my precious
Oh social networking, where would we be without you?
T swims and snorkels often in our fabulous San Marcos river, and frequently finds Stuff. Especially after a holiday. He must have twelve pairs of sunglasses by now. He finds jewelry, keys, lighters. He brought home a twenty dollar bill the other day, wet but legal tender. This morning it was a class ring. My heart gave a little pang when I saw it said 2009 on it: a high school treasure barely owned before lost.
It fit me perfectly, or almost–just loose enough that it might fall off my finger if I were swimming in cold water. It had a first name on it, and then engraved inside a full name, not a very common one.
I took it to my real-life social network, my cronies–some real pieces of work these ladies, and connected one way or another with everybody in town. But all they could say was that it wasn’t from the local high school.
No ad on Craig’s list in the lost and found. Nor in the local paper. So I took a stab at Facebook. You can’t see much about people on Facebook unless you’re an official friend, but there was the name, and a high school affiliation, class of 2009. Hometown hours away but it was worth a try.
So within 6 hours of being found the ring was in the mail on its way back home. Amazing. In retrospect, perhaps it was unwise to slip the thing on, a ring lying there in the river muck. But nothing noticeably evil happened. Except, y’know, that big blue stone looked pretty good on my hand there. I’m going to have to hint around to T.
you will get burned
You will get cut. You will get burned. If this troubles you, take painting lessons.
That’s my favorite warm-glass t-shirt. But this week it’s too hot to melt glass. Or shall I embrace the obvious hyperbole: it’s almost hot enough outside to melt glass. It’s definitely too hot to sit in front of a torch. The kiln can soldier on, though–it’s not going to make the garage perceptibly warmer. I’m still on bottles, although I’ve overcooked a few in my zeal. It’s nice being able to experiment on free trash. I bought a couple of casting molds too, and some mica powder to play with. Glass crushing is to become my next skill. Seems easier than precision cutting, whereat I have not yet arrived.
Everything outside is getting burned just sitting there. We’re breaking all kinds of heat records this week. We’re on stage 2 water restrictions, and I continue to indulge murderous fantasies directed at my lawn and so-called landscaping. I’m thinking a nice rock garden for next year…for growing rocks. They don’t drink much.
Creatures are suffering and on the move looking for water. T and Milo even saw a porcupine the other day. Milo was on a leash or we’d have a disaster story to tell. The chickens are quite put out and wait impatiently for noon every day when I let them out of the hot chicken yard into the hot backyard, where there is at least a little green shade left to enjoy. Mojo, that most sensible old dog, wants to go outside only three times a day: once for dawn patrol, once to help me feed the chickens, and once for dinner in the evening. Otherwise he’s counting his blessings and his zzzzzz’s in air-conditioned bliss.
Scheduled trips to Portland and Finland sustain me. But Portland has Bullseye glass. Finland has Iittala. There’s no escaping this heat. Glass is always hotter than whatever else is happening.
sagging stuff
I guess everybody who gets a kiln slumps a few bottles. I don’t mind being one of the herd. Saggy bottles are neato. Everybody likes them. And they’re not entirely predictable, so there’s always that moment of great anticipation just before lifting the kiln lid.
The Martini & Rossi bottle that went out to Dad on Sunday: 
This is a vermouth bottle so it seemed right for an olive tray complete with little forks.
The blue one here is a Bombay Sapphire gin bottle. I’ve taken up collecting odd shapes. Can’t wait to see what happens to the boot:
So thanks, littering douchehounds who drive through my neighborhood on Saturday nights. I’ll take your empty beer bottles and use them for general niftiness.
You can keep those used condoms, though. They’ll never sell on Etsy.
part of the problem now
Remember way back when the internet was only half ruined? Back before AOL was a web portal? Pre-Google days? 1996, say. Back then, you could research a term on AltaVista and get solid hits and great references. But then the junk began to appear. Articles that were nothing more than gibbering concatenations of phrases designed to lure a hit, or similarly nonsensical lists of hot topics tacked on the end of a half-hearted attempt at relevant content. And nowadays, a vast proliferation of trashy pap, recycled general knowledge or widely circulated misinformation, reproduced over and over until you spend much more time wading through bilge than actually gleaning any useful information.
All in the name of search engine optimization. Hits are a hot commodity, and so is rank on a Google search. Those dopey articles repeat keywords over and over, and who cares if they are written at an 8-year-old’s reading level. Or even if they’re wrong.
Here’s what really irks: Somebody is getting paid to produce that crap! Somebody not me!
Okay, I don’t really want to write the worst of the drivel. But there’s plenty of writing to be done, and I am happy to have found a marketplace that, so far, looks legitimate and even intelligently designed…maybe even ingenious.
Textbroker.com is just that, a text broker. You can sign on as a writer, get assigned a level, work your way up to better rates. The word rate is abysmal for the most part, but on the other hand, you can pick your poison. There’s always some kind of work. Clients create job orders and specify what they need and pick a writing level/rate, and the writer can look through the list and pick up whatever looks promising.
Just to give you an idea, level 5, the highest level for writers, pays 5 cents per word. I was getting 8 cents per word for that asbestos research work I did a while back. Not great pay, but not bad for a newbie freelancer, I thought. Five cents is pretty sorry, but okay considering you can pick your topic, turn down the work, even throw it back in the pot without penalty if you change your mind. The only (giant) problem is that Textbroker rarely gets level 5 jobs. And the next level down pays 1.4 cents per word.
