Foovay’s Cauldron

Archive for the ‘updates’ Category

One step forward, two steps back.

We got approved for Food Stamps. This is a big deal for me as I have a real hang up about not being able to feed everyone.

The fistula did not take. Whatever that means. We have to go see the surgeon again and “discuss alternatives”.

I got a job. I quit the job. It was an awful job – and I’ve had some awful jobs. The sexual harassment from my trainer did not help.

Seems like all we do is go to doctor’s appointments and various social offices, round and round and chasing our tails. Bleh.

But I do manage now and then to do a new Squidoo lens for the Get Cracking Challenge. You can see all the new lenses listed here. At this rate, I might find myself accidentally in the 100 club this quarter!

I did some updating at the Free Clipart Blog that I hope will make it easier to add new clip art and possibly get it indexed and make a bit more cash on it. I also switched to a new theme I really like

The rest of this evening will be spent (I hope) working on blogs.

That’s all I can think of at the moment. LOL. Blessedbe

Indeed, spring has sprung. I offer as evidence the ground squirrel we saw on the ranch yesterday. They are so small and so fast that to get a photo to share with you I’m going to have to spend a sunny day lurking near a burrow. This is also probably true about getting a photo of one of our fascinating little rock squirrels that have begun scampering around the rocks near the lake. Certain populations of these Rock Squirrels have a genetic anomaly that, once they shed into the summer coat, causes them to be half black, and half the silvery gold agouti that is the normal color. They look as if their head and shoulders have been dipped into an inkwell! I heard a Red-winged Blackbird in town just yesterday. They don’t usually visit us at the ranch – not enough water here – but we may be treated to a fly-by visit from their cousins the Yellow-headed Blackbird. Earlier this week a huge flock of Sandhill Cranes flew over, circled a while, and left. I suspect they had hoped to stop at Jornada Lake for a snack and a rest. However, thanks to the road building and spaceport crews, this year we have no lake, even though we have had some rain and even snow.

My friend the juvenile Sharp-shinned Hawk has posed for some more photos – this time sitting on top of the brush pile waiting for something small enough to eat to dash out. Now THAT’s lurking! I’ll share the full photo first so you can see how thoroughly he blends into his background when he is being still. He’s right on top of the brush pile.

And now cropped just to show the hawk:

He really outdid himself yesterday though. I went out to feed the chickens for the evening. My eyes were on the rooster – who is feeling rather crabby as I don’t let them out to free range on cloudy days so they haven’t been out for a day or two. So I didn’t even notice the young hawk was on top of the chicken pen until he took off from right above my head. I was about to say something to him about not eating my chickens when another visitor flew up from under my feet. A cottontop (Texas Scaled) Quail had been inside with the chickens. When I came in, the quail flushed out through the side of the pen – and the hawk was instantly in hot pursuit. Great – now not only does he think we are pals, he thinks I’m going to flush game for him! Glad to be of use

Speaking of cloudy days, which means a bit of spring rain now and then out here on the high desert – hubby got lucky and caught a picture of this magnificent double rainbow that arched over the far end of our ranch this week. It was a perfect complete arch, both ends touching the ground on the inner rainbow, right at sunset. It was so pretty when I went outside the horses and mule had even turned to look at it. Probably watching the fairies dancing around the end of the rainbow.

Of course, traditionally there should be a leprechaun and a pot of gold down there. Maybe I should have hopped on Moses and galloped down to see!We could use a pot of gold around here!

Dover sent me their sample this week and it was all about the Irish – irish folklore and fairy tales and leprechauns and celtic coloring stuff. Drool. I was so inspired I did a new Squidoo lens about Irish Fairy Tales and Folklore, and updated the St. Patricks Day Coloring Pages and Coloring Books, Leprechauns, and Fairy Tales.

