I meet the coolest people on Twitter, like arianaelle whose profile led me to The Monocle Chronicle – a forum and gathering place for those of the steampunk persuasion and soon an RPG, too. I’m so excited

Well of course I joined – look for Kitty LaRue.

Kitty LaRue

Which all just reminds me that what I set out to do today was work on blogs – including my just for fun little Victorian playland called Foovay’s Floozies. Yeah, it’s pretty blank right at the moment. I have photos and stories ready to go – in fact, it was a going thing for a little while earlier this year but all that hosting BS came up and, well – yeah. I’m doing blog stuff today though, really I am. I started a new one last night and realized I have 16 set up and about three actually working – LOL.

Oh, the new one? Well – I gotta tell you it’s an Internet Marketing site that goes with that Affilliate Systems thing I’m trying out. Not that there are not some really good deals that I’m itching to share – just you should know it isn’t either my usual yappy stuff or fiction – it’s shopping pure and simple. That said, here it is – My Best Deals. I mean – if you are looking for some sort of deal on the internet and you want to toss your business my way, I’m sure not going to stop you!

*smile*

WB

I so have to share these folks with you – just met them via Twitter. Clockwork Couture features steampunk clothing, corsets, costumes, jewelry, hats and oddities according to their introduction. They describe themselves as a group of crafters, fashionistas, tinkerers and explorers and give part of their proceeds to bring art back to the public schools. And this is before you go drool over the new “vintage” styled victorian clothing. OMG. I want it all and I want it now. And if you feel the need, they do have gift certificates for Christmas! They are really new so lets give them all the support we can so they can hang around and share these gothic creations with us all for a long time.

WB

For starters, let me admit that I do not like reality shows of any kind. The only ones I ever enjoyed was cops – and that has more to do with my fascination with crime and law enforcement than love of “reality” shows. Most of them portray a warped negative reality that has little or nothing to do with anyone’s real life.

I must add to that, that I especially dislike these shows like “Interventions” and “Hoarders”. While they may actually provide some good in the world by helping one or two people who have real problems and who can benefit from the help they are offered, I believe they create far more pain and negativity for others. People watch these shows and instantly every one they know who has collected more than five collectibles, or who has taken a recreational drug, or who has any other foible must be mentally ill and needs immediate intervention from the authorities.

This is absolutely not the case. It is very rarely the case.

The reason I’m on this subject is that I recently happened to see some advertisements for the show “Hoarders”. I will state up front I have never watched it – although I’ve read a bit and seen some of the videos on the A&E site now. My immediate reaction to the commercials however, was a groan of agony.

Most of my life I’ve worked with animals and done rescue. I have had in excess of fifty animals living in my home with me. Clean, well cared for, well fed, spayed or neutered animals seeking good homes. But because the news services love to sensationalize every case of animal hoarding most people ASSUME that anyone with over two or three pets IS DEFINATELY A HOARDER in NEED OF THEIR HELP. Or at least, police or animal control intervention.

This is absolutely not true. Yet not only myself, but every single rescue person I’ve ever known, and a good many responsible breeders of show quality animals has at one point or another (and some of them many times) been accused of being an animal hoarder and had the authorities called in to investigate. For someone who dearly loves animals and takes the best of care of them, this is a hurt that never heals.

During the year I was an Animal Control officer I investigated a number of households accused of animal hoarding. Not one of them was an actual hoarder. In fact, during that time of all the cases called in to Animal Control – exactly ONE was a true case of animal hoarding. Sadly, in that case, the animal hoarder was an elderly woman who had died – and only after her death (and after she had laid dead in her home long enough for the smell to cause someone to call authorities) was the conditions she and her animals lived in discovered. In other words – none of those nosy people bothered to look into her situation while it was going on. Had one person showed this woman some concern, some love, perhaps it would have saved her life and saved her animals a great deal of suffering.

There is a big difference between a mentally ill animal hoarder and a legitimate rescue person, or responsible breeder. Before you run to call the police or SPCA, take yourself over to their house with an open mind and talk to them. Find out why they have so many animals, if they work with a vet or other organization doing rescue, or if they have several animals they have bred and shown and sell one or two litters – by reservation – each year. Look around and see if the animals seem healthy, if the house is clean, if the owner is alert and attached to reality. You just might meet a really cool person you are proud to know.

