My Dad sent this email. I might try it out this spring.

"We went with friends to Sweety Pies on Sunday for breakfast and sat in the patio section beside the house. We happened to notice zip lock baggies pinned to a post and a wall. The bags were half filled with water, each contained 4 pennies, and they were zipped shut. Naturally we were curious! Ms. Sweety told us that these baggies kept the flies away! So naturally we were even more curious! We actually watched some flies come in the open window, stand around on the window sill, and then fly out again. And there were no flies in the eating area! This morning I checked this out on Google. Below are comments on this fly control idea. I'm now a believer!

"Ann Says:I tried the ziplock bag and pennies this weekend.. I have a horse trailer. The flies were bad while I was camping. I put the baggie with pennies above the door of the LQ. NOT ONE FLY came in the trailer. The horse trailer part had many. Not sure why it works but it does!

"Danielle Martin Says: Fill a ziplock bag with water and 5 or 6 pennies and hang it in the problem area. In my case it was a particular window in my home. It had a slight passage way for insects. Every since I have done that, it has kept flies and wasps away. Some say that wasps and flies mistake the bag for some other insect nest and are threatened..

"Maggie Says: I swear by the plastic bag of water trick. I have them on porch and basement. We saw these in Northeast Mo. at an Amish grocery store & have used them since. They say it works because a fly sees a reflection & won't come around.

"DJ Says: Regarding the science behind zip log bags of water? My research found that the millions of molecules of water presents its own prism effect and given that flies have a lot of eyes, to them it's like a zillion disco balls reflecting light, colors and movement in a dizzying manner. When you figure that flies are prey for many other bugs, animals, birds, etc., they simply won't take the risk of being around that much perceived action. I moved to a rural area and thought these "hillbillies" were just yanking my city boy chain but I tried it and it worked immediately! We went from hundreds of flies to seeing the occasional one, but he didn't hang around long."

The Quick Blue Facebook Jumped Over The Lazy Blog

Wednesday is the two year anniversary of the start of this blog. As I stated in my first post the reason I started this blog was because a co-worker said that I expressed myself well. Since I like to tell stories of my life and the ponderings of my little brain, which is what this blog is about, I really have a lot of fun with it. I hope that people are amused by it, even if all I'm doing is venting.

A question came up recently about the content of my blog, and I didn't have a ready answer at the time (the answer is 'not since June, and she was mentioned in a post that she hasn't read yet'), so I went through the entire blog and came to a startling discovery: In the ten months before I joined Facebook I had written 77 posts. Since joining Facebook fourteen months ago, there have been 23. This is not good.

A friend of mine, Mark, recently wrote on Facebook, "I stopped blogging awhile ago. And I was active blogger. Facebook is easier, and I have control over who reads my posts. I much prefer facebook these days." His is an entirely different point of view from mine. Valid for him, but different.

In my point of view, the two serve entirely different functions, so "preference" is not a factor. Facebook is kinda like a post-it note: little quips we throw out there that we hope someone will notice. They can turn into a conversation, and that's the best part - especially when the participants are in varied locations around the world. Sometimes, though, that's a problem too. When my brother came to town for Christmas, he told me, "I would ask you what's going on, but since we're on Facebook, I already know." Face to face conversation became somewhat unnecessary, and I missed it. Scott and I do better in vocal conversations anyway. If he doesn't hear my voice, he often doesn't catch my meaning.

Writing a blog is more like writing a short story. I can go into more depth with the topic I want to write about, and not be worried about going over the alloted number of characters, or that someone will pull it off subject with their conversational input. Furthermore, like most authors, I really want a variety of people to read it.

Now, there are parts of my life I will not write about because I believe they are too personal, and another that I have written about a lot, but have been told I can no longer do so, so there is a little bit of self censorship going on. But there is still a lot going on in my life that I can write about, even if it is just a short paragraph. It's just a matter of actually doing it.

All The (Unused and Unusable) Time In the World

In the winter, typically, I am an idea hamster. I get a bunch of ideas about things I'm going to do as soon as the weather gets warmer. Relatively few of those ideas actually come to fruition, but they don't all go away just because they hadn't been accomplished. They just sit in the back of my head and develop into little bubbles of guilt and regret.

