6/24/05  I've now gotten Wally hooked on taking pictures just for our web site.  Here's a cool picture he took of Lake Amador in the morning and you can see fog on the lake.

And here's a disgusting picture of a HUGE bug.  Gosh you just know this thing can FLY!  I told Wally he had to put a quarter in the picture so you had something to relate the size to.  He was afraid to do it because he thought the thing would turn around and bite him....hehehe!

  6/18/05  I got a very interesting order the other day.  Someone was ordering two stamps to put in a letterbox.  I had never heard of this before but it is similar to geocaching but specifically deals with rubber stamps.  She ordered two stamps that represented the area she was hiding the box, a cliff and a tree.  The box contains a journal and is hidden in a public place.  Clues are left on a web site and when you find the box you stamp your personal stamp in the journal.  I haven't read up on all of it but here's some links so you can check it out:      Letterboxing.org,    About letterboxing 

If any of you are doing this let me know!

6/14/05  My neighbor out did me on Momma turkey and chick pictures so here's one of hers.  Gee, I just figured out how to take good bead pictures with this thing and that's not an easy task!

But I did take this picture of a butterfly.  Of course it was hard to get him to sit still and when he finally did it wasn't on a beautiful flower or pretty branch...it was on icky dry grass:

6/11/05  I have some more pictures of life around here.  First is a momma turkey with her chicks in our backyard:

 Next is a praying mantis that Wally rescued from the tractor.  It did some modeling for us:

And I have some good news...new images!  I'm going to make the boards today and price, name and number them and probably have them on the site tomorrow night.  I'll email everyone when they are up!

6/7/05  Today is Wally's birthday and he got home from the MA show at 1am so he's a little tired.  The babies are very happy that their Daddy is home though!

6/5/05   My back is a little better now but still not back to normal.  I am filling orders again.  Mainly because I can't stand having them pile up and because I'm really tired of lying around.  Enough is enough!  I have another "glamour" shot of me and the kittens that proves that they really do sleep on my neck and face.  I keep pulling them off and putting them near my stomach but they crawl right back up.

 And a couple of close ups of them.  They photograph a lot better than I do!

And a picture of some more life around here.  I'm not sure if this is a butterfly or a moth but it's pretty no matter what it is.

Wildlife here that I don't want to be able to take a picture of are the rattlesnakes.  Our neighbors have lived here for 13 years and never have seen a rattlesnake on their property.  We've been here 6 months and Wally saw his first one in our backyard.  He had accidentally killed a gopher snake the week before with the lawn mower so when he saw another snake in the yard he assumed it was another gopher snake...and then it rattled at him!  He went to tell me and try to figure out how to kill it but when he went back to place he saw it, it was in the process of taking off very quickly.  And he wants me to go out there and water the garden while he's gone...not gonna happen!  I made him get an automatic system because until I have some rattlesnake boots I'm not going back there.  

5/31/05  Well I've gone and done it again...I screwed my back up.  It was so bad this time I couldn't get off of the floor.  Wally wanted to "call someone" and I knew he meant an ambulance and that wasn't going to happen.  I kept thinking of the commercial of the lady that had fallen and couldn't get up.  However this wasn't funny at the time.  Usually I know the exact moment I've messed it up but this time it just took me by surprise and it was also the worst I've ever done.  I'm finally walking around but I had to cancel my flight to the MA show.  I'm sending Wally instead.  We made the decision early enough to only get a semi-expensive flight for him.  Here's a picture of me (not looking my best) with our two new babies...yes, we're keeping these kittens because I love them and they love me.

They just love sleeping on our necks which isn't really very comfortable for us anyway.

5/25/05  Darn!  I just emailed the group and I forgot to tell everyone about the addition to the web site.  Well I'll explain it here and let everyone know in the next email.  Did you ever want to order a specific stamp but couldn't find it on the website?  Maybe you saw it in the art gallery or you are lucky enough to have an old catalog (no, I don't have anymore catalogs!)?  Well I added a feature that allows you to just type in all the info yourself and it gets added into the shopping cart.  Of course, if you still want me to add them to your order for you then you can just add them into the "special instructions" section when you check out.  I'll adjust your total...remember, I manually charge your credit card when your order is ready to be shipped.  So I put this special feature in three different places.  One is the main catalog page, the second is the prices page and the third is the FAQ's page.  Hopefully it will be easily accessible for you.  I tested it out before I posted it but of course, if you have any problems with it please let me know.

