I love Canadian Pharmacy Trust.

I love CANADIAN PHARMACY TRUST!! My dog Katy needs thyroid replacement meds; the generic brand they make for pets doesn't work for her (it doesn't for about 10% of pets), so she is on the non-generic Synthroid. And she takes 5 pills a day. In the US it cost me over $125 for one bottle of 100 pills. Yeah. That would be over $150/month.

Canadian Pharmacy ships her drugs down to me. I am getting 5 bottles of pills (a 90 day supply) plus international shipping for less than one bottle costs in the US. And.. I faxed them her prescription last night. They called me this morning to check on quantities and shipping address and will send it to me today. It will be in my mailbox within a week.

My personal drugs are covered under our health insurance plan at the moment. With the changes in benefits (and retirement in a few years), I don't know how long this will continue. But if I'm ever at the point that I need to pay for my own drugs, I'm going outta the country. (watch our government screw this up for me).

Interesting..

I've spent a little time today looking at other blog hosts (word press and typepad). Neither of these services let the individual get at their actual template to alter it, change it and make it their own. I couldn't even get figure out how to get my bloglines feed to work on either service.
Which means, I'd never figure out how to add buttons, etc.

Nice services. But instead of switching, I think I'll have to find someone to help me with my template here instead of switching to a different service.

Changing Perspectives catalog online!

The Changing Perspectives Exhibit is up online! You can go to this page then download the PDF catalog to view all the pieces.

This is the exhibit that I made Spheres of Influence for. Scroll down the page, to see the link for downloading the PDF File. You cannot view this online. Off to see all the work.

Technorati Tags: fiberarts, quiltart, quilts, art

My Blog is Cursed!!

Blogger has been breaking down for over a week.. this weekend and Monday, it his the file server that stores my blog. Broken blog off and on all morning.

Now HaloScan is offline.. and they handle my comments.

Off to find a virgin to sacrifice to the blogger gohds...

Update: Well HaloScan is back. That was fast. All I had to do was sleep on it.

Deb L. asked if the problems might be caused by going "off the reservation" for services like Flickr or HaloScan.

I think the problem with downtime at both places (Blogger and Haloscan) is the rapid growth of blogging. With a reported 25000(?) new blogs every day (a number I find suspect), the people providing the services don't have time or necessarily money to maintain/upgrade the equipment they use.

I doubt my recent cursed situation was complicated much by going "off res" for my comments (I don't use Flickr to upload photos, don't even normally use Hello.. just the basic Blogger upload option), except that it means there is one more place for equipment breakdowns.

Then Deb wondered why I chose to use HaloScan instead of stay with Blogger's comment system. I use HaloScan for several reasons:

1. I have friends who read my blog but do not have blogs themselves; they could not comment with blogger without setting up a "profile", so they wouldn't comment. With Haloscan, they don't need to register with anyone. Just comment. This was the most important reason. (yes, Del, Deb and Jennifer, this means I did this for you! Do you comment? No.)

2. Blogger still doesn't allow for trackbacks. I don't get them often, but I would use them more with other people's blogs if I could. Still it's not an option that Blogger offers.

3. With HaloScan I can block trolls and sploggers without requiring legitimate commentors to do that whole word verification thing every time they comment. Can't tell you how I dislike having to do that all the time. Since switching to HaloScan I've had to remove/block 2 comments total without word verification.

4. That pretty looking comment box that matches my blog.

I waited for Blogger to make these kinds of changes on their own, they didn't. I'm seriously thinking about jumping ship on Blogger; when I switch will I stay with HaloScan? I don't know. It depends upon the comment service offered wherever I go.

Humph!! And double Humph!!

I have spent time for the last three days working in one of my garden beds. A couple weeks ago my goodly neighbor and landscaper had some of his workers tear out all the spreading juniper in this bed: 8' x 20' give or take. They carried the torn up bushes behind our fence (but still on our property) to eventually compost and left me a bed of a few bushes and lots of bare ground.

