Apathy or Just Chaos???

So my beady friends and anyone else who may have stumbled across my blog,

I must apologize!  I must apologize with all sincerity for the fact that I haven’t posted here in months!  Now, I know that some blogs that you read just drift away…a post here, a post there like a stream that is slowly running dry.  I know I’ve read those blogs, thinking “today there might just be an update!”   Only to be dissapointed until one day you realize that the author must have grown tired of writing and become lazy or apathetic regarding their blog.

I can assure you that is not the case here!  In my case it has been CHAOS that has reared its ugly head.  Let me find the definintion…here we go Dictionary.com defines chaos as:

A state of utter confusion or disorder;  a total lack of confusion or order.

Yup, that pretty much sums it up!  Since I last blogged in the fall..the following things have happened:

• I went back to work
• I lost my father to cancer
• I had strep throat
• My kids had strep throat
• My mom came to stay with us for the winter (trust me this was enough chaos for a lifetime!)
• My mom’s large dog came to stay with us for the winter
• My mom went home from her 2 month visit
• Her dog did not (the gift that keeps on giving…large clumps of fur and suspiciously greener spots in my yard!)
• I had strep throat
• My kids had strep throat
• Cub Scouts
• PTA
• Church
• oh my I almost forgot….my bead business and all it entails
• and finally a little more strep throat.

So,  in all of the chaos and disorder in my house this past 6 months, my blog, despite my best efforts did not get updated.  Dear readers, I promise to do better!   I have to because gosh, I’ve had way too much funny stuff happen this year that I really must share!

Green Eyed Monster

Susan Sheehan at Flaming Hot posed this question:

Do You Want To Be Me?  What is so cool about you people are envious?

Wow what a tough question!

I’ve been fortunate enough to have done some cool things like be in a couple of commercials in my hometown or my love of public speaking….many people are fearful of speaking in public, but I love it.  I don’t think as a beadmaker, most people would not be envious of my ability, since my work is pretty basic stuff.  Be that as it may, I do have high standards for the quality of my work and if I’m not satisfied with it, then into the flower bed it goes!  I’m pretty fortunate that I’ve been able to make beads for the past five years and stay home with my kids.  Not everyone has that opportunity and now that I’m back to work as the assistant librarian for two different elementary schools, I’m still pretty lucky because it is a job I adore (in addition to bead making of course)

It goes without saying that my dear, sweet, smart, sexy husband and my little boys are pretty awesome too!  If I weren’t me, I’d be pretty darned jealous of myself!

The Librarians Cringe

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!

Hotter than Satan’s Barbeque Grill

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!

Don’t call me baby…

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????

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..

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!

Spam and Not From a Can!

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!

Diversify or Die?

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!

Too Much?

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?