I bet the librarians cringe when I check out books.  I have some weird tastes in reading materials.  I go in fits and spells over my subject of choice at any one time.  Once for about three months straight, all I read were books about climbing mountains, then it was heartwarming tales of dogs and after that the lives of smoke jumpers.  I’m sure that my recent checkouts have them secretly thinking, what kind of nutjob checks out  Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers, by Mary Roach, and at the same time Gastronomalies:  Questionable Culinary Creations from the Golden Age of American Cookery, by James Lileks.  I have to say the stretch between dead people and casseroles from the 1950’s are not as far apart as one might think!  I just have to say read em’, read em’ both…they both made me a little sick to my stomach, but they also made me at one point or another laugh so hard I nearly peed my pants….what’s more to love in a book than that!

At least that’s how it feels here in the midwest in July!  In a vain attempt to keep cool over the weekend while we were in St. Louis, the boys, James and I as well as about 100 of our closest relatives decided to go to the waterpark.  Okay, well not quite 100, but enough that at one point everyone on the lazy river inner tube ride was related to me in some way, shape or form.

I have to admit that the waterpark is not my cup of tea.  There are way way too many kids, way way too much jiggly flesh, way way too much potential for future melanomas, but I find consolation in the fact that the waterslides are almost like a roller coaster if I squeeze my eyes tightly shut…only wetter…much wetter.  In fact, I am waiting impatiently for my youngest to be just tall enough to go on the big slides and then the whole family can partake of the stomach churning 45 second rush right before 10 gallons of water fly up your nose during the landing!  Yeehaw!!!

Now they have this whacked out surf pool wave rider thing that I just had to check out.  A good tip off might have been that there were no girls, no women whatsoever in line to ride on this stationary surfing monstrosity.  Not to be outdone by my BIL and husband, my sister in law and I hopped in line behind them and one by one as the bodies of those misfortunates ahead of us flew off of the boogie board, I realized that I just might have made a serious error in judgement.

As my turn came up I walked, to the edge of the wave pool and in an attempt to look cool, I dove right in and quite nearly missed my board entirely.  For a brief second as I hung onto the board for dear life, I thought..hmmmm this might be okay after all.  Until, I realized that I was no longer on my board, in fact I was no longer on the wave, but had been spat out the top of the surf pool like a waterlogged rat.  Now the water pressure and current is so strong that when I figured out that I was no longer boogie boarding, I also realized that I couldn’t stand up either.  So after throwing myself forward to get out of the current, in the process, spraining my big toe, I managed to stand up and turn around to face all of my onlooking family as well as about 100 other people at the snack bar, the kiddie pool and the brave souls waiting in line for their turn at the torture device.

It was then that I realized that not only was everyone I know cracking up with a slightly embarrassed look on their faces, but that I had been the victim of a wardrobe malfunction of the Janet Jackson kind!  Now I had a sprained toe and some seriously sprained pride!  I’m sure it will be one of those stories that will never die either, like the horse and the beaver or James and the nunchucks.

So, I’ll say it again, the waterpark is not my cup of tea, or coffee or boozy beverage…I think I’ll just stay in the shade and read from now on!

I cannot believe that I am the mom of an eight year old and a five year old.  When did they get to be so big.

My five year old informed me that I was not to call him “baby” any longer.  His reasoning was that if he was old enough to start kindergarten in the fall then he must be medium and not little.  Preschoolers were little. Preschoolers were babies and he is not a baby!  Never you mind that he was in preschool until LAST MONTH….nope he wasn’t a big kid like his brother and he wasn’t a baby!  Therefore he must be medium!

Pretty darned good reasoning, don’t you think?

Have you ever done something so ridiculously stupid, that you look back and think how in the hell do I manage to get through each day!  Somehow, some way….I managed to erase all of my bookmarks from Firefox.  Then I cried….cried for days over the long lost links that my brain had tucked away in the depths of it’s giant unorganized filing cabinet of useless crap!

Yes, that included the link to get into my wordpress account.  So, that’s where I’ve been, but here’s where I’m back and hopefully this week we can get reacquainted and I can show off my new nose piercing and all the other good stuff swirling around this crazy household!

Time, time, time, see whats become of me
While I looked around
For my possibilities
I was so hard to please
But look around, leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter

Just a little shout out to good old Simon and Garfunkel there, but seriously some evenings I sit back and think where did the day go? That is this week’s topic on Flaming Hot….how much time do you spend doing things other than create to run your business?

I seem to spend much more time promoting, blogging, photographing, editing, ordering supplies and listing new beads and jewelry than I do actually making the new beads and jewelry! I would say that for every hour I spend torching I spend at least two doing other bead business related tasks. Some days, I am sure that I spend 3 hours per every hour torching even though I would certainly like the reverse to be true. One day I’ll be more streamlined and less scattered (well I can dream can’t I?), but in reality it takes much more than just making the beads to make the moola and whether we like it or not, to be successful, you have to put in that non-creative time!

