11.30.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:36 am by Administrator
I have had a busy week. I picked up the kittens Monday and spent the rest of the week refereeing them. Stuart’s cat, the black female (still no names for either of them yet) was spayed, and she didn’t feel too good for several days. My cat, on the other hand, had no testicles for them to remove (still not sure if that’s because he was neutered before being picked up by the shelter, or if he has undescended testicles—he has to go back in a month to be checked again), so he has been feeling good. In fact, he’s pretty wild. I’m thinking about naming him Grendel, Jr. because he likes to run and pounce so much. My mother bought Grendel a yellow fuzzy ball on a spring that cats knock back and forth. Grendel always used it like that, although he would hit it so hard the base would get knocked over. Not Jr., though; he’s been systematically ripping the fluff out of the ball. There’s yellow lint all in the floor of the spare bathroom. I also have to beat him off black kitty because he plays too rough with her and she doesn’t like that.
I have put a sale on all my items for Christmas: 20% off all orders of $20 or more (excluding S&H). I also have found some jewelry that I made up when I was still crafting, and I’m going to add it to my clearance section. I have had a few clearance sales in the past week, so, seeing how I have some products anyways, I don’t think it would hurt to bulk that category up some. After all, everyone’s going to be looking for deals this year as they tone down their Christmas budget (I know I’ve cut ours by about half; I’m going to make most people’s gifts).
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11.21.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:03 pm by Administrator
Stuart and I went to the shelter today and spent several hours. First, we made half a dozen passes around the cat enclosure, looking at all of them and reading the information on them. Then we held two juvenile cats and three adult cats, each in turn, to see how well they responded. My husband held a 6 month old black cat with a single dot of white on its chest. She had a sweet face and soft fur, and settled down quickly and just laid there and let him pet her while she purred. He was instantly attached. I, however, could see this is a cat I’d not get any time with.
The other juvenile we held was also 6 months old. He was napping in his litter box while we were walking around looking at cats, and I found this immediately endearing. He’s also orange and striped, like Grendel, except his belly and legs are white, whereas Grendel was orange all over but for a narrow strip of white up his belly. They fed them shortly after we arrived, and this perked him right up. He ate a little, then started trying to bury his food dish. In the process, he knocked it over and spilled it. So it’s really not going to get buried now, unless he… pulls the towel over all of it. He spent an hour being most amusing, swatting at the staffer in the room when he came close, and chasing his food all over the cube. He also had a funny habit of picking one piece of kibble up with his paw and eating it off his paw. He didn’t try to eat me when I held him, and he purred as loudly as the black kitten, but his eyes were everywhere. I saw him as a junior to Grendel.
So, after we had it narrowed down to those two, we walked around the cat area several more times and hemmed and hawed. My husband finally said, since I was going to be home with it all day, I should get the one I wanted. I knew, though, that he really, really wanted the black cat. So I asked him if we couldn’t have both? His and hers cats? He took to that idea pretty quickly, so he’s got the quiet, loving cat, and I have the wee beastie. (Come to think of it, my first cat, Sylvester, was a bit of a beast; I guess I like tough, independent cats; probably because I’m somewhat allergic and I can’t love on them for long periods of time without getting my nose in a twist; I want a cat to love a bit, then get down.)
So, we’ve paid their fees and they’re going to the vet Monday to get fixed, and then I can bring them home Monday evening. I’ll put pictures up on my website next week.
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11.20.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:18 pm by Administrator
No sign of the beast anywhere. I’m convinced that whoever has been prowling around here found him out Saturday and killed him just for the hell of it. After all, someone killed our neighbor’s dog, and it was in a pen. My husband doesn’t like to think that, however, even though he is equally convinced that Grendel is gone for good. I think he prefers to think that someone took him, although logic would say if it was anyone local, he only needed to escape out the door to run back to our house, and if it was some stranger just passing through, why on earth did they keep him for more than a few blocks? Surely he ate them up. He wasn’t Grendel Beast, the Flesh-Eater for nothing.
