to make another one like that!! (That’s if I remember what glasses I used). A good example of that is this one:

 It could be Aurae underneath, or maybe Psyche... or this one:

 Kalypso, maybe?

And then if you want to get to real frustration, try TerraNova,

 TerraNova needs to be heated red dripping hot, then cooled (but not cooled to where it might break when you put it back into the flame), and then heated again, then cooled, then encased with clear, but you can’t get the bead too hot when melting the clear, because that takes away the color so you’re left with muted browns. Maybe 1 out of 10 comes out with this beautiful coloring.

I like the way the storming came out on these two,

That’s why the silver glasses get to be an addiction, there’s always a surprise waiting when you open the kiln.

Cool! I had 3 Red Cardinals come visit today, a male and 2 females. I don’t often get them up by the house, so I was pretty excited to see them.

My favorite glass is Dark Aurae, but it’s an odd lot from Double Helix, and hasn’t been made since 2009. This is Dark Aurae, gorgeous striations and colors,

I’ve been buying any new test batches that Double Helix comes out with, and I have found a combination of glasses that comes pretty close to Dark Aurae. I haven’t been able to get the blue and purple combinations yet, but I can get the lovely striations and shimmers of Dark Aurae,

 And on that note, I’m cold! I’m heading to bed with my iPad, and my nice cozy warm mattress pad and electric blanket.

What a change in weather! Just a couple of days ago it was cold, cloudy and gloomy. My poor birds had nothing to drink because the water was frozen (going to have to find the heated birdbath for them).

Today was a gorgeous day! I sure wish we had another 2-3 months of this kind of weather. The boys came up with some of their kids, and the kids went out back and had fun playing ball. The littlest one had to pet the baby calf, but he didn’t want to milk the cow. ‘Nasty!’ was his response when I asked him if he wanted to milk her. :)

Our hay was delivered today, so now we’ve just got to get the propane tank filled, and we’re going to be about as ready for winter as we can be. Yuck!!! Don’t think about it, don’t think about it!

Meet the newest addition to our herd. Just born today, and safely locked in the barn with Mama, Daisy May. We haven’t decided on a name yet, but considering it’s a bull calf, it will be appropriately named, as is Chuck Roast, who was born earlier this year.

In 24 years of working on a Mac, I’m for the first time reverting to a previous OS version. Lion (OS 10.7), in my opinion, has very little to recommend, unless you use it only for surfing the net and social networking, as in a iPhone or iPad. For serious work, it stinks. One of the new features they’re touting is auto-save and resume. If you close an unsaved document, it will automatically open the next time you open that program. In reality, it slows down opening programs tremendously, because it has to look to see if there are any unsaved documents. And it locks documents older than 2 weeks. Actually, that was the last straw for me. I have a folder of 118 photos of beads that need to be cropped and edited. I have to individually unlock each one to work on it. So now I’m copying data off of one of my hard drives, and tomorrow morning, after it’s all done, I’ll reinstall Snow Leopard. Disappointing!

It has certainly been a huge change in weather this past month and a half. All summer we had lots of rain, but then the spigot turned off in September. We’ve had the driest September on record, and today was the warmest Oct. 5th on record (over 125 yrs. of records). We really need rain, and I will not at all regret seeing 80s go away and nice cool 60s come back.

The birds certainly have been enjoying the weather, though. This one took a bath and sat in my tree fluffing up and wiggling his tail feathers; I just had to watch him and laugh!

 

 I love chickadees, they are so lively and saucy. Here’s one enjoying the water.

Continually amazed at the extremes of our ‘experts.’ Did you know that cheese is a junk food? http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-wi-cheeseheadbillboa,0,5569651.story I think these experts would be happiest if we all ate just broccoli, spinach and beans, and drank just water. Everything else is bad for us.

Winter is on its way. This morning at the crack of dawn, the guns were booming in the refuge; one reminded me of a gun on a WWII battleship, a rhythmic boom, boom, boom. Then came the geese flying over the house, honking to get the survivors rounded up to continue south. I’m not against hunting, I grew up in a hunting family, I just find it a sad fact that there are geese, who mate for life, who will be leaving alone.

I’m getting old, and death is a sad thing that’s become too familiar. I think that’s probably why I don’t watch nature shows too much any more. They’ve become too graphic, showing lion cubs starving to death, the crocodiles in slow motion bring the wildebeest down, etc. I always watched Marlin Perkins Wild Kingdom on TV when I was younger, and it was so much more fun to watch. I know that the film makers want to educate people, but do we really need to be entertained by watching animals die? I think most people realize that it happens, entertain us and educate us without the grim and gritty details, please!