I was able to get some pictures of the little frogs that Wally has to save every time he mows the lawn.  He also built them a little fountain which I still need to get a picture of.  Here's a couple of frogs:

5/23/05  Well mommy cat abandoned her babies or the coyotes got her.  So now I am mommy to four kittens.  I finally got my brother to commit to take two of them.  I'm giving him the black one and the orange one because they are tame.  I moved the two into the house in the computer room today.  The black one purrs as soon as you touch her and the orange one now loves to be scratched.  The other two are a little feisty so they may just have to fend for themselves.  Of course we will still feed them and try to tame them too.  I'm really not getting much done though because I just love being with the babies!  

Speaking of wild things....Here's the view we had from our back yard the other day:

Before I ran and got the camera they were all staring at us straight on.  It was pretty funny.

5/14/05  Well you can tell that spring is right around the corner here.  Wally has to keep saving baby frogs while he tries to cut the grass and we have some more babies:

 a stray cat that lives on our lot had kittens and they are so adorable.  Wally found them a couple days ago.  He should never have told me because I can't seem to tear myself away from them.  They are probably about 6 weeks old, maybe a little younger.  Mommy is a calico and she had four kittens.  One is solid orange, one solid black and two are black and white.  I'm trying to pawn two of them off on my brother.  Now as soon as the kittens are old enough we have to take them all in to get fixed so this doesn't happen again.  Of course Mommy could be pregnant again already.  Anyone wants some cute kittens?  Now for a another cute picture.  This one of of Wally and me taken last summer at our friends wedding.   

5/8/05  Happy Mother's Day everyone!  We just got back from the San Jose show last night and we stayed with my parents so they got their Mother's Day visit early.  During the show Saturday Wally went over and visited his parents so today we are home and ready to get back to orders.  Wally did take his boat out a couple days ago even though it was pouring down rain.  He even caught some fish too.  I know he took a picture so let me snoop in his file and find it.

That's the trout he caught and kept.  I think he caught some bass too.  Anyway, guess what's for dinner tonight!

4/28/05  Wally's been working on his boat trying to fix the motor for the past few months.  This is a boat he's had for about 20 years and it hasn't run in the last year or two.  I have never even been on this boat!  Before I just had no interest but now I'm more than willing to go.  Of course the few times we have gone fishing together I catch all the fish so I'm not sure he's going to want to take me very often.  We have a lake just a quarter mile away and two others just a few miles away.  Wally is in fishing heaven and he hasn't gone fishing since we moved here.  Here's a picture of us when we went fishing in Alaska a couple of years ago: 

Every fishermen's dream, getting his wife in waders!

4/22/05  I got back from the WI show at 1am on Tuesday morning.  It took a few days to recover and I'm not sure why because I'm usually fine the next day.  Everyone at the show was so nice even more so than at other shows.  The weather was great which is always a good thing when your from California and going to an area known for extreme weather.  I got some beads made yesterday that will go up on ebay tomorrow night.  I have no idea if any bead people read this or not though.  I finally am getting the hang of taking pictures of the beads instead of scanning them in with a scanner.  Our camera does not allow manual focus and I had tried multiple times taking pictures of beads with it with no luck.  You'd think it would be easy but it's not.  I finally stumbled on the right setting and lighting though.  Wally's been taking pictures of our flowers lately:

 I think it's time for a photography contest between Wally and myself!  I'll try my hand at taking some pictures of flowers.  It's so easy with this computer because you can just take the cf card out of the camera and pop it into the computer and pull the pictures right off of that.  Much easier than the way I had to do it with our old computer.