No. That isn't why I'm humphing. I paid them to do it.

I spent this past weekend single-digging the dirt. It's mainly poor clay, kind of stony, so a total waste to double dig. I'm sore but happy at my accomplishment.

No. That isn't why I'm humphing, either. But muscles all over my body are awake for the first time in months.

This next week, I'll add some quality soil amendments. Still no humph.

While working on Saturday, I listened to the music on my MP3 player. Good music, I was compelled to sing along frequently. At one point I was accompanying MeatLoaf's Paradise By the Dashboard Light. (not my key, btw)..and Steve signalled for me to take off my earphones. Then he tells me:

Don't quit your day job!

HUMPH!

Ofcourse, I quickly retorted:

What day job??

Now for the Double Humph: A file server on Blogger has been funky for the last few days. If my blog looked really strange, it's because of the problems they've had with that. If my blog has looked particulary strange, that's the reason. Hopefully the fix they implemented this morning takes.

PodCasts for Arts/Crafts

Diane from Going to Pieces extolls the joys of PodCasts today.

She pointed me to Annie Smith's Quilting Stash podcasts, describing these them this way:

Annie has such a pleasant, melodious voice, and sounds like she's smiling the whole time. . . .Her podcasts are like a one-sided telephone conversation with a quilt-obsessed friend. She talks about what she's working on, quilt shows or shops she's visited, books or tools she's found, all sorts of things. She interviews interesting people she encounters along the way, and gives lots of links to websites.

After that ringing endorsement, I decided to follow her directions:

If you have Itunes on your computer you can open the Itunes
Music Store, go to Podcasts, and then search by any key word to find
what podcasts are out there. And, via Itunes, you can subscribe to the
podcasts you like so they're automatically downloaded when new issues
are available. You don't have to go hunting for them.

So I searched.

Alex Anderson has a podcast!! Everyone mourning the lack of new episodes of Sew Many Quilts can get there fix! There are several other quilting podcasts listed at ITunes. I will be spending days checking them out.

Brenda Dayne is podcasting knitting over at Cast On. Knitting News not only podcasts themselves, they list other knitting podcasters just to keep you in the loop.

Jeannie Gist is doing the only crochet podcast. I've found.

Scrapbooking has been in the podcast world by SCRAPcast for months now. Again, they list other scrapping podcasters.

And CraftyPod is:

The homemade podcast that celebrates all things crafty.

Ok. Enough for now. I will be searching out and listening to more these podcasts; hopefully to report on these every month or so. If you find a great arts/craft podcast, please share it with me!! This may be a new obsession!

In the meantime, I think I've found an excuse to buy an IPod. (My current MP3 player just doesn't have the memory to keep current with all of these), and another reason I'm glad I'm attending Day One of BlogHer, so I can learn more what goes into podcasts.

I'm having a good day.. without photos.

I've spent a few hours the past couple days playing with this idea. Though I'm having fun, I've decided that it doesn't need to go further. Paul Klee's paintings look like quilt blocks.. so I was wondering if I could use a similar technique to paint some fabric and make it into a quilt. It's turning into a fun experiment in layering color with watercolor. However, the work is so derivative that I now think I will just use it for a little play but let it be as far as a new piece. What would I be saying?

So I've worked through an idea by using some inexpensive watercolor paint and cheap watercolor paper instead of the real paints and fabrics. A good thing.

Today I got outside to work in my gardens for about 1.5 hours. My landscaper neighbors tore all the groundcover juniper from a bed (8'x15')a couple weeks ago. So I'm turning over the bare dirt, clearing some of the weeds and moving some plants up into the area. It's a good 1 month project, but atleast I've got a start on it. Pictures when it's further along.

Katy (my black lab) is all healed from her plastic surgery and feeling feisty. I'ts amazing how good she looks!!

quiz del giorno

Yep, this sounds like me... and the pizza I eat.

Everything Pizza

Diverse and adaptable You enjoy the full buffet of life It's hard for you to play favorites with friends... or flavors There's very little that you dislike!