Suka is so happy now that it’s cold enough for Christian to wear long pants and shirt, it gives him something to grab.

Here they are on the deck, Suka is teasing Christian to try to get him to chase him.

That didn’t work, so let’s attack!

That worked!!

It’s been cloudy and dreary here, the flowers are all dead except for the bush roses. We’ve had an awful lot of fuzzy caterpillars this year. This one is covered with dew.

I felt safe taking photos of this, since the owner is absent,

 

And some newly listed beads,

A big sigh of relief… After 3 days of 90°, a cold front has moved in, and it’s a lovely, refreshingly crisp 49°. I love it!! I just wish it would stay like this another 3 months, but it’s not going to. We’re going to get frost tomorrow night, so I’ve started moving my plants indoors. Now comes the struggle to keep them alive until next spring.

Some new beads from me, a focal with silvered ivory and silver murrini (I just wish people liked to buy them as much as I like to make them), and a sheeny, shiny big hole bead.

I’m making my own cottage cheese tonight. OK, I have an admission to make, I had no nap today, and I’ve been zipping along on Red Bull. I LOVE Red Bull. It’s 8 p.m. and I’m not in bed. :)

Anyway, I felt hungry for cottage cheese, but what I have is expired. I’ve got rennet tablets, so I figured I’d give it a try. Headed to the Internet for some recipes (too disorganized and didn’t know where my back to the basics book is). Amazing what you learn on the Internet (Did you know that you can freeze buttermilk?!?). I came across a recipe from Alton Brown,
Ingredients
1 gallon pasteurized skim milk
3/4 cup white vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 cup half-and half-or heavy cream
Directions
Pour the skim milk into a large saucepan and place over medium heat. Heat to 120 degrees F. Remove from the heat and gently pour in the vinegar. Stir slowly for 1 to 2 minutes. The curd will separate from the whey. Cover and allow to sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.

Pour the mixture into a colander lined with a tea towel and allow to sit and drain for 5 minutes. Gather up the edges of the cloth and rinse under cold water for 3 to 5 minutes or until the curd is completely cooled, squeezing and moving the mixture the whole time. Once cooled, squeeze as dry as possible and transfer to a mixing bowl. Add the salt and stir to combine, breaking up the curd into bite-size pieces as you go. If ready to serve immediately, stir in the half-and-half or heavy cream. If not, transfer to a sealable container and place in the refrigerator. Add the half and half or heavy cream just prior to serving.

I cut it in half, and am at the sitting at room temperature right now. Got another 15 minutes.

Fall is here, and I’m enjoying the cool temps. It was a two blanket night last night, nice crisp cold air coming in through the window. What a relief after all of that hot muggy air. I’m just taking it one day at a time and not even thinking about what’s coming next. As the Bible says, don’t worry about what’s coming tomorrow, sufficient to each day is its own badness.

PS: Next time I’ll try the 12-18 hr. recipe which uses rennet tables. The vinegar method leaves the curds the consistency of ricotta cheese. I like my cottage cheese with large curds.

I don’t understand the big draw of this “Extreme Couponing.” I’m watching a show on TLC, the shopper’s overjoyed at how much she saved. What did she buy? Dozens of bags of Cheetos, packages of Poligrip, containers of yogurt with M&Ms, cases of pop, dozens of deodorants. Another one, 134 boxes of couscous, 93 bottles of hot sauce. What’s the sense of it?

It certainly doesn’t promote healthy eating. Yogurt with M&Ms?!? Boxes of Snicker Bars and Snicker Eggs? Nice and healthy! Instead of buying 10 packs of Snapple Ice Tea, even if it’s free, they’d be better off buying a box of tea bags and some cans of frozen juice.

Watching this show, and the time and effort these people put into it, dumpster diving, spending all night organizing coupons, it seems to be a form of obsessive behavior, like hoarding. One woman spends up to 70 hours a week couponing! Gosh!

I think it’s a shame that the television executives take advantage of people like this.

Want to see how your tax dollars are being wasted, the inhumanity of the Bureau of Land Management, the power of the cattle and sheep ranchers, who insist that the wild horse population be decimated so they can run more cattle and sheep on public land? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObXB0Wq3nRE&feature=share

Did you know that tens of thousands of wild horses are warehoused at public expense because they’re being rounded up off of public lands. There was a law passed in the 1970s to protect the wild mustangs, to guarantee their traditional ranges. The BLM has been fencing off those ranges, and restricting water access. Why is a government bureau free to break the law? Go to http://www.thecloudfoundation.org/ and read some of the politics involved.

