Foovay’s Cauldron

Archive for April, 2009

True Beauty is not seen with the eyes alone

I have a long lunch hour at work. Yawn. Being me, I spend it outside. The other day, I walked around and chose a place to sit that was in the sun and out of the wind. The way I chose a place to sit, you’d think I was a reptile. One of these days I’m going to sit down and find a rattlesnake sharing my space.

The place I sat down was graveled. Not with boring old white and grey chipped rock, though – with what I suspect is crushed native rock mixed with sand.

I’ve always had a fascination with rocks. New Mexico is a real treasure house if you love rocks. In a matter of minutes I had found this little group – each of them intriguing, interesting, or beautiful in their own way. One is just the color of the land on the ranch, another is pure sparkles (although the photo doesn’t show that very well), a couple look to be quartz, and I think one of them is a citrine. Another isn’t as “pretty” as the rest, but shows a lot of iron oxide which is interesting – a symbol of strength and endurance. Some have interesting colors.

People are like that to me. If you stop to look at any one person, there is something interesting, intriguing, or beautiful about them (sometimes all three!). Perhaps they are not pretty in a conventional sense, but have an inner strength that makes them special. Sometimes you have to look at people with your heart or mind rather than your eyes. If you don’t see something admirable in them right off – perhaps you just haven’t looked deep enough. Life doesn’t always afford us the opportunity to take the time to do that, in which case I prefer to act as if that wonderful spark is surely there even if I haven’t seen it yet.

This little rock looks kind of plain. But sometimes if you crack a rock like this open, you find an amazing treasure inside. And when I picked it up, I found just a bit of sparkle on the other side.

I have to resist the temptation to end up with a pocket full of rocks. I allowed myself to choose three to keep and take home. Friendships are a bit like that. You might love everyone, but you chose a few that are most appealing to you to take to your heart and into your most intimate life.

Taking all of our unique traits and working together – what magic we can create.

Photos from my phone

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Speaking of mindfulness, Leo Babuta of ZenHabits shares The Mindfulness Guide for the Super Busy. If you think you are much too busy for meditation, spare yourself a few minutes to read this post. As a person who tends to get workaholic myself I can promise you that even a few minutes a day to just do nothing will make a difference that you have to experience to believe.

I have to share this post about dealing with it when others try to bring you down, yet another fine article from Happy Lotus. Any of us who try to keep a positive attitude, have run into those people who can’t help but try to bring you down to their level. I believe it is because if you manage to hop along being happy and creating a good life with good thoughts – it points up that they could do that too, if they would only put in the effort. Thus – much easier to try and bring you down. Sometimes, they succeed. For a few minutes.

Myself, I’ve concluded that there is no point trying to bring these people UP to my level. It is like any kind of addiction – you cannot cure anyone who doesn’t first admit they have a problem they want to be cured of. Anyone who is interested in learning to change their life, is going to be attracted and open and asking questions about why you are so “ridiculously” happy. People like that, you should certainly share your wisdom and philosophy with, and hopefully they will take it from there to seek their own happiness.

OTH, people who are clearly intent on “bringing you back to reality” are not going to change. The best thing to do is smile, send them love (because they probably really need it) and move away while affirming “I do not accept this negative energy”.

My work schedule is about to flip flop around and I’m not thrilled but I think I might like it more than I think I will. If that made any sense. I just might have a bit more Internet time. Maybe.

I posted a few of the drafts of the sketchbook drawings.  Some of them posted for today, some back on the date they were originally written.  I clearly don’t have the hang of this!  I wanted to have some fresh art for you to look at it if you came by to read this post.  Sigh.

Blessedbe

Summer

At last the sketches I know people have been waiting patiently for – the petroglyphs from Three Rivers BLM recreation area outside of Alamagordo, New Mexico. These are in ebony pencil on paper.

We stayed there several days. Everytime I walked up the trail I saw more petroglyphs that I had missed before. I could spend weeks sketching up there, and sitting and wondering what it all means…

Summer Fey Foovay

I have blisters on my feet from working.

But I just spent about two hours trying to access and close my epassporte account – the highlights are talking to a nice, but incomprehensible foreign lady to explain to her that I cannot get past the security checks online to get to my account, only to be unable to get past her security checks to get to my account – to close the motherfucker – because I can’t get to it most of the time anyway.  I give up, hang up and by all that is holy I actually luck into some security questions I CAN answer online and get into the account to discover I have a big hairy $6.83 that I cannot get out for hell or high water because I sure as fuck am not going to connect this useless account to any other account I have anywhere to make the transfer.

