Settled into my Oregon apartment!

Settled into the new apartment near Portland, OR this week. Here's some pics of the surrounding areas (first is multanomah falls off the columbia river gorge.) It's good to be back. The apartment grounds are nice too, lots of varieties of plants and flowers. I love how green this state is!

Jumping on the Blog bandwagon + How to subcribe to blogs and rss feed readers.

For years I've been hearing a lot of talk about blogs. At first I didn't think much of it, assuming that "blogging" was just a way to keep a public journal. Over time I began noticing more and more awesome blogs here on blogspot, live journal and typepad. These weren't limited to my imagined "private diary" style writings either, many people were using them to spread cool news, links to things around the net, their photography and art galleries and sometimes as a replacement for a personal website altogether.

After gathering quite a few bookmarks it started to be a huge task to check all these individual blogs for updates. Recently a friend told me about google reader (learn more about that here: http://www.google.com/reader ) As many of you probably already know (I think I'm late catching on) the google reader is one of a few RSS Feed readers you can use to check all your favorite site's updates on one easy page.

Basically when you go to a website you often visit looking for updates, you may see a button that says "subscribe", "rss", or at the bottom of most blogs "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)." When you click that subscribe link there is usually an option to choose which reader you'd like to view it in (I have experience with google, so thats what I choose.) Then when you go to your google reader page you'll see a
stream of all the newest entries from every website you've added to your list! That's it, one convenient page instead of surfing each individual website looking for news.

I realized that this would be the perfect solution for website updates as well. I could just make a blog post each time I added new art, rubber stamps or flexible molds to my sites. The people interested in RSS Feed news readers could automatically see the newest things. Also, for those people who just want to bookmark my blog and come visit the old fashion way, you can see the newest entries instead of browsing through the many pages of my site looking for the new products!

Moving Back To Oregon

Last year I moved back to Michigan for several months to visit my mom and save up money for living on my own back in OR. After years of having a husband to help take care of me through my cancer treatments, I was terrified after our divorce last year that I wouldn't be able to survive on my own. Especially with the limited (and often unpredictably fluctuating) income that running an online store provides... And the lingering side effects of chemo, radiation and stress have had on my current health preventing me from being able to work outside of the house.

Luckily during my time in Michigan I became closer to an old friend again, who happened to be looking for an excuse to move out of his current location as well. We decided to move to the Portland OR area this week. Hooray! I have a roommate! This helps me be less stressed about being alone, and as an added bonus I have someone to split rent with.

Before leaving MI this week I made two going away presents for my mom. These spring and winter Goddess art doll wall hangings. I was inspired by a beading magazine I had seen years ago with instructions on how to make a heavier wire goddess frame, then beading it using thinner wire wrapped around the frame.