I have a bald blue jay, no kidding. I’ve seen him now for some months now, and have to shake my head every time I see him.

Meanderings all over the place today.

http://artisancraftpage.com is a digital cork board for artisans, handcrafters, and handcrafting supplies of all kinds, and for the month of August, all ads are 50% off. So that’s $50 for an ad that runs until 2014! All proceeds go to the Artisan and Glassworkers Legal Fund.

For anyone who has seen the latest Wyoming Chamber of Commerce tourist ads, with the wild horses running, if you want to see wild horses, you’d best get out there fast. The BLM, at the urging of ranchers running thousands of sheep and cattle on public land, have been for the last dozen years decimating the wild horse herds from California to Montana. The ones that can’t be adopted are farmed out to ranchers who are paid to feed them, and others are sent to government holding facilities to live out the rest of their lives. Wild horses are dying in the roundups and are illegally being sent to slaughter houses in Canada and Mexico. An interesting article here: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/08/the-quiet-war-against-wyomings-wild-horses/243286/

Someone on Lampworketc. posted the link to this website, http://dearphotograph.com/. Funny and so terribly sad.

The Baltimore Orioles are back, winging their way south now that the babies are all grown up. Such gorgeous birds, I just can’t help snapping more photos of them.

I really do have to get beads listed tonight. I’ve got 4 bags in the drawer and the kiln is just about full. I’ve been on a roll the past few days making beads. I made 11 this morning! Maybe it had something to do with Chester having to go out at 5:30 this morning. Here’s some that I just listed on Artfire:

The 8 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers:
1. Effective bloggers are prolific
(Uh, when did I blog last?)
2. Effective bloggers are concise
(Yup, that bead is a shimmering blue.)
3. Effective bloggers are analytical
(Analytical? What's that? I had to look it up to get a concise definition: (of a language) characterized by a relatively frequent use of function words, auxiliary verbs, and changes in word order to express syntactic relations, rather than of inflected forms.)
4. Effective bloggers are lifelong learners
(OK, one out of eight isn’t bad.)
5. Effective bloggers are focused and consistent
(Where did I put my glasses?)
6. Effective bloggers plan ahead
(What's for supper? Oh, I have to make it?!?)
7. Effective bloggers are persistent
(Oh, those weeds will go away when it snows.)
8. Effective bloggers are self-starters
(Ree of Pioneer Woman had a recipe for making iced coffee concentrate. I have a gallon jug in the fridge. Does that fit the definition?)

I’m finally starting to get over my bronchitis. The steroids helped, I don’t sound like a rusty old steam engine anymore. Now I just need to get rid of this cough. Our weather is helping, it’s cooled down a little bit, and the nights are getting cooler so I can open the windows. In paradise (my paradise anyway) it’s always going to be between 50° and 70°.

Our health care system leaves a little to be desired, to say the least. Lukas turned 25 last month, so in June Medica sent out a form for his doctor to sign verifying that he’s handicapped so he could stay on the insurance. Christian dropped the paper and the envelope off at the clinic and I assumed that it was filled out and sent in. Then last month I got the new card without his name on it! I called the doctor’s office and they didn’t know anything about it. I called Medica and they said they’d send out a new one and as soon as they got it he would be reinstated without lapse of coverage. Got the paper, Christian took it to the clinic and told them to hold it, and he would pick it up. They had it done by the next day, so I sent it off to Medica with delivery confirmation. They got it the 23rd of July. I called the next week to make sure they got it, and the guy I talked to said that it needed to be reviewed and it would take 2-3 days. Reviewed!!?! He’s been on Medica for years, they paid for some of the operations he went through to keep him out of a wheelchair, and they’ve paid for the ambulance to take him to the emergency room for seizures.

Monday Christian went in to pick up Lukas’ seizure medication, and he’s not covered!! $93. So back on the phone with Medica. The lady I talked to tracked it down to the enrollment department, but there was no one there to talk to (this is at noon), so she said she would follow up and let me know. At 4pm I called again, and she tried getting a hold of them, but they had already left for the day. Huh, talk about banker’s hours! She called the next morning to let me know that she was still following up, but the guy who was doing the reviewing was in a meeting. A few hours later she called to let me know that she talked to the guy and Lukas is back on the insurance.