What's Your Pizza Personality?

Wednesday Sunset, a secret told,

Here is a shot of our sunset last night. A storm is rolling in (again),
so it will be a few days until I see this sight repeated. I'm trying to regularly take the sunset from the house this year. This will let me see how far the sun moves. I know in mid-summer the sun will be setting off this picture to the right.
While I was out taking the sunset, I spotted the colors through this bare liquidamber (sweet gum) tree. Yeah, I played it with a bit in Picasa... but isn't it rather wonderful? I love photos of bare tree limbs.

Today I'm taking a break from handwork. I will pull out some of the ideas for my next painted piece and continue them on paper. Watercolor painting! Working in a different (kind of) medium.

And here I am going to admit something. At WoolfCamp, the other attendees introduced me to Flickr. I have had a negative reaction to the flickering images on people's blogs, so I have avoided using the site. I'm trying to get a bit comfortable with it (why, I'm not sure) but I'm going to whisper a secret to you all:
I don't really like Flickr.

Nope. You won't see a badge on my blog, even with a stationary picture. I may someday come to tolerate using Flickr for some things.. but I don't think I will ever be a Flickr fan. I do not find using it "intuitive"; I have to think too hard to figure out how to do something and their "help faq" isn't any help. It seems to me that it is just another way to lose time online.

Ya know just admitting this makes me feel better.

What online "hot thing" do you secretly feel no love for?

Pajaro Pictures

I mentioned that last weekend we were down by Monterey on a Pickle Retreat. Actually, we were about 4 miles south of Santa Cruz on a quiet part of the bay called Pajaro Dunes. And although Julie Z. mentioned that there was snow on the beach at Santa Cruz, we didn't see it where we were. I even went walking on the beach barefoot!! But I thought I'd share a few photos:


Obviously it was stormy this weekend. That spit of land in the distance is Santa Cruz and those clouds became a storm a couple hours later.












The stormy weather meant there were plenty high waves. And this trip? No surfers!! (sigh).












Another shot of the clouds coming in from the west.












On my walk on Saturday we spotted this log that washed up in Friday's storm. Interesting at a distance....











I really loved the way it looked up close!


Looking at my pictures, you'd never know I spent 4 days with 10 other women, would you? One of them spent the weekend "practicing" taking pictures of us; she said she needs to learn how to take good pictures of people. I simply DON'T take pictures of people. Don't like to look at them, so I don't like to take them. (hmm... what does that say about me?)

Asking for a little help

This is Diaspora. I put this all up on New Year's Day, but never finished fusing it until this morning. And I've run into a small problem:

I need a few more squares of the orange/orange red pieces for the lower left hand corner.

This was made with pieces a friend had left from a Melody Johnson workshop, so these are Melody's hand dyes.

Does anyone have a piece about 1" x 8" somewhere in the orange/orange red/red range that they can spare? I thought I had more stuffed away in a drawer somewhere, but I can't put my hands on it at the moment. Below is a fuzzy closeup to give a better hint of the colors I need. NOT the yellow square.. just the smaller red/orange stuff.

UPDATE: I found my stuff and have enough to finish it!

They Like It!!

Just got an email from Anne Copeland who IS Fiberarts Connection of Southern Cal. and she likes Spheres of Influence!! Wheewh!! I know she wouldn't send it back and tell me it's a piece of crap... but still, I had that "daydream" occasionally. Now I want to get on with more pieces!!

YES, I'm working on the next design.

Katy had some minor surgery yesterday, so I'm acting as nurse this week. She has a genetic condition that caused half her lower eyelids to roll into her eyes. The lashes would stick on her cornea, irritating things and making her eyes water all the time. So yesterday she got an eye tuck.

Fortunately, she doesn't have a whole lot of recovery for this surgery: an e collar for a couple days, and some salve in her eyes for a week. Still, she's awkward with the collar on, and probably a bit uncomfortable.
(edited 2 pm.)
ToDo Tuesday: Finish Laundry (done); walk the dogs (done); continue the handwork on 4 Conversations (done this week.)

