Costumer; Black Eyed Peas

A Friend of mine is a costume designer & dressed The Black Eyed Peas dancers for a concert in Paris this past week.... Must be hard to dance wearing a washing machine, Karen...... : >

Oh, Mona!

A 100 years ago this month, a Louvre employee stole Mona & was caught trying to sell her in Florence; (NOT the sharpest knife in the drawer). "She smiled down on me!" he explained.

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The Edge of Dreaming

A 48 year old woman has 3 premonition dreams in this documentary & they all seem to be telling her she will die before the year is out. She is a scientist, so she seeks out medical doctors for their opinions on the meaning of dreams. Fascinating.

Chartres, France: A Favorite Spiritual Place

The best known labyrinth of its type & beautifully preserved in Chartres Cathedral, France was constructed during the second decade of the 13th century. 

Rose Window

Believed to Be Relic of Mary's Dress

Star & Moon Ceiling in Crypt

"La Maison Picassiette in Chartes France, is the extraordinary result of one man's work between 1938 & 1964. The monument he left behind is a house & garden covered with intricate mosaics of broken crockery, painting and sculpture. Much has been written to try to explain why Raymonde Isidore, a middle-aged manual worker, produced such a beautiful, complicated, inspirational & mystifying environment from the house he had built for his family."

Postage

I'd have to say that the most difficult part of selling online is figuring out how much to charge for postage! AND my time packing it AND the cost of gas while driving to mail it AND....... 
I happen to use a small independently run postal place that is more convenient then our historic post office, (where movies have even been filmed), but by the time I'm done standing in that line, I might as well have brought my sleeping bag. The problem with the smaller mail stop is they add their own charge because they need to make a few bucks too. Urgh......... : /
I also run into the rush issue. I get wanting to get your goodies by tomorrow; the question is, can you actually afford that? AND don't get me started on foreign postage; I have no idea why someone in France wants me to send wooden beads that cost as much to send them as to pay for them. Surely they have wooden beads in France, but hey, I'm not complaining about selling them, just the fact that I didn't, once again, charge enough to send them!
I  know people who ship for free & frankly I don't know how they do it. Some add that cost into the item being sold, but I often see items that are selling for too cheap plus no shipping & wonder how they even cover the cost of their materials & more importantly, the time they spent making, collecting & carefully packing the item.
I'm going to throw my two cents in here. Unless the item is absolutely under 13 ounces, or can fit into one of those flat rate envelopes or boxes from USPS; don't charge any less then $4 to send it, anywhere, AND if you're sending it overseas? Don't charge less then $8 for a light item or $15 for a heavier one. I HAVE learned that there IS no rhyme or reason to any of it. I sent an item to Australia once & it cost $5. I sent practically the same item to England & it cost $15. I have, in the past, offered a discount on the next purchase if my postage charges turn out to be too high; but have never been taken up on it. The only request in fact that I've ever gotten was to dial down the charges when someone was buying another 2 or 3 items in the same order. I was happy to do it.

Alamar: A Meditation

My First Computer

I went back to college at 32 to pursue my Bachelor's Degree & this was the computer I took with me; the first Apple (Mac) computer. Five years later when I was pursuing my Masters, I was still using it.  Was the size of a large ball, could carry it under my arm & thank God was still young enough to see the screen which couldn't have been much larger then 10 inches across. You know what it did? Word processed in B & W with the choice of about 10 Fonts, 5 of which were actually APA acceptable. I lost many a page & pages, DAMN IT!!!, because auto-saving was still to come. It also crashed & burned frequently; although what that meant was having to push a re-set button somewhere on the back & losing everything if it hadn't been saved to the floppy disk. Remember those? By the time I was writing my Thesis, thankfully I had graduated to the next hand me down Mac from my dad which was, in contrast, HUGE & cumbersome. That one wrote in color I think & maybe did a few more tricks, but still no instant saving.

Tonight I am blogging on a Mac 1500 Lap top on the bed. As I write this, I am listening to I-Tunes I downloaded, ironically Dire Straits, which I believe were popular in the 90's?  I hear the bing go off when I receive an e-mail, & am also using the on-line dictionary & calculator while this blog continues to auto save. I copied the picture of the old Mac on this entry from the internet. Before that I was downloading pictures from my digital camera on to my Etsy site that I had altered on Photoshop; oh and I also made sure there was enough $$$ in my bank account.......  see where I'm going with this?

I would no more have spent an extra second more then I needed to on that ol' Mac, unless I was doing school work, or writing a letter or composing a journal entry. In fact, I was probably still writing those entries in a 'hard' journal. I would also be visiting in 'real life' with people, talking on the phone, or actually reading a good book.

Don't get me wrong. I Skype with my cousin in England for free; it used to cost a fortune on the phone. My profession has been on-line teaching for a college & now I make extra income by selling art supplies on Etsy & books on Amazon. I just wonder sometimes what my life would be like without all this. Or at least less of all this convenience? Hmmm......

Waste land

Vik Muniz is a world famous artist who uses 'unorthdox' materials to paint with like dirt, sugar & peanut butter & jelly. His portraits are fabulous & like life. He wanted to give back, so he went back to his home town, Rio & helped the garbage scavengers to create a massive art installation from, that's right, garbage. Then the photo's of the work are auctioned & it changes lives. This is an absolute inspiration. Check it out!