It’s been terribly lonely around here and quite depressing. I haven’t made anything, even though I have an apron cut out and laying on my sewing table, plus Christmas presents to be making. I also have some jewelry that I made up years ago that I need to add to my clearance offerings (I figure that in this economy, it would be wise to have some clearance offerings), but I haven’t taken the pictures or uploaded them. I’ve just moped around the house and tried some writing to take my mind off the fact that I’ve been laid off from my second job, which was doorman for the cat.
My husband and I are going tomorrow to the shelter to get another cat. It’s just too empty around here without a pet, especially as I am here all day alone. As much as I adore kittens (funny, really, I am a softie with a kitten but not at all with a baby), I think we will probably get an adult cat to save it from the chop. I was in there the other day, looking for Grendel on a snowball’s chance, and they’re pitiful, looking at you and meowing and following you as you walk by. They all just want some love. And it’s like they KNOW what will happen if no one takes them home quick enough. I couldn’t work in that place; I’d be bringing cats home every night. And probably dogs. I like dogs too. I’d want to save everyone of them. But, geez, there’s a constant, never-ending stream.
What’s worse, there are some there with notes that they are owner surrenders. Some owners will get rid of an animal if it doesn’t mesh with the new baby, for example, but I guarantee that most surrenders are from people in financial trouble. We’re not rich people, but I can’t imagine giving my cat up to a kill shelter. We’ve got more crap than our house can contain right now; I’d sell a lot of that to keep my cat fed, and I’d do a lot to place him with someone myself. But, who knows? Maybe these people are looking at living in their cars. Maybe they figure the cat or dog has a better chance of getting adopted before it’s put down than it has of continuing to get food if it stays with its owner.
Anyways, if you’re thinking about a pet, please consider adopting one from your local humane society to keep it from be killed. Here we had a cat we loved, that I can only assume was killed for the sadistic fun of it, and there are loads of living cats and dogs out there being killed just because they lack an owner. What a waste.
Remember your St. Francis of Assisi, and do charity unto the furry and feathery and scaly creatures of the world. In these hard economic times, they need charity too.
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11.16.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:37 pm by Administrator
For the past several days, we’ve had some sort of static on our phone line, and our internet connection has suffered. To the point that we were connecting at 19kbs and less. It was ugly. Took me 30 minutes or more to open four e-mails, looking for written directions the other night. Needless to say, I haven’t been able to post to my blog. What a blessing to be running at 24kbs. And to think, just a week ago, I was complaining about that! How little I knew about how much worse it could be.
A lot has happened in the past week. Or, rather, this weekend. I was still getting over my cold earlier this week, so I didn’t accomplish much. I managed to cut out an apron, but it’s been sitting on my sewing table for a couple of days now.
I went out Friday to run errands, and saw one whole corner of our electric rope fence was on the ground. I put the car back in the driveway and went out with a bag of post clips, because some of them have been known to break. But it wasn’t broken post clips this time; the ground told a different story. Someone ran off the road, went through out fence (between posts), and came to a stop a couple of feet from our forsythia bush. Then they backed up, dragging a part of our rope behind them, then got back on the road and went their merry way. Not one thought to the fact that there was an animal contained within that pasture and that it could get out. It wasn’t until somewhere around 11am that I went out, and it surely happened late at night or early morning, so it’s a wonder that the horse didn’t get out of the pasture. I suppose the only thing that kept her in was the fact that the fence was still on and when it’s on the ground like that, it makes a loud popping noise as it grounds out and she’s shown before that she’s afraid of that noise. That was surely all that kept her from stepping over the rope on the ground and ending up a block down the road sniffing the neighbor’s horses.
Lucky for us, electric rope is quite resilient. This corner was near a gate (the rope ties into a plastic gate handle and hooks onto a loop of rope on the other side) and one of our gate handles was broken due to the stress, but none of the rope, clips, posts or the other two gate handles were damaged, so it just cost us a $3 gate handle and 15 minutes or so to get it put back together. Can’t say that about a wooden fence that someone’s run through.
