Jewelry Group
I am member of an online community of Jewelry Crafters. These artists whose occupations range from mommies to wholesalers all get together through the wonderful link of cyberspace and share ideas, hints, links, and works. It’s one of the online communities that I found active and helpful.
Every day there are posts from someone being a newbie and wanting help in knowing what to buy to begin their new hobby. Personally I bought one of those little kits that help you make 1 necklace and that came with all materials and instructions for said necklace. It was an economical way of learning if I was going to like the idea of jewelry making and if I found that I didn’t, no problem, I hadn’t spent much in a bunch of things... just in that one kit for that one piece of jewelry. After a couple of kits then one knows if the hobby is what one is looking for. But anyway, everyone starts their own way.
So when we’re not repeating the same thing for the new aspiring crafters (I’m not complaining really!... but... would it hurt new people to perhaps scan archives before asking such common questions?) we are just chatting it up about particular issues that concern us: which wire is better, where to find a particular brand of bead, pewter beads vs silver, how to sell, how to advertise, listings of local fairs, so on and so forth. Then there is the most interesting to me (which I am proud to say I suggested): The actual classes.
^_^ And I just happened to have given my first one yesterday! After seeing enough interest in hemp related items, I volunteered for a small project. I made a supply list and a set of instructions and posted it at the group. I shall be posting here as well, just as soon as I upload all the piccies. I hope instructions aren’t all that difficult. Guess I’ll just have wait for the comments from my fellow group members.
Real Life Equations
OFFICE ARITHMETIC
* Smart boss + smart employee = profit
* Smart boss + dumb employee = production
* Dumb boss + smart employee = promotion
* Dumb boss + dumb employee = overtime
SHOPPING MATH
* A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs.
* A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need.
GENERAL EQUATIONS & STATISTICS
* A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.
* A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.
* A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.
* A successful woman is one who can find such a man.
ROMANCE MATHEMATICS
* Smart man + smart woman = romance
* Smart man + dumb woman = affair
* Dumb man + smart woman = marriage
* Dumb man + dumb woman = pregnancy
HAPPINESS
* To be happy with a man, you must understand him a lot and love him a little.
* To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot and not try to understand
her at all.
LONGEVITY
* Married men live longer than single men do, but married men are a lot more
willing to die.
PROPENSITY TO CHANGE
* A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.
* A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, and she does.
DISCUSSION TECHNIQUE
* A woman has the last word in any argument.
* Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.
HOW TO STOP PEOPLE FROM BUGGING YOU ABOUT GETTING MARRIED
* Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and
cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the
same thing to them at funerals.
Mechanic Vs Heart Surgeon
A mechanic was removing the cylinder heads from the motor of a car when he spotted the famous heart surgeon in his shop, who was standing off to the side, waiting for the service manager to come to take a look at his car. The mechanic shouted across the garage,"Hello Doctor! Please come over here for a minute."
The famous surgeon, a bit surprised, walked over to the mechanic. The mechanic straightened up, wiped his hands on a rag and asked argumentatively, "So doctor, look at this. I also open hearts, take valves out, grind 'em, put in new parts, and when I finish this will work as a new one. So how come you get the big money, when you and me are doing basically the same work?"
The doctor leaned over and whispered to the mechanic "Try to do it when the engine is running".
Homemakers
“And what is so 'just' being a housewife? I think it is the most difficult job of all. So much so that people cliche it. Much like a rocket-scientist. Everyone wants to be one but cannot be one and so use it only in idioms :-)”
A copy-paste from a comment left earlier. ^_^
We were talking about having too much time in our hands and I mentioned that I did have a lot of time, since I was just a little housewife. Nice comeback from Srikant!
Yes, being a housewife can be quite challenging especially if there are children involved (and if it is the summer or winter, or any other holiday that lets children out of school for about a week!) But I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it is ‘the most difficult job of all.’ It is tough, since not only does it require some hard labor (try cleaning those floors on your knees and scrubbing those toilets to a shiny, squeaky clean every day), but also requires imagination and good management skills. However, more than being ‘difficult’ the job of being a housewife is boring.
