Merry Christmas Eve! Sea Glass, Dead Cat, VIRUS, Snow, Peter Gabriel, and a Christmas Tree!

Since my last post, I went to the beach (yes SEA GLASS!) we found a dead stray cat on the lawn, my computer caught a virus, and we got incredible amounts of snow in our first snow storm of the season! Those of you who were following me on twitter would have noticed the saga of Cat Doe. I went door-to-door but no one would own up to the dead cat (which had been hit by a car and someone either placed it on our lawn or it died there). So we gave it a home and buried it ourselves in the back yard, before the snow came. The poor thing was frozen when I picked it up with a snow shovel, but I didn't want to leave it there because our neighborhood isn't THAT trashy to the point where we leave dead cats sticking everywhere. And we couldn't stand looking at it because it was only 10 feet from the front door. (We live 15 feet from a main road).

ANYWAY, now for something cute and happy, a Chickadee at the suet feeder!

Now, SEA GLASS! The day before Cat Doe, I went to the beach, and had amazing finds!

The last find of the day was this blue shard from Scarborough Beach.

Many pre-1860 "black glass" deep olive green shards.
And an "upkick" from the pontil of a bottle!
11 cents, the dime is dated 1972.And then, the best find that wasn't discovered until we got home....

Another piece of uranium vaseline glass!


And on that happy note, Merry Christmas!

When I'm faced with a problem, I start whistling the theme for MacGyver.

LOL

And in case any of my readers are too young to remember MacGyver, well here's the theme song for the show.


Anyway, many people know I don't watch TV. Truth is, I don't even have cable (I do have cable internet! lol). However, when I'm too tired to do anything else (such as recent USPS days where I run my behind off delivering packages and 27 certified letters) I love to curl up and watch MacGyver, which makes me feel like I could be smarter if only I knew how to make explosives out of a dead fish, a broken bottle, toilet paper, some buttons, and a shoe. Maybe a stink bomb. lol. And in today's internet age, if you want to use the internet to be more like MacGyver, you could always search "how to make bombs out of common household items" on Google. The first thing you do is put the coffee on, because by the time it's done percolating you'll have the Secret Service at your door.

But it's always good to know that if we were to get kidnaped by Soviet agents, that freedom is just one Swiss Army Knife away.

So I had this dream that someone had this plot to bomb the Norwichtown Mall, and the only people who could save the mall was me and MacGyver. LOL For all my non-eastern Connecticut readers, the Norwichtown Mall is a dead mall, with only three stores inside among about 25 empty storefronts. They would consist of a Dollar Tree, a hair salon, and a GNC vitamin store. The more recent stores to close included a chinese restaurant with only 8 different combo dishes to choose from, and the Radio Shack my parents bought their first computer from in 1988.



That computer still works, by the way.



In other news, I really want to head back to the beach. I wish there were more of me to go around and do things, and that flea markets weren't only open on Sundays.

Raptor Randomness

So I'm listening to iTunes on RANDOM. It's not something I do often because I'll hear something like BEER!!! (Psychostick) followed by MMMBOP (Hanson) followed by the German version of "Komm gib mir deine Hand" (The Beatles) followed by London Bridge (Fergie) followed by something utterly ridiculous like something from the soundtrack for Sonic the Hedgehog. ha. I'm sure I'll get sick of it in a few minutes, especially when something awesome comes along that I forgot about.

Here's some random pictures from my last day job that I got laid off from in January. I can't help but think these are the reasons that place went out of business. We had a lot of fun...I should get my raptor videos up on youtube. Trust me, you want to view these full size.

The day after Halloween:

Emergency response plan for Raptor attacks:

Emergency response plan in case Millstone (nuclear) in the neighboring town had a meltdownEric's poptarts. Developers and practical applications (microwaves) do not agree.

Company paid for snacks, these were usually our month's worth of beverages.