For more information about the difference, please read my article Crazy Old Cat Ladies. I just updated it to include more information about animal hoarders and how to tell the difference. Please, pass it on. If I can save one person the heart hurt that I had when I was turned in as a “hoarder” by some self-righteous ignorant (but probably well meaning) busybody who watches too much “reality” TV, it will make my year.

Blessedbe

Summer Fey Foovay

Lady of the Dead

I’m a member at ESBQ art and although I haven’t bothered to upload any of my own I do enjoy getting their daily art in my email. I had to share this lovely Lady of the Dead by Greg Culligan with you.

I am having difficulties today in getting links and things to work so I’m not even going to try and give you a link to the artists page or any of that – you can click on the painting and it will take you there, or somewhere near there. LOL.

Yes, I am a bit grumpy. I’ve had a very long couple of days – although yesterday was fantastic. I’m calling it my Solstice celebration. Hubby and I had to go to Las Cruces for his doctors appointment, but we made it a good day by eating out and having a wonderful meal and doing our holiday shopping. I got a bunch of fun craft, art, and sewing things so while I may not be here quite as often to inflict myself on the Internet world I will hopefully have art and craft goodies to share when I am here. I’m basically going to take much of the rest of the month off from Internet things and go play with fun creative things instead. Of course, that does include writing.

I just noticed how warm and wonderful and sunny it is outside – I love it here – so I think I’m going to go soak up some sun before I get involved in house and ranch chores for the day. Internet things will just have to wait for this evening after dark.

TTYL

Is it a bad thing when you discover new songs via Music monday on Twitter? Nah – I don’t think so. I don’t get out like i used you, you know.

Once upon a time one of the things I loved about being an exotic dancer is the amazing variety of music I got to hear when all the dancers could bring in their own. The newest, the oldest, the most unusual. I remember taking some old blues tapes with me to Pennsylvania to a club and having the DJ freak out because HE HAD NEVER HEARD BLUES BEFORE. He loved them and begged me to let him make copies. LOL.

Well, enjoy the music – Tokio Hotel is a great band and once upon a time MY mohawk was almost that big. Almost. But mine is usually blond or pink. Occasionally green or purple.

Hmm, can’t locate any photos of the blond or pink right now – figures. This is a new computer, they’ll be hidden on the old fellow over there…sigh. Some other day.

Right at the moment, due to the fact that I am doing a lot of behind the scenes things trying to catch up, and spending most of the rest of my time creating Christmas coloring pages and Squidoo lenses I’m not getting to blog nearly as much as I like. So the best way to really keep up with me right at this second is by following my Twitter feed.

That said, I’ve been playing with a couple of new Twitter toys.

One of them I am very, very pleased with so far is TweetCatch. It allows you to set up filters to add followers based on keywords in interests. Since I started using it like two or three weeks ago – yes, during the time I was largely off line – I’ve gained like 500 followers. Better yet, they are very interesting, cool people who happen to actually be into the same things I am – coloring pages, birding, music, etc. I’ve met some really neat people and through them even more interesting people. I’ve become one of those people who, if I don’t watch it, can spend all day just on Twitter, looking at news stories and pics other people posted, blogs, and have a great time at it. Twitter was always pretty fun – but this has taken it to a whole new level. No affilliation, but if you want to meet new people, and/or add to your Twitter follows for your business venture – this is well worth it.

I just added the other toy a couple of days ago, and I’m not sure how high I am on it yet. Still in the experimental stages. I’m a gonna slap you with a banner ’cause they are kinda pretty:

But, hey, ignore that viral marketing monster stuff (unless you are really looking for something like that) what I like is that now everytime I put up a new blog entry for any blog I’ve got this on – it automatically tweets it for me. It also gives me a nifty little widget with my tweets to put on the blog. It is uber-easy to install, and it is free. It does come with an affilliate program so you might even make a penny or two on it – but at this point that is pretty much beside the point to me. It’s a handy toy. If I make money, too, well, YAY. LOL.

While I’m talking about some experiments; what that TweetMyBlog actually does is try to upsell you to other thingamabobs that WP people or Twitter users would maybe like to use. Some of them are pretty cool, and I bet people do buy them. I don’t mind getting them a few more eyes on their ads, since they are ads that are relevant to my readers since, obviously, you have some interest at least in WP and/or Twitter.

