I keep telling myself this ;)

Life is...a bit weird lately. Or maybe I am just weird lately. No maybe, I have been pretty weird lately. I went off the deep end and took three days off line and out of this room completely. Set the goats up in the garden - they seem happier anyway. Obsessing, worrying, having disturbing dreams and as of last night, seeing things. Well, you know, I've always seen things - ghosts, fey, elementals. Seeing new things, I guess. And it spooked me because it moved very fast and it reminded me of the ghost cats I saw in Sapulpa - and they were not nice things. But this was...well, I think a Raven and not a ghost but a spirit Raven, if you will, a protector spirit I'm thinking. Probably meant to reassure me, not freak me out.

Damn "Art of Redemption" by Stuart Wilde. I started reading and his descriptions of the morph made me go - "Wow, I've been seeing this for a couple of years". I read the rest of it and now I'm seeing and/or dreaming of the things he describes later in the book. Now my problem is I'd like to not believe some of what he talks about - although I've never known him to lie and have found everything I've ever tested of his words to be true. All this "end days" type stuff bothers me (well, why wouldn't it?) and of course, I have my beloved Xtian here who seems to pretty much literally believe the Revelations and whose friend, with the doctorates in theology and such, says the end day will be in something like a month. I hate to tell him, but Stu says THE GODDESS is coming, and boy is she pissed. LOL. Kidding - not the Goddess part, the pissed part - Stu says she is all feminine love. But she'll be doing some sorting, too.

Hope everyone had a good Valentine's Day. Mine was rather up and down. I don't know, maybe I'm making a lot of problems where there are none. We did have a pretty, storm sunset last night. Today, it's cold (for us - 50s), windy and very overcast. We are supposed to have snow tomorrow (yes, the guys are blaming me).

More at Flickr - although not all that I took. We are having some weird major Internet slowdown. It took like three tries and I never did get all the photos uploaded. Wondering if we have exceeded the bandwidth (you only get so much on these freaking satellite accounts - they don't cut you off or charge extra, they just put you on slower than dial up speeds). I hope that isn't it. My dearest hubby is in total spoiled mode and runs the music player constantly when he is online, and the electric heater. There is no telling him that he is using up electricity and bandwidth we really cannot spare because he considers what he wants to be a necessity for him. *shaking head* So, yeah, that is a wee bit of the problem there.

Two male Scorpio egos rattling in the same cage, one of which is old, tired, and rather grumpy of late. The other is younger and has been rather indulged and spoiled for the last 17 years and despite a few blips, thinks that good days are here again of using without thought to a limited supply or budget.

Considering the stress we've all be under, we're doing pretty good though.

Me, I've caught myself now, figured out what my mental mind block is about. I probably owe an apology all around. At the same time (here we go with Redemption again) it has let me pinpoint and identify that block, stick it in a box and look it over, hug it, love it, forgive it, and perhaps - redeem it. Uh huh. Thats what it is about. And since it was Third (through me) who kicked it awake, it reinforces that message I received earlier that he is a healer - not because he sets out to heal, but just in his presence and being himself. And occasionally kicking over my mental blocks. Without even knowing it or meaning to. I'd bet he has no clue he even did it or how quietly weird I've been all week.

On the work front - I'm still working on switching OUT of all those damn MT blogs and back into the old scripts, old URLs and so on. Dammit. So, yeah, that's got me in a mood, too. I'm nearly done now.

I spent a day doing clipart of Boston Terriers and realizing I can't find a cute one for a headstudy because I think they are ugly little fuckers (sorry if you like them - they are neat dogs - just not for me) - and the same night deleted the file of reference photos. That morning I discovered I had, for some unknown reason, saved the finished cliparts not in the artwork folder as I usually do - but in the photos folder I had deleted. (**Whacking self over head**) I haven't been able to bring myself to redo them. Yet.

I got a bunch of new pages up for Color-Your-Own.com though - border collies, thoroughbreds jumping, and a new section of fairies. Here's the horses:

• Horse - Thoroughbred - Hunter headstudy


• Horse - Thoroughbred - Jumper front view


• Horse - Thoroughbred - Jumper side view

Horse - Thoroughbred stallion

It occurred to me that you never see black fairies. I know the Cherokee have tales of little folk, but do any African or other black indigenous people? Anyone know?

So while I'm looking that up, I run onto some neat stuff about Leprechans and tricksters and it occurs to me that I could make a fun little website about PRANKS, TRICKS, and the various trickster gods (I don't know of any that are goddesses?) that would mainly promote PrankPlace, of course, but be fun to do and sit about making seasonal money like that little April Fools page I have that sits and makes money whether I remember to update it or not.