To do list:

Found near the emergency response plans:

And to think...we got PAID for this! Then again, they did go out of business. LOL

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

We got our first snow of the year, which is already starting to melt. I'm actually glad because I have to deliver the worst route in the office tomorrow driving from the wrong side of my jeep in Bozrah...and frankly don't feel like dealing with iced over roads and the rest. I mean, it's not like I can wear a seat belt while driving from the passenger side (wouldn't be able to reach brake/gas pedals) so to say I'm nervous while driving on less than ideal roads like that is an understatement.

Anyway! Since many bloggers are posting their Christmas lists, I'm going to post mine.


And here we go!

1. Nikon D60 D-SLR camera. I've only wanted a new camera for a year now, especially ever since my Kodak DX7590 that I got for my 21st birthday (I'll be 25 in February) broke in the fall of 2007.. Many of the buttons wore out suddenly and my camera lags in orienting itself (so pictures that I take right-side-up come out upside-down...this problem preceded the buttons failing by about 2 months but easily fixed in any photo editor). Anyway...A digital SLR would be a logical upgrade now that they're affordable. My Kodak cost almost $500 in 2005, and the Nikon D60 costs about $550. I would also settle for a Nikon D40, but for about $50 more you can get the D60 so therefore the D60 is a better value. One of the differences is that the D40 is 6 megapixel, and the D60 is 10.2MP. I would be extremely happy if I got this and nothing else...the Kodak is still going but the last 5000 pictures have produced more than its share of disappointments. (During its whole life, my Kodak has taken roughly 18,000 pictures.)

2. The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb. Wally Lamb is my favorite author by far, though I could be biased because my mom had him for a teacher for her poetry class at NFA around 1975. He's since been on Oprah's Book Club. His books are well written and if you grew up in and love eastern Connecticut, it's fun to try to relate to the story by finding the little clues he leaves that you would only know if you lived here. Not to mention his plots are fantastic. I often wonder if he would remember my mom. It's not like she looks any different. lol

3. Elect the Dead (CD by Serj Tankian, lead vocalist from System of a Down). I love SOAD and I don't listen to the radio much anymore since I have a CD player in my car, so I only found out recently that Serj has solo projects going on. I like what I've heard so far.

4. Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime Boxset. It's the Talking Heads. I love them. A lot. Watched True Stories last night and still never cease to be amazed by how much that movie had an influence on current pop culture (or late 90's at least...both American Beauty and Titanic have obvious references to two clips from that movie less than 5 minutes apart.) I'm sure there's others. Not to mention the Love for Sale video, which is the most demented music video I've seen. Even Hell by the Squirrel Nut Zippers takes a back seat to Love for Sale.



and Hell (not that great quality):



5. Custom Nightmare Snatcher Journal - Mugwump (in blue!). From the Spiderbite Boutique on Etsy. Looks like she shut down for a bit to fulfill a large order. Oh well, my birthday is coming too.

Also, please support your local brick and mortar stores, buy as much handmade as you can! The big box stores will survive.

This vaguely reminds me of 2006, when I boycotted all malls and Walmart for my holiday shopping, just to mix things up a bit. Of course, in 2006 I got strep throat out of the blue just before I bought plane tickets for Egypt, and so my entire Christmas budget that year was $125. I think I did end up going over that, but it was such a blast! This year I've done most of my shopping on Ebay, Etsy, and Amazon. But I do avoid the huge powersellers on Ebay...you know, those people with 100,000 positive feedbacks. Take a closer look, 4000 positive feedback in one month with 50 negatives that they never even reply to...well...I'd be willing to pay just a little bit more to a seller with 300 positive feedbacks and only 1 negative, just so I know I'm helping someone in their quest to be successful independently!

I have several ebay auctions ending today but have to work extra hard to get the next round of items up. I'm going to have a very long day at work tomorrow and be exhausted when I get home. Better to be productive today!

Day at the beach...SCORE! And a new toy!

