9/28/05  Back from the hair cut.  Poor girl, she was very nervous about cutting my hair just based on my phone call.  Half way through she admitted it and then said she was so glad I came to her and that I was "Hella nice"...hehehe, how cute!  She seemed fairly new but she took her time and actually referred to the picture I brought in through the whole cut.  She did a really good job but I won't know for sure until I style it myself  a few times.  When I was done another woman walked in and said she was from the Bay Area (where I'm from) and her daughter had just moved here too.  Her daughter was sending her to find a new hair stylist first....using her Mom as the guinea pig...since no one else had done their hair in years.  So I'm not alone.

Now for a couple of pictures since I will be gone for awhile.  Wally is calling these pictures porn....dragonflies mating:

 And a large alligator lizard, I checked for legs before getting too close!:

I will try and update while I'm on the road but we'll see how that goes!

9/27/05  I guess I need to take care of this card contest or else you will all be waiting a month until I'm done with these shows.  So far I've done the random drawing only.  I had some helpers, of course!

After taking turns helping they had had enough and just started wrestling.  They pulled out eight names before they got bored.  

I have all the winners of the card contest!  I was feeling pretty generous so there are a lot!  We have two Mega Grand Prize Winners!  What is a Mega Grand Prize Winner you ask?  Someone that went above and beyond and that is so talented they get their own gallery on our web site!  Our two Mega Grand Prize Winners are:    

                                                            Sulea Lee and Diana Collier!
You can go to the art gallery and see their art now! 

And here is our list of winners:
Best Collage: Irene Giesbers
Best Scenes: Sheyl Hengen, Darci Simmons, Vynette Hughes and Evelyn Duncan
Best Envelope: Jeanne Williams
Best Simple yet Elegant: Betty Sovereign and Carolyn Summers
Best Holiday Card: Roberta Schinner
Best Greeting Card: Doris Neely
Funniest: Jeffrey Hitchin
Random drawing winners: Barbara Bisson, Eli Persson, Beverly Shupp, Sandra Hampson, Mary Darling, Rosemary (I emailed you, need your addy), France Chevalier (email me, I need your addy) and Poorva Malhotra (email me, I need your street address)
That makes a total of 21 winners!  I only gave one prize per person otherwise some of you would have walked away with two or three!  I will try and mail out prizes before I leave (Thursday) so watch your mailboxes.  I probably won't be able to post any cards in the mail art section until November.  I will be gone most of October (stamp shows) so please be patient with any orders placed or emailed questions sent.  Thanks to all that participated!  It was way fun! 

Don't have a clue what card contest I'm talking about?  That's because it was a secret card contest for Beeswax members only...you better join the group!

Email list  *join and receive members only specials!*

Subscribe to Beeswaxrubberstamps

9/25/05  I was cleaning up some stuff off of the computer when I came across this picture:

It's probably three years old.  We needed some marketing pictures at work so we had an all day photo session.  We needed a patient so Wally got to fill in for us.  Ahhh, my old life as an x-ray tech...Wally asks me once in a while if I miss it and the answer is still "no".  I'm not even sure if I could still run that CT scanner.  Hmmm, cute hair cut but I think I'm going even shorter.

9/24/05  Well I'm pretty much ready for the York, PA show but I'm in serious need of a hair cut.  I haven't had it cut since we moved which is almost a year now.  Well, I did cut it once and had Wally help me with the back...under heavy protest from him.  I finally had to tell him that I can't see the back anyway so just cut it!  Now the same person has cut my hair for the last 25 years and no one else has touched it during that time.  Now Reba is 3 hours away which just isn't feasible so I need a new stylist.  I decided to call the place that was voted best salon in Amador County.  Okay, this poll was done by the local newspaper and I'm not sure if voted best is really a good thing.  Wal*Mart got runner up for best clothing store...yes, I'm serious.  And the best chicken in all of Amador County....drum roll here....KFC.  Yes, it really stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken and not the name of some famous chef's fancy restaurant.  So I called the salon and asked the person that answered "who is the best at cutting hair?"  I even told her my story so she would understand why I was asking.  Well the phone got passed around to a few people and I was feeling like a hot potato and I could hear them talking about me in the background.  I think that I've really freaked them out at this point.  I finally ask them "who would you have cut your hair or your best friends  hair?"  So they give me back to the girl that answered the phone.  She says she can take me and when would I like to come in?  I tell her early next week.  Well she then tells me that she has a hair cutting class Monday and Tuesday so she can take me Wednesday....oh my...is it a good thing that she's going to a class on how to cut hair or a bad thing?  Yes, I made the appointment but needless to say I'm just a tad nervous.  

