Take Your Fabrics In A Brand New Direction!

Spoonflower Fabrics is hosting a Zombie contest. I'm not making this up. Dozens of cute little blood-dripping, slack-jawed zombie dolls (including "Zombie Mommie," evil twins, "Contagiously Cute" and one vacant-eyed guy with plumber's butt) that you can cut out and stitch together. Vote for your favorite!

Getting Through the Election - And Other Prickly Issues

We're seeing our share of verbal fistfights in the pro-Romney/pro-Obama supporters right now.

Nasty commercials. (On both sides.)

Even nastier accusations. (Again - both sides.)

And there we are -- right in the middle.

It's not just them, either. I've had to fight my way through other people - groups and organizations -  who disagree with each other. It's worst when members of the same group -- people you normally respect and admire -- go to arguing, then insulting, then move on to downright enmity.
    What usually happens? A huge fight that proves nothing. A church split right down the middle. A group that accomplishes little, because it's so busy putting its energy into drawing battle lines.
    Nothing good comes of it, either. The opposing group doesn't change its mind. (You certainly wouldn't!) Hurt feelings, harsh accusations and a generally bad taste in the mouth.

 I recently came across this comment from Randy Cohen's book, Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything.
     Cohen wrote a column called "The Ethicist" twelve years for the Washington Post. "Readers will endure - will welcome - views unlike their own if those ideas are expressed without contempt," he says. "I tried to make the column a place where people could argue amiably, could disagree without discourtesy."

   "For the first few years of the column, I tended to respond in-kind to angry e-mail. (I suspect many of us have a tendency to treat others as they treat us, for good or ill.) When I received a particularly hateful screed, insulting, ad hominem, SHOUTING AT ME IN ALL CAPS, I would think, You call that vicious? It's amateur work. I am a trained professional; I can compose something a hundred times more venomous. And I would.
    ...When I sent one of my tormenters a savage response, I felt great. It is a pleasure to thrash a bully. (And by "bully," I mean anyone who is unkind to me.) But it is an ineffectual pleasure, one that solidifies disagreement, makes enduring enemies, changes nobody's thinking, garners no dinner invitations. And so eventually I forsook the pleasures of the punch-up for another strategy: a soft answer turneth away wrath. [Yes, he's quoting Proverbs in the Bible. No, he's not religious.]
    Turns out, it doth.
    I began ignoring the tone of even the angriest e-mails and responding courteously to the sense of it. Just as an experiment. Often, even the author of a barbarous e-mail would then reply politely. Sometimes he'd apologize for his initial intemperance. My first, unworthy, though, I'd hit upon a cunning way to make my tormenter feel guilty while I seized the moral high ground. Brilliant!

What if all the sides actually agreed to work with each other, even if they disagreed? 


We might actually get something accomplished. 

Presidential Debate Tonight

Don't miss it! 

Oct. 3, 2012  
9 p.m. Eastern Time   (7 p.m. Mountain time, of course.)

at the University of Denver in you-know-where, Colorado.

Subject: Domestic policy.

(And anyone who's going to try and drive up in that area is totally nuts. Street and exit closings galore. Traffic jams aplenty.)

Go here for more information. 
Full ongoing debate coverage here.

Fall, Please Don't Leaf!

Fall leaves -- oh my, they're beautiful right now. 

A trip down Castle Rock's main street this afternoon was a pleasure, with the warm sun causing the trees to glow all along the way. Mostly yellows -- we have a lot of those in Colorado -- with a few warm reds and oranges chiming in.

If you're a big leaves fan, too, take a look at this slideshow of fall photos from around the country, courtesy of Weather.com. (Click here to start.)

And enjoy...you know it's going away soon.

Yep...looks like this around here.

Fight Over A Renoir

This is a complicated one. Ready? Here we go:
    A woman buys a painting at a flea market for $7. She assumes it's a fake.
    After two years in storage, she wonders whether the painting is authentic, and decides to have it appraised.
    Turns out the painting is documented as a Renoir.