BTW that $6 would have paid the webhosting account that I cancelled today – because they unilaterally and without my authorization decided they were going to put my credit card on recurring billing and that’s the last thing I need right now – another bouncing charge on that account which I am having a hard time funding since no one in my little town has a clue how to bank electronically and that has some weird charges showing up that I did not authorize (but am getting nice fat bounced charges for) so that account is now $55 in the hole and counting – yeah, I sure want more recurring unauthorized charges costing me $25 a hit for a $6 charge there.  But – guess what – the phone number on the hosting account goes to an answering service who will take my number and let the -what only one human working at this hosting company? – call me back someday maybe.  There is no support email for billing, and no link or anything I can find to turn off the recurring charges although I could pay the bill (due the 1st of May) today if I’d like.  More time on the phone with uncooperative people who can’t help me.  But you know what, I can find a link to CANCEL the account altogether.  So that’s done.

All my adult sites will vanish in the next 12 hours. Solving the problem of the webhost and their unauthorized recurring charges, AND incidentally solving the epassporte problem since only the adult sponsors use that payment method.  This has taken two hours and considerable stress and headbanging on my precious day off to eliminate my occasional surprise check for $50 or $100 amounting to maybe $600 last year total.

I can make that pushing shopping carts for two, or maybe three weeks.  With blisters on my toes – but far less headaches and ulcers and screaming on the phone to maybe make under $100 a month if I am lucky and can actually GET the damn money.

Whew – God it’s great to be back on ticktock.

The blisters on my toes will heal.

“Making Money on the Internet” – please don’t make me laugh.

if you make me happy…

HHHH – okay, just a song by Garbage that is running through my head. I’ve survived over a week of the tick tock world and am beginning to think I’ll live and still be happy.

As if New Mexico wanted to remind me why I was putting myself though all this, and why I love it here so much, I started my last work day with a brief visit from a Red-Winged Blackbird, happily singing his head off from the top of a power pole. One of my favorite birds, and although they are pretty common in town, a rare visitor out here in the desert. They much prefer to be near water.

A few days earlier the yellow headed blackbird came by and even tucked himself into my chicken coop to steal their breakfast and say good morning. It’s pretty neat to have one of my “wish I could someday see one of those” birds dropping by every spring for a few days.

On the way to work, we passed a roadrunner – they are so neat. Further on down the highway a small band of eight mule deer in their sleek summer coats paused to give me a good look before leaping off into the desert. We usually see them near the lake, not out here. We did have a good storm, so I guess everyone came out to see how much the waterholes filled up and test the graze.

The wildflowers are starting to bloom, but there isn’t much in the way of green grass yet. We seem to be having our windy season about a month late, so I suppose the rain will be a month late, too.

When it is windy I don’t have Internet. Between that and only two days off I haven’t been around much. I have some requests for coloring pages I haven’t even started on and over 100 emails.  If I owe you one, sorry, I’ll get to them when I can.

I have read some great blog posts lately though, mostly (it seems) on Happy Lotus, like this post on the High Beam to Success. I really like the part of the quote about advertising being fine as long as it is used to inform, but not to manipulate. This is a principle I’ve always stuck by – sort of part of my personal honor system. That’s probably why I’m not a particularily successful Internet marketer. There are just some things I will not do.

It got me thinking, too. I have been doing a lot of thinking about my personal direction, and the direction of what’s left of my little Internet empire. What purpose does it serve now that I am no longer actively trying to make a living at it. My thinking has evolved and changed even in the last few weeks.

I’ve been noticing, especially now that I’m more of a reader and surfer than perpetually working on my own “stuff” that the big push to “make money from your blog” with all the well meaning and informative articles on how to do it, how this one does it, how that one does it, that it seems to me that blogs have become…homogenized. Some bloggers have created their writing style to revolve around advice on what gets people to read, like lists – the top ten blah blah blah. And How to yadda yadda yadda. One minute it is “develop your brand” and the next it’s guest posts.

My point being that in the beginning blogs were very individual, very true to their blogger and their interests. Bloggers wrote for themselves and their friends and by golly, other people enjoyed it, too. There weren’t a lot of rules about “how to make money from your blog” so bloggers just wrote what they wanted to, when they wanted to. Blogs were fun to read and gave you a real feeling of knowing the person on the other end. Sure, there were business blogs that only talked about the lastest thing that XYZ business was selling – but they were obviously so, and if you happen to buy XYZ’s products you might be pretty excited to learn they had a better widget coming out.