First off, beach finds from yesterday. I hit the beach at low tide finally (those online tide charts are so handy!) and it wasn't too cold. Here is one of the best finds of the day, which was this lime green patterned piece that's now one of my new favorites.
When I had first arrived at this beach (where we found 99% of the day's glass), there was this neurotic woman who was dashing all over the place picking up small bits of something and hiding it in her hand like the nearest person who might be looking for the same thing would mug her for it or something...I discovered she wasn't picking up sea glass, but rather bits of brick and shells. Seriously, this is why I take a ridiculously large bag. Anyone wants to mug me, feel free, I'll hit you with 5lbs of sea glass and then pelt you with any nearby rocks. Shows you. Anyway, Neurotic Woman and I were heading in the same direction down the beach, but then I found this!
My third marble, and second from this beach! I started jumping for joy and celebrating. Well, Neurotic Woman just turned around and ran away as fast as she possibly could. This is now the second time I have managed to scare someone away from the beach just by being myself. Also in that picture is an awesome piece of sea pottery, and the back is marked Greenwood Trent.
I also found my first piece of true teal, one of the hardest colors to find in the blue category. This is a lovely piece and only found at the end of the day, far far away from the other awesome finds at the same beach.
Some other finds. Who's ever lost a cell phone at the beach? Well...I found it. haha. The knob is pretty cool and the other thing is bronze and copper.

All finds for the day! After a day like that it's really hard not to hop in the car and go back, especially since gas is now $1.81 (compared to $3.81 when I was going back in the spring!)

Now, new toy! I finally bought a handheld UV light to test for uranium glass (better known as Vaseline glass). My first sea glass post back in March mentions Vaseline glass because I suspected that one of the pieces I found at Charleston beach on March 7 was a piece of Vaseline glass. (Below, it's the light green piece near the center).
It barely glowed at all when I held it up to my mom's blacklight lightbulb from the 70s.
So...while I was disappointed, I tried to tell myself it really was there, and freaked out about it anyway. On March 10, I found a piece that I suspected glowed (below, next to the cobalt blue pieces)...

...and I found another piece on March 11 (below under the marbles)...

...but under the blacklight there was NO GLOW AT ALL. So no pictures.

I had better luck with finding glowing things while bottle digging. They showed up slightly under the light

And need I say that unscrewing a lightbulb in the dark stairwell and screwing in a blacklight which gets impossibly hot after 30 seconds is a huge pain in the behind for a glow that sucks anyway? I held off on testing this beautiful heartbreaking shard I dug in August until I got a REAL light.


So finally, after months of disappointments, I got my handheld UV light from apexminerals on Ebay. And here's the difference between a normal $5 blacklight and a UV light:

And I was in for a surprise with my sea glass collection!

The two on top, Charleston Beach finds from March 7 and March 10, and the large frosty one on the bottom was found on March 11. I also found that old clear glass that will turn lavender/purple in the sun turns light yellow under UV light, and some of my clear buttons with a quartz content turn orange. Awesome. When I get some extra time I'm going to make a video on the difference between black lights and UV "black light".

After I run all my errands today I'm going to poke through my collection of sea glass from this year and thin it out a bit and put it up for grabs on ebay (or Etsy...haven't decided). I have a few pieces of plain sea pottery/porcelain and of course many shards of beach glass that's still glassy...I'm sure there's some mosaic artists out there who'll have a field day!

Another day at the beach!

Yesterday I went to breakfast at Olde Tymes in Norwich and afterwards decided that despite the 18 degree weather, I was going to head to the beach anyway. What fun! Charleston and Scarborough were both bust, though both were lovely and not as cold as I thought they would be. Of course, the last beach, as usual, did not disappoint. Too bad I didn't hit it at low tide, and had some fun running from waves while trying to dig in the sand.I know the color balance is off in the photo above, but I got this piece of China (lol) and a piece of porcelain (Charlestown, 1 of only 2 pieces I found).

Odd embossing on a lime green piece. Not sure what pattern this is.

