Hi Everyone

,
I'd intended to post again sooner than this, but I got sidetracked with a major burst of creativity! (Finally!

)

The altered-imagery book I mentioned I was reading last time led me to investigate the kind-of-recent (in the last decade or so) art form called Artist Trading Cards (ATCs). They are delightful teeny wallet-sized pieces of artwork in any type of media, and the only official rule is that they have to be 2.5" x 3.5" (or 64 mm x 89 mm) in size. People make them and trade them with each other in organized "swaps" both in person and on-line. Its main purpose is for artists to meet each other and to be introduced to many different personal artistic styles.

The card swaps frequently have different fun themes, like "Big Cats" and "Blue Christmas" (where all the cards have to be predominantly shades of blue), and so on.
Well, the idea sounded like such fun that I found an ATC group on-line, joined it, and, in the space of maybe 12 days or so, have already made 27 cards for 4 different swaps!

As far as working on Abraham and the Law of Attraction goes, if we indeed make it our primary career and main goal in life to
feel good, as Abraham suggests (which, if we can manage to feel good enough often enough, will put us into alignment so that everything else we want and need manifests much more quickly and easily), then this is the perfect task -- it's been keeping my mood very high on a consistent basis over the past several days!
So far, I've been amassing all these cards I've made here (have them propped up on shelves, desks, etc., all over the house

), but I will soon be mailing them out to their respective swaps -- it'll really be fun and interesting to receive cards back from all the other participants and see all their different styles!
PP, to Sher, wrote:that's wonderful that you're not very far from AquaDeb,,,,someday you'll probably get to see her artwork...
she has a web site,,,,which she posts for us every now and then...
(hint, hint Debs).....
Okay,
PP, I can take a hint!

I uploaded photos of all the fun ATCs I've been making to my art website (the main page is at
http://www.aquadeb.com .) In particular, the link to the ATCs is:
http://www.aquadeb.com/artgallery.html#atc
The "Art for Sale" page still only currently has about 5 items on it, since I haven't gotten back to the silk painting yet since we moved

(though I still plan to do so soon, and working on these ATCs is fortunately getting me back into "creative mode" again

), but, as I've noted before:
A portion of the proceeds from any art I sell through this site will be donated to the 11:11 Progress Group! I'll let you all know as I continue to add more new items!
I'm glad you all got a kick out of my "stinker photies!"
Sandy and
Lilly, the comparisons of those photies to Ozzie Osbourne and Vincent Price are hilarious, and, I must admit,
just a little too true!
PP, that avvie photo of the turkey is just
too funny! Truly hilarious!

By the way, I also saw and liked the Halloween one you put up earlier -- it didn't actually strike me as that much of a "stinker photie," though, at least not at that small size, anyway!
I've also been meaning to answer your post (from "way back when," now

) on the Ask and It is Given thread -- Hopefully, I'll get around to that before too long! ...
Sher, best of luck to you and Gordon in starting up your businesses!

Working with polymer clay, that sounds exciting! Though I've never worked with it much, I've always been attracted to its bright colors and the fun, intricate designs one can make with it!
How cool that you live so close to Capitola as the crow flies! I looked Patterson up on Google; I see what you mean about it being a pretty small place. What is that big brown barren area between our two desitnations? It looks pretty uninhabited with few roads, kind of like a desert, or, from that satellite-photo distance, maybe even like the surface of the moon!
I'm enjoying reading "Harmonic Wealth," slowly, a few pages at a time whenever I'm on the treadmill. I'm still not that far into the book yet, but so far, I've really been liking his physics explanations of stuff like what's happening with thought waves and such underlying the Law of Attraction -- it just helps to strengthen the teachings all the more!
As for turkey tips, here's mine: Putting the turkey in an oven bag to bake it will keep it juicy (besides keeping moisture in, it'll cause it to kind of baste itself) and let it cook in half the time. I always just buy one of those big disposable aluminum turkey pans to set it in too. These measures keep the oven clean as well, then after you cut open the oven bag and the pan gets all yucky, you don't even have to wash it; you can just throw it away at the end!
One other thing to note (though I'm sure you've already read this in the stuff you printed out from the web

), is that if you happen to get a frozen turkey, it needs to thaw in the fridge for 24 hours for every 5 pounds before you cook it, so if you're getting a huge bird, it's best to get it a few days early! Last year, we lived in a teeny place with no actual oven (only a toaster oven!

) and a teeny refrigerator, so we just bought a pre-cooked smoked turkey and had to cut it up small enough to fit into the fridge before we could even put it away after we got back from the grocery store!

Now we've got a normal-sized kitchen in this place, at least!
And yes, like everyone else has mentioned, remove the little bag of giblets.

I used to chop up some of the less disgusting-looking giblets and add them to the gravy, but now they all just kind of gross me out too

, so now I just throw the whole little bag out!
I've been enjoying the stories of baking/cooking/fireworks mishaps as well!

Speaking of which, I finally found and tried the canned version of the chipotles, which, as it turns out, are a good bit hotter than the ones I made from scratch, because they seem to have left the seeds in!

So, I made that excellent butternut-squash soup again a week or so ago, but this time I used the canned ones, and naively put in twice as many as the recipe called for (since it had worked just perfectly with the chipotles I'd made from the dried ones

). But this time, it was so hot that we couldn't even finish eating it!

So I saved it as a "spicy soup concentrate" and diluted it by mixing it half-and-half with other various canned soups each night (which made each soup just spicy enough to be pleasant

) for several days until we'd finished it all!

Now I've learned my lesson: One little can of those chipotles really goes a
long way!
Pet, love your photies and stories, as usual!

And Hi to you,
Kim, as well!
Well, I gotta run for now, but a big Hi also to everyone else I haven't mentioned here by name!
Lots of love to you all

,
Aqua Deb
(later edited this because at first I accidentally said I made 37 ATCs, but it was actually "only" 27!

)