I’ve been taking pictures of our beautiful storms and sunsets, trying to get a nice collection to chose from for my Squidoo lens devoted to the New Mexico Sky, and also Maxfield Parrish. Now they aren’t done, so those links probably don’t work right this minute – but try them later today, okay? LOL. Here’s one of the photos though:

The hubby had his surgery Thursday to install the fistula in his arm for dialysis. Everything went just great and we were even home early. They did tell him not to use the arm until it heals – and of course when it heals they’ll begin dialysis. So it is quite unlikely he is going to be able to return to work as a cook. Despite the fact he cannot work, Disability says he isn’t disabled, call AFTER he starts dialysis. *rolling eyes*

Luckily, I had already started job hunting and have gotten a call from one job already which would be only two days a week – the weekend. Actually, that is ideal since I have to drive hubby to Dr.s appointments and so forth and they’re all during the week. I also took the test to work for the Census and did well, so they are supposed to call me Monday. Until he begins dialysis I can work both – and will. We need every penny we can get.

Up until I am working, I will do my best to hang in there with the Get Cracking Lens a Day Challenge – so even if I don’t get here to the blog, you might want to check in on my New Lenses for the Get Cracking Challenge list.

Yesterday we had to drive to town for a errand, and did we luck out on the way home! A small herd of mule deer were grazing right next to the road. We got some great photos. Here’s my favorite:

When we got home and got them on the computer, we saw a deer BEHIND that mesquite bush that we had not even noticed while taking the photos – LOL!

You can click on any of these BTW and go to the Flickr page and see the bigger ones – this new camera takes huge photos. When I get time I’m going to mosey through, tag things better and license them for use.

It’s been a good week since I added any new coloring pages. Job hunting, Doctors, stress… but all things considered we are doing well. I will do my best to keep my little online empire going and growing, but it doesn’t earn enough to support us and I can no longer depend on the husbands income.

Oh! I was so gobsmacked – someone sent me a donation for the artist for use of my free public domain clipart! Not only did it make me jump up and down with joy, it made it possible for me to pay for another month of the downloadable digital coloring book shop. Thank you!!

I also updated my homepage/business card at Summer Fey Foovay.com and added a new binder at my Zazzle store. Don’t forget that the Pagan holiday ecards I used to have up at fre-ecards.com are now at my Zazzle store as paper greeting cards and stamps. Ostara is coming!

And I wanted to share my hubby’s idea of a day of “take it easy, don’t use that arm for anything” – he fixed the kitchen faucet, did the dishes, cooked dinner, trimmed some mesquite bushes that had grown into the driveway, and took those photos of the deer. All one-handed. He’s a pretty great guy, huh?

Thanks for hanging in with me. I have a lot I hope to get done today so I gotta go.

Summer Fey Foovay

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

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!

@Rivethead Rasta – one of my favorite Twitter pals – shared this link to the 20 Scifi Movies We’re Most Excited to see in 2010. I don’t know about you, but I think I’m just going to print it out and check them off as I get them

I was even more excited, however, to see that they are making John Carter, Warlord of Mars into a movie. I am a serious Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, and although he is best known for Tarzan – my personal favorite of his series was John Carter of Mars. I am also a huge Pixar fan, and it does seem just too perfect as the medium for four armed ten foot tall Martians to be brought to life.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten the ,a href=”http://color-your-own.com”>coloring books organized and sent off to the magic software man who also happens to run eBook Connections, an ebook store. I am eagerly anticipating their return and also trying to figure out how I’m going to be selling them.

Here at home we’ve had some rather distressing news about my hubby’s health. We are still pending more information before any big decisions or changes can be made but it seems likely that there will be some changes. We are trying to look at it all in a positive light and it just might turn out that way. Who knows? We don’t yet – not until next week.

I’m off to do some dishes and then settle in to the tedious job of updating the coloring pages site one page at a time. HoHum.

O – I added a new original short fairy tale at Demented-pixie.com as well as another of the Victorian age short stories over at Foovay’s Floozies. As life settles into a more humdrum routine again after the holidays, I’m sure I’ll start getting more of the fiction blogs going properly.