But now, I skim down the reader and see post after post with similar titles, and much of the posts I do read are regurgitated content from other blogs or print books or articles with little or no personal thoughts or opinions or experiences to give them any flavor.

The social sites, Twitter and Tagfoot being the only two I really follow much anymore, but from a quick glance, the others as well – are not so much people sharing this or that article or video they found interesting, as self promotion platforms to get more folks to come look at your blog, Squidoo lens, or latest full page ad disguised (not very well usually) as an article.

After a bit over ten years as a full time Internet junkie, I think we are seeing the whole blogging and social sites thing come full circle. They’ve had their heyday, and now that they are little more than advertising gimmicks, I think we’ll see them decline. The ones that will survive are the bloggers who have never catered to “write blogs for money” get rich quick schemes, those who kept their voice and their interests and their personality. I also think that a lot of the people who are blogging in hopes of making a living from it, are going to discover, as I did, that Google is fickle – and no one else counts. After a year or two of $200 one month and $20 the next, they’ll quit purely due to financial concerns and go back to the tick tock world. Whenever their hopes run out. Others will continue to blog, because they simply love to blog, to write – and their regular readers will be very glad. We’ll have fewer blogs, but they’ll be better reading.

With the “current economic situation” (which I think is largely the product of the negative media hype BTW) I’m sure we will continue to see a lot of people wildly casting about to “make money on the Internet” with everything from Squidoo and Hub pages to blogs and social sites. I don’t expect that bubble to last long though – as a good many of them will soon discover that you aren’t going to get rich and quit your day job on the strength of one webpage written with all the latest gimmicks and next to no real content or originality.

Some of the lenses I’ve seen lately barely even make sense.  Even a free ebook I downloaded recently desperately needs an editor for grammer, punctuation, spelling and simply making sense. Just typing straight from a book into your Adobe software doesn’t make you a WRITER. (Actually, it makes you something else, but we won’t go into that)

As always – I want to live to be 100 just because I think it will be interesting. *evil grin*

I was talking about some of my own thinking, and got sidetracked into a rant – LOL. The blogs I have left are largely created to showcase my writing, although they have a lot of other ads on them – especially the sex blogs. But the more I think about it – the more I think I’m going to make the rounds as I have time and pull the vast majority of those ads off. End each sex story post with a link to buy The River Way and call it good. Before long, I hope to have the new book done as well and when it finds a publisher I’ll add links to purchase it. Just informing my dear readers – not manipulating them (and wow do porn sites use every manipulation trick ever invented).

(*as an aside*)With all the free porn available now, even considering that I think porn sales will go up through this economic downturn (vice always does well in troubled times – we do need our little escapes) I don’t think pornslinging is nearly as viable a way of making money on the Internet as it once was – unless you’re the big guys handing out tons of free stuff to make a few bucks from others advertising on your site.**

As always – I’m a little ahead of the curve *wink*chuckle* so my blogs will all go back to being just me. Like ‘em or don’t. In all actuality, I don’t care anymore if they make me any money. It would be nice if they displayed my writing well enough that I can attract a good literary agent that can get my books published by a real publishing house, because I think they deserve that. If I actually sell a copy or two of The River Way too, well, that would be nice. I probably won’t get paid for it, but I’d like to know a couple of people read it anyway.

You know you can download it free here, right?

LOL.

And a mea culpa…looking at the Squidoo lens written to promote The River Way – and all my other promotion of this novel, I think I’ve made a mistake. You see, I’ve always talked about the “nice” parts of the book, the nature observations, the sort of mainstream friendly bits. I have this silly hope that people will get drawn in by that, and then gobsmacked by the more controversial bits. That the people that IMHO “need” to read it, will. How wimpy of me. When I get time, expect to see the guts of the book hanging out on the advertising. If you can’t take talk about incest, bisexuality, and prostitution you probably ought to be reading something else anyway.

Have a great weekend. I’m off to my tick tock job.

Blessedbe

Summer Fey Foovay

I’ve managed to survive diving back into the ticktock world! I do not have a firm schedule yet, but it looks like I’ll be working 32 hour weeks, four 8 hour days, on an afternoon to evening shift which suits me just fine. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing my specific job for a couple of days and I have to say – I love my job. Yeah, well you know I just never have been able to fall in line with the major negativity of the world. I’m outdoors, and physically active – I couldn’t be happier.

In fact, the only “problem” I’ve had so far is that every single manager type, and even my co-workers, seem bent on “reassuring” me that I don’t have to stay in my present position – because obviously I will want to move “up” to an indoors job. I keep reassuring them that I love my job, that I love being outdoors, I love being physically active, and being “moved up” to an indoor job is absolutely NOT what I want. It’s true, I don’t want to be “advanced” or “promoted”. I’m happy where I am. This isn’t my life, or my career, this is Just A Job and I’m perfectly happy with it.