Where I’m going with that is I broke down and bought one of those late night TV advertising make a million programs. Blush. Well, he sounded so – normal. It’s Anthony Morrison. He sounds normal to me because he doesn’t go off telling you you are going to make millions, he says maybe you’ll only make a few hundred a month but wouldn’t a few hundred a month make a difference to you? Well, in my case, yes – it can mean that I won’t have to go get a J-O-B after the first of the year like I was thinking. Because it isn’t that I need a billion dollars more, but a bit more so that we could take care of some old debts, have a little savings cushion, buy a few big ticket things we need – yeah. So I make the phone call, and before you know it, they are upselling me. Yeah, his book is $19.95 with $9.95 shipping (yeah, right but okay, I expected a bit of that), then it is “you need this and it’s 197.00, want to order it too?” and “oh yeah, you need this too and it’s $97, so you want to add it, too” and so on and on and on and on and…so my respect for him is sort of mixed. I should hope some of those upsells are worth the money (although I don’t think I need to pay someone $197 to teach me how to use Twitter at this point), but by the time I got off the phone I’d said “no” about 100 times and still somehow spent almost $40. Not sure how that happened. But I won’t bitch until I get the stuff, try it all out, give it an honest chance, and see if I make a bit of cash.

Upsell is more or less a honorable thing. You’ve already got an audience who is interested in your stuff and maybe even if they only have $20 for the book right now, they might be back around later for the rest of it – or maybe they’ve got $300 laying around to hand over for the whole enchilada. Either way, no one is hurt and it’s not like you’ve sent viagra ads to little old ladies who are just grossed out. So…hmmm…

We shall see

WB

Hey, how goes it? Yes, I am still alive, and still slogging along playing catch up. In fact, that is my task for the day – catching up. I’m sick of seeing over 500 emails in my inbox and 300 more in the box just for FetLife mail and never mind what I’ve probably missed that got tossed in with the 1000+ SPAM stuff.

But among other things – I have a Google alert for “happy dance”. Now this is because I do a Monday Happy Dance entry (usually) at Foovay’s Cauldron. Mind you, it is kind of off and on because I don’t always find a happy dance that moves me to be happy.

So that alert tossed me this amusing happy dance today – it won’t embed – but here’s the link:
One very pregnant lady doing the happy dance

I had to chuckle. Mind you – I’m almost amazed she can still dance at all. I bet she is counting the minutes until she delivers that beachball. But the reason it is over here, where I feel I can speak freely amongst the grown-ups, is that watching her do that reminded me of a girl I danced with some years ago.

Yes – exotic, nude dancing. That girl danced until everyone in the bar held their breath watching her for fear of seeing a little foot pop out from between her legs. The boss kept gently telling her that he would happily hold her job and she would be welcome back if she would like to stop now…right now…really soon…PUHLEEZE.

It wasn’t that she was unattractive – a beautiful woman who is pregnant is no less a beautiful woman. We were all just living in fear that she would sit down with a customer and deliver the baby off the edge of the chair while sucking down a $20 drink. I mean she danced right up to the last minute. She did finally stop – and delivered the baby less than a week later. One thing her doctor had to admit – she was in awesome physical shape, so the delivery was super easy. We were a bit worried she might shoot it across the room like a football – whooooosh!

But you gotta give her credit – she didn’t go on welfare (she certainly could have) or hold the unnamed father up for blackmail/ransom/child support – she supported herself and the baby when he arrived. So, you know, kudos to her. Even if she had us all breathless with fear for three months.

Oh go enjoy the dance. It’s cute.

WB

First I must ask your forgiveness for this cross-post from my main blog at Foovay’s Cauldron. As you may have guessed I’ve been without Internet for the better part of a month and now that it’s back I’m racing around trying to update and catch up and move forward and…but I thought you might enjoy this article and update.

I’ve just finished reading a very interesting article titled We May be Born with an urge to help.

I found several points to be very interesting. First – that very young children will innately reach out to help adults and other children. I have to agree that this information gives me a bit of hope for the human race. I would certainly like to believe that we are born with the desire to help, to cooperate, to “be nice” and “get along”. Wouldn’t we all?