Being a housewife is monotonous
It causes mental weariness
It is Tedious
Lacking
And it can make a person become dissatisfied.
All these can be confused with ‘difficult.’ But it really isn’t difficult at all. It’s all a matter of doing things right the first time and then the rest just lands correctly. If one doesn’t wash clothes in a week, it will pile up. And when it piles up it falls to the floor. If it falls to the floor, then the floors get dirty. If the floors get dirty then the house looks unattended. If the house looks unattended then it becomes shameful to invite anyone in. If no one is invited to the house then one becomes lonely. When one is lonely, then our life becomes utterly ‘bleh’.
And becoming ‘bleh’ is the worst that can happen to a housewife.
A lady of the house must be kept busy all the time... but not by cleaning, but by enhancing our mental abilities (reading, learning a new language, sewing, crafts, or even school). You wouldn’t expect a person in the cleaning business to put in 18-hour shifts a day, would you? Then why would a wife be expected to do this at home?
So it’s not a matter of the job being difficult (you really think we experience a lot of mental stress by washing dishes? Not at all! It’s a no-brainer!) But rather of it being among the most misunderstood jobs around.
House Painting
Had quite a productive weekend.
Nope, I didn’t finish my backyard. Husband and Dad were talking about the yard and one thing led to another and they said they were going to build me a carport. So then they need to have the ground free. If I continue my yard work then I will have to remove it when they start working. So I will wait... once they get that done I will resume (in 6 months if I am lucky! Pft. When men say they are gonna do one thing, it takes them months to get started). At least I placed my stepping stones so that I can walk around in case of rains.
Anyway. Painted the living and dining rooms - a beautiful deep garnet. ^_^ I still need to paint the entrance and the hallway - thinking of using green.
So the rooms went from this
My plain living roomTo this
After the move of the furnitureTo this:
Not bad! And we didn’t spill the paint. ^_^To presently this:
Chic and ModernBut when I get my new living room furniture it will look something like this (well, prettier, of course, with the new curtains and all the furniture in its right proportions...):
My very crappy image superimposing... oh gaw I hope it looks better than this! :p tututut. I can’t wait for my new furniture to get here. Though, I may have to cover it up... You can’t see it in the 4th picture, but the sofa has this huge hole on the left arm... Chico got claw-happy one night and discovered it with a big chunk of fabric missing the next morning, hence the position to the far end of the room, to cover it up while we get the new furniture. :D
Hm. The sofas may not fully match with our wall designs, but... it was the style of sofa I liked the most - no back pillows. I have come to dislike furniture that relies on pillows to give them shape. The pillows flatten after a while and I hate that! Plus I need to be fixing them all the time after anyone gets up. The aren’t very trendy and often look messy. So we purchased the new livingroom furniture (3 pieces: sofa, loveseat and chair) after much search of something with no pillows for the back. I will probably make some covers for them in a plain color (I really like blue... but found nothing in blue in the style that I wanted) to 1) make them match my walls a little better, and 2)protect them from my Chico-baby.
Anyway, at the moment I’m very happy with the new look. ^_^
3D Art
I haven’t been sleeping much lately. And these are why:
Gun
Reaching Out
Reaching Out [hands targeting]
Reaching Out [closeup at a different angle]
Run!These things have taken me forever to make... and since I generally sit down to do these at around 10:30 or 11pm... and then I get into it, well I don’t go to bed until early the next day. :p
I will be making more of these for Figure Studies. I told my mom I was giong to make the basic poses for her (she's painting again! yey!!!) to use as models. ^_^ And maybe if I keep practicing and I learn to use Photoshop really, really well, I can do those very cool works with the frosty lipsticks and kickbutt hairstyles!
