Seismic Twitch

Apparently the supply of jewelry at the Fringe Festival (a 10 day event with independent plays, music performances, street performances, psychics and craft sales galore) on Broadway Avenue this year is creating a buyers market. I haven’t heard from Bran yet, but as of this morning only one pair of earrings had been sold. I have a feeling that mine is the only nickel free stuff though.

I spent yesterday rather productively. I went into work at 1130 or so to get the month end report done. It needs to be handed in on Tuesday. My boss could’ve done it, but he prefers that the person who knows what they’re doing take care of it. I was ok with that. I ate lunch and then phoned Bran to come get me.

We went off to Michael’s to find some earring nuts (those backs put on studs and hooks to prevent them from falling out of the holes). The place was rather crowded. I didn’t like that much. I liked it even less when I couldn’t get up to see the rack of findings. That got even more less desirable when I encountered a woman wearing enough perfume to kill flies at 50 paces. What is that all about? Do people have no sense of smell? If they don’t they should be outlawed from wearing scents. Anyway, it was a fruitless trip.

I worked to make jewelry on Thursday to increase the supplies for the Fringe but didn’t do anything on Friday. Today I made two bracelets. They’re rather pretty. When the Fringe is over, I’ll start taking photos again to get some up on my Etsy store. I’ll also be working on advertising on other sites to get buyers.

Today I set up the etagiere I took from Dad’s. It didn’t fit where I hoped it would on my bedside table. It does, however, fit on my end table on the living room. I now have multiple shelves holding my beading, tissues, pills and other junk that crowded my table.

I went to Panda Hall and Rings and Things and made orders. I got earring nuts, various tools I need, wire, and beads. I think I spent around $450 or so on supplies. Oh, I also bought a wire working book about the basics. The wire I ordered is surgical grade stainless steel.

On a more disappointing note, last night I ordered yummy Chinese food. I got deep fried shrimp (colour me having had a craving) and tofu and vegetables in sate sauce. That’s not the disappointing part. The disappointing part is the whole thing falling off my work table and leaking sauce all over the floor. The food stayed in the container as the lid had still been on it, but damn!

Boy approves of my movie choices today. First was The Cheap Detective which he missed because he was entertaining a friend. the second was The Incredibles, third was Interview with a Vampire, fourth was Catwoman (yes, the bad Halle Barry version) and now Casablanca is playing as I type this entry.

We had a discovery when we got home on Wednesday. Because of all the rain we’ve been having the ground has been saturated. The last good storm we had about 12 days ago caused water to leech through the concrete and infiltrate our basement. The tenant in the suite down there didn’t say anything until his floor was getting wet. By that time it was too late, damage had been done. Had he notified the landlord when he noticed water the first time a sump pump could have been put into a hole and the water pumped out through the sewer system. Now we have a small issue with black mould.

The downstairs tenant has to move out. His suite is contaminated. Since black mould is highly toxic (or produces toxins, I’m not exactly sure) he has to leave. The stuff we have downstairs is also contaminated and will have to be cleaned. We may have to move as well depending on the results of the tests conducted that evening in our suite. Upstairs has also been affected, but it’s not known how much. One advantage we have is that we rarely use the rear door and did laundry over a week ago, before the bloom of black mould (hopefully). We don’t have forced air heating so that prevents fast spread of the mould. The symptoms of poisoning from black mould are heart burn (or increasing heart burn), sleeping a lot, and a few other things that we suffer from all the time anyway – and did before we moved in here – so which came first, right?

Anyway, the tests done will determine whether or not we can stay here. Cross your toes would you please? I don’t want to move before we move into a house we buy after the will is completed in probate.

Speaking of buying houses, I’ve been looking through the real estate listings for Saskatoon. I’ve found several areas that are affordable to us, up to $300,000. Some are a little bit more than that but we’d not want to spend much more. I want a house that we don’t have to do a lot of altering to. This means I’m looking for hardwood floors (or laminate) throughout the house, a good, high wooden privacy fence, a well functioning kitchen, and a basement that has adequate windows for egress. This means it’s most likely to be a split level house. Central air, though not a requirement, would be a definite bonus. At any rate, it was entertaining and kept me amused for several hours. I even looked at the areas we’d not likely buy in unless desperate.