It’s really simple, health care should not be a for-profit industry. I was reading in the Consumer Reports about doctors and hospitals pushing for heart tests that are not necessary, and a story about how Medicare is spending so much more money since for-profit hospices took over the market. Seems they get patients from nursing homes into their hospices, and then when the 6-month limit is up, they return them to the nursing home. What a crooked system!

End of rant.

My sister has been nice and has not bugged me about listing while I was sick, but she warned me my vacation is at an end. I wished I liked selling the beads as much as I like making them. :) A couple of whispy, shimmering beads in my Etsy store.

What the heck?!?

I went down to the cities today for an MRI on my shoulder, and stopped off at K-Mart to buy a HEPA air filter to see if that won’t help with this bronchitis (the antibiotics didn’t do anything, and I’ve been on steroids since Monday, and can’t say that it’s helped much). So I got home and got it out of the box, and at the bottom of the box is a car insurance quote, dated Jan. 27, 2010. It has the guy’s name and address, his birthdate, work number, home number, his email address and all of his wife’s info.

I’m kind of aggravated with K-Mart for selling a returned product without at least marking it down! And why is this guy’s insurance quote still in the box?!?

My dog is such a character! He likes to take paper under my desk and shred it. Grabs a mouthful, rips it off, grabs another mouthful, rips it off…

And not just paper,

It keeps him occupied!

My bronchitis continues to drag me down. Antibiotics didn’t do anything for me, I replaced the window AC unit in my bedroom because I thought maybe mold was aggravating my lungs, but that didn’t change anything. The next step is steroids. I’m considering it.

Another 90+° day here. Hot, hot, hot! I feel bad for the people down south, who put up with this every summer! I made 2 beads this a.m., and called it quits. Just too hot to sit at the torch. I’m in a mental and physical funk, with no energy to try to get something done.

A meanderings post, all over the place…

I’ve been sick for the past week and a half with bronchitis, so between that and the heat, I haven’t been getting much done outside. My flower gardens are being over run with weeds, and I don’t want to take any photos because I’m ashamed of all of the weeds. We had more storms come through this morning and dump more rain. I wish I could send some of this rain to Texas. Minnesota this summer has been more like Florida, hot and steamy.

I am so sick of coughing! Lukas is too, because my bedroom is right next to his, so he gets to listen to me all night.

I upgraded to the newest Mac OS, Lion. I like it, except for the fact that Microsoft hasn’t kept up with the drivers for my keyboard. So now I’m trying to type on the generic Apple keyboard, the flat one that doesn’t have room for these big hands. I really liked the Logitech ergonomic keyboards, but they quit supporting Macs, so I switched to Microsoft. But until they release an updated driver, I’m up a creek. I ordered a Kensington from Amazon, but it’s not ergonomic. I wish Apple would make a decent keyboard!

Last night it was too early to go back to bed, even to just lay and play solitaire on my iPad, so I cleaned a batch of beads. I was up to 5 bags in my drawer, so I figured it was time. There were way too many ‘blah’ beads. I get all of these ideas in my head of different colors to use, but too many of them turn out to be not-so-spectacular. I need to change my bead making habits. I’m getting more and more limited in my time at the torch by my shoulder. I have a torn rotator cuff, and the doctor said there was nothing that can be done for it, although I think it’s time to get a second opinion on that. It aches so bad, sometimes I find myself clenching my teeth, and that can’t be healthy for the rest of my body!

Anyway, to get back to beadmaking, I think I need to concentrate more on color combinations that I know will work. I’ve been too willy-nilly, just all over the place. So maybe by being more disciplined, there will be less ‘blah’ beads. My favorites, the blues and greens,

 And my all-time favorite glass, Dark Aurae,

We have a storm coming through,

Unfortunately, it’s not going to cool us off any, only make it more muggy. Tomorrow it’s going to be up to 95-100°. As my sister says, it’s still better than snow.

Awww, that was so cool! A daddy Baltimore Oriole came to the feeder and grabbed a beak full of grape jelly and then fed it to one of his babies.

Here’s Papa,

Here’s one of the babies. Papa grabbed a beak full of jelly and went and stuffed it into the baby’s mouth, who was sitting on the shepherd’s hook screeching.

Talk about doing the splits!

We’re having a heck of a storm right now. It got up to 99° today, and a cold front is moving in. The trees are whipping and getting lemon drop size hail. Stuff is coming down with some force; it hits the deck and bounces 3’ into the air. Nature is impressive.