Busy, Busy, Busy

And this is what I've been busy doing.

And this.

And this.

All are finished, inventoried, priced and boxed for tomorrow delivery to the store along with the others in my last blog post.

Now all I have to do is wait and see if people will buy them.

Oh, and I have to keep painting just in case they do.

New Camera And Reawakened Interest In Painting

There is a store locally that is selling strictly hand crafted items by local artists. I've been asked to sell my wares there. It works much like a show, we pay $35 a month plus 10% of sales and the store owner does all the work. I really don't have much to sell yet so I've started working on painting things to sell.

Now that I have a camera I can take pictures of my work and share them on the blog. Which makes my artwork more fun.

On the last post I shared a piece that I had done some time ago and after looking at it, I decided it needed something so, I got out the paints and this is what I came up with.

I definitely like it better. I added 2 roses and did a transparent green effect around the entire arrangement which made the white edges of the flowers pop out and become more visible against the background color.

Yesterday I did this one.

 I'm looking forward to creating many more and with my new camera, now I can share them.

Random Thoughts From The Retired Me

Some day I may figure out how it is I get close to 2000 pageviews a month on a blog that isn't updated regularly. Since I haven't a clue I'll just consider myself special or something.

It took awhile but I have organised my home and life to the point where I am the happiest I've ever been. My problem now is I don't wish to go out of my home into the maelstrom that I am safe from behind my closed door. It's bad enough I have access to it online I really don't need to experience it on a face to face basis.

Maybe I feel this way because I'm closer to my expiration date and my peace has become more important to me? I don't know, I just know that I can make a faster getaway from the information superhighway than I can while driving in my car. No speed limit online. Well, unless ones provider decides to limit it, but I can still find that little red x faster than some people can blink. Most of the time I use it before I get into trouble, lately it's become more important to me to speak my mind than to stay silent.

Online I can "slip out the back Jack," In person I'm apt to get my nose punched. I suppose I could pretend that I wear glasses all the time instead of just for reading, but these days people don't care if they put out your eyes. They want their right not to be butthurt unless they can do something about it, like knock your teeth down your throat. I wonder if it's all that online arguing that builds that kind of frustration? I wonder who I should contact to suggest a study about that? We waste money on everything else, why not to answer my questions?

Anyways, back to the organisation. I have closets and drawers in which I can find everything. The cans and stored foods in my pantry are now not past their expiration date.  I've rearranged the kitchen so that things I use regularly are easier to acquire. I've even changed the location of my chatchkies.

I have a small collection of hand painted Fenton Art Glass Cats that were buried on a corner shelf in the dining room. I've moved them to the top of my computer hutch where I get to admire them in the moments when I need to sit back and stare upward while requesting guidance. Some of them need to be elevated more for clearer visibility but I haven't decided what to use for that yet.

My husband's book work and tools (sigh) still take up space in my livingroom, but with everything else organised to my liking I don't seem to mind so much. I assume that is due to less stress and being more relaxed. I do have one more area that needs organising. Actually it's not so much organising as replacing that's needed. My paints have all gone past their usefulness.

I will need to find some way to dispose of them, clean the bottles and recycle those. Then I get to go shopping for more paints. They're all water based acrylics so it's not such a bad thing as it would be if they were oils, but there's close to 100 bottles partly filled with separated or dried out paint. Disposing of them will take days of fighting to get the contents out of the bottles. If I were less eco friendly, I'd bundle the lot of them up and just throw them in the dump, but I won't do that. It's not the right thing to do. Easier, but not right.

I'm going to go and replace them in September so I'll something to do to occupy my time now that I have my house organised. It cleans easily this way and doesn't take as much time. Which leaves me too much time to spend online unless I find something else to do.

I'm going to actually buy a camera this month. That will get me out of the house to take pictures that I can share on the blog, and it will give me something to look at when I try to duplicate the scene with paints. Fall is gorgeous here and this is farm country. Just the kind of bucolic scenery that begs to be celebrated with paint. I might get lucky and capture a deer or two in the process.

In the meantime I found the latigo I needed to hang my latest painting on my front door. I scanned it in instead of taking a picture so part of it is cut off at the bottom. I had finished it quite awhile ago but couldn't find the leather to hang it with until I got busy and organised my life. One of my neighbors wants me to paint something like it for her door. Fortunately the paints I need for her decor are still good enough to use.

People Amuse Me

One of my neighbors has been screaming about his income tax bill. It seems he underestimated the amount of money he would make in 2014 when he applied for the tax credit for his healthcare insurance. He admits his underestimate was intentional and now wants to screech that the government took the correct amount back from him via his income tax return. I fail to see what part of the subsidy being based on EXACTLY what he earned didn't alert him to the fact that if he earned more than he claimed his subsidy would be different? OMG OMG OBAMACARE DIDN'T LET ME LIE AND THEY TOOK MY MONEY. This means, of course that Obamacare is a failure. I can't convey to you the epic facepalm moments I have when I hear crap like that. Are the people complaining about having to pay the correct amount for their insurance really that stupid?