I discovered this thick clear piece was embossed when I got home, but it's awesome nevertheless! Wish I could ID the bottle this came from :). It would have been read while lying on its side, which is odd because it was a round bottle and not your typical medicine bottle (rectangular shape). Other round embossed bottles would be read while the bottle was standing up.

Best find of the day, olive green rounded lip. Wasn't quite expecting this when I picked it up. Wish I found it earlier as the breaks are pretty new, but after the stormy weekend I'm not too surprised.

All finds! Loving the pink lizard and the bullet shell. There's some kind of writing on the bullet shell but I can't read it :(.

Sooooo...there you have it. The vintage plug was also found at the last beach and will be turned into some kind of steampunk wire-wrapped pendant. Stay tuned!

Revamping the Mannequin Reject Image

I need to start advertising my Etsy shop. I'm already on places like Indiepublic, Plumdrop, and others, but I don't use important things like banners, pictures, etc. I don't have any graphic ads on any site at all.

8 years ago, when I first got into photoshop and HTML, I couldn't get enough of doing my own graphics and getting out there and advertising myself. People used to come from all over the world to my fan site...which had a bunch of focuses and 5 different portal/entrances...ME, Dark Shadows , Pokemon, I Dream of Jeannie, and Final Fantasy 3 (or 6...depending on where you are). I never really understood why or how they found my site, but just used common sense to get them to keep coming back. I didn't know it, but I was using awesome SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to keep my site at the top, and all that. It was kind of an accident. I made a website for every school project to try to get some extra credit since even the teachers had no idea how to code. I had found a lot of webhosting space free and decided to use as much as I could, but 50mB was hard to fill back then! The site just kept growing. When I posted pics of my high school's junior prom, the site got 500 views from the students in a day. That was unexpected. 2000-2001 saw the most visitors ever.

Once I got my license, I was never much at home. Too busy driving everywhere and stealing traffic cones with blinking lights. Then I went to college and decided to HELL with my site and deleted the entire thing off the internet in January 2003 and put up a tiny picture saying the site was gone till I felt like caring again. I was sick of it and didn't feel like trying to keep up with much of anything. Besides, I had LiveJournal! I didn't really need to code anymore and I could always make LJ icons !

...And then I tried to bring it back in October 2003 with a whole new look and bring back the Dark Shadows page (Known as Reverend Trask's Hole in the Wall (if you visit, please collapse the stupid geocities banner on the right or else the page displays funny) and other pages under a uniform style. I tried adding a section for all my urban exploration photos and some other things that never made any sense. Then...my free webhosting site up and crapped out in late 2004 (it hadn't actually been updated since before I joined in 2001!)...so I scrambled to get the abandoned house photos back up since Insane Bunkers had just given me a link. And then Facebook and Myspace happened, and Geocities decided to frell good website design 50 ways till Friday by adding their banner on the side. In 2000, we could choose to put a banner on the top or bottom of the page. We had control over where Geocities put their ad. Now we don't, and my site looks like hell.

In 2005 I decided to leave Geocities. You may have noticed that never happened. Instead, I got a full time web design job for The Yankee Retail Company. During my time there I actually learned something about html and website design, marketing, seo, and some other stuff. A full website design went underway in 2006 and I was going to pay for hosting from my friend Josh and get my own domain and try to sell zines. Then Insane Bunkers offered free photo hosting for urban exploration photos and you could have albums and all that fun stuff. I still had dialup...so I spent literal weeks uploading 1300 photos of abandoned houses. IB gave me moderating and publishing privledges so I could post articles. My modem burned up that September.

And Insane Bunkers burned up in February 2007 in a massive site wide crash that brought it down till March of this year. They never brought back the photo galleries. During that time I attempted to start a blog similar to The Caldor Rainbow called The Indie Historian to make up for the absence of IB...but I never got far with that. I got a freewebs account but was extremely dismayed to learn that you could only upload 1 file at a time. Oh noooo. Not when I'm used to uploading via FTP or at least 5-20 files at a time! The freewebs page still exists, but it's just the design only and almost none of the links work.