4/12/05  Been super busy getting ready for the WI show this weekend and trying to keep up with orders.  Wally made it home from the Las Vegas show safe but I think he spent all our money at the Pro Bass shop he found there.  He's been acting like a woman does when she spends a lot on a shopping spree, you know, sneaking things in that have been in the trunk of the car?   Not that I do that!  

I hope to get semi caught up with orders tomorrow and then I'm off for WI Thursday morning.  I've been thinking of lots of different kinds of specials to do for you guys so stay tuned.  After all, August will be our 10 year anniversary of Beeswax! 

4/4/05  A customer at the Allentown show this past weekend had her husband take a picture of her with Wally.  That's Beverly on the right ....Thanks Beverly!

And here's my friend MaryKay of Stamp Camp with Beverly: (hehehe MK!)

  4/2/05  Did your spouse ever ask you to take their picture?  Wally actually asked me to the other day.  So this is what he wanted taken....him on his tractor:

Men and their toys!  He's at the bottom of our driveway getting wood that he cut up from a dead tree in our yard.  He used another one of his toys for that, his new chain saw.  I think he has a list of more toys that he wants.  At least my bead tools (my toys) are cheap compared to his.  I got him off Thursday morning to the Sacramento airport for the Allentown, PA show.  So far everything has gone well.  Both flights went fine, he found the hotel and venue ok and I have a report back today that the show was actually pretty good.  Poor guy, he gets home Monday and then has to leave Thursday morning for the Las Vegas show. 

3/26/05  Gosh I just hate show crunch time.  We have three shows back to back and we need to get two different booth set ups ready.  It's so much work plus trying to incorporate the new images in as well.  We are actually doing really well though plus keeping up with all the orders coming in.  You guys are keeping me out of trouble!  So nothing new to report here except we are very busy.  Wally went to go get Chinese food since I've bee too busy to get to the grocery store.  I do try and cook every night and I've done pretty well with that.  I won't tell you what we've had for dinner when the cupboards are bare though (think Campbell's soup, rice and green beans all baked together...hey, it's dinner!).  I haven't done the fish sticks and tater tots thing yet...(hey Brenda!).  I do have a better hummingbird picture too!  I took this one but through a window so please excuse the glare:

3/22/05  Very bad things happening here.  We had a computer death.  A corrupt file was stopping windows from starting up.  After many phone calls to both Microsoft and Sony and lots of internet research I finally got the computer back up...only to have everything gone and I mean everything.  We had a grey desktop with two icons on it, the recycle bin and internet explorer.  Have you ever seen a desktop with two lonely icons on it?  My heart sank into my stomach.  More phone calls and we were able to restore the software that it came with but all software we loaded and all my files are gone forever.  Luckily we have a backup computer and about 95% of our stuff is on it.  The biggest loss is I had pics of every bead I had ever made in folders by month with how much they sold for.  It was really just for me but It was a cool way to have all my beads saved.  Gone forever.  Most of the pics are stored on my web server so someday I'll retrieve them all but they'll never be all organized in nice little month folder again.  I think it's going to be like when you get your house robbed, a month later you realize that something else is missing.  I'm sure there are more things I'll find that are gone forever.  

I did manage to get the new images up.  I'm working off our old computer right now with dial up...yuck.  I have to get all of our software loaded on to the new computer again.  Until then I may be a little slow.  I'll be emailing the group so everyone knows about the web update. 

3/18/05  Sorry for the silence but I've been in major tax depression.  This is just the worse time of year.  I think all my dreading it and putting it off is really worse than just sitting down and doing it.  So I finally got started today.  It usually takes me 2-3 days to go through everything but I'm hoping to be done by tomorrow night.  I'm also hoping to get the new images up for Monday or Tuesday.  That's another reason I had to sit down and get the taxes done.  I couldn't have a slew of orders coming in when I still had taxes to do.  The new plates came in a couple of days ago and they are really awesome.  I'm very happy with this engraver.  It makes me more excited about new images so I have a bunch more waiting in the wings.  I probably won't get to them until next month and I'm planning on releases them by June 1st or sooner.  Anyway, when the new images are up I'll be emailing the group and I do have a special something for everyone for being so patient with me.

Here's a couple of cute pictures for you:

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