That’s about it. I’m looking forward to the new supplies coming in.

I’ve sunk down a lot with my feelings about Dad dying. I’ve preferred quiet to talking. Boy and Bran went out to Shell Lake to be with friends today. I opted to stay at home. I didn’t feel up to being with people and welcomed the time in solitude.

I got most of my order from Panda Hall. They left out one of the spacer bead orders though. I contacted them that day, and of course, made a typo in the email. It should be straightened out soon, I hope. I didn’t pay much for them, but I’m missing out 2000 pieces of stuff I paid for.

Since the order arrival, and after I checked it, I started to experiment with what I could create. I’ve made several bracelets and some earrings. I’d make more earrings but I don’t have many earring backs (I use rubber backs) left. Getting more will have to wait for a bit. For the time being I’ve deleted my Esty inventory. I’ll let you know when I put anything up for sale there again.

One of the bracelets I made uses up some of the sandalwood beads from a necklace that Boy finally gave me. I love the scent of sandalwood and having a bracelet made of it pleases me no end. I’ll have to get a picture of it for you to see. I’ve not made another like it thus far.

The best part of the items I ordered is that they’re nickel free. Nickel is usually what people react to in metals. There’s no (or little) nickel in surgical steel and that’s what the earring hooks are made of. The eyepins, chain, bead caps and spacer beads I bought are all nickel free. That can be a selling point of my product. I haven’t found any nickel free wire though. I want some half-hard silver wire that is nickel free, but can’t find any.

Because I’m doing something with my hands, my mind needs to be occupied with other things. I’ve always found it difficult to do only one thing at a time, except for reading. I still prefer to have no noise or distraction when I’m reading. But I bead, do crosswords, crochet, knit, etc. to the television. This means that I’ve been watching movies again. Not new ones, that would be far to radical of me. I’d been watching Scooby Doo DVDs (8 of them), Scooby Doo the movie (the first one), The Avengers, Emperor’s New Groove, Kill Bill (Part 1 and Part 2), and now the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tomorrow I’ll be watching more movies, I don’t know which ones, but I’ll be watching more.

One thing about LOTR I’ve been wondering about. The narrator says at the beginning that the elves are immortal folk. If this is the case, why is it that Arwen’s father is middle aged? Shouldn’t he appear to be in his 20s? I mean, sure, he doesn’t look like suffering from old age, but still, he has wrinkles and looks to be of about the right age to have a daughter the age Arwen is.

Dutchess hunted tonight. There was a rather large moth flying about the living room and she was in very close attendance to it. Alas, being an inside cat has caused her hunting skills to rust and she lost track of the prey as it flew toward my light. More to the point, it was my getting up to get out of the moth’s way (vicious things they are!) that caused her to lose the trail. Hopefully the moth won’t creep up and pounce on me when I’m least expecting it.

I got an email from my thesis supervisor yesterday. She wants to see what I’ve done. Of course, I’ve not done a damned thing since I saw her last. I asked her if I could take a year off the program. By the time a year is up I should be able to get back into doing stuff as I should. By that time Dad will probably have died and things will have settled out emotionally speaking. Either that or I’ll need to step away and not get my Masters degree. Regardless, I can’t do anything right now. It stretches my abilities to deal just going from one day to the next. Working is going to further stress that. It’s hard fighting the inertia I’m feeling. Adding stress to that isn’t going to help me any.

That’s about it for now.

I’ve been catching up on blogs the past couple of days. It took me that long to get through not just all the blogs I read but entries back to just before St. Patrick’s day when I last read. Last night at 2:30 am (I guess that would be this morning) I finally finished.

While I was reading one of my regulars, April Cherrie I was struck by the differences in culture. April just had her second baby. He was born by C-section a little over a month ago. Though I doubt that every woman in Malaysia can have this but April has a woman come and tend to her needs during the 30 days that April is in “confinement”. That was a word I thought was used only by old fashioned medical personnel to describe the first month post-partum.

