Abalone and pearl necklace 21", bracelet 8", earrings on sterling silver wires by Tammy Vitale

You know how when you walk in a house where someone is baking or maybe cooking potpourri and it smells like cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg and all things yummy?  Well, that’s how life is right now.  And it’s a combination of many different things that make it that way.  So I’m going to share a bunch of them with you and hope you enjoy it all too!

Monday I got a royalty check for my poetry book, Shift.  Okay, it was only $2, but hey!  people (all 6 of them) are buying my book!  People I don’t know.  Who knows – perhaps the tip of the iceberg and I shall find myself a best seller and that can support my art!

Yesterday, Tuesday,  I finally got my blue heron glazed and into the kiln, and wouldn’t you know it?  all that productive procrastination and mixing the glazes was a snap.  I used the drill and a mixing blade and it all went zip zip zip and everything was ready to go in no time at all.  Which makes me wonder.  When I originally got the glazes form Georgie’s, many of them were almost concrete hard settled and a real pain to mix.  They’ve now been sitting since June 06 and it was a snap.  Just how long do they sit on the shelf?  No matter, I got that todo out of the way.

Later,  I was on my One Coach weekly calls and got in line and had a great conversation with them about how to find shops.  Their "list" expert, Jack, noted that when you talk to list sellers (like magazines), ask for 4 line addresses instead of 3 line addresses and that alone will sift through and get you mostly businesses (who would have thought?).  They actually had even more suggestions, all of which I wrote down as I was paying attention to asking and listening and that just doesn’t make it stick anymore.  But now I have it in my trust notebook.

That got me all excited and I went back on the website and started sifting through all the information (yet again) and downloaded many of the Virtual Coaching MP3s (that’s where they interview experts in one of several fields.).  I made it through Mindset, Marketing, Sales, Personal Growth, Lifestyles, Management and Millionaires and got all that situated in respective places on ye olde IPod, which is the greatest invention since peanut butter and white bread.

During the day I was browsing Technorati and found a post with the top 100 art sites on Technorati at Laketrees blogspot…and discovered this blog is in the Top 30s!  and Ascender Rises, a regular visitor here and favorite spot of mine to visit, in the top 20s!  How do they do these ranks?  Anyways, the person who put it together when by the "authority #s" – anyone out there know how one gets "authority?"  I have 49 or 52, I’m not sure which.  But that was kinda fun to discover.

Then, Husband being off, we went to dinner at our favorite place on Solomons (or anywhere close to here), the Dry Dock and of course were not disappointed.

Today was more socialization for me.  Opened the kiln so the heron could cool off (and there it still sits waiting to be unloaded), pulled down a bunch of the One Coach action exercises to start working through (just the action exercises, most of which are matched with a Virtual Coaching call, make a big binder’s worth of info!), and ran up to AnnMarie Garden for their holiday party.  About 5 minutes after walking in the door I won a door prize!  Not hard, they were giving away quite a few, so now I have a nice bottle of Kahlua for the holidays (to go with my Chocolate Raspberry and Chocolate Orange liqueurs I bought at Port of Call on Saturday evening).  Ran in to several artists I know and had a fun chat with a free lance writer who didn’t know much about blogs – so I shared what I know especially about community.  His wife, also a free lancer, thought that might make a grand story idea.

After that I ran up to the Bead Boutique so Tricia could help me make sure the necklace pictured above went together smoothly, and made the bracelet and earrings while there.  Then home to walk and feed dogs and off to the Lexington Park Library where Candice Cummings was having an opening of her very eclectic work (which she calls magical realism).  Candy also put together and has run the gallery at the library for several years now.  I am to have a show in March.  That took me to 7 pm.

Finally, here is an early holiday gift from artist and friend Dhyana Mackenzie – it’s a snow wand!  Eat your hearts out…you should see the yummy crystals at the top in person.  Spectacular!  And the background is material from one of her skirts from college.  Don’t you just love it when someone puts something together special like this?  The wand comes with its own snow spell (if the year continues – they’re saying more perhaps this weekend), I’ll have to keep that spell for another year.

thought for the day:  A sense of humor is one of the most important qualities of the truly spiritual person.  A sense of humor is the result of a true sense of proportion; it is the opposite of self-importance…Rajneesh [says]…"Playfulness is as sacred as any prayer, or maybe more sacred than any prayer, because playfulness, laughter, singing, dancing will relax. you.  And the truth is only possible in a relaxed state o being."  Eds of New Age Journal, Chop Wood Carry Water:  A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life