I'm very short tempered about things these days. Probably because I am lacking transportation. My Youngest stepson's car needs a new oil pump. It went to hell last Friday. He drove the car here, grabbed my Bravada and has done nothing to fix his problem since. Car still sits here while he runs all over Hells Half Acre driving what I usually drive. With my beloved HUSBAND'S blessing.

My vehicle needs some work done on it. Intake manifold gaskets need replacing. I've been running with it on one of those Miracle In A Bottle quick fixes. Works fine since I don't go that far. The Youngest Idiotic Offspring of My Soon to be Dead Beloved Husband travels hundreds of miles in a day.

Since I have accepted the inevitable I started hunting for another vehicle. I found an Olds Bravada in much better shape and newer than the one I have. Husband is whining that the guy wants too much. Well DUH! Hasn't he heard about dickering? Sooooo, this means WAR!

Yesterday I stuck him with the having to answer the business calls while actually conducting business trick. Of course, do you think people would call so I could share the inconvenience? Noooo, of course not. So, next attempt will be tomorrow since we went for groceries at Aldis and he won't drink their coffee plus they don't have the brand of cat food my cat eats. Since I couldn't get to where I needed to go because my friend wasn't going there and I have no transportation, he's going to have to take me.

As I explained to him, he can go without coffee on Sunday and without canned cat food to keep the cat from pestering him at 5 in the morning or he can cart my butt to the grocery store. I can't drive his pick up since it's manual and I never learned to drive on a manual. He doesn't want to take me out to teach me, nor does he want to kick his son in the butt to make him give me back the vehicle I need.

So, this means he needs to drive me to my doctor's appointment on Wednesday, the hairdresser appointment on Friday. He'll have to make the bank deposits, pick up the vehicle parts, the plumbing supplies, the oil for his pumper from Baums and call a tow truck if he breaks down somewhere since I have no way to help him. In the meantime, his son is using my vehicle to cart his daughter to work and back, let his wife get the groceries and whatever she needs and they get to go to the movies in it while his Passat sits in my driveway for a week now instead of being taken care of.

Funny how I married a man who isn't bright enough to understand why I'm angry. Yep, people do amuse me.

Seasons, Reasons And Lifetimes

This morning saw the property owner at my door to pick up her check for our leasing agreement. She's a mess these days with her Mom in a nursing home. Actually, she's a mess for other reasons going back 8 years now to the death of her husband, but she's dealing with a family issue that is adding more to that mess.

It seems her younger brother took advantage of the impending death of his step-father to grab power of attorney for step-dad and his own Mom. Their mother is an alcoholic with liver disease and with that power of attorney he also acquired her healthcare proxy. His first action was to lock her out of her own bank account so that she didn't have access to money for booze. Secondly he went through her house with a fine tooth comb and cleaned it out of her stash. 

There are long term alcoholics that shouldn't be dried out without medical supervision. She is one of them and she wound up in a locked down mental ward at a local hospital. Her kidneys shut down. As a result of his actions she is no longer considered to be capable of managing her own affairs and he has now transferred her to a nursing home. She needs to be there. I know this sounds harsh, but other than his lack of understanding of just how drying out would affect her, he is doing this for her own good.

His sister is upset. Not because of her impending death. She is upset that her Mom wants to go home to die and her brother won't let her. The doctor has declared this woman can't live alone any more. She falls all the time since all she's done for years is sit on her butt and drink until she passed out. She won't cooperate with the therapy to make her stronger, and there is no room in her apartment for someone else to live in.

There is a solution, but it isn't one my landowner likes. She has a 3 bedroom ranch in which she lives all by herself. It hasn't been cleaned in 8 years and she spends no time in it except to sleep at night because her husband died there, 8 years ago.

He didn't die suddenly, he died from cancer. Prostate cancer because he was a Jehovah's Witness and wouldn't accept the treatments that might place him in need of blood transfusions that were against his religion. She had time to prepare herself and she didn't. I don't know if she was in denial, I don't see how she could have been had she paid any attention to his condition. Then again, her lack of ability to stay home started when he was suffering. Church members spent more time with him than she did.

My Dad died May 4 and her husband died May 20 in 2007. My step-Mom has gone on with her life and she misses him 8 years later, but she lives her life head on. She doesn't run from the pain of loss. She owns it and finds things to do when it's this time of year. At the time, she let go, she didn't try to hang on to him because he was suffering. That's not what my landowner did.

Death hurts. Being left behind to fend for oneself hurts. The only way someone is in our lives for our lifetime is if we die first. That's a fact that can't be gotten around no matter how hard we try. People are in our life for seasons or reasons. For lifetime we have memories. It's up to us what mood those memories give us. We can waste our time wallowing in the hurt or we can use that hurt to do something constructive for someone else. It isn't the hurt or the loss that defines us, it's what we do afterward that will. That's our choice and nobody else's. 

