What's Going On ...

The garden is deadheaded, watered in, the cardinals are growing, the cats haven't delivered any new presents and the dog and I had a good walk this morning at the high school tennis courts...I guess summer school is in session cause there are cars there in the morning...our schools let out the first or second week of May, cause they go back to school the second week of August, which I have always found to be weird, but its what Texas does...I'm just used to Labor Day being the 'end of summer' but down here it really doesn't stop being hot until after Halloween, and September is just as brutal as August as far as heat goes, so I guess it doesn't really matter...at least they are in air conditioning...

I do believe it is time for me to change the litter boxes and get underway...I'm kinda pleased with some of the beads I made yesterday, but I have more work to do...I'm making troll beads right now, I'm not silver coring these, cause I've found that they won't fit over the Pandora style bracelets if they are silver cored (they will fit the Troll bracelet if they are cored,tho, and that's what I wear)...I dunno, how many folks have Pandora bracelets vs. Troll bracelets? Is it a huge market share? The silver coring is really ideal for the bead, as it keeps the metal from wearing the glass down and causing stress in the bead...its also much more time consuming to silver-core a bead and it costs more money in time and materials...so right now I'm leaving them uncored, and will have to decide which ones to core later...

We moved two years ago, for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest one was we were tired of the ridiculousness of the Austin mentality...and its all coming to a head now...Out of control property taxes, red light cameras to make money, toll roads that charge $1.50 per quarter mile (for roads that you've already paid for in your gas tax), and now they are charging people who want to go to a public park and exercise...seriously...if you gather up a group of people and want to do pushups, or thai chi, they want to charge 'who ever is in charge' $500 because they are 'making money on public property'...and yet - they allow developers to build multi-million dollar shopping centers (The Domain in North Austin) and give them tax breaks...the irony there is, no one shops there, they just window shop, cause people in Austin are not gonna pay $5000 for a Birkin bag or $2000 for a pair of shoes...there's money in Austin, but this isn't Dallas...you can sit next to a multi-millionaire in a local bar who is dressed in shorts and sandals...this is not the Austin of old...and I'm glad we aren't living in it, giving our money to the craziness...We buy a lot of stuff online, and I stay out of Austin as much as possible...I'm listening to the local radio show, freaking out at how much the city has changed, and all I can do is smile and say 'yep'...and then I jingle the 8 pennies in my pocket and am grateful to still have them...One of the things I forgot about - the city is trying to, (or may have already) pass a law making anyone selling their house bring it up to 'green' code before they can sell it...that would mean replacing all the windows, upgrading the a/c unit, upgrading old appliances, adding insulation in the walls/attic...can you imagine having to do that on your home before you moved? How much would that run you? 20K? 30K? we upgraded our a/c and ducting - it was 7K just for that...we had 10 windows that would all need to be replaced, that's not cheap either...how long would all that take? The last thing you wanna do is upgrade the house you're moving out of before you move into the new house you wanna upgrade...