This does not mean I am without ambition or goals. It means my goals are probably a bit different than most people. For one thing – I don’t need a huge income. I’m frugal, and my wants are simple. My goals are to have a bit more money to save and spend. I want a few things I simply cannot afford on the $20 a month my websites earn. Like a little RV, a little truck to haul the kayak, a good camera, and to improve my chickens lifestyle so I can add about 25 more hens. The hens will make their own contribution to my income after about six months or so. If all goes well and I feel confident and secure financially, I’ll buy a horse. (Horses are an expensive pleasure) Perhaps after some investment, I’ll be in a situation to go back to my nice work from home lifestyle because I’ve made it possible to live on even less than we do now, as well as done a few things to increase my non-JOB income streams. Why is that so hard to understand?

*shrug* Well, I feel no need to justify myself to everyone. They can go right on thinking there must be something wrong with me.

So – I have just started checking email and so on after about a three day absence. Here’s some blog posts and news I thought were noteworthy:

Dance, dance, dance at Happy Lotus
I just started reading Happy Lotus blog after I liked her guest post at Attraction Mind Map blog. It’s so nice to find two or three very interesting posts on her blog in the first week I added it to the reader. (On a side note: I’m very disappointed in a number of blogs who barely bother to post at all anymore) If you know me at all – you know I am a dancer, and how I feel about dancing. Skip the comments, they all want you to do this or that or whatever style of dancing – just turn on some music and have a good time. I’ve even figured out how to work dancing into my new job!

Chicago gets first solar powered charging station
This is a double scoop of goodness – solar powered charging station for electric cars (which incidentally are part of the fleet of City cars) How cool is that? Chicago gets a big attaboy from me!

Having had a couple of positive things to share, sadly, here’s a couple of less happy shares.

Strong Sonar Causes Deafness in Dolphins
Finally, a scientific study that proves strong sonar causes deafness in sea creatures – those very sea creatures who navigate through their world with sonar and communicate with long distance singing. About time we tossed that Bush era attitude out and re-evaulated our use of super long distance sonar. Yes, we ARE the cause of the beachings, and at the very least the source of considerable suffering for these creatures.

Plastic found in one third of sea turtles
I read something not long ago that said the changes we were creating in the worlds oceans were making them into a great habitat for jellyfish. Leatherback Sea Turtles eat jellyfish – but they also happen to eat plastic bags that look a lot like jellyfish floating around in the ocean. How easy is it to at least do a little bit good in this situation? Buy yourself a canvas shopping bag (or in my case, remember to take the darn thing when I go shopping) and cut down on the plastic bags in dumps. And here I slip in a little attaboy to Walmart for making it easier to recycle plastic bags by having a collection bin at the front of most of their stores.

And a goodie for you – speaking of Attraction Mind Map blog – Evelyn Lim has created a free PDF download of several of her blog posts regarding negative money beliefs and how to change them. Download the Money Belief Report here, read it, share it. If you are working with the Law of Attraction, or using your own affirmations, positive thinking, visualization, etc. you will probably find a helpful nugget or two or more in this report.

Before I even began catching up on my blog reading, I somehow got involved on Squidoo (hey, I got $12 from them – only took me two months to earn it – woot) and started a new group for greyhounds. I just barely started on it this morning, so it isn’t active and I’m not sharing the link yet – but I found over 100 greyhound lenses in one quick search so I think it’s gonna be a good ‘un.  (No, I really mean it – woot – it used to take me about a year to earn $10 on Squidoo)

I have to white tornado the house today because I don’t know yet when my next day off will be. My roomie is having the family over for Easter, so I’d like the place to look as good as possible. Hubby and I will probably both be at work – so they’ll get a chance to have a wonderful family day without us underfoot. I need to catch up our laundry and all the other things that are neglected. Three days or so of having someone else create my schedule to please them has quite upset everyone here who is used to me being at their beck and call 24 hours a day. LOL.

Which is to say that I HOPE I’ll be back later to share some new stuff on my own sites but I’m not making any promises. It is also supposed to get windy again, and you know that knocks my Internet connection out. As we all get settled into the new schedule, I do believe it will work out so I can continue to keep my online “stuff” going.

Might not hurt if you are on Twitter or Tagfoot to follow me on those sites as I can just dash in and out there during the day with updates.

Blessedbe

Summer Fey Foovay