I also created a new Squidoo lens that I hope will save bloggers, crafters, artists, webdesigners and other folks like me a lot of wasted time Public Domain Clipart has all my personal favorite sources for public domain clipart that you can use.

That pretty well catches us up!

My first big job of they day was to download the entire Color-Your-Own.com coloring pages website in preparation for two more big jobs. Lets call them A and B under 1.

A is a major change in advertising and/or how I make a bit of money from that website. You can read a nice, long thoughtful post about that on the coloring pages blog here – and if you are interested in making money on the internet with your creative work or with affilliate marketing you might find it a bit educational. All my personal experience and YMMV of course.

B)A very nice man named Jim who runs eBook Connections.com emailed me to offer his help. He has written software that can resize and convert images into ebooks. I sent him ten images and he sent back the ebook. I printed it out. I did happy dances at how beautifully it turned out. We are now working things out to have the drawings at Color-Your-Own.com converted to ebooks divided up by subject that you can download for a nominal fee.

So – before doing either of those massive projects, I wanted to download a complete copy of the website before the big changes. This is going on as we speak. Blog. Read. Whatever.

This task has NOT been simplified by the unexplained fact that electricity at the ranch is going on and off today. I can’t begin to express, in fact, what a royal PITA this has been on several levels – not the least of which is that it is about 40 degrees outside with a north wind and the heat keeps going off and staying off…

So during an electricless period (is that a word?) I started another project here at the house. Last week we brought home my piles of art, craft, jewelry making and sewing supplies to go with the art, jewelry, and sewing supplies I got for winter solstice. There is now a vast unorganized pile of the aforementioned supplies in the living room. I have one shelf area in our bedroom devoted more or less to that sort of thing and it, too, is very unorganized and messy. So I emptied the shelf and made categorized piles (at least). They are now scattered across the bed courtesy of Ms. Pearl who is now contently asleep in the middle of them. Sometime today – probably while I am without electricity – I will attempt to put all of the supplies on the shelves in some sort of organized manner so that I can gaily make things this winter.

I made a few things last night – wanna see?

Betta Fish Coloring Page

Well, okay, first I sat back with my great new lap desk and colored with colored pencil one of the freshly printed out coloring pages – a Betta Fish.

Hematite spiral pendant

This is a hematite with a spiral pendant on a long cord. Sorry the photo is so unfocused. I wear a lot of hematite for grounding. I probably ought to be wearing this one now

man's choker necklace

I created this choker for my roommate. No telling if he will wear it. If not, I’ll probably sell it somewhere. It has a turquoise pendant and another stone I can’t remember the name of now – but the reasoning is it will bring good luck to a male wearer.

Lepidolite pendant

Sorry for the bad focus again – this lepidolite pendant with a coyote and a moon and star was meant for me. I want to put it on a choker so it can lay on my skin right below my throat, but don’t currently have the right materials and findings for that. An odd thing happened when I put it on a long chain – it began acting like a pendulum. Lepidolite is supposed to help counteract depression and I’ve used them for years. This is my last big piece. Hope I can find some more. Meanwhile, I’m not sure if this will get to be a choker or a pendulum for magic or oracular type work.

And last but hardly least – here is a photo of the snow on the Sierra Mountains at sunset a few days ago. This is the view out my back window. No wonder I love it here.

Snow on the Sierra Mountains at sunset

And now for the laughter. As you may imagine I have been a little impatient and grouchy this morning. However, while trying to be patient as the website downloads I did some blog reading and ran onto this post about a mini-drama going on over at Amazon. The comments are really the part you got to read. They are hilarious. I laughed my head off at the ones about the book’s title being a good name for a fancy show dog – because it’s so true. I feel for the author in question – but there are times when you should just walk away from Internet wars. And that time comes before you offer to sic the FBI on people who disagree with you.

So that’s what I am doing today. Hope you are still enjoying a fantastic holiday.

Oh wait – one more thing. When I’m done here I think I’m going to put up a new story and pic at Foovay’s Floozies. If you love Victoriana, or my adult fiction, or are just curious – check it out

Blessedbe