Foovay’s Cauldron

Archive for the ‘rant’ Category

The hubby has been busy this week getting some great photos like this one of a house finch. What I love about this is if you look, you can see how those streaky breast feathers blend right in with the brushy mess on the ground to provide the perfect camoflage.

He also got our best photo yet of that pretty pale Eurasian Ring-Necked Dove. I’ve begun to feel quite sorry for her as the rest of the flock clearly ostracizes her. Of course, she may as well have a target painted on her as be this pale color here in the desert. We have at least two hawks who pay daily visits to the ranch. I wonder how long she will last?

And our best photo yet of the buffalo. We always consider it a sign of good luck when we see them on the way to town.

Speaking of luck, in the last few weeks I have won five times in a row on the Lottery. Only a dollar each time – just enough to buy the next ticket – but I’m feeling pretty special! I’ve concluded that I probably ought to spend more time and effort playing the lottery since my chances of winning a big jackpot are somewhat better than the odds of getting a book published that actually makes any money! (No, really, look at the figures someday – it’s pretty unlikely that even a GOOD novel will make anything)

Never mind the odds of making money on the Internet. I had to laugh the other day at a comment on a money making article about “why isn’t my article making money?” and the writer said “Oh, you have to let them mature”. Yeah. I’ve got articles that have been maturing for almost 10 years and they are up to a few pennies a month now! LOL.

Yeah, playing the lottery is looking good.

But until I win “the big one” I’m working on some Squidoo lenses for the Get Cracking with Robin and Bonnie Challenge. The idea is to do a lens a day for…however long you can take it, I guess. Although their main thing seems to be giving prompts for ideas – and the last thing I need is more ideas since I have half a notebook full of them – I’m using it as a motivation to get all those Work In Progress lenses I have finished up and published. So far, so good – I’m four for four. Here’s my list of the new additions – everything from “I love my iPod shuffle” to “Dragonfly Watching”. Keep your eye on this space, folks!

Yesterday I got a nice surprise check from the sponsors of one of my adult sites. It’s even nicer when you think that I don’t even have a link up to them right now! Gotta love the adult biz – repeat customers rule. So I have put that on my todo list – really got to get a real website up there again someday! Besides, it’s fun. I guess you’d have to say it’s MATURED. *snicker*

Blessedbe

Summer

I just sat down at the computer to try and kill a few minutes before I go feed when I noticed this outside my window:

The bird on the right is a Eurasian Ring Necked Dove of which we have so many here that they are shoving the native White Winged Dove right out of their habitat. The bird on the left…well my guess is she is either a dilute color variation of the Eurasian Ring Necked Dove, or some sort of hybrid. Here’s a better look at her:

Sorry the pix are so bad – we have a storm rolling in and I was taking them through the back bedroom window at a weird angle to avoid the window frame, which included me standing on the desk. I keep getting knocked off line as I try to post this, too. Yeppers – storm coming in.

I got a great Squidoo payday today and was really excited until I discovered that everything I wanted to buy would not accept PayPal. I no longer allow PayPal to associate with my bank account – since the $300 fiasco over a $10 bill where they refused to use the PayPal balance but instead kept dunning my empty checking account until they cost me about $300 for a $10 payment, no matter how many times I called them OR the bank. So I’ve got money – yay – I just can’t touch it – LOL. Well, I could spend it shopping but I wanted to invest it in advertising (no one accepts PayPal) or go shopping at my adult toy store (PayPal closed their account since they don’t allow any adult businesses).

Speaking of being an adult, a twitter follower “threatened” me that if I did not watch what I said on Twitter she would HAVE to BLOCK me as she is a homeschooler. Well, I’m sorry, but I am an adult – and I am a Pagan – and I call it as I see it. I do not write for small children or sheltered children or children as a matter of fact, so block me and get over it.