That’s the brilliant part for them. The brilliant part for the writer, or at least the part that makes this possibly better than slave labor, is that clients can request a particular writer directly, and for those assignments, the writer can set her own rate. So it’s possibly a foot in the door for the right writer, and meanwhile it’s not such a bad introduction to freelancing life…you don’t have to get stuck with dreadfully boring topics, and you don’t have to fully embrace the feast-or-famine nature of freelancing with this setup.
It doesn’t seem likely you’d ever earn a living from these guys. Still, I’m finding it useful in its way. I pick topics that I can cover without research, or else things I might like to learn about anyway. As an info junkie, I frequently entertain myself with short ADD-fueled bursts of Googling—and why not regurgitate words and make a few cents in the process? It’s been helpful to me to sit down and knock out 400 words fast. I don’t have time to get bored, and each little article reminds me that writing is not hard, not a big mystery, not a big effort to begin—something I need to relearn constantly.
The real winners here are the people running Textbroker. It’s such a perfect combination of exploitation and opportunity. I wish I’d thought of it.
MooJesus
“What if it’s a cult?” said I, as we bumped over the cattle guard and the ranch gate closed behind us. What if that sweetly reasonable website was a lure and a trap for the unsaved such as ourselves?
We visited the MooJesus raw dairy today. Had to, once we saw the name of the place. I was browsing for local foods and ran across the website. The “Everything Jesus” ranch just outside of Seguin hosts the Genesis Christian Academy, and a farm producing organic produce and grass-fed meat, and one of only two licensed raw dairies in the state that does not use milking machines.
Well, they’re not a cult, and they’re perfectly delightful. We sampled the dairy products, took a tractor tour of the ranch/school/gardens and then had lunch. A leisurely lunch…it must have taken two hours; they’re not in a hurry to move their customers out down there. It’s a beautiful location, on what was once part of the Capote ranch, running along the Guadalupe river. I ate more dairy products than I usually consume in a month. It’s going to be at least 18 hours until I’m really hungry again. I’m thinking I need to get antithetical to milkfat for dinner…pickles. Yeah. That would do it.
No brainwashing occurred and they didn’t proselytize (except about sauerkraut) , but the garden, the livestock, the sheer amount of knowledge of raw and cultured foods over there are on my mind. I could live with that. Strangely, I found myself checking out their “help wanted” listing this evening.
More pickles, please.
which leads to…
this:
I don’t know about you, but I can’t listen to (or watch) this one without a big dopey grin on my face.
I’ll stop now.
bugging out
I’ve lived in this house for nine years now. That’s the longest anywhere in my lifetime. And, as a house will after nine years, it’s starting to get dirty. There are a few parts of it I’ve never cleaned. Some that get cleaned every three or four years. Or not. Lots that I just don’t see anymore. Everything but the wood paneling and one bathroom needs painting. The kitchen floor is crumbling as I type. The cabinets need some restoration, and two rooms still need wood laminate floor. The front foundation planters are full of leaves and dying shrubs. We could use a home facelift and some curb appeal.
So I think I’ll leave.
Not forever. I’m going to Tucson to put some wear and tear on Mom and Dad’s place instead. When I get back, who knows. Maybe I’ll be spared all that effort. As good Texas boingboing readers know, if the swine flu doesn’t get us, the crazy Raspberry ants probably will.
pointy kitty
A couple of days ago I noticed that we were going through rather a lot of chicken feed out there in the coop during the dark hours when I know the ladies are getting their beauty roost. It’s the old chicken tractor, but I removed the bottom at one point to put better wheels on, so it’s not critter-proof. And so far so good; the only real predator at hand is our own dog. But we were certainly feeding something uninvited. So I picked up the feeder last night before dark.
Took it back out there this morning and all was well, until Milo the PITA dog came outside and promptly went ape shit. Barking snarling digging slavering biting at the deck–and from underneath, hissing and gaping mouth and teeth, which I had to quick make sure wasn’t a rattler. Between the decking I couldn’t see much, but finally I got a look at fur that didn’t seem to be dog, and then a snout. And then an eyeball, followed closely by resumed teeth and hissing.
I saw a baby possum once on my back porch and it was cute, but there is nothing cute about this grownup one lurking under my deck, actually fighting back at my fighting dog. There’s a malevolent look about the masked eye, the pointy snout. And you know there’s a ratty tail hanging there somewhere. I hope the dog has convinced it that this is not a comfortable neighborhood. The free night-time buffet is definitely closed for the foreseeable future.
All of which is to say, I’ve promised to get some writing done this summer–it’s close enough to summer already, here–and this is the writing hour, and I hate like hell to pull up a blank page and get back to work on Annie. Blogging seems a fair warm-up.
creation is messy–and expensive
The most wonderful money pit yet…and the studio is alive with new possibility. Elphaba, Dirty Martini, Leaky Pen, periwinkle, eggplant, along with white, black, various other greens and violets, comprise my new palette. So my advanced beginner beads will begin to emerge in purples and greens. And I still need a wonderful pink, but I’m not sure I can afford one.
You need gold to achieve pink glass, I hear. I’m not clear on what you you need for CIM Heffalump or Dirty Martini or Kryptonite, but I sure love the color names.
I took a class this past weekend and came home with a bulk tank adapter for my hothead, too. Endless gas — no, really, it’s a good thing!
