More rural art photos around snowflake and Taylor, Arizona

The presence of Grandmother, still here. I got up near dawn the other day and spotted this fantastic household scene. My mother is surely an artist. My family is full of artists. I'm so lucky to be around them, and to have been raised by them.

Saw this rural scene walking through Taylor and had to capture it. The cows were nuzzling each other and playing, except for the one who had taken ownership of the single tree in this huge meadow.
Irrigation canals like this one remind me of my childhood in Turlock, California. Click on any of the photos above for a larger view.

The Destructive Hand of God

Wow, Ganesha is not what I had in mind but I randomly came up with this photo and it fits. Ganesha is the "remover of obstacles."

Yes, God the destroyer--- the third part of the Hindu trinity of Creator, Preserver, Destroyer. Not that I'm Hindu, but sometimes these definitions are useful. Not that I seek to define God: as that would literally mean "to make finite".

Anyway somebody is in "take away" mode right now. And I'm not whining. No, I'm not. Not right now anyway. I mentioned Cafepress recently-- an outlet for artists to self publish their work, and the fact that thousands of artists just got about 60-80% of their money taken away. There is more to it than that, a lot more, but for now let's just say we're amongst that group. You could say that we're some of the lucky ones in that we never made much money there anyway. In essence we all got fired, just not all of us have admitted it yet. I have a grand theory explaining it all but I'll write that down here later. Anybody who has ever worked corporate knows that money explains everything, even ridiculous bald-faced lies and seemingly incredibly stupid decisions.

Then there is Craigslist; a free online advertising venue for goods, services and more. We had been using them for a long time. Just the other day we realized that they wouldn't allow any postings with photos under therapeutic services anymore. Then a day or two later we discovered that they are now charging ten bucks every time you place an ad in that section. Right there that makes it not worth it for us. Oh, poor us, but then those ads never really worked all that well anyway-- and they especially don't work out here in the desert. We no longer have an in-person, face to face practice because we are too remote from everything. Telephone sessions are what remains, and Craigslist is all built around that which is physically local to the shopper or potential client.

Another prominent marker of Craigslist is that they list a lot of "erotic services" ads, and unfortunately many of those ads have ended up in Therapeutic Services despite explicit warnings that they aren't allowed there; they have their own section after all. So, Craigslist decided to fix a few problems at once: no photos in that section kind of put the hurt on the sex ads, and then the ten dollar charge was supposed to discourage postings in therapeutic when they really belonged in erotic. You see, they had already started charging the ten-spot in Erotic, and for awhile it just made matters worse in Therapeutic. So now, if you check Phoenix, for example, therapeutic is almost exclusively sex ads which are mildly disguised as legitimate therapy. Because (duh, craigslist!) most sex workers can afford the ten bucks over and over, and most, say metaphysical counselors would rather raid the piggy bank to pay for lunch. Hilarious, really, that the sex workers now pretty much own two sections on CL, and us more mainstream types have been driven out. In Flagstaff, by the way, Therapeutic services contains exactly zero ads now. But hey, what in the world were we thinking having our ads right between "Sweet Melonie Massage" and "Man for Men Rub-a-Dub!"

More funny Craigslist stuff: I used to post ads for my art-work under for sale. If you post once in a while, you get very, very few looks. Maybe several the first day, then nothing after. If you post too often, people eventually get mad and the ad gets pulled down. Basically, abusing the free ad privilege pays off though, and a lot of people have figured that out. I abused it some. A little bit. I wasn't the worst of them. I tried not to be annoying. But CL got wise to me a couple of times. This time-- they pulled down several of my art ads at once, but not all of them. They left a single art ad in the middle untouched, in Paris, France. Sigh, I guess we'll always have Paris. I think they are trying to tell me something. I think they have an excellent sense of humor too. I just wish I knew who to write to and could thank them for it. Did those ads really sell my art well enough to be worth the time and effort of placing them? No way. Not even close.

The Jeep still works but a mouse crawled into the ventilation fan and built a nest. The AC part stopped working a while ago. For you Californians: we're in Arizona, and it's June.

A lot of stuff still works though and I am glad for that. I am thinking that Sheryl and I are being assisted with the concept of "One door closes, another opens." Sometimes it takes blind faith to close a door and stand in the darkness. But I do think that sometimes that door must be closed first, that it standing ajar actually prevents the better one from opening.

Overgrown House

I love these old, overgrown houses. Click the photo to see it larger.

Guttersnipe

Hey, get a job you, or you're going to end up in the gutter.

Anybody know what kind of snake this is? I suppose I'll have to learn to identify baby rattlesnakes before I start crouching down again to take pictures of the "cute little snake."
I'm off to google that right about now. This guy did threaten to bite me. That was cute too.

At the end of the rainbow

Like a lot of us, Sheryl and I are still seeking the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We have the good fortune to pursue our various interests as entrepeneurs and there's a lot of upside to that, mostly having to do with the freedom to make our own choices, the control over our own lives and business decisions without having to run it by "the boss" because we are the boss. But it's not easy, and too often it's not rewarding enough. In essence, everything we do is self published, self promoted, self everything. Very recently we suffered a setback where our self publishing intersected a big corporation called "Cafepress." I'll write more about that another time, (and I have already blogged here about it some) but just picture the worst of both worlds: all the responsibility of a self run business and a sudden money grab by a corporation who actually holds your puppet strings.

When we were back in Santa Cruz, California, we got pretty good at getting ourselves known. All our client feedback was at least 99% positive, we got oursleves in the newspapers several times (in a good way) plus we had a print advertising budget. But it wasn't enough. If we had been in another more mainstream line of work, like say, yard maintenence, we'd have been the best known in the entire region and would have been making great money.