Now I need to get out there and feed before it gets worse

Summer Fey Foovay

I happened to notice a few people doing #saturdaysketchbook on Twitter. If I can remember to do Follow Friday (and I usually do but some Fridays I am in town and away from the computer), and spend Music Monday at Blip.fm (I am trying to limit that since it seems to suck up our bandwidth here and then they shut us down to slower than dial up for the rest of the week – love you Wild Blue and your arcane BW limiting system that makes no sense to anyone including your operators) then I should be able to manage sketchbooksaturday. I can at least try. Easier for me right now than Daily Art, unless you count the fact that I am really trying to add about one coloring page per day (or do several in one day and sprinkle them out to you). Anyhow – here is what is in my sketchbook – see now and then I do something that would pass for fine art by hand.

Now, I am going to piddle with my widgets some and give you the RSS feeds to my short story and coloring page blogs which I have not done for some reason.

I am stripping every possible reference to the Anthony Morrison late night informercial AffilliatesSystem.us folks – they are scammers. Sorry. I got fucked out of my $20 investment, but at least I didn’t fall for their constant upsales. I’m sure they would say I failed because I did not pay someone $197 to sign me up for a Google Adsense account (I already have one, thanks), nor do I have a $5000 credit line to spend on ads that MIGHT make me $100 a month if I’m lucky. ROFLMAO. Thank goodness! The only person making money on this is Anthony Morrison and his cohorts.

Sigh. Live and learn. He’s got a GREAT scam. Instead of saying you will make bazillions on the Internet – which so many of us now know is not true – he says “well you might make a $100 or so, and wouldn’t that help if you are struggling to make the house payment?”. Sure it would – if I didn’t have to SPEND $500 to MAKE $100. ROFLMAO. That is assuming they even credit you with your sales (which they do not – or at least they skim them, something porn masters made into an artform).

Oh enjoy the artwork. I’m working on a little short story, then I’m going to go play SEO expert for a friend. I’ve got housework and some sewing on the menu, too. Taking Sunday off, I think, and Monday have a Dr.s appointment for hubby that will probably eat most of the day one way and another. So have a great weekend!

Summer Fey Foovay

Oh – I hereby release the artwork above into the public domain. I’d rather not mess with the karma of theives who steal whatever they like – if I give it away no one can steal it.

The last week has been quite eventful.

First there was the idiot event. Sunday night, January 10th, the Internet suddenly just went off. Since I had just paid for it on the 21st of December, we thought maybe there was some sort of problem at the service. Finally on Wednesday we were able to find out they had cut us off for non-payment. Back in December when I paid – four days early – the entire balance – the idiot on the phone swore there were no past due bills or fees or anything and in fact was quite freaked out that I was paying a few days early rather than leaving it until Christmas Eve (when it was due). January 10th someone suddenly discovered we had a past due pro-rated partial balance from…AUGUST 2009. So they shut us off. Since we’re on a budget here – and I thought the bill was paid in full – we had to wait until payday on Friday to turn the Internet back on.

I am really getting sick of idiots who through their incompetency fuck up my life.

I know I told a lot of people that some major changes were coming in my life and then left it hanging. I really didn’t want to go into it if it wasn’t necessary. You see, on Monday January 11 we went to the hubby’s Nephrologist (kidney Dr.) to get her final word on something. The word is yes – hubby is going to have to start dialysis. This means a flurry of Dr.’s appointments in the next few months. Then he will go on full disability and be going to Las Cruces (about 100 miles) 3 times a week for dialysis. In case you didn’t know, he has had kidney disease since he was a child – this was not a big shock except in that he really doesn’t seem to be SICK, just tired a lot.

In a way, we are rather looking forward to it. He will be home all the time, and have an income we can depend on – no fear of lay-offs, getting sick, being fired, etc. We plan to start traveling again as the Dr’s assure us that won’t be a problem. Hubby is a great cook and is looking forward to getting to cook for us every day. He has been interested in photography for a few years – he takes many of the gorgeous photos you see in this blog – and will be able to finally take some courses and spend more time on that hobby. After all, he will be spending less time in dialysis than he spends now working for some soul sucking jerks who don’t appreciate him at all.

So yes – it’s going to mean some changes, but I think they will be mostly for the good.

Unfortunately, the latter part of the week was spent caring for a severely ill dog. In the end there was nothing more we could do and he was clearly suffering, so on Sunday we put him out of his misery. We all miss Klyde and it will be a while before we are really okay around here again.

