Lunch and Lilac Blooms

 This is one of my purse charms.  They're quite a lot of fun to make and I can get really creative with the bead combinations.  I call this one "Lilac Blooms".

As I am getting ready to leave for work this morning, I am aware that there are no leftovers in the refrigerator to heat up quickly for lunch.  So I ask Ariana to please put potatoes to bake for us to eat, since we have to leave quickly again after we eat  and go back in to work.

Just before I leave I ask her what she is supposed to do for lunch?  One--to make sure she'll remember, and two--to make sure that I actually asked her to do something.  Today her answer was..."To heat up potatoes for lunch."

"No!"  I said.  "I don't want you to heat up potatoes for lunch. Heating potatoes would indicate that they have been previously cooked.  I want you to BAKE potatoes for lunch because I want baked, totally cooked potatoes when I get home."

For some reason this struck Ariana as inordinately funny.  She was laughing so hard that she nearly fell over.

Here is a completely unrelated factoid...If you are desirous of making leaf and wax-paper decorations, make sure that you get the leaves between the wax paper as soon as they are picked.  The wax-paper acts as a preservative and will help the leaves retain their color.  If you gather leaves and wait a few days (like I did with the children at preschool) before putting the leaves in the wax-paper, much of the color will have been lost and the leaves will be a uniform and fairly unappealing brown.  This might not be the case with sycamore leaves, but that is what happened with our maple, hawthorne, and redbud leaves.

Burning Questions

 Yes, I voted...that is all I'm going to say.  I realized that in spite of all the histrionics, I still have things to deal with in life that will not be resolved by this presidential election...

There is my bathroom.  About the only good thing to be said for it is that it is indoors and I don't have to trek outside fifty to a hundred feet in the cold, damp and wind to use it.  The sink hasn't drained right in years and seems to suddenly not want to drain at all!  It gurgles and bubbles like there is a mud monster living and breathing in the pipes.  And then there are the times it spits back!

I don't really want to add plumbing to my skills, but this sink is really testing my patience.  Part of the problem is the hard water has coated the pipes in mineral until the actual size of the drain has been reduced to the size of a pea.  I just installed a new towel bar and shelf--complete with screw anchors.  How hard could replacing the pipes be?  Probably harder than I suspect.  Mostly I see a recipe for a huge mess...

And then there's my car.  The poor thing needs tires.  I already had one unrepairable flat.  The nice tire store very kindly put a used one on that will get me by until I can manage to replace all the tires at once.  It's only tragic that their fall tire sale doesn't include the ones I need...

I'm not done cooking through the Veganomicon.  I really couldn't see myself cooking through one of Julia Child's cookbooks (being most definitely vegetarian), but I'm having the best fun trying the recipes in Veganomicon--and I'm not really vegan.  It seems that it is mostly the dairy products that jump in price whenever I'm shopping, so I'm mostly trying to cook without them as a way to save myself money (and also protest the ridiculous price increases).

My metallic black monster is part of the order that went to Canada...I love working with the metallic black in this size bead--it has so many variations.  I also love his gooseberry green eyes!  Hmm...I think I forgot what color green I used for them.

My newest necklace "Summer's End"  practically made itself and will be photographed soon.  I didn't run fast enough and the current cold/sinus infection caught me.  Then when I felt great on Monday, I overdid it just a trifle and had a relapse...So, hopefully, after the weekend I will get busy with the camera and get pictures taken.

Critter Drama Continued

It turned out that the crying dog of the other day, was not responsible for the disastrous state of my floors.  It was my wonderful Lucy who had been sick.  The crying dog was afraid that she was going to be in trouble.  And this after living with us over ten years and never once being beaten (she's a rescue).

Lucy is now fully recovered and back to bouncing around which is rather alarming given her size!

But yesterday our beloved Buttons kitty died en route to the vet.  I think she must have somehow contracted leukemia, in spite of being spayed.  She was just a few months past a year old. 

Today, I was happily working out to my new Zumba Fitness (for Wii), being somewhat tired of my Wii Fit Plus--to say nothing of the fact that the disc is wearing out and no longer wants to play.  When I was finished and ready to hit the shower one of the golden retrievers proceeded to have a seizure!  She had spent most of my workout in the living room with me watching from the couch.  Obviously, the rythm, lights, and sound was too much for her.  So now I will have to make sure that the dogs are elsewhere when I exercise, or that I have the lights on in the house to minimize the contrast between the game and the ambient lighting.

The picture is of a necklace that was part of a recent order that was sent to Canada.  I especially love the sparkly, iridescent beads.

One of Those Days

 Yesterday was one of those days!  It started of innocently enough and quickly degenerated into a farce.

