Cat Litter Box Joke

Mom bought one of those little thought for the day calendars this year. It has a picture of a cute cat and a little saying, quotation or other bit of cat-ly wisdom.

I loved the one from earlier this week….

“You know when people see a cat’s litter box, they always say, “Oh, have you got a cat?” Just once I want to say, “No, it’s for company!”

Speaking of litter boxes….did you see that gal on EBay selling used kitty litter? The premise was to use the litter like a stink bomb with someone you didn’t like all that much. eeeuuuwh!

For a while, there was also an Etsian selling hand-made pieces made from wool that looked just like a hairball. The girl seemed totally oblivious to what her wearable art looked like. While I try never to laugh at anyone’s artistic endeavors, seeing her woolen creations adorned with glitter and beads was just too much. Glad I don’t know that gal personally. But, then again, maybe she had never encountered one of those cold, wet hairy things between her toes in the middle of the night.

As I type this on my new fancy-smancy keyboard, the clicking is accompanied by the light snoring of one of our girls. Hapi, a sometimes author on this blog is curled up on her box in the window on my desk having a bit of a snooze after filling her tummy this morning.

Have a good day.

Spring 2014

I so love spring. It is without a doubt my favorite time of year. The daffodils, the crocus, the greening of the trees. All of it signals something of a rebirth of the landscape. But, it’s not until a particular wee little birdie comes to visit that it really means spring has arrived.

It happened yesterday. I was sitting at my desk and I saw movement at the window. The first hummingbird of spring! He flew up to my window and just hovered there. It was if he was saying hello and asking us to put his feeder up. We quickly made a bit of sugar water for him and put it out. After all, most of the nectar-bearing flowers aren’t in bloom yet and after such a long trip to us, he was probably quite hungry. I’m not sure if there’s more than one about in the yard but so far I’ve only seen one. They move so fast and look so similar that we really don’t know how many are around until we see them fighting over the feeder.

ruby throated hummingbirdI thought I would share a picture of one of these pretty little birds. I’m so glad I found one by such a wonderful artist as Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Fuertes is most well-known for his wonderful depictions of the birds of the world.

I also posted this piece on Reusable Art today. If you would like to download the original, larger sized version of this piece, you can find it here hummingbird drawing.

The weather has been quite pretty the past few days. We were lucky enough to be able to play a bit of hooky. We visited a small town in South Carolina. Abbeville was a pretty town with the most friendly folks. It has a large town square. The sidewalks are a combination of segment and cobblestones/bricks. There’s trees, grassy areas and flowers. The town has a bit of French history and the downtown buildings sport colorful fronts with black wrought iron accents. Almost looks like it could be a small town in Europe somewhere, rather than South Carolina.

We stopped for lunch at a restaurant on the square. I wish I remembered the name of it but it served Italian food and pizza. The staff was quite accommodating and the food was wonderful. I had a cheesesteak stromboli and Mom had a small Italian sausage pizza.

It was a fun day to be there. While we were waiting for our lunch, a lady whom we think was the owner or at least the manager came rushing over to one of the other tables. She was almost shouting, “He’s here! He’s here!” Her joy was evident to everyone in the place. There were other people in the restaurant and it seemed like everyone knew everyone. The he in question was a new baby boy. Just born. They teased the lady for her exuberance and joked about who would get the first pictures. She went back to the kitchen but it couldn’t have been five minutes later that she returned to the dining room brandishing a cell phone. While we were not part of the celebration, it just turned our lunch into one of yummy food and utter joy.

After lunch and not wanting to leave Abbeville yet, we walked down the street. Our first stop was what first looked like a gift shop. It turned out to be a wonderful store run by Mennonites. Near the door was a display of baked goods and fresh cheeses. There were grains, spices and all sorts of dry goods. Fresh butter, fresh cheese and all sorts of other yummy stuff too. Then there was the meat cases. Oh, if we hadn’t been so far away from home and the weather not quite so warm, we would have left with far more than we did. The fresh meats looked nicer than what we often see at our local Fresh Market and the prices were better than most grocery stores. A sample of their cheddar ranch dip had me drooling for more – if we ever go back in cooler weather – some of that will definitely be coming home with us. The pecan, chocolate bar cookie was divine. Mom’s molasses cookies melted a bit in the car – butter! they were actually made with butter. Seems like hardly anyone bakes that way anymore.

Next door was a jewelry and gift shop. We’ve visited many tourist gift shops and so many of them have the same stuff everyone else does. This shop was full of wonderful Native American inspired jewelry and other handicrafts. We saw a number of interesting pieces but just felt we shouldn’t indulge. The owner’s disappointment was evident. But, it is definitely a place worth visiting again, particularly if we need a gift for a special someone.

Whatever, I Quit

I started Blog About Crafts in 2006. When looking for a name, I thought Blog About Crafts fit perfectly with what I had planned for this site. The site grew and thanks to a pair of controversial posts hitting the front page of Digg.com, things were moving along fairly well. Until the hacking incident. I was down for around 2 months. Google and to a lesser extent the other search engines, slammed me and slammed me hard. They discounted many of my back links and things that I ranked well for seemed to be treated as if they were suddenly written in secret code that couldn’t be interpreted by the search engines anymore.

It’s been several years since then.

I tried regular posts with lots of outgoing links. I did a bit of guest posting (before the latest edict that says they are now evil). I Pinned, I emailed and I commented on other blogs. Very little changed. And, many of the people I thought I was helping acted indifferent to my showcasing them and their works. Those who supported my efforts and for whom I was able to drive new business to almost made it worthwhile but unfortunately the time vs payback just wasn’t there.

This site gets few visitors. If I add something that I think is appropriate, I might get a small handful of extra visitors but generally I’m ignored. If I revamp the entire site to better match “Good SEO practices” as defined by the latest edicts out of California, there might be a small, little jump but it goes away in less time than it took me to pick out a new theme/design for the site. Google sends a bit of traffic here and there but generally it’s a ghost town. I could write more often but what I felt like talking about wasn’t always “art and crafts.” Couldn’t dare do that, it would hurt my rankings on Google and the other search engines. Well, darn, I’ve done just about everything I’m supposed to do to keep the search engines happy and they still seem to be penalizing me for being down for two months.

Whatever, I Quit.

No, I’m not going to discontinue this site. I’m just going to quit worrying about what Google, Yahoo!, Bing or any of the others might think about this site. If I want to talk about crafting today, WordPress tomorrow and how much I hate beets the next day; that’s what I’m going to do. Maybe some folks will come and visit along the way and perhaps I’ll just be talking to myself. But, whatever, I give up. This is going to be my blog going forward and I don’t give a darn about staying on topic, keyword optimization, back links or any of that other SEO crap.

Furthermore, I don’t really want to be bothered looking for a photo to go with this rant. That will mess up this site a bit, but that’s just too darn bad. Don’t like reading a post without a photo…go away. If you are mad at me now because you think beets are the best thing God put on this wonderful Earth of ours…please just go away too.

The rest of you are warmly invited to join me on this journey. Who knows, maybe that will be the next Google edict…sites that talk about random crazy, mixed-up stuff are more natural because they are obviously not trying to gain search engine positions. And maybe, Blog About Crafts will gain the number one ranking for “gal who quit worrying about SEO and just decided to write about what she was thinking about that day without worrying if anyone was listening.”