9/22/05  Not a whole lot going on here except getting ready for the 3 conventions in 4 weeks slam.  Not my favorite thing to do especially when I don't want to leave my house or my sweet 'dorables.  I'm going to see if I can get all high-tech on you by updating this from the road.  I have a cute little notebook pc and I'm going to load my web software on it.  Let's see if I'm technical enough to actually figure it all out.  Now that I got my clie working I can also take pictures with it, pull out the memory stick and put it in the notebook.  Speaking of shows, I put a page up of the 2006 conventions.  We will add more shows to it as soon as we find out if we have been accepted to them.

Today Wally found the biggest praying mantis we have ever seen.  I think he wanted a piece of my finger.

9/16/05  This summer we have had tons of these HUGE dragonflies all over.  They never seem to land so it has pretty much been impossible to get a picture of one.  One night at dusk there were about a hundred of them flying all around catching bugs.  Well I finally got a good picture of one:

Ummm....I did cheat just a little bit.....this poor fella is dead.  Wally found him in the backyard and I posed him on the flower....CHEATER!!!  Nice picture though, huh?  And here he is by a dime so you can see just how big they are:

9/14/05  I just got an email from a sweet customer, Barbara Gayle.  She sent me an adorable picture of her new darlin' Dutch.  He's a  white German Shepard....isn't he just the cutest thing?

9/13/05  Well our new images will make it up later tonight along with our Halloween special.  In the mean time here's a picture of...guess what?...the kittens!

9/10/05  Here's a picture I took of Sissypoo.  You can barely see her Marilyn Monroe beauty mark above the right side of her mouth.  Yea, I know, I actually named her Sissypoo but there is a story, of course.  She was the meanest kitten in the bunch.  She was the only one that actually acted like a feral kitten.  She constantly hissed and ran from me.  So anyway, I was calling her Hissy among other things.  When she finally calmed down and turned sweet I had to name her something close to Hissy and since she was the only girl, Sissy was perfect.  I added the 'poo' on somehow and Wally can't stand it.  But when he calls her he yells "Sissypoo!" and it's pretty funny.  I can't believe how fast all four have grown in the last two weeks.  Wally will be shocked when he gets home.

9/9/05  I bought a Sony Clie a few years ago which is a PDA.  It stores all kinds of programs, plays games, plays music and takes pictures.  I got it because I felt it would be the perfect thing to take on trips to conventions.  Well, I've been having issues with it all year because it won't charge and when it does charge it keeps losing it's charge really fast.  I finally got it working again and I found some old pictures on it to show you. 

The plates for the new images just arrived.  I'm hoping to have them up by Tuesday.  I really need to catch up on work before putting new images up so hopefully I'll have them up early next week.  Also Wally will be home so I can put him to work...hehehe!

9/6/05  A few pictures to share with you.  Here are some great pictures of a hummingbird from my neighbor Terri:

 And a couple of pictures from my brother of his "pet" squirrels.  I'm jealous because that's the one thing we seem to not have here and squirrels are among my favorite animals.  

  Yes, that one squirrel is actually sleeping on his lawn furniture.  I have seen one big fat gray squirrel in our yard a couple of times.  But I'm used to lots of squirrels running all over the yard.  It's so funny to watch them chase each other.  We do have a lot of hawks here so I'm sure that's why we don't have any squirrels. 

9/4/05   We have tons of lizards around but they move so darn fast that you can barely spot them.  I've been determined to get a picture of one so I was outside with the camera and the one I had spotted wouldn't cooperate.  So I see our two black and white kittens, Charlie and Sissypoo, that I have never taken a picture of, and they are playing together.  I go over and start to take their picture only to see that they've taken a hostage.  I gathered them up and hauled the two inside but I think I was too late for the poor garter snake.  I seem to be trying to save a lot of lives lately from the kittens.  A couple days ago I managed to save a bird in time from Charlie.  We have a lot of snakes around and I don't mind the gopher snakes and garter snakes but I do mind the rattlesnakes.  A couple days ago I found a dead baby rattlesnake on the driveway and then yesterday another baby was sunning himself on the sidewalk.  I came within three feet of him in my THONGS!  I have been wearing tennis shoes ever since.  By the time I ran in the house, changed my shoes and grabbed a weapon (the little shovel from fireplace tools) and got back outside the little brat was long gone.  I did spend about 30 minutes looking all over for him too.  Hopefully he headed for the neighbor's yard...hehehe.   