Antivirus
Lately several acquaintances have been assaulted by viruses! If I can help them I do... but others are way beyond help. Why? Because some have never even downloaded a trial version of an anti-whatever software! Or even OS security updates. I recommend downloading all updates from the windows website (if you have windows OS). In the updates they handle security issues as well as giving patches for particular pesky worms.
There are several good anti-virus and anti-spam software out there. Some are a little expensive, but most of them have the free trials or the home editions (Free!).
Here are a couple that I generally suggest to my clients and friends:
* AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition - http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php/doc/2/
[Free for homeusers. Has automatic updates to keep your computer safe from viruses. It will warn you if you've received a virus but you have to run the application manually.]
* Ad-Aware Freeware - http://www.lavasoft.com/support/download/
[Removes spyware from your machine. Free for homeusers. Noncommercial. Has automatic downloads to keep updated on new spyware]
* Get a Pop-Up blockers (because pop-ups things sometimes load viruses or worms in your internet browser's temporary files)- Netscape browser comes with one integrated and it's really good. Inter Explorer also has a bar add-on (although personally I don't like IE's as much). I rather use the Yahoo bar instead, it has been more reliable to me.
* Anti-Spam. Try not to mark your messages 'as read' in your mailbox (this is for programs like Outlook, Outlook Express, or Eudora). Soemtimes spam come with script attachments that run even if you just preview the message (or marked as read; ex. they subject are no longer bold, etc). There are several free anti-spam products that you can find at download.com. The one i've recently tried out is LockSpam ( http://www.lockspam.com/downloads.html ). It sorts my e-mail and puts spam directly in my trash. They have a 15 day trial version of the Pro product as well as a completely Free version (limited capabilities). If you only use Yahoo or Hotmail (or any other web-based e-mail) then those already have their spam-blockers, so no worries there. ^_^
Give them a try if you don't already have them (or any other similar product). If you like what they do you can then purchase the higher versions. However, even if you don't buy them, these never expire.
McAfee also offers a trial version of their software (McAfee is pretty good, one of my favorites) http://us.mcafee.com/root/package.asp?pkgid=100 but it expires after 90 days and then you need to purchase the license ($35). However, it is worth it. It comes with firewall, anti-spam, virus libraries, automatic updates, security updates, spyware detection, worm and script stoppers, etc. So you basically have all products in one.
I am not a big Norton fan because I find it a bit more difficult to understand (too hi-tech), however, I do have it in one of my machines and so far not a single virus either.
Landscaping
I decided to do some landscaping. My yard was looking rather bleh, so I asked Husband to help me get some measurements down and then I sat down to make some budget plans and sketches. We basically had 3 options: cement, wood, or pebbles.
For the surface that we wanted covered, cement would have required about a 400 investment, wood about 1000, and pebbles around the same as cement.
Out of all cement is most durable and since we have a 2 door gate we could have placed the cars inside the fenced area for more protection. But while cement is a good price, I know little about the mixing part (and leveling) so I would have had to hire a couple of people to help me out, shooting up our costs. Dad said we could have purchased a mixing truck with formula - the big mixing truck comes to the house with the cement already mixed and spills it out wherever we need it and then we just spread it and brush it accordingly. The only thing we would have needed to do then was to scrape the ground, set the wooden frame, set in the metal maille, and after the cement was there then we distribute it inside the frame, wait a couple of hours and then brush it (to give those lines on the top to prevent having a slippery surface). That’s not too hard, ‘cept that I don’t know how to level stuff.
Wood is out of our budget for the moment.
So the pebbles was the other option... and I could do it in parts as opposed to having to do everything at once. I took 100 bucks from my savings and drove over to Home Depot to look at the pebbles. I have seen people around the neighborhood using white stone and it looks very pretty so I wanted that. The only other thing I needed were the stepping stones. I bought 10, 50-lb bags of white pebbles and just 5 stepping stones (23 lbs each) to start, oh and that black surface needed to prevent weeds from growing in between the stones. That was 66 dollars and change. ^_^ Took forever to load those bags, though.