Eventually I left Yankee Retail to start working for a startup called ITema, where I finally learned CSS and started to Twitter. But ITema went out of business and I learned I really hate office jobs and burned out on web design, especially when they wanted you to churn out a web template that looked entirely different from the one you just did every 3-4 hours or so. When I got out of there I wanted nothing to do with web design ever again and I haven't opened Aptana (web editor) since January. Incidentally, I opened the Mannequin Reject Emporium on Etsy the day before ITema let me go. I started this blog around the same time I started another blog called Is This Your License Plate? during boredom at ITema days.

I've realized while writing this post that I'm spread too thin all over the internet, especially since joining Etsy. I have accounts on YouTube, tumblr, JPGmag, Last.FM, flickr, deviantart, ebay, artfire, dawanda, and linkedin. Some I'm on a lot more than others. I lurk on the Antique Bottles Forum and used to be active on VisaJourney when I was doing immigration paperwork for X.

To succeed on Etsy I have to spread out MORE? There aren't enough hours in a day!

Nevertheless, I need to revise some strategies. My website redesign needs to happen and it's would be easier if I used joomla or modx or some kind of content management system, especially with all the photos. I need to get off Geocities. I want shopping cart functionality...maybe. Paypal buttons would also work just fine, I think. I had one for my zine when I first started selling it directly off livejournal back in 2005.

I need to start some kind of off-etsy marketing. Locally just isn't enough. The question is where to begin, since it seems there's an awful lot of cleaning up to do. I don't know what aspect of my shop to focus on when I make ads. Maybe some jewelry with a handful of buttons tossed around to advertise that I sell both jewelry and supplies?

Sorry for the braindump, bless your heart if you read the whole thing and bless you 50 million more times if you actually found it interesting! At least check out some of the links I posted, there's some cool websites out there :).

Back to the beach!

So...sea glass is starting to show up again on some favorite beaches of mine after their annual replenishment of sand starts to go away.

I had a wonderful time at Bluff Point in Groton, during which I found all this including another marble and a green blown crowntop bottle mouth (1/2). The marble is a real beauty too, especially since I hadn't found much that wasn't common and suddenly kicked this out of a pile of pebbles. A lovely aqua shard washed up at my feet too :). I hadn't been to Bluff Point since a field trip I took in the 5th grade and brought home a dead horseshoe crab...which sat around in our computer room for about 2 years and suddenly it started to stink really bad...so I sent it on its merry way in the stream that ran through our property. I'll bet that's going to throw some archaeologists off in about 30000000 years when they find its fossil among trout and dead deer. lol

So...sea glass!





And of course, last week I returned to my beach that never fails to show treasures (EXCEPT it actually did back in September...but I figured I just showed up too early and the annual supply of sand dumped on that beach hadn't been depleted enough yet and replaced by pebbles. Sure enough...another 3 weeks went by and that beach had changed quite a bit...)

Check these out...my first coins found on the beach! It's fascinating to see what the sea does to them. Only one has a readable date (1989).




Another thing I did was finally get around to organizing urban exploration photos I've taken since Insane Bunkers crashed in Feb. 2007. I just kind of left them in folders and realized that I kind of forgot certain photos, especially some cemetery photos because my camera couldn't seem to orient itself. This was about a month before the electronics went all wonky and buttons stopped working or stopped doing what they were supposed to do. (IE: Press review...and the camera takes a picture! And the menu button just doesn't work at all...so I can't delete photos off the camera without hooking up my camera to my computer and doing it there....but enough about my camera woes.)

So...speaking of pictures forgotten...here's an interesting photo.

This is a street sign embedded in a tree, as seen in 2004. As far as I know, it's still there, and I'm pretty sure I have better pictures of it but I have no idea where they are. lol