Saturday we went to a crafting party at a friend’s house. I got someone to show me how to knit in the round and I have been practicing today. Now that I know how to make knitting go in a circle, I can knit in the round just fine. I even practiced increases and decreases without a problem. Still, I find the extra needles get in the way, and I can still knit faster flat. I see no reason not to continue to knit my Monmouth caps flat, especially as they have a double-thickness brim, which is a bit tricky on just two needles; I can’t imagine working it on four.
Today there has been good and bad news. Good news is that someone who bought from me before has put in an order for 5 things, which is my first sale in well over a month. And I’ve had three different people on Etsy ask me within the past week how I managed to get my advertisement on MySpace, which means it’s getting seen. Bad news is that we can’t find the cat. He went out yesterday morning as we left for the party, but wasn’t to be seen when we came home last night. And he’s not been seen all day. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday morning, and it’s not like him to miss a meal. He’s been gone for some hours before, but never 24 hours. He’s fixed, so he shouldn’t be roaming a large area. I went out around the property and called for him late this afternoon, but didn’t see him or hear him. He has been known to get stuck in trees, but he always yowled quite loudly, so we were able to find him. We don’t know where he is or what might have happened to him.
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11.08.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:41 pm by Administrator
Well, my cold has gotten worse, so I’ve accomplished little, but I am excited about what I have managed to do.
I mentioned, a couple of weeks ago, of writing articles (lenses) on Squidoo. I thought the only real benefit of them was that I would get some link connections, and therefore get my website ranked a bit higher in search engines (Search Engine Optimization).
But I found out, reading someone else’s lens, that you can actually make MONEY from your lenses. I can promote my products in my Etsy store, and make sales that way, and I can recommend books and music on Amazon—of which I get a commission fee if someone buys through the link—but, the part that I didn’t know about until just a couple of days ago, is that Squidoo divvies up 50% of its advertising revenue among the people who write lenses. Your share of the revenue is based on how well your lenses are ranked, and how many hits they have gotten over the past month. And those monies are disbursed once a month.
Coinciding with this discovery—that I can make money without having to hope that someone will buy something I’ve recommended—is a huge increase in traffic to my earliest lenses. I mean, I went from having 8 hits over the course of two weeks to suddenly having 45 hits just this week. Apparently it takes 2-4 weeks for Google and other search engines’ spiders to crawl and find your lens. Once they do, it starts appearing in searches—thus the sudden explosion of views for a few of my lenses.
Now that I know that people will eventually be able to find my lenses, and now that I know I will make a tiny bit of money for everyone that looks at my lenses, I am highly motivated to write some more! I love to write anyways, and used to wile away boring days at work writing about anything that interested me at the time. Now, for the first time really since college, I have a list of ideas of things to write about.
Squidoo is not just a marketing tool for my website, but a source of cash of its own. And with these increasingly desperate economic times, I’ll take cash from whatever source I can find it (it’s not coming from my store at the moment).
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11.05.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:03 am by Administrator
Well, my rise to great business heights is going to have to take a slight detour as I have got a bit of a cold this week. While working from home makes it easier to work around sickness in a way you cannot when working outside the home, being sick still lowers your productivity. And I’ve been getting in something like 10+ hour days, 4 days a week, with several hours the other three days a week. That’s not going to happen when I need multiple naps during the day to make up for the terrible sleep I got the night before.
I was just looking out the window behind my computer monitor, idly watching Infanta grazing, when I noticed something on the ground behind her, moving. A bird? So close to her? No, it’s a turtle. I put on some clothes and go out to rescue it. Not from Infanta, and not even from the cat, but from the road; he was making for it fast (even being a turtle). About this time of year, the roads around here are full of box turtles, going wherever box turtles go to hibernate. I’m careful to drive around turtles in the road, but some of the punks that speed up and down this road would not care if they ran over a nice specimen of a turtle. So I went and got it, let Infanta and Grendel both have a sniff of it, took a picture of it, and then put it on a rock facing into the ravine and woods behind our house. Hopefully that will look appealing to him and he will climb down into the rocks and find a place to hibernate for the winter.