Stepping stones, white marble pebbles, and toolsSo the bags were unloaded at home then and I began to scrape the ground to take off all the grass and such. It’s tough work! It had rained last week so the ground was not hard and that was an advantage. It wasn’t overly muddy either so I did not feel all gross, which is good too. I started working at around 6:30 pm and finished a 6x10' area in about 45 minutes, then I began setting the black weedstopper and held it down with the stepping stones, which went from my door to the doggie house’s door. ^_^ I can now feed her without getting my shoes dirty! (Yeah, doggie’s been sleeping outside for abotu a week and a half now... right after she tore a hole on my wall. ~_~ ). Set the pebbles and ta-da!
It looked so bleh.
The first area covered But only ‘cause it’s not done! ^_^ I need to do the rest so that it looks prettier. Husband and I went back to Home Depot to purchase more stepping stones, this time we got 33 (‘cause any more and our car would not have moved) and at around 9:30 pm I started deweeding another area of the yard. Ideally I should get rid of all the grass everywhere first and then set up the stuff, but I get discouraged and bored quickly, so I need to see some sort of result. Seeing how the areas were looking got me into it. I finished close to midnight. If husband would have helped I would have finished deweeding the entire place that night, but he said it was my project, so he just went inside to watch TV.
Sunday I woke up late because I felt tired. At 4 we went to buy another 30 stones and more black stuff and I began to work. Another 3 hrs or so later and I had finished the area where the table and chairs would go. The ground was not leveled properly... ~_~ so my stones looke uneven. But, oh wells. If they are really uncomfortable I may take them off and throw sand on there and then set the stones again. It all depends.
I haven’t finished. Woke up with a heck of body ache today and can barely move. Aerobics, running, or anything else never pained me as much as this. No wonder manual laborers are so fit. I won’t touch the yard again until the weekend. :p hehe I’m so lazy.
MuVo
I just received a package via UPS. It came under Hubby’s name so I gave him a call to ask if he had ordered anything. He told me to open it and in it there was a little hardware from Creative Labs.
Nomad MuVo by Creative^_^
Husband bought me an MP3 player/Flash Drive!
YEY!!!
This is from the website:
And here is a little flash tour for the product:
MuVo Tour!Now I need to fill it in with music! *skips off to get MP3s*
Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham
I just finished watching a Two-In-One Movies Hindi DVD. The first movie I watched was the 2nd feature, which translates to something like ‘Rain or Shine’ (well, actually it doesn’t, it is more like ‘Through Tears and Smiles’ but if you watch the movie, you’ll see that this is the closest thing we have for translating the title into English).
Shah Rukh Khan stars as an adopted son that grows up to be any parent’s dream child, and along him stars Kajol, a sweet but accident-prone girl from a lower caste. Why did I buy this DVD? ‘cause Shah Rukh Khan stars in both movies. :D I love that guy. He’s not the most handsome, nor the best of actors, but you may be able to compare him to Jackie Chan in the way that when you see him… you just fall in love with him. No and I don’t mean the action either! He’s just… loveable. Oh, but where he lacks kick-butt moves that Jackie Chan has, he excels in Dancing moves (which Jackie lacks. ^_^ ).
Shah Rukh KhanHindi movies are musicals… and if you want to enjoy a Hindi musical, you better rent one with Shah Rukh Khan while your western brain get used to this very culturally-oriented style with the lots of colors, sounds, and extreme family-oriented, tradition-based situations. Shah Rukh Khan just makes the dance scenes fly by. Quite entertaining man.