If You're In Too Deep, Put Down The Shovel

I can't count the number of times people have asked us, as business owners who have just provided a service for them, if we can't hold the check until after Friday when they get paid. I'm tempted to say no, we need this money to pay our bills on time. I'd love to see the expression on their faces if we did that, not that they care, we don't count in their struggle to make ends meet.

When something like that is requested from someone who is obviously struggling, we don't have a problem with it. My problem is when you look at the homes they live in, the 3 nearly new cars in the driveway, the RV parked next to the garage, the boat, the snowmobiles, the ATV, the big zero turn lawn mower and all the fancy toys that are clearly visible on the property, I don't have much sympathy.

You have all that but you don't have $250 or thereabouts to pay our bill on time?  Really? Whose fault is that? Accept some responsibility for your problem and do something about it, stop whining.

I don't have all those toys. I'm not asking anyone to send me money so I can have those toys. I'm asking people that we provided a service for to pay for that service so we can pay the bills generated by that service. No more, no less. How hard is that? Pretty hard according to most of the people who are owing us money.

Excuse me for not being grateful for your business when you bounce checks, have paid with a maxed out credit card and then ignore my calls to try to straighten things out. I'm not impressed with your exclusive country club membership then. Trust me on that. You aren't any better when you do that than the people you call low life scum. You call them that because in your mind, they don't pay their bills. So, tell me what part of paying your bill just didn't happen?

And don't think that life will change much when the Republicans get serious and take our country back. You will still be buying toys on credit that is creating payments that are higher than your income. Funny how that's everyone else's fault except your own.

Yada Yada Yada

I've come to the conclusion that political discourse as we know it now is stupid. I'm not just talking about those commonly called Right Wing Nut Jobs, I'm also talking about the habits of the Progressives as well.

They don't like Gov. Cuomo. He's a DINO, he's for the rich, He hates education, etcetera, etcetera! However, they fail to accept that Cuomo is attempting to rebuild a state that lost $93 BILLION in taxable revenue as a direct result of the Wall St. crash of 08 and the number of people and employers who left the state for other places that had less taxes.

So, to combat that exodus he established tax free zones so outside businesses and start ups could get their feet in the water and learn to swim before the tax situation in this state creates an anchor that holds them underwater. Businesses here are still failing. And it's great to say TAX THE RICH" but that isn't really the solution.

TAX THE RICH isn't going to bring new businesses in.

TAX THE RICH isn't going to employ the nearly 600,000 people actively looking for work.

The answer isn't just TAX THE RICH and then spend the money on stupidity. For instance. Onondaga County has asked the State of New York for $900 million to tear down the Grandstand at the State Fair grounds and build an Amphitheater. Meanwhile the city of Syracuse in Onondaga County has some serious issues with their infrastructure. The newly revitalized business district called Armory Square is having water main breaks at the rate of 2 a week. The county won't help them because of the request for the money to build the amphitheater. And they don't have the money to rebuild the water mains themselves.

The prevailing reasoning behind this move is that the State Fair brings in millions of revenue for the county. Somehow they seem to not remember that the State Fair is a once a year deal and that businesses open daily bring in revenue that if allowed to continue will keep the money coming in when the fairgrounds doesn't. That requires the ability on the part of the city to see to in that the businesses actually have what they need as far as sewer and water.

And while this may sound like an excellent idea to many who want to use the fairgrounds more than once a year, they aren't making the decision based on what the outside the fair use actually is. Every October, Super DIRT week is held at the fairground on the Grandstand's race track which they plan to do away with. What the County Exec wants to replace that with is horse shows. And there is already an arena where those are held. Which don't bring in the money DIRT week does, but the reasoning is they could have more of them?

Mind you, this isn't just $900 million of Onondaga's money. It's the state's money that she has no qualms about asking for. A move which will cost the DIRT revenue and eventually the businesses in Syracuse when they move to other places where water and sewer is available. Some of those business owners are already looking for alternate sites, reluctantly, because they want to stay there. DIRT week adds to their revenue too because of the shuttle buses between the fairgrounds and their businesses.

And when the lovely Liberals scream TAX THE RICH how are they defining the word rich? I took a peek at Gov. Cuomo's tax returns. And he pays half his income in taxes.

On the Governors total income of $553,000 he owed the federal government $155,193 he paid $6916 over the income deductions he filed quarterly. For state tax his bill was $41,000. He'll get a refund of $3212. In addition to that he also pays 6.2 Social Security plus the Medicare tax which makes his tax indebtedness equal to half his income.

He's not starving by any means with half of his income left, but how much more can be taken to offset the expenditures our government, both state and federal are making? The reality is WE are in the habit of spending too much money. If We the People keep spending ourselves into debt on a personal level, why is it we expect any different behavior from our politicians? It's not just them, it's US.