The confinement lady is to help with the infant and generally cook and take care of the mother. This also means cooking special foods that April’s culture says is important after giving birth as well as making sure that the mother doesn’t eat foods she isn’t supposed to.

This is an interesting cultural function allowing a new mom to get used to being a mom, recover from the arduousness that is childbirth, and generally just concentrate on bonding with her new baby. But like I said, it’s unlikely that, unless this is a standard part of healthcare and is paid for by the government, not many women would be able to afford to have another woman come in and do that work for her.

Another interesting thing is that April has her first child with a nanny. That in itself isn’t extraordinary to me, but the nanny lives in another house with April’s daughter. Here, we have the nanny come in and do the childcare in our homes.

Anyway, it’s nice to get out of my cultural box and see what others around the world are doing.

I skipped the gym on Friday. Not on purpose mind you, but apparently I wasn’t ready to get up when my first alarm went off because I turned it off and resumed sleeping. I have no memory of having done so. I hope I don’t do that tomorrow morning because I’m on days this week.

Weather-wise it’s been rather sucky. It snowed, in fact, blizzarded on Friday. Many highways were closed because there was zero visibility. There was no appreciable build up though and the temperature was steady around -2 or so. It’s just that I thought we were done with that nonsense and that spring arrived. I was wrong.

Today’s workout was awesome. I did 20 minutes on the elliptical machine. 20!!!!!! When I started in February I could only do 6 minutes. I was impressed a couple of weeks later when I could make it up to 10 (with a couple of breaks to rest). Today I did 20 with one break to have some water.

I tried out the rowing machine. It’s something that will need to be done sparingly since it involves my body folding in 1/2. That’s not good for the sciatica. I rowed 500 metres in just over 5 minutes. That’s not too bad for a first time. I was concentrating on learning and maintaining the form rather than going fast right away. After that we did some work on the balance halfs (I don’t know what they’re called, it’s a platform on top of a soft partial rubber globe. It exercises the stablizers and helps with balance) with medicine ball tossing. I fell off my thing once and my arms are a bit noodly now.

Then we moved on to do some weights concentrating on the legs. Since my arms were tired from the medicine ball tossing we didn’t want to hurt me. The one upper body thing we did was working on my trapazius (sp?) muscles at the neck/shoulder. Those are the ones that will help me in the Captain’s Chair, holding my body up. Right now I have no problem with the leg lifts but my body weight is too much for the shoulder muscles. We also did calf lifts and leg presses.

All in all it was a good time at the gym.

After the gym we headed to Michaels and I got some beads. They’re on at 1/2 price so I got some green aventurine, hematite and onyx. Bran found a display piece for showing off necklaces. Speaking of showing off, I haven’t listed anything new in my Wicked Witch Jewelry Etsy shop. Mostly because I haven’t taken any new pictures. Also note, I cut the price of shipping. Feel free to buy something.

After Michael’s we went to Sobey’s to pick up some sushi. Sure I should’ve gone to the restaurant and gotten all-you-can eat, but live and learn. It was nice to be able to nosh on it at home. I got the brown rice sushi. It was quite a lot nicer than the regular with there being a nice added nutty flavour of the brown rice.

Now I’m tired. I should sort out some laundry so that I have clothes tomorrow but I also want a nap. Guess which one is going to win out.

Ta-Ra

My Etsy store is now open!

Wicked Witch Jewelry has 13 items currently posted for sale. There will be more as I get photos complete.

Now, go help me save for a more decent car and maybe add to the new house fund.

That’s right. Slowly but surely Wicked Witch Jewelry Esty Shop is moving toward opening. I have created most of my policies and stuff so I’d appreciate if you’d go over there and give them a read over. I need feedback on them, especially since I don’t have any idea what I’m doing.

Really, everyone go over and leave me feedback here in the comments. I need to know if my wording is insulting, what I missed in the way of policies or information. Please? I really need you lurkers as well. The more brains involved in setting this up, the better.

Thanks.