Okay so on to Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. This is the story of a rich Indian businessman that has everything he could want. A loving wife, great children, and a very prosperous business. He is a man of high standards and very deep-rooted traditions and he tries to pass all that was given to him onto his two sons. It is all tradition-tradition-tradition with him and whatever his grandfather, father, and he did, he wants his sons to do. Mommy, however, understands that times are changing and she sees no wrong in their children starting up their own traditions. We start the actual story-telling when the youngest of the sons, Rohan (played by Mission Kashmir’s hottie, Hrithik Roshan) returns home and finds his grandmothers whispering about the pain they are going through for not having their family together, it is here that he learns that his older brother, Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan) is adopted and that before he [young Rohit] left for boarding school 10 years ago, Rahul the older brother was banned from the house by his father. He demands to know the truth and so we have the flashback.
All is well and great and the family is celebrating one of India’s holidays when Rahul finally makes it home after several years of studying overseas. Happy-happy joy-joy. He have lots of speeches and dances, everyone from the young ones to the mature parents have a go at the very energetic moves. Now, the kids have a Nana (not a grandmother, but a lady that has taken care of them and that is almost considered family by them) and she gets ill, so older brother Rahul takes his pudgy little brother (who grows up to be yum yum) to the Nana’s house to give her some medicine and say hi… *swoosh* Rahul lays eyes on Anjali (Kajol) and is love at first sight for him. A series of accidents and misunderstandings take place and the two begin getting to know each other
Anjali being shy while Rahul flirts with her at a partyNow, Rahul knew since the young age of 8 that he had been adopted, but it was learned by mere accident and when that happened his father, Mr. Raichand (Amitabh Bachchan) told him that no matter what he was his true son and no more would be spoken of the matter. This basically makes the boy love his father even more and now Mr. Raichand’s word is sole rule and command. A command that he never breaks until he falls in love with Anjali. Rahul refuses to marry the girl that his father has chosen for him and he explains it is because he is in love, but his father demands that tradition states that he must marry into the family chosen for him so he orders Rahul to break off any ties with the lower caste girl. Rahul sadly goes to break off with Anjali but upon his arrival he learns that Anjali’s father has just died and that Anjali and her little sister are left alone and with nothing. He marries her immediately and it is this what causes his father to kick him out of the house, and prohibitn anyone from ever mentioning the young man’s name. Rahul would be his son no more and the marriage would not have his blessings. Young Rohit had been sent out to boarding school a couple of days earlier so he never learned of this tragedy until when he returns home, 10 years later (where our story begins). So then Rohit makes a promise to reunite the family and bring back the happiness they once had.
Intermission. Yeah… INTERMISSION. These movies are long! It’s because of the music scenes. ^_^
The 2nd part involves the young brother’s acts to try to get his family together again. I won’t say anymore, but there are some tear-jerkers and well, a happy ending. ^_^
Shah Rukh Khan [Rahul], Kajol [Anjali], Amitabh Bachchan [Dad], Jaya Bachchan [Mom], Kareena Kapoor [Anjali's sister], Hrithik Roshan [Rohan]
Scared Shitless
… or rather Scare the Shit out of…
We bought a small remote control car, nothing fancy, one of those 17.95 buck ones. It is a red mustang or something, that runs on 4 AA batteries and a D one for the control. We got home and started putting all the components together and reading the manuals. Chico was on the sofa sleeping while Tushi was on her mat chewing on a stuffed toy.
Well, we put the car down and husband turned on the remote. The classic remote winded wheel noise filled the living room and Chico raised his head attentively. Tushi in turn started barking, not knowing what the heck the noise was. Soon they realized what was making the noise and Chico’s head followed the movements of the car while Tushi continued to bark crazily with a few whimpers in between from nervousness.
Well, Tushi decided to follow the car barking and whimpering until we turned it around. Then she just began to cry out running away into the hall. Hehehe. We ketp playing with the car in th eliving room and she kept going crazy at the hall. Finally we set the car straight towards her. Tushi was moving foot-to-foot, braking and growling until it got too close for her, about 4 feet or so. She yelped and jumped over the car and ran away.
She left a present behind.
It sounds means but really you had to be there. It was also funny as heck. I finally see where that expression come from. One can actually scare the shit out of others. Damn.
