Willowtree over at A Dingo Ate My Barbie taught us this trick to click on a picture and make it download another one. (His is much cleverer, but might be offensive to some readers.) Mine doesn't seem to work quite right as when I click, it downliads the second picture in a file onto my computer (which I think is completely weird and can not logically explain. Here is the picture
Here is a second try.
This is a reply to Jenny's post today on the Mama Drama blog "hosted" by the Houston Chronicle. Her issue is (in light of the recent writer's strike in Hollywood) why bloggers are generally also not compensated for their work. 
This is an issue that is very near to my heart, so when I sat down to write a response, I found that I could not contain myself to a three or four sentence response. I certainly want to note that I have no desire to malign the many very talented men bloggersout there. (Men in fields traditionally dominated by women suffer the same financial disadvantages as women and also frequently have to deal with image issues that can make their lives uncomfortable. Think of the historic views of male nurses, and dancers).
When thinking about the problem of unpaid blogging, the first thing I wonder is, how many of these unpaid bloggers out in the blogosphere are women. Our society has a tendency to not value the work of women. Painters and sculptors (who have mostly been men throughout the history of our culture (never mind why for now)) are revered amongst artists, film editors, needleworkers, lace crocheters and quilters have a history of being ignored. 
Women express their creativity in many ways and almost always there are many who pursue their interests without even thinking about getting paid, because they love doing so, and our society (be it due to market forces, supply and demand or whatever) tends to be reluctant to value women's work financially. 
As a Middle Eastern dancer and teacher of dance, I see the same problem daily. There are so many dancers out there that restaurants, conferences and even friends are able to pay next to nothing for performances and anyone with a few lessons has started providing belly dance classes to others. (Me included). There are a lot of us out there, so the supply is large and it exceeds demand. The value sinks.
Part of what I find interesting is this whole (in my opinion masculine) idea that something is only valuable when it has a monetary value. I like to resist that belief. I like to think of art as having intrinsic value beyond financial defintions. I want to regard teaching crafts, being creative, dancing as a way of being part of a community and sharing and I like to work with other people who value those acitivities. 
On the other hand it is inherently unfair for a big corporation to pay some people for work and ignore another group of workers (whom they could very easily pay) simply because they can. I wonder what it is about our society that values some "work" and not other and values these things in only one term - money. I wonder why we have become so dollar obsessed, that we can not allow for other things to have worth unless we are a hobbyist in the same field. I wonder if the Mama Drama blog at the Chronicle were a popular blog on business practices and skills (or on sports) run by men (and don't forget mothering is a job requiring skill, hard labor and intelligence), if the Chronicle would be more willing to pay its writers.
I suppose it really doesn't matter. As long as we are imprisoned by this particular part of capitalist philosophy which suggests that when supply exceeds demand the relative value of something is worthless. Unfortunately this means regardless of how talented or skilled the individual might be the value is still the same. We have lived in a hyper matierialist age for a long time now. Perhaps it is time to find some other values to compete with the almighty dollar. Its val;ue is going fown the tubes now anyway, maybe American Ingenuity, Creativity, Sincerity, Generosity and Self Reliance are values we can once again embrace.
I heard my dog barking this afternoon and when I checked it out, I found we had company.
Well, I need to look at this picture, because when I got up this morning it was 5 degrees. The world is an amazing place - it can go from barren ice field to green and lush in a matter of months! A truly marvelous feat!
Thanksgiving was a pleasant day - mostly overcast with just a little bit of sun in the afternoon. I managed to get out for a walk to look for the wild turkeys (no, not the bottle I have hidden in the shed!) On my walk, I took this shot of the back of our house. Today is also sunny, but we got into the single digits last night and snow is on the way. I wince in a bit of unwilling belief, I guess winter is really here.
That's Polymer Clay for the uninformed. So here is what I spent my day doing (after I went to Micheal's and spent a bundle on spacer beads and tools for working with polymer).
I've discovered I'm much more interested in making beads than in making jewelry.(And I have to admit I could have bought some really nice jewelry for what I paid for beads today - but of course I have enough beads and clay for many, many more pieces, so I guess if I don't get bored, it will eventually have been a worthwhile investment.)
One interesting little experiment involved layering and then cutting and then rolling to get stripes. That was kind of fun.
Another experiment involved canes - doing beads with little color spots inside. The green necklace with the series of round beads surprisingly actually looks better on a neck than on a table! (And I got the clasp twisted and had a really hard time getting it off. I was afraid I was going to have to sleep in it, because I did not want to wake up my husband for help getting it untangled.)
Another experiment involved printing a design with the inkjet printer and then transferring it to a bead. Blue ink did not work at all, and black seemed to work to some degree. The yellow bead has a printer pattern on it.
The blue necklace unfortunately turned out to be a bit too busy, so I will have to try again with thse beads and see if I can make a better setting for the marble blue beads. 
All in all, I feel like I have accomplished something today even if I don't know exactly what.