Speaking of seasonal, I was plesantly surprised at how many people used Fre-eCards.com for Valentines - considering I do not have a Valentines, or even a love/romance section. I had planned to add something like that this year - but got distracted between this weird mental/spiritual/emotional stuff going on and the MT blogs and all that jazz.

Thrifty World Travel got one new page, a nice little article about Winter Backpacking tips. I noticed while working on that, that I have a gazillion adsense ads for clipart there right now. All over the travel site - nothing but ads for clipart. I'm going to assume this is a temporarly glitch due to the current placement of my clipart sites on Google. It only seems to be happening on TWT though. I thought it was just the subdomains, but Animal-Nerd seems to be okay, and all the folders are okay. Weird. Slightly annoying because it will probably hurt the click through rate on the travel site, and those are some very well paying clicks.

On the other hand, it also inspired the thought that I could just as well do nothing but answer Ask Me Anything questions, and draw coloring pages and clipart and figure on increasing my income. Maybe the last six years of trying this and that and the other has come down to teaching me where to stick my focus. That and those little sites like A Spring Garden and the April Fools site mentioned earlier that just putter along making money without any updating to speak of.

Speaking of puttering along - JustHorseCrazy.com is doing just that - the income so far this month is pretty much doubled. Okay, from $2 to $4 - but that is with minimal promotion, effort, and little more than bare bones of the site done. And the articles are on an MT blog (which is to say, so much wasted time), which I guess I'll have to go fix someday if only to stop the fucking SPAM comments that fill my email box and annoy the fuck out of me.

Always so much more to do than I have time for.

If you are in a charitable mood - check out this article about Operation Shanti. My first take was, ugh, never mind the poor in India, what about the poor here? (For crying out loud - not that I'm complaining, but we just found out that James & I probably qualify for free health insurance here - because we are working poor). However, read the article and give it a chance. I'll probably send them a few bucks from my next Google check. Their wants are very simple, they don't spend all their money fundraising like a lot of others, and I believe that the way they are going about helping will really improve the quality of life. The old - don't give a man a fish, TEACH him to fish theory. I'm into that, you know.

Speaking of charity, Google gives like one dollar in ten to their charitable foundation which does some very cool shit. Again - it doesn't just buy fish, it even helps finance small start up companies who have a good idea or invention that would benefit "the world". Sure, they concentrate on the information and energy facets and yes, they would stand to benefit from it, but so would everyone else who uses information or energy, eh? To me, it seems like the perfect nemesis to say...oil companies buying patents for alternative energy cars so they can quash them.

Speaking of which, I am not getting involved in the election shit - I no longer believe in our government or that we have any say in who gets elected. But this is pretty interesting here; How Oily is your candidate?. It tracks how much oil money each candidate is getting. Don't look at the Bush election years, it will make your skin crawl. Unless you're like me and already knew the Oil Companies run the Federal gov't now, not just Oklahoma.

I will say, if you do give a shit, or just like to laugh about it (I'm so disillusioned I'm beyond laughter, sorry) Prank Place has some pretty cool political joke stuff for this election. They slam everyone equally (including Bush) so don't get all huffy on me. I'm telling you - I think we need Carter to oversee our elections these days more than he needs to be worrying about elections in Africa.

In good news, the old horse, Moses is doing a lot better. He still has a runny nose, but the jaw went down. We are speculating maybe he got a bit of hay up a sinus or something. Who knows. All I know is he looks better, he whinnies and walks fast (about his top speed unless there is a calf involved) to come be fed, and in general is acting like he feels a lot better. For which Third and I both feel a lot better. The horse still looks like a walking skeleton, but we're feeding him up with senior food and hay and graze and he is sure eating and making gut noises and his manure looks like proper dry, round horse poop again so I hope it will be just a matter of time before he picks up again. Poor old guy.

The goats are getting fat, they obviously love being in the old garden. Monty and Miriam tell me the three chickens they took are happy and laying eggs. At least one of my hens has finally started laying regularly again. I think Buffy and Hussy are laying, but Klyde and Harry are getting the eggs. Oh well - it's good for them (the dogs that is). If we get to stay, we'll get a pen put up to keep the dogs away from them. Fido has taken to eating with Suzy Q - LOL. I'm surprised she lets him share. I'll have to get a photo.

Well, I bet this is about all you can stand of me in one day, and I have assigned myself to try and hit all my various blogs and social sites today. I'm just shy of making that $100 dollar month on Adsense - going by my daily average this month - so I'm hoping to drum up a bit of traffic and clicks.

Besides, I'm bored with myself :P

Blessedbe