Still with me?
    The woman puts the Renoir up for auction. It's expected to fetch in the neighborhood of $75,000. (It's a small piece - 5 1/2" x 9".) Every flea market enthusiast is green with envy.
    Only a few days before the auction, the painting is pulled. Turns out:
    A Washington Post reporter discovers it -- or a painting very similar to it -- was stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951.
    But an insurance company already paid the Baltimore museum for the stolen painting back in 1951. (It was valued then at $2500.)
    The original owner had only loaned the painting for the exhibit back in 1951 -- though it's believed she planned to give it a permanent spot at the museum. (She'd donated many other works.)

    So who owns the painting? 

The original owner...or the museum...or the insurance company?

 Or is it the lady who purchased it at a flea market, and inadvertently brought all this to light?

    That's the big fight right now.

  The flea market painting, documented as "Paysage Bords de Seine," or "On the Banks of the River Seine" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Photo from the Washington Times link.

Trader Joe's in Colorado? Yes, But...

A while back, I posted a whiny message, begging Trader Joe's to open a location (or two, or three, or four) in Colorado. Why did they keep making us go out of state for our groceries, fruit and 'Two-Buck Chuck' fix?

Well, now they're planning to.

Boulder will have Colorado's first Trader Joe's, at where the Applebee's currently is on 29th St. See the report here. 

But not until 2013.

What about the upcoming holidays? They're missing out. Thankfully, I have a teaching gig in Albuquerque in early November -- guess I'll stock up before leaving town.

Darn it.

Monday Stuff On the Way to Other Stuff: Chicken Update

Frost warnings are out for this week. Just in time, the Brick got the furnace fixed and running. (It's been out pretty much all summer.) We keep our house cool, compared to most; last winter, the temp was 67 during the day, and 62 at night. Surprisingly comfortable, with a sweater or a little boost from a space heater, as needed. We'll also build a fire in the fireplace now and then, too. And the energy savings are great.
    What are the chickies doing?
From our standpoint: absolutely nothing. Oh, they enjoy running around the yard, chasing after scraps and grasshoppers. They're certainly eating and pooping on schedule. (Just cleaned out the coop yesterday -- I know.) We actually caught our neighbors watching them with binoculars the other day. (The neighbors thought a mountain lion was on the other side of the fence. I think they probably just saw Charley, whose fur is yellowish.) 
    But no eggs. Not none.
What do I have to do: schedule laying sessions? Exercise therapy? Pep talks??
    sigh. 

While I'm brooding about this (get it?), you might enjoy the eggs of wisdom laid here and there on the Internet:

 Jeffrey Gundlach got his $10 million art collection back! Police arrested the manager of an Autosound store in Pasadena, CA, among others; the paintings were found in the building. (Another painting was recovered from a home in Glendale.) Hey, offer a reward of more than a million dollars...I'm sure that didn't hurt. (See the original report here.)

From the "Now I've Seen Everything" Department: a cat who eats with a fork. Really. 

Freezer cooking for the busy mom -- from Keeper of the Home.  Using freezer meals has saved my bacon several times during busy deadline periods. Also, take a look at her post on 10 Easy Meals When You Forget to Plan. Not that this ever happens to me... :)

An interesting airline brouhaha...the airline wants to charge parents $60 extra, so they can sit next to their 5-year-old child. Hmmm...

A bulldog, a trampoline -- and bliss.

Paying debt on a really tight budget; a guest post from Stacy Makes Cents. (One of the questions in The Simple Dollar's mailbag also pertains to this, big-time.

Celebrating birthdays the frugal way, a post from yours truly on Penny Thots.

Helping a deer in distress. What a kind thing to do. (It's not uncommon to see dead deer out here on the prairie, stuck on the fence.)

Thirteen Halloween treats kids would rather trash than eat, according to Len Penzo. Plus 10 treats they'd do anything for. The Mama will be thrilled; she hands out popcorn balls every year, and these were on the 'good' list. She even made us a batch before she left. (How long did they last? Errr cough harrumph...well, let's talk about something else.)

Have a great week.