I have a little vent here…it’s spam!  No, not the kind that jiggles on a plate as a gelatinous  shrine to  unidentifiable pork bits, but the kind that glogs up my inbox and gets my email account blocked from my service provider.  Seriously folks….I don’t need cheap meds, a penis enlargement or nude photos of Britney!  I am not stupid enough to click that link for a reeel cheep Rolex!  I just need my email to work efficiently and to blast the spammers out of their desk chairs with a cannon barrage of flaming email of which they have never seen the likes!  Am I a bit irritated!  You betcha!

This week’s topic over on is all about diversification to sell more and boost the bottom line!

I’ll be the first to admit it, that the ability to be more diverse in my sales venues has pretty much been my weakness. I am a serial monogamist when it comes to selling venues. I started off 4 years ago on Ebay, made the jump to JustBeads and now Etsy. I don’t sell locally at any bead shops or boutiques. I don’t do shows with any sort of regularity, unless you count once a year regular. I don’t do home shows. I even have a hard time promoting my own website!

With all those dirty little secrets admitted, I am trying! I am exploring more venues like iCraft and recently was involved in a trunk show locally, with plans to do another one in June. Up until this past year or so, I only did bead sets and focals and didn’t really even make jewelry. Now, I am spending more time making finished, yet affordable pieces that sell and the cha-ching in my paypal account certainly makes me want to find new and better venues in which to sell my work!

My love of gnomes is once again revealed in its full glory! Isn’t this the coolest gnome stool? Designed by Philippe Starck, it may be the coolest gnome EVAH!!!! This groovy stool and companion pieces are available at Hive.

I wonder if James would protest too much if I suddenly replaced the end tables with a pair of these guys?

To quote dictionary.com the meaning of the word lest is:

Unless of course you are a lampworker with nothing to fear, but the siren’s song of the water bucket. Then lest means Lampwork Etc Street Team. A street team is a group of like minded artists sharing promotion, sales, and business ideas on the online sales site Etsy.

You can find works by the LEST group by plugging in LEST in your search bar on Etsy and we will be having a team sale running April 1-7. Check it out!

Snapshots, pictures, photographs….I never realized what goes into marketing and selling items that your customer can’t pick up and fondle, caress or lick! That is until I started selling my work online and my oh my what a learning experience that has been!

I started out photographing my beads with a hand-me-down camera from my MIL (thank you Cookie), but it had no macro setting. Getting a decent pic was pretty difficult.  I researched and read and stalked the dpreview site for all the talk about the digital revolution. I haunted the Ritz photo sales guys and all those kids working at Best Buy, trying to find just the right camera for my and my budget!

I finally had made my decision and went and ordered the Olympus Camedia C-60 Zoom with super macro! My baby, my pride and joy, my beloved Oly with the lithium rechargeable battery and 6.1 mega-pixels of love! I drove my childrend through the cold December in an overheating van 45 miles to get my little darling! It was love…..an unrequited love though as the Oly didn’t love me!

I read some more! I built a cumbersome lightbox with pvc pipes and white foam core…this proved to be too cumbersome (read, I kept knocking it over and it would take me an hour to set it back up). So then I found a cheap light tent on Ebay, I got a copy of Photoshop Elements 2.0. I took pictures outside, inside, on white, on gray, on slate, on glass…until that fateful day that Gabe started kindergarten.

On that beautiful autumn morning, my darling child #2 grabbed my 8.2 ounces of cinematic sweetness and chucked it across the room! I truly believe he was trying to give me the thing to take a picture of his brother heading off to the school bus for the first time, but instead my C-60 was dead.

Dead, so very dead that it had to go back to Olympus for a 2 month and over 200 buck restoration. So the hunt was on again and this time with seriously limted funds as I had a huge repair bill for my baby as well as the need for a new snapper. After all it is pretty darned difficult to sell stuff online with no photos…..I guess I could sketch them, but I don’t think my customers would get an accurate representation of my work!

So, I went with a less expensive model of Olympus…the D525 Zoom, which has served me well as the original camera came back to me and after about 4 months of clicking away, it began to eat memory cards for no apparent reason. My beloved Oly C-60 had betrayed me once again and now the love has gone completely!

Fortunately for me, the cheaper Olympus does its job and does it fairly well as I take tons of pictures and then spend hours editing, reviewing, color balancing and cropping before my work is ever seen online, but sadly I’m not as attached to it as I was the D525. Maybe, the next camera and I will have a cosmic connection…maybe a Canon this time around or a Fuji….I”ll know the right one when I see it!