This article also led me to think about the relationship of this apparently natural urge to cooperation to the current trend on the Internet to social sites from Twitter to Tagfoot, Squidoo, MySpace, all of those websites. Especially to those of us with online businesses, or using the Internet to promote our product or business (you know, like coloring pages or our writing) this spirit of cooperation, or helping, is essential. I know I often ask for help in promoting a particular article or piece of artwork and I am always happy to help out by promoting other peoples work, sometime because they ask, but also quite often because I find a really good article or website that I really want to share with everyone. And at the moment, the first thing I do is twitter about it. Later, if I get a chance, I’ll blog about it, maybe add it to my Tagfoot favorites, stuff like that. There are people who are very down on all this social cooperation – a lot of people do use it for shameless SPAMMING and strictly for their own business promotion, and others who say it’s just another fad that will go away soon. Things do pass through quickly on the Internet. However, after reading this article, I am more inclined to think that this is the natural, human way to interact on the Internet – sharing, helping.

The article also reminds me that Edgar Cayce (you know I am a serious Cayce fan) when asked what the purpose of life was, or any other related questions like “what should I do with my life” or “how can I improve my life/my relationship with God” always replied that we are here to help others, and that by helping others we grow closer to God and to expressing his and our purpose in life. That we have the urge to do this long before we are taught to do so by our families seems to support his words. God (or whatever supreme power you prefer to believe in) put us here to help each other.

Because of my personal experiences and history, this article also emphasizes yet again the untold damage of child abuse. Most severe abusers, particularily sexual abusers, will socially isolate their child victim either physically or through mental and emotional manipulation. This isolation naturally is going to limit a child’s ability to practice this natural urge to help and cooperate. In addition, abusers will specifically say and do things to discourage this urge. For instance, my mother would tell me that everyone is out to get me and that they would take advantage of me, so I should never help or cooperate with anyone because it would just lead to them harming me in some way. The discouragement of this natural urge and the inability to practice it because of social isolation is yet another type of damage an abused child may suffer. We do not learn normal ways to interact with other people.

“We’re preprogrammed to reach out,” Dr. de Waal writes. “Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control.” The only people emotionally immune to another’s situation, he notes, are psychopaths.

This quote is very interesting to me, because of course, I am writing the novels based on a family of psychopaths. I wish the article had gone a bit more into whether they feel this lack of empathy was innate, or learned, but given that they are working with very young children and saying this urge to help and cooperate is natural, then I am led to believe that what they are saying is that psychopaths are born without this urge. It would be interesting to do another study, maybe with children who have been identified as at risk or potential psychopaths to see if they react the same way as the young children previously tested – do they naturally try to help or do they just ignore the situation and go on their own way. Hmmmm.

But probably the most interesting quote for writers is this.

“That’s why we have moral dilemmas,” Dr. Tomasello said, “because we are both selfish and altruistic at the same time.”

Yes – and that is what gives us stuff to write novels about

Speaking of which – I didn’t win Nanowrimo. As you may have noticed, I’ve been without Internet out at the ranch for close to a month. You would think I would get a lot of writing done, but I discovered that I really missed the support of other writers, as well as being able to look up something instantly when I needed it. Despite that, I do have over 30K words written on the Hunters 2 novel, and I have just dropped the inescapable moral dilemma in my “good” FBI agents lap. Jay has already been struggling with his urge to investigate the Hunter family even though the FBI has said they have no interest and in fact, think Lily is a nut. Mahdi Dixon, a “rogue” family member who is an FBI profiler, has introduced himself to Jay and asked Jay to share the information that Lily discovered. Jay has a sneaking suspicion that Mahdi may want the information to …well…kill the killers. And is that a bad thing? Hmmmm…

I am back online and hopefully will remain so for the foreseeable future. I am WAY behind on all kinds of things, but I am working away at catching up. Right at the moment – I probably should go fix myself something to eat.

TTYL

Summer Foovay

So – yeah, that’s it – Happy Halloween, Merry Samhain and hot shit Nanowrimo is almost here.

Depending on where you are because I notice from Twitter that a bunch of people have begun already.

Not doing much for Samhain myself this year – turns out we don’t even have enough gas to go in and look at the other people in costume parading up and down Main St. Oh well.

I’m finishing up Hunter 1 today so I can start the Hunter 2 novel at midnight for my Nanowrimo project.

I am NOT as depressed as I sound – LOL. I just need a break from computer ish stuff and flies landing in my hair. But I was putting my Nanowrimo badges up on my blogs and you know, that kind of stuff.

Have a merry!

I saw this widget on another blog with another subject today and had to play with it. I like it! So, Halloween according to:

Fun? Expect to see it more often!