I'm recovering..

The weekend away was (surprisingly) wonderful! Very few of the personality clashes that make we always rethink if I want to go away. Don't know if it was the time of year or what. But I'm recovering still.

So, to keep you entertained, I will brag that:

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

I even think I know which question I missed!

Going... going... gone

I'm off with my Pickle Girlfriends for a long weekend together at the beach down by Monterey. Weather reports say it will be raining all the time, but let's hope for breaks.

I'll be offline until late Sunday. So simple notes for the week:

-Got the errors on this blog down to 77 or so... (from over 100). I'm packing the printout with the list of errors, and the laptop so I can choose to make more corrections.

-Got Spheres sent to Anne Copeland.

-So glad to see Michael Kors offer Daniel V. a job! I hope Daniel takes him up on it; he could learn a lot working with that staff.

The Michelangelo Project

Ok. This is simple. I'm working on the template for this site, so things may look ugly before they look pretty.

But I have hope.

Or I'm insane

We should know within a week which it is.

So I'm spending all my spare time staring at this screen, but you might not see a thing.

What I WILL ask you. If you can't read the information in the center panel, look over on the right hand side panel, and EMAIL ME. Tell me:

What Operating system you use. (windows xp, windows whatever, Mac, version #.. whatever. )

What browser you are using: Netscape x.x (well fill in the numbers), Firefox version, MSIE version number.. etc.) Opera.. the browser and the version. (ok, a geeky giggle: Instead of writing Opera, I originally wrote Oprah. I am sick.)

What size display you have. 800x600; 1024x768; 1280x600; 1280x768. Whatever...


In the meantime, go to FRENCH TOAST GIRL and do The Michelangelo Project.

I think I'm listing...

This past weekend, I wrote a piece for BlogHer about the lists on blogs. Looking at my own, I don't have any!! I do occasionally write an entry that's a list of thing to accomplish, no other lists extant on the page. I want to change that.

Now I could have:

• a weekly To Do list broken into catagories (art, blogging, home stuff, menus). Then cross them off as they're done. (yawn...)
• random and various lists (books, music, movies, tv shows, etc) as a blogpost.
• a list of books I've read.
• a cool idea from Lisa Stone: A list of The Ten Things I'd Do If I Won the Lottery. (nobody says you have to win to begin on the list...)
• a cool idea like Keri Smith's 100 things, or her 10 Ways
• a list of quilt shows I want to enter, including dates and notes if I made it or not. ooo. publicly holding my feet to the fire!

Think there is some potential here...

For Monday:

Make A List...

Now This is Embellishment

From PAM's blog, Nerd's Eye View, a photo of some costumes at the Fasching (Carnival) celebration near her home in Austria.

Time On My Hands...

While getting ready this morning, I was thinking about what Lisa Call wrote:

There seem to be trends in quilt making and this show ( Miniature Art Textiles: Dallas) is fairly representational of what I feel is currently "hot" in quilting today: collage applique, surface design with dyes/paints/etc, image transfer, text, “content”, and embellishment. When I look at the catalog for quilt national 2005 I see about the same things.

I get the impression looking at a lot of these pieces that, while there is thought in the design, the actual work is relatively quick. Paint or stamp or bleach or fuse or screen. Rinse and repeat until complete. Stitch together densely by machine. Not that it's a bad thing!

Is a perception that one needs to produce a largish "body of work" behind this trend? (this sounds like a discussion on the QuiltArt list every x months). Much of the work could be done in another fashion: careful piecing, needleturned applique to construct the pieces. Embroidery to create the surface images.

All these would be slower more demanding methods of working. Fewer pieces of work out there. The pieces, too, would be very different. Is this a good thing? Or just a different thing?

Would they be equally received?

