I’ve got a renewed interest in art and last night pulled out my Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards (a good review of it is here).  I haven’t opened it in a decade, but I remembered it gave a good explanation of the mental confusion I feel when looking at my first blank page in months, and how to overcome it.  I’ve never taken an art class, and never thought I’d want to paint realism, but I wanted to learn the basics. I love internet search engines!  The last time I “studied” art, was with books from the public library, pre-internet days. I quickly found some cool sites online to teach me the basics – for free! – and last night I studied drawing shadows, light and dark values, and one point perspective. Continue reading →

I spent Sunday sketching and drawing, something I haven’t sat to do since last year.  The night before, I pulled my big art bag out and looked through some spiral sketch books to see what I had.  I usually keep a couple going at once, a 6×9 and a 9×12.  I’ll sketch images that come to me, or images that I see in front of me.  I may do just a rough sketch and then skip a page and begin another.  I leave every other page blank on purpose.  I will go back and forth through the sketches later and add more detail.  So I always have dozens of drawings in various stages of completion.  If I do anything I particularly like, I’ll watercolor it or maybe use some pastels to finish it. Continue reading →

Someone I know wrote on Facebook that friends have insulted his new wife of two weeks, whom he met a month ago. I don’t know the details other than JP met her through work and Spanish is her native language, which he speaks so all is well.  There were comments about her “getting a green card” and driving out of state to pick up her children whom no one knew about before. She has moved in with JP, age 40+, who lives with his parents.  I wrote to him:  “I take it some well meaning friends projected a hidden agenda for marrying before knowing each other? They are likely just fearful for your heart (and $$) and didn’t express themselves diplomatically.”  His response was to unfriend me, as I figured it would be.  Continue reading →

Every so often I get indigestion and don’t know the reason for it.  This doesn’t count any time I get indigestion because I’ve knowingly eaten the wrong thing or overeaten.  I don’t do that too often these days, but there are times that I just feel like I need to have that bread or those noodles and I overdo.  Bread and noodles are for me what pastries and chocolate are for other people.  I believe that in moderation anything is fine, but when I eat bread or noodles, I am not in a moderate state of mind; I’m in my emotional eating state of mind.  After a big bout of indigestion last year, I began keeping a food journal: writing down everything I ate and what time I ate it.  If I got indigestion, I wrote it down and then looked back over the previous few days to see what might have caused it.  Keeping a food journal has been real instrumental in letting me fine-tune myself to be more intuitive about what my body needs and how it reacts to certain foods. Continue reading →

It’s been a whirlwind week and for the first time in years actually feels like a holiday weekend.  Working for myself the past 18 years, I am outside the Monday thru Friday. 9 to 5 schedule.  Late night, weekends and holidays are my busiest times for psychic readings, so it’s easy to lose track of holidays.  Last Monday, I applied to refinance my mortgage and everything fell into place magically.  As of yesterday, I’d already heard from the appraiser and gotten a wind mitigation inpection which will lower my homeowner’s insurance by hundreds of dollars for the next five years. I used Phil White at White House Inspections 321-427-2080 who charged just $100.  Nice guy, it took about 25 minutes and he told me the results before he left.  He emailed me a pdf file of his report, along with the photos, and I’ll email it to my insurance company.  In fact, I am going to use it to shop around for a better homeowner’s rate.  I love modern technology. Continue reading →

I just got 3 new catalogs in the mail.  Did you know for every junk catalog you get, there’s a website listed on the back cover, and you can go online and unsubscribe?  You’ll need the mailing label in front of you when you do it.  You may need to scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for words like Unsubscribe.  We can save lots of trees this way.  The trees thank you, and the birds thank you also.  And the squirrels. The raccoons don’t care.  They are going to live in your roof either way.

I’ve used Paypal for a dozen years and never had a problem.  But I know how it works. There are two kind of accounts: one to send money, so you can buy things or make donations online, and one to receive money.  If you want to send someone a payment or a donation, you would tell Paypal to send it to their email address.  If your Paypal was set up at first with a credit card attached to it (like to buy things online), then you might think Paypal would just credit the card with the amount sent to Paypal.  They don’t do that.

My experience with Paypal in the past is there has to be a bank account attached to the email address before anyone sends money to you.  Otherwise it gets mis-routed in cyber limbo and the people who sent the money have to be the ones to contact Paypal to find it and make sure it gets to you. Continue reading →

I have 3 sets of friends who are in brand new relationships with people they just met.  In relationship to the point of having joint bank accounts and sharing passwords. (Two things I never do, by the way – ever.)  Now suddenly there are issues about passwords being changed and money possibly missing.  This has been going on for over a week now and at this point it seems something else is at play also. If there is a misunderstanding and you think a friend has stolen money from you, you confront them.  You ask them about it before you start speculating to other people. Then you simply call the bank and the same day they will email you your account activity report and you will know. And as soon as you know, if you have wrongfully accused your partner to a friend, go to that friend and let them know you were wrong. Do not let them think for a moment that someone has stolen from you when they have not.  Reputations are ruined on false accusations like that.  You don’t want that karma.  Continue reading →