Update

I have really been lazy about blogging lately. I promise to do better. We had a huge credit card bill, so I put on a 4 day sale on the website. Whew! The orders poured in from Tues to Friday, and as of Saturday night, we still aren't caught up. Looks like Monday will be a catch up day in the shop, and everyone has really been working hard. Except me - I tend to goof off.
I started my summer semester in my art school Monday. This semester is Color and Design, and the first assignment was just a value scale from lightest to darkest, painted with gouache paint. The next one is a 5 x 8 design, done in grayscale. Boring stuff, so far - well, the 5 x 8s are sort of interesting.

Last weekend was big doings in northern Wyoming. Days of 49 here in Greybull, with parade, tug of wars, street bowling, all your small town fun stuff. It was also Mule Days in Ralston, a little town about 60 miles from here. We did the 49ers stuff, but we had to take a trip to Ralston. We can't afford a mule yet - and although we have the land, we don't have a shed out there yet or potable water. (we have the tap, just havent built a water line) But here's a picture of Dave falling in love.
They have a big mule auction there on Sunday, which we didn't go to. I guess the mules sell from $1000 to $12000. Seems kind of high for an animal that can't reproduce, but they can work for 30 years, and they really are steady and dependable and friendly and smart. And silly looking.

I did a really dumb thing Friday - I was cleaning out my computer of all the dumb programs that think they have to completely load at startup. Like quicktime, real player, aol, google notifier, all the automatic updaters, yada yada. I do it periodically. I looked at all the programs that were running, and deleted one called lsass.exe, which said it had to do with NT something. Since I don't run NT, I have XP on that computer, I deleted it. Instant fatal error. I spent hours Friday and Saturday on the phone with Dell trying to restore my computer, and their restoration disk didn't do it. I still get the fatal error - can't get into windows. So tomorrow, Sunday, I will be trying some solutions I found using Google. I can get to a DOS prompt, but I've forgotten most of the DOS I ever knew. I'll also be cutting more Russian olives. In this part of the country, Russian olives are a plague - they take over pastureland in a couple of years, and we are determined to get rid of all of them but maybe one or two majestic shade trees. I'll take pictures tomorrow.
I have gotten too fat, and I'm determined to lose it. Today I started again on the Adkins diet - its the only one that I ever really lost weight on. Dave is our cook, and he loves to cook with rice and pasta. I told him, if he wants me to eat what he cooks, he's going to have to pretty much stick to salads and meat for a while. Tonight I went out for a bike ride - going to try and do it every day that I've spent sitting, at least til winter. Wish me luck!