Can one DO the other work now and still stand toe-to-toe with today's "trends" ? Lisa has decided that the trends do not effect her work. She does what she does irregardless of trends. She is established, though.

I do not have much of any "established reputation" , but I also don't have much of a desire to follow the current trend, exactly.

So if I (for example) took a graphic design that might be done with a silkscreen.. and instead marked it and did it with a variety of hand embroidery stitches, would "people" (Ok, read "show jury", "show judge" and ultimately "buyers") accept it? Or would those "people" think: not in the current vein?

This work takes on a very different look. More 3-D texture. Can I choose to take my own path and hope that the work stands up against the trend? Guess I will have to find out, because I would love to experiment more with this idea. Then I remembered this pronouncement of one of my goals for this year:

-I love texture in pieces brought about my dense machine and hand stitching, weaving, embroidery and encrustation. I will seek out places to use this for emphasis. (practice more to develop my own "stitch vocabulary" first.)

Apparently, I've been thinking about this for a very long time.

The last couple days and all of next week, I'll be working on pieces that need hand work. At the moment, it's a piece I started at AQT last fall; I'm adding hand embroidery to it to emphasize and adhere the lines of the silk. I expect there won't be a lot of time online... so I may be quiet.

But I'll be thinking. And you, lucky readers, get to hash out (that is, comment on)the stuff that I disgorge through my fingertips.

See what trouble my mind gets into while hands are otherwise occupied?

Thinking Like a Blogger

"Scheherazade" from Stay of Execution took time today to write A Few Unsorted Thoughts. I hadn't seen anything from her in a while, but she sucked me in with her first paragraph:

Taking a break from blogging actually shifted the way I hold onto thoughts, so for some reason a lot of the small thoughts that blow into my mind and turn into posts are just blowing right on through right now. I'm not just out of the habit of writing, I'm out of the habit of thinking like a blogger.Hard to explain.

Do we end up thinking differently when we begin to blog?

Are thoughts that can "blow right through without being shared" really necessary to share at all? If so, why?

I think that the thoughts we choose to share with the world make up a pattern that can reveal us more significantly than many other activities; however, that's just my personal observation. So I'm putting this out there for all of you.

What is the value of the thoughts we share with the world?

Wednesday's Ways

Got a lot done today... less in the studio than I wished, but a whole lot done. The weather today was nice, but it's apparent a front is moving in.

Anyway, today.

First. I think it's cruel to wake up an hour early and then try to do yoga with a body that hasn't quite adjusted to being out of bed. Still I woke up near 6 am., and thought: what the hell? Let's give BREATHE (the yoga show on Oxygen) a try. I lasted for about 6 up/down dogs with some other stretches thrown in. About 5 minutes. So next time I'm awake early.. I have a goal to aim for: 6 minutes!

After breakfast, checking emails, blogs, groups etc., took the dogs for a nice 3 mile walk.

Home and talked to the neighbors about some work they will be doing in my yard this week. We have a garden bed planted with a spreading juniper. I'm allergic to juniper. But, lucky me! my neighbor owns a landscape company, and they will be tearing out the bushes for me this week.
it's out of there, I can till in some compost and move my butterfly/hummingbird garden up to the larger space. Then more veggies in the lower beds.

So I emptied my fairly cooked compost tumbler, reloaded it from the box composter. From now until November I will be doing this every 2 months. Happy, happy garden beds.

After a nap (I got up early, remember)... I prepped a small piece for it's inital quilting. I know that the piece needs something more.. this is a good beginning but kind of lacking in any meaning. But I'll stitch it up and something will speak to me. That's all ready to begin tomorrow morning. (that Twyla hint to leave something ready to do at the end of the day).

Speaking of Twyla... yes, we were!!... I gave Steve her book to read over his year end vacationtime. He's a researcher.. which is a different kind of creative.. and I thought he'd understand her work ethic. I haven't seen the book since. Last night I asked him where it was. He's been handing it around to folks at work that he thought might get something out of it!!

Thursday: rain predicted. Begin quilting the small piece.