My husband informed me a while back that turtles are primarily water animals, while tortoises are primarily land animals, and that despite being called a “box turtle,” what we really have around here are box tortoises.
I had added a Google and Amazon ad each to my main page, to see if I couldn’t draw up a bit of revenue, but I’ve had to get rid of both because one or both of them was slowing my SiteBuilder program down to the point I couldn’t make changes to my home page. I could make changes to all of my other pages, but my home page would allow me to do about three keystrokes or mouse clicks and then it would lock up for about 30 seconds. It was intolerable given the amount of changes I need to make to that page weekly. One or both of them must have been trying to access their sites on the web while I was working on that page, causing the hang-up. If I was running on something faster, it may not even have been noticeable, but it surely is on dial-up.
I donated two of my necklaces to my high school, St. Andrew’s, for their auction this weekend. I’m really hoping to be feeling better so I can go Saturday. I could get in some good networking and hand out many business cards, especially with the help of my stepmother, who will be there; she’s one of those people who has the gift of being able to talk to anyone as if she’s known them for years. Funny enough, there are usually a lot of Episcopalians to be found around this Episcopalian school, and they are one of my prime clienteles when it comes to religious goods. I could also get some help when it comes to finding out what people like in vestments, and maybe I will be able to find the answer to a very pressing question that I’ve had for some time: what’s inside a bishop’s miter? I mean, how does it keep its shape? Wire frame, or buckram, or something else I haven’t even considered? When I know what supports them, then I can make one. There are a couple of surviving medieval ones with a nice bit of beadwork on them, and I’d like to base my creation off one of those.
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11.02.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:17 am by Administrator
I am much accomplished! I finished my psalms last night and proofed them and uploaded them today. I also finished getting all of my stuff uploaded to eCrater yesterday. So I had a productive day yesterday, even before you take into account that I went to the grocery store, the library and I opened a new bank account.
In addition to picking up my usual collection of books on business, I took out Ben Franklin’s autobiography. The book I got a few weeks ago on Ben Franklin’s principals for business made me interested in reading the autobiography for myself. I’m finding it pretty interesting, although it’s not exactly fast reading. For one thing, the editor has left the original 18th century spellings, which are not as difficult as some I’ve seen from that time, but they make it interesting. Also included are contractions favored at the time. It is not generally known that contractions were exceedingly popular in the middle ages and they have been slowly dying out since, until we are left with only a few standard ones. The man who did the “Connections” series pointed out in one episode that medieval people would have found our tendency to write out complete words all the time very odd. Apparently there were several forms of short hand in the middle ages. This makes a good deal of sense if you consider that paper was made from animal skins (parchment) and was expensive. If you were to write anything, you would want to write as much as possible in as small a space as possible. Apparently in Franklin’s time it was not uncommon to shorten the suffix “ed” to just “’d”. So that “walked” becomes “walk’d”. Another one I just ran across shortened “friends” to “frds” with the “ds” written in superscript. You most commonly see this sort of thing on tombstones, where “William” will be shortened to “Wm” with the “m” often in superscript. Hey, when you’re paying per letter to carve that headstone….
I’ve watched several documentaries on Franklin because I’ve been a fan of his since I was a kid. I am glad that I have picked up his autobiography, because I’m definitely getting a different interpretation of him than some of the people who have previously commented on him. I found the same thing happening with Margery Kempe. Margery Kempe—whom I one day hope to introduce to my website through a lecture piece—was a 14th century woman given to ecstatic religious visions and conversations. Even in her own time, people didn’t know quite what to think of her. Some people loved her and thought her a saint, while others reviled her and tried to charge her with heresy. Modern scholars often take a biased view against her, I have found, thinking that she was suffering from some sort of schizophrenia. They greatly color retellings of her life with their own biases against her. When I actually read what she had dictated about her own life, I found her to be much more mild, sane and rational than anyone had described her. Both cases thus proving that it’s better to go to the source than to take someone’s word on it.
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