True, time and money do play a big factor, but a lot of times it's just poor planning or no planning or just plain old ordinary wasting my time (especially in front of the computer or TV). Then there is the backward thinking, which is really irritating (I can't do this till I do that, but i can't do that till I do the other, etc, etc, ad infinitim.) I also use my schedule as both a reason and an excuse; likewise the people in my life.

I was sitting in our "yellow room" (a spare bedroom that has been turned into a sort of lounge/reading room/ studio annex) just looking around and thinking. Gaby came in and asked what I was doing and I started telling him about all the things that I'm not getting done, and some of the reasons for that:

I have a model of the Lusitania that I got some 25 years ago, and little of it has been put together. (I also have a Titanic model in the same large scale that hasn't been touched yet.) The reason is because I don't have a space I can dedicate to that project. Plus, I am mixing my own paint colors to match the paintings by Ken Marshall in Robert Ballard's book. In short, I am making this into a very complicated project that I don't have time or space for. But it will be magnificent when it's done.

I have a number of things that I'm trying to sell on ebay. I just need to post the auctions. I don't particularly have an excuse for not doing this, except that I want the auctions to end at a particular time, therefore I have to post them at a particular time, and something always seems to come up. Or I just forget.

I'm supposed to be working on a research project for my brother. I have the materials to do it (three books, a pencil, and a yellow pad), but it requires a lot of reading and cross referencing and typing the results. I really don't have an excuse to not be working on this project except that it falls victim to "getting started is the hardest part," as many of my projects do, because the stuff gets put away or moved, and getting them out again and figuring out where I was before the stuff got moved is just too much trouble. I also need time to myself to think, and that's hard to come by.

Then there's my Spanish lesson, which I am also blogging about. Again, getting started is the hardest part. Plus, I'm overcomplicating it, while not getting enough practice. Time to myself is not a problem with this project, because having Gaby here is (usually) helpful. I guess I have no excuse.

I'm working on two pen & inks and six paintings. I got a lot done on one of the drawings last weekend (yay), but this weekend all eight projects either are or need something that is behind the wall of snow between the house and the studio. At this point, I'm not sure that I'm going to get anything done on these this weekend. (Truth be told, though, three of the paintings haven't been touched in years.)

I wasn't expecting the weather to get in the way of my current art projects. When I think of weather interference I'm usually just thinking that it's too cold to work in the garage, or too wet to work out on the patio. But right now it's 9½° outside and we have 10 inches of snow blown up into huge drifts that prevent us from doing a lot of stuff. We're stuck in the house because the snow is too deep to drive through, and we are using electric portable heaters because the central heat quit working this morning. We have a kerosene heater that is very efficient, but makes the house smell bad for weeks. Gaby is afraid to use it. I'm afraid not to, because if we don't use one of the electric heaters in the utility room the pipes around the washing machine may burst. We really need a new storm door and a new energy efficient window on that room. Things we need to do when we have money and nice weather.

Other things that require nice weather:

We have some tables for the living room, two of which need to be stripped, all four need to be stained.

The framing business has pretty much fizzled out, and I have hundreds of frame samples that I want to make into little wall shelves and other things to sell on ebay... which reminds me, I need a scroll saw. But I also need a warm garage.

But the big project is changing the arrangement of my studio to accomodate a new direction in the business. This will require moving a lot of stuff, most of it paper goods, out on the patio while construction is going on, so the weather has to be dry. It also needs to be warm, since the doors will be open through most of the project. Everytime I go out in the studio I am so distracted by the excitement of this project that I have trouble making myself do something useful. I've measured the room over and over again. I know the results will be the same every time, but I just can't help it. I repeatedly go over the details in my head, afraid that I will forget something when the time comes.

Anyway, that's how I am: obsessing over the things I can't do now, neglecting the things I should do now. I've been this way all my life. I do actually accomplish a few things, but it's never enough, and always at the last minute. And every year it's going to be different. But this year I have a plan.