9/3/05   I moved March through June of the Chatterbox to the new archive section so hopefully you'll notice this page loading faster for you.  I believe I had another month or two that just got deleted...oh well, nothing really earth shattering going on here anyway.  The link to the archive section can be found at the bottom of this page.  I'll try to purge it  quarterly from now on.

Remember my statistics software I loaded onto the website?  Well any time someone does a search and this website gets pulled up in the search it gets logged.  Even if 20,000 other sites were pulled up too and the person doing the search never made it to my website at all.  So, one weird search that pulled up this website was "hot wife in waders".....huh?  Is that for real?  First of all why wasn't the search "hot girl in waders".  Why would you want to look at someone else's wife...in waders...creepy.  But the really weird part is the fact that this site was pulled from the search.  I did post a picture of me in waders (now moved to the Chatterbox archive section) and I typed the words "Every fishermen's dream, getting his wife in waders!" under it.  There are some really bizarre people out there.  At least this software can amuse us!

I made some cookies a few days ago and I'm gonna get all Bon Appetit on you with my fancy picture.  This is a really easy recipe that anyone can make.  You do need to have miniature muffin tins but they have them at a lot of the grocery stores.

8/31/05  Wally has left for the Portland convention and then he'll just continue on up to the Spokane show the following weekend.  So here I am just a one woman show trying to get all your orders out.  I really can't wait until midnight...if I had a bottle of champagne I'd pop it open!  It will still take me days to catch up but I'm working on it night and day.  Here's a few pictures of Wally getting ready for his shows with a little help...

8/26/05  I have 15 new images for you guys that are going out to the engraver's today.  I also did the Wisteria smaller and a reverse of Missy which I'll call Sissy.  Many people have been asking for a reverse of Missy since she came out, hmmm about 3 years ago now.  They wanted the reverse so they could make a book and have a cover and a back with the same image...very clever.  I should have the images out sometime after Labor Day weekend, just depending on how quickly I get my engravings back.  

Now here's a cute garden spider, I just love the cool markings they have:  

8/24/05  I had promised some people a sneak peek at some new images.  I'm hoping to release them the second week of September.  Here are two of them that I just loved so much together that I used them for my next RSM ad:

And here's how the ad turned out:

8/21/05  Well like the good wife that I am I was up at at the lake at 7am just in time to see Wally pull in.  He did catch a lot of fish (yes, he managed to get his spot too!) but he didn't place in the tournament.  I think next year will be a different story.

And now for more kitty pictures!  Just like Monty Python..."and now for something completely different"

They always like the free toys the best, don't they?  Trevor has a raging ear infection...so bad that I had to call the Vet on a Sunday.  Luckily I had some leftover antibiotic drops that they said I could give him until we can get him into the office tomorrow.  All four have had ear mites and have been fixed now and this is Trevor's second ear infection.  These "free" kittens have now cost us quite a lot of $$.  But of course I would pay anything right now to relieve Trevor from his pain.  If you see a pregnant stray cat in your neighborhood run in the house quick and don't look back!  I swear that cats from miles away know we are suckers for kitties.  If I start getting boxes in the mail stamped "live animal" I'll know you guys are shipping your strays off to me...don't even think about it!

8/20/05  Wally is fishing in the Lake Amador Bass Tournament tonight.  It started at 7pm and ends at 7am tomorrow.  I went to the lake and saw all the boats take off.  All the entries drew numbers and at 7pm they started calling boats to take off.  About every 20 seconds they would call the next number.  Wally drew #21 and hopefully no one got to his "spot" before he did.  You have to stay 25 yards away from other boats and the other night he found a killer spot and was catching fish all night.  If he does that tonight he would probably win.  I'll see if I can make it at 7am tomorrow to catch them all coming back in but here's a picture of him and some other entries behind him.  There were 29 boats entered in all.

Someone next to me commented that "It must be exciting to be married to a Bass Fisherman, you get to travel all over".  Hehehe....little does he know that no, Wally only does this tournament, he's no pro and no, it's not very exciting to travel all over for any business because you never get to sight see.  Traveling all over to rubber stamp shows means we see the airport, hotel and convention center and after awhile they all look alike and I've even forgotten before what city/state I'm in.

Alrighty, enough fishing, how about some kitty pictures?  These pictures are from Anu in Lake Worth, Fl.  Her kitty named Sidney likes to sit on her husband's head too!  If you missed the picture of my Misha on Wally's head just keep scrolling down...