When the dogs went out before their breakfast three of them decided that it would be a great time to check out the happenings in the neighborhood.  This is never a good idea.  They always reappear--highly unrepentant--dirty, stinky, and having found nasty things to eat (that make them sick).

Work was fairly uneventful until I was at my afternoon job.  I needed to get something out of the car, so I ran out--sans shoes and coat--to grab it.  It didn't occur to me until I was trying to get back in, that I had left my keys behind and shut the door--locked--after myself.  I pondered this situation for a while and decided that breaking a window was probably not the best way to solve it.  At that very moment, it dawned on me that my daughter was just across the street at the library with a spare key.

So off I went, in my sock feet, in search of the key.  It had rained earlier, and although the sidewalks were dry, the streets were still very wet.  Fact:  asphalt is more porous than concrete and you'll get your feet soaked.

The rest of the afternoon was peaceful until I arrived home.  To a crying dog and a house  with every room needing to have the floors scrubbed.  Unfortunately, I couldn't just scrub.  The floors themselves were in serious need of a good sweeping which I couldn't give them due to the nature of the mess on the floors.  So I had to roam through and spot clean all the rooms.  This weekend I will actually sweep and then do another thorough scrubbing.  Naturally, when I was all done I felt contaminated  and rather in need of a good cleansing myself. 

Learning and Fall Projects.

 After posting my blog requesting help for installing some of my gadgets, I got a message from a friend.  Her husband--who is a computer genius extraordinaire--would be happy to help me figure out what I needed to know.  So Friday afternoon I got to go over to their house and have a quick computer tutoring.

As you can see, I now am the proud owner of a "follow me on pinterest"  button.  I also can now claim to have the link to my Facebook business account.  This is a good thing because I have many more pictures on Facebook than I actually have on my blog.

And then I was shown how to pin to my own pinterest board.  I wanted to learn how to post my own projects on pinterest.  I have yet to see if I actually learned how to do that.  The last time I tried to pin my own pictures, I was informed that it was an invalid pin!

I am thrilled to have gained some new knowledge.  By the time I was finished, I felt a little like my brain was about to explode from a surfeit of information.

Also on Friday I shipped a lovely, larger order of bookmarks with monster charms to Texas.  I'm always somewhat nervous about trusting my "babies" to the postal system, but our local post office is very nice to deal with and, so far, I haven't had much breakage.  I think I lost one shell.  So I can't complain.

Now that the bookmarks are finished and on their way, I have an order of earrings that I am putting together for another customer.

Added to all this glass activitiy, I am finishing up the final canning for the season.  I have been making apple butter with our apples--this is a first for me.  I think I have ten pints stashed away as well as the batch I sent home with my sons.  I've been using a very simple, but very good recipe.

In Need of Assistance

Could someone please, please, slowly and carefully--using simple words--walk me through how to install the "follow me on pinterest" button onto my blog.  I cannot figure out how to do this and I would really like to have a follow me button.  I try to copy and paste, but blogger tells me that the gadget is broken.  So today I wrote down the address and tried to put that in and it still told me that it was broken.  Obviously, I am not doing something right...

October--Already

I see that it is almost a month since I last posted.  I really have no excuse...I haven't had any pictures to post, I haven't had anything interesting to say, I've been busy making monsters for an order of twenty bookmarks.  Oh, and I had to pick the last of the garden produce and I've been busy making apple butter.

October is one of those months...where I can succumb to depression if I'm not vigilant.  Well, I do not have time for depression this year.  So...I'm thinking that once my twenty bookmarks are finished and shipped off that perhaps I will reward myself with a gallon of paint.  The raspberry walls in the kitchen are woefully faded and I'm tired of the pale green cabinets!  I still have a lot of apples to preserve; some to make into apple butter and the rest into applesauce.

I also got some new cookbooks (to replace the ones I gave away...).  I've been exploring the outer edges of vegan cooking.  Not for health reasons or any other large, political, save-the-world, reasons, but because I'm tired of paying high prices for dairy products--and I don't like milk that much anyway.  Most of the things I've tried are very good.  I still cannot, however, seem to develop an appreciation for tempeh, even though I have tried several different ways of preparing it.

The studio has new bedding, so now I actually have a place for guests to sleep.  And I can see some more organizing and decluttering projects in the near future.  And I'm really certain that it is time to learn some new glass techniques.  Today I have to make one last monster and the last accent beads for the bookmarks that I intend to ship Friday.

Brent acquired a new beagle rescued from a local shelter...he was supposedly looking for a parrot.  He's a cute little dog and christened "Sonic" for his tendency to do everything at hyper-speed.