When we did get the Internet back on I made the wonderous and happy discovery that my Squidoo payment this month was about twice as large as my Google Adsense income! I admit it – I mostly spent it on some fun things for myself. I bought tokens at SandboxFarm and paid my friend Robert Sloan for a fantastic bit of art he created for me last month. When it arrives I’ll try and get a good photo or scan and I’ll tell you all about it then – but suffice to say, it’s really special and I love it already.

Speaking of Robert, we were chatting the other night and he has agreed to create a number of dinosaur coloring pages for Color-Your-Own.com. I am really excited because I draw really LAME dinosaurs and Robert draws GREAT dinosaurs. This will be the first time I have ever asked or even allowed another artist to contribute at Color-Your-Own.com so that’s a bit of a milestone. I’ll be paying him for the art and I’m sure it’s going to be a really good thing for both of us.

And speaking of Color-Your-Own.com, the coloring books are done. They’ve actually been done for a week but…yeah, anyway, AHEM – all that awaits now is for me to find a workable payment system that will let me sell them for a price I think makes sense and in a way that (I hope) you will be able to pay and download them instantly. I’ll look into that some more tonight.

Doing research today for Valentines Day coloring pages, I ran onto an interesting bit of Victorian trivia that I posted at Foovay’s Floozies.

About the last thing I accomplished last week online before we got cut off was a Squidoo lens on Finding Free Articles on the Internet. Yes, someone stole an article from me and was rude about it and I obsessed over it for a couple days and then wrote a nice, long article on how to correctly find and use free articles on the Internet, and further more, how to make money doing it. I hope someone benefits from my ten years of experience in learning to do just that. I also happened to notice at the time that one of my old domains is up for sale again and I still have the whole old website that used to be there on my hard drive! Sooner or later, much of the old “empire” is liable to return. Hopefully on a more profitable basis.

And while you may have missed me just a little bit – and yes, I missed my Internet friends, too – I did enjoy being home to enjoy the mule deer who came to visit during deer season. They seem to have figured out we are suckers here and no one is going to hurt them. And here is one of hubby’s photos now!

This is the email I got back from the organization that stole my article.

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 5:28 AM, Aaron Turpen wrote:

I’ve removed the article from the site. I honestly didn’t think it would be a big deal and I gave full attribution with a link-back (which is likely the only reason you even knew it was posted on our site) to you and your site.

At any rate, I’ve deleted it and won’t be visiting your site or using anything from it again.

Sorry for any offense. We are a small organization with no budget and little time. We currently have more animals than money to care for them and little prospect for income other than what we spend ourselves, which we can’t afford.

Good day,

Aaron Turpen
Director, Gateway’s Needy Animals

Let’s see – he insulted my intelligence and he is bitching at me for pointing out that they were STEALING from me. And, again, let me say that all they had to do was ASK PERMISSION to use the article. Well, at least I won’t have to worry about what they will steal next since they are blessing me with their absence.

Grrrrrrr

I did not need to open my email to discover a “pingback” to the article about Hoarders on this blog. I especially did not need to follow the link and discover my copyrighted article used without any permission or a request for permission on a blog FOR ANIMAL RESCUE ORGANIZATION.

Needless to say, had they politely – and legally – emailed and requested my permission I would gladly have given it. But no – they just ripped it off. I guess it is okay for a rescue association to steal.

I am not going to make this a clickable link because I do not want to give this blog any assistance in any way. You can see the theft here: http://gatewayanimals.org/2010/01/hoarders-%E2%80%93-a-pet-peeve/

How low can this world get? Charity organizations stealing from creative people – who also do pet rescue.

I guess it’s just a symptom of this whole societal thing where the work done by creative people is considered worthless and not worthy of pay or respect (and if that is the case then why are you stealing it?).

Go ahead steal from me. I’m out of cat food and my groceries this week consisted of a 10 lb bag of potatoes and a big bag of salad. This so we can afford the gas to take the husband to his kidney doctor so they can tell us if he is going to have to start dialysis three times a week. Yes, steal from me – I can so afford it.

Summer Fey Foovay