]8/17/05  Well I just did something that can be kinda fun for us.  I loaded some statistical software on my web site.  I've never had a counter on my site because it never really mattered to me how many people came each day.  It really only matters how many orders come through.  I didn't think I could put statistical software on my site because I use Frontpage to create it...I was wrong.  Verio hosts my website and they have free statistical software so I loaded the other night.  Now I have way too much information at my disposal!  I can not only tell how many people visit each day (or each hour!) but I can see the way they get to my site.  I can see the search words used in the search engines that got people to my site...cherry background seems to be a popular one!  So I thought I would share with you once a week or so the most bizarre referral I get.  You won't believe this one.  People are finding my website through Vampirefreaks.com.  Yes, Vampire Freaks!  Okay, any of my customers wanna fess up? 

8/15/05   Below I have some pictures of our grapes.  During the winter, Wally was trying to clear away all the blackberry bushes that are all over the place when he uncovered tons of grape plants.  They were all labeled and lots of them are Thompson Seedless Grapes.  We are fighting with the birds for them though so next year we'll have to get some netting.  Aren't they pretty though?  Tomorrow Misha and Trevor go in to get neutered.  Poor darlin's have already been in to the Vet's twice for ear mites.  I feel like I'm torturing them.   

8/12/05  Well, I got an interesting picture of Misha.  I'm really not sure why he's doing this but he was on a mission.  This is right after I had been bragging about how smart Misha and Trevor are.

8/9/05...later on...  Well we had a little excitement here today.  I've got a little picture show to tell the story.  It started with a scream coming from our neighbors yard.  Nothing really unusual there (hehehe) and I turned to Wally and said "Maybe Terri saw a rattlesnake".  That's kinda been our joke since Wally saw one in our backyard a couple months ago and the neighbors have never seen one in the 13 years Terri has lived here.  A few minutes later I went in the house and our message machine was blinking and I knew it was a message from Terri and that something was wrong.  Sure enough, she had a rattlesnake in her garden and wanted Wally to come with his shotgun and kill it.  Wally sprang into action!  

The snake was in the tall grass and we couldn't actually see it we could only hear it.  Every time it stopped rattling we threw another rock at it.

We were kind of freaking out because we couldn't see it.

Well lets poke it with a stick and see if it's dead yet.

8/9/05  Well I'm back!  So glad to be home for awhile.  I think my next show is about 5-6 weeks away.  The 'Dorables sure missed me.  They were both laying on me purring all night long.  Wally got his entire list of things to do all done so he snuck out and went fishing.  When the cats away...

Hmmm, just how long was he out there for?  Also notice the rubber stamp t-shirt.

7/27/05  Well Wally got our computer back up and running last night.  It's so nice to have it back!  Of course I just had to be right, the cd's they sent didn't work and it turned out our hard drive was dead.  Wally put in a new hard drive:

I'm trying to get everything done before I leave for Texas early Friday morning for the stamp show.  I'll be emailing the group tomorrow night with all the Anniversary special details.

7/24/05  Nothing much going on around here until Thursday night when our computer DIED AGAIN!  It's so bad this time that you can't even get into the bios to try and do a recovery...which of course wipes out the entire hard drive.  So they are sending me the recovery discs in the mail and I have this bad feeling that they won't even work.  Other than that it has just been pretty hot here.  We've decided that once it gets over 100 degrees without a breeze it's just a little too hot for us.  Lately we've had day after day of 106.  So we just have to readjust our schedules and get up early (yuck) work until it gets really hot, take a nap and then get up and work until 1am.  We just had the Sacramento show yesterday and I have a show next weekend (Arlington, TX) and the weekend after (Rockford, IL).  So there is a lot of work to do here.  For those of you not on our email list I suggest you join NOW.  I'll be updating the website with our Anniversary Special and anyone that's a Beeswax member will get a better special than the general public.  The update will happen Thursday night and then I'll email the group with a secret page link.

7/11/05  Well I have something other than kitten pictures to show you.  How about some bug pictures?  I actually had to do some research to find out what these things are. 

7/9/05   Are you sick of kitten pictures yet?  If you are...too bad!  They just do so many things worthy of a picture.  Sometimes I'm not even trying to take their picture!

And I was really proud to take this picture before Misha moved.  Then Wally told me that he does this all the time!

7/4/05  Happy 4th of July everyone!  Hope you are all having a great weekend.  I'm going to bore you with some kitten pictures.  Hope you don't mind, they are so darn cute!

Below is a story of how anything can entertain a kitten!

Here is Trevor sleeping in a bowl

Misha and Trevor

Yes, I named the two Misha and Trevor.  Both are boys.  Poor things don't know their own names because since we brought them into the house I've called them  'dorables.  short for "My Adorables".  I don't think they will ever know their names.  The first Vet visit will be interesting!  "What's the black ones name?" " 'dorable".  "What's the orange ones name?"  "uhhh, 'dorable".

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