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.

An eventful day today. I went out to water the vegetable garden this morning and saw a big brown lump laying out in the pasture. It was a cow. Cows do not lay all the way down unless they’re dead, so I asked Christian to go out and see if she was dead. He came back and said she was still alive but she was just laying there making little grunting noises.

I went out, saw mucus hanging from her rear, and realized she had milk fever. Milk fever occurs mostly in dairy cows (which is why I’m phasing out of them and into a heritage dual purpose cow); when a cow has a calf, the body pulls calcium out of the body to put into the milk and milk fever occurs when too much calcium is pulled out, which shuts down the muscles, and the cow can die. I was flabbergasted, since she had just started bagging up the previous day or two, and I thought the milk fever had come on before she calved, which hadn’t happened before.

So I called the vet (none of the local vets treat livestock anymore, there’s more money in cats and dogs), and had to wait almost two hours for him to get here. So I would go out there every 15-20 min. to see if she was still alive, and try to pour a little bit of water in her mouth, and to chase the vultures away. There were two of them just floating around and coming in every once in a while to see if there was something there yet for them. I finally put up a couple of sticks and put a sheet over it to cover her up a little bit.

The vet came and said there was still a chance for her, and asked if I realized that the treatment could kill her. I said yes, I knew, but she would die without it. So he stuck a HUGE needle in her neck and hooked up a calcium drip. He put a liter of calcium in her. She started to come out of it a little bit, but still wasn’t moving much after that. He put on his long sleeve gloves and put his arm in to check on the calf. I was flabbergasted again when he said, ‘There’s no calf in there.’ She must have had it in the middle of the night. So we started looking for it, tromping around the pasture trying to find it. Cows hide their calves, and the calves stay there until momma comes back. We couldn’t find it, so went back to Sally and tried to get her turned over. After some pulling and pushing we accomplished that, and she was laying up in a more normal position. So we went back to hunting for the calf. Couldn’t find it, so headed back to Sally, who had in the meantime recovered enough to get up on her feet and go find the calf. The vet had walked right by it, it was hidden under a pine tree. I think he was expecting it to be black like Dex (papa), but the calf (now named Chuck) looks like a Jersey like mama, so he blended right in with the dead pine needles under the tree.

So Christian carried him back to the barn while I paid the vet, and 15 min. later we went out to check on him, and he was gone, along with Sally. So this evening we took the truck out to try to find them again, and after a half hour of walking Christian finally found them. He got Chuck up into the back of the truck and he and Sally are safely locked up in the barn. Now hopefully, they’re still both be safe and sound in the morning.

Photos, Christian and Chuck in the truck with Sally following,

Chuck and Sally

Gertrude, Sally’s daughter and hopefully the next one to pop, checking out Chuck,

Christian threw some hay into the barn, and some of it landed on Sally’s horns. Goofy cow didn’t even try shaking her head to get it off, so he had to go in and get it off of her.

Meandering photos, a wall cloud that went through this morning. That thing was really moving fast!

I have a rose-breasted grosbead pair hanging around,


And here’s one of my big goofball dog, Suka. He’s getting to big to fit in the recliner. The other night he was sleeping with his butt on the arm rest. Here he is sleeping with his head on an old swivel chair.

Well, we got the invisible fencing put up around the dog run. I ordered it after Suka dug out and caught his 6th chicken.

I have to say, I LOVE IT! I can keep the doggy door open all day and not worry about him getting out.

Right now, he’s running in and out the doggy door with his stuffed raccoon. He is so funny, he will take all of his toys outside, then the next day I’ll find them all piled up in the same room. What a goof!

I really do need to have my nephews build a gate big enough for me to get the mower in there. There’s poison ivy coming up all over the place, and I need to get it mowed down.

We’ve had really pleasant weather, right now it’s misting and 61°. Just a nice day, warm enough to go outside barefoot. I’m enjoying it, because the heat will be moving back in soon enough. I’ve still got to get my pumpkins and squash planted! But I have gotten all of the bulbs (3 big Rubbermaid tubs full) that I saved from last year planted, now I also have to get the new ones that I bought this spring out into the ground. Such a slow poke!

Random pictures of the day:
My baby Suka, sunk down into the recliner with his bone,
I loved the way the sun’s rays were shining through this rainbow,

And a couple of bead photos that I really, really liked,

A sunny 68° with a nice NW breeze and no bugs. It just doesn’t get much better than this.

From the roaster to the freezer. My outdoor thermometer read 104.7 in the shade day before yesterday. Right now it’s 52°. A 50 degree drop. I’ll take it!

99.6°. This does not bode well for the rest of the summer, since this is just the beginning of June.

I do not handle the heat very well, to say the least. Christian picked up a couple of window air conditioners (our central air is 15 yrs. old and just can’t keep up with the heat anymore). We put one in my bedroom, and I’ve been escaping there after I do the exercise bike. We tried putting the other one in one of my studio windows, but my ferret-proofing halted that midway. I’m going to have to use the Sawzall to cut some boards to fit that in. I just think I might wait until my nephews come up and let them do that. It’s too hot to do anything right now.

And in the meantime, the weeds are overtaking my flower garden. They don’t care if it’s hot, sigh.

Suka got out of the dog pen again and killed another chicken, a hen of course. He couldn’t go after the roosters! I’ve got way more of them than I do hens. I ordered some invisible fencing from Amazon and we’re going to just put it along the fence to keep him from digging under it and getting out. If he wouldn’t kill the chickens I would just let him run, since he stays up around the house and barn. Big stinker!

Yuck!! 93° today. In a perfect world (for me anyway), it would never get below 32° or above 75°.

The weeds are overtaking my gardens, and I still don’t have all of my bulbs planted. REALLY need to get busy!

AGLF’s May Random Bag of Glass Fundraiser sale is on now, http://aglf.info/special.html.

There’s a limited supply of bags for lampworkers and jewelry artists!

OK, ready for a funny story?

This is about my latest contact with Windstream Communications, our telephone and Internet provider.

“10:59 a.m. 24th call, called broadband tech support, speeds still 1.5mbps or lower, paying for 6mbps since May 11, put on hold. Tech answered 11:10, said it wasn’t put over to 6mbps yet, and he didn’t know why the other techs didn’t do it. After a couple of minutes, he said to do a speedtest, and it was over 6mbps! He said if I had any more problems call static ip dept., put in phone number, and not as a residential customer.

25th call, Called to try to get a refund on the slow speeds and the 175 outages we’ve had since I started keeping track on April 4. Got transferred, explained I wanted a refund, she said I was sent to wrong office, transferred again. Told the rep. I wanted a refund for all of the outages and slow speeds, put on hold. He came back on and wanted to know if we would like to combine our telephone, internet and cable TV. I laughed and asked if he was out of his freaking mind. I think he was a bit offended, even after I explained the 175 outages, and no way did I want my television service through a company with that record. He issued a credit of $64.

Internet went down again last night (thanks, Windstream Communications), for the 175th time since I started keeping track in April. They last anywhere from a few minutes to 17 hours. I just love to listen to their recorded messages when I’m on hold (last night I was on hold for over a half hour), talking about Windstream being able to meet your business solutions and their ‘blazing fast high speed internet.’

Ha!!