Long story short, the least affordable county in the entire nation was not in the least bit affordable enough for us. I began to understand that getting mass publicity on a scale we could hardly imagine would apppear to be the necessity just to live in the Bay Area and eek out a living there. Like I said, it's because being independent spiritual counselors/healers is not all that mainstream. Oddly enough, we consider oursleves pretty maintstream: what we do is a lot like any counseling session. Hard to picture that we'd have to write books and become as well known as a Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Caroline Myss, but it's starting to look that way. Those guys don't self-publish. They're part of the great mass media machine, and I do understand why.

In photography too, in art, writing, even in Sheryl's perfume business the common factor is that we're doing it all oursleves, and we'd be doing a lot better with a little help. So, currently we're looking at those options. Exactly what help do we need to enlist, what's OK with us and what isn't--because we do a lot of different things, it's complicated and we'll have to be addressing it one step at a time.

Con men and the "free gift scam"

Not talking about a "buy one get one free" or "buy five and get a free gift", those are often perfectly legit. Sheryl will give you a free Reiki Teddy bear if you buy a certain number of her retail perfumes, but that's very upfront, an honest incentive. This is something altogether different. I did a little research online about recognizing scams and cons (aka confidence artists) after we got a couple of suspicious phone calls. My mother is in an age group where she gets preyed upon by nefarious types on a pretty regular basis.

Here is a variation on the "free gift" scam. Picture this:

A guy from a shipping company calls on the phone to verify your address in order to deliver a large package. "What? we didn't order anything."
"It's got your phone number on it, but the rest of the address label is illegible-- we don't even have a return address. So, if it's not yours, then I don't know what we're going to do with it. We can't store it, haven't got the space."
"But we didn't order anything. . ."
Then the guy chats with you for awhile in a friendly way, just making conversation, comes across as a real regular guy, makes jokes, seems to be in no hurry. He takes his time in sealing the deal.
"So, are you SURE you didn't order this, because it's a really nice army generator, heavy duty. Maybe somebody you know sent you a gift or something. Do you have any use for a generator?"
"Well, yeah, as a matter of fact we do need one, pretty badly-- ours is on it's last legs."
"No kidding. I guess I'd feel better about delivering it to you then. Because we're just going to mark it down as "lost in transit." Like I said we don't have any place to store this, can't send it back either. . . we just need to get rid of it. Is it OK if we deliver it tomorrow?"

The phone call went on for quite a while: the guy was extremely polite and ingratiating. Just trying to do his job. We'd be doing him a big favor by accepting this package, and after all, it does have our phone number on it. The entire rest of the tag is obliterated, except the word "seacrest" and do we happen to know anything about that?

But that's as far as we got. Unfortunately they've confirmed our address (it's listed anyway). The somewhat scary part: the fact that we have a generator and could use a new one one. How did they know who to target ? As free gifts go, not everyone wants a big old generator. Out here, however, everybody wants one. We got a bit roped in because we thought, well, what could be the harm in having a package dropped off-- we'll leave it sealed for awhile and it will just be like a lost and found. If nobody claims it, then I guess it's ours. That's basically how the idea was sold to us. The guy even said they'd pick it up again within 2 weeks if we didn't want it.

How do I know it's a scam? First, it makes no sense. No legit shipping company wants to knowingly deliver a large, expensive item to a wrong address. It costs some money to send a truck out here, and you just don't "lose" something on purpose. I'm sure every shipping company has ways of dealing with illegible tags, and this isn't one of those ways.

The guy wouldn't identify himself, the name of his company, nor would he give us a callback number. Packages get tracked, they get signed for every step of the way. And a big generator ships insured-- there would be follow up, that is, if this item really exists at all (which I doubt). He also said the item is "already on the truck". Oh yeah? already on it's way to some completely unknown destination? Just waiting for an address to be dictated by telephone? Our smooth talker made a couple of small mistakes, but overall he was pretty good and pretty convincing.

Anyway it has all the earmarks of a con: the victim gets a free offer for something that they actually need pretty badly; something big and expensive. But it's just a little shady, slightly dishonest because the con man would rather that you felt a little bit naughty, a little bit lucky, and a little bit ashamed so that you don't go around talking to other people about it; especially the police. So today, I think, the story will change just a bit. We'll get another phone call. Shipping delayed, perhaps. Or, "you can have it for the cost of shipping". Something like that. I don't actually expect a big truck to show up in the driveway with a free gift. Box of rocks maybe, at best-- and a demand to pay a shipping charge before we open it, but I don't think so. I can think of several other ways that it might play out, but we don't really want to play.

I think the guy is going to call and request credit card info or cash on delivery or some such-- it could easily be an identity theft scam. Very safe for him, no face, no name, no phone number-- no recourse. Again, I'd be really surprised to see an actual truck out here-- with license plates, etc. Too risky for the con man. But it could happen.

So, watch out people. This guy came across as very nice. Not a fast talker, but a more or less constant talker, not giving you enough pause to think. He took his time, apparently called about a week before also, just laying down a little groundwork.

We'll be telling all our friends and family out here about it. And they'll tell their friends and so on-- so at least this guy may not be able to pull his scams in this small town.

It's all a myth

They say we get extra-terrestrial visitors out here in the desert. I haven't seen anything weird or unusual. Sure had a pretty sunset tonight though. That's enough for me.

Summer Rain

Taking photos with my family watching and saying "what are you doing? What are you photographing?" is just so much fun.

JPEG 1742 from holbrook, at the concrete wigwam

Click to see it larger. I was printing out another jpeg 1742 for my mom, and I found this one. Liked it. There's yet another jpeg 1742, it's a picture of a wood duck. Nice, but it only evokes wood duck type feelings. Trying to grow beyond that sort of thing.

The watcher

If you order a chicken sandwich at Darby's in Pinetop-- prepare to be scrutinized.