While I don’t currently have a large paying client, I do have lots of work to do. Work on my portfolio. Getting my chops down with the new CS3 software, photoshop, illustrator, dreamweaver, flash. My brain is fried. I’ve decided to give myself the afternoon off. Love this part of being my own boss. I tend to work on weekends because I like what I do so…
Playing with new photoshop and illustrator brushes. Ain’t it grand when work is play?
Stealth mode. Perusing the photos from Pagan Pride just for fun and there was me in the class I took. Tis me with the very short, kinda messy, white hair and green velvet jacket… Listening very intently to the folks discuss things like eating in a magical way. The two cool priestesses from the Aquarian Tabernacle Church are there in the center facing us in black. I don’t think they mind me saying as their photos are on the ATC website too. I am seriously considering going to Hecate’s Sickle but I digress. I need to get some money coming in before I go there. Money comes easily and frequently. Blessed be.
There was discussion of a great magical ritual around food. You can do it at your desk at work while eating your lunch and only you will know that the witch is at work. I’ll share it with you here. Two, two tips, two for the price of none!
If you’re like me you get emails or calls out from the universe that someone is in need. They need our energy or our prayers or some other type of magical work but they are far away. I find it always helps if I also get a photo of the person (human, animal, or plant, etc…) So. The request has come in. Typically over the interwebz and through my email so I’m usually sitting at my desk and in the past in my public office. How do you do this service in stealth mode? This is what I usually do.
I relax. If there is a photo I stroke it and get to know the face I’m seeing. The animals especially get petted. I say nice loving things to the being in the photo. Then I sit back, close my eyes, and ground. Once grounded I start drawing energy up through the grounding channel and get it coursing in a deosil circle though my body and back down through the earth and back up into my body, round and round. Once the energy is really flowing I start holding it in my body, typically my chest cavity, using my lungs to suck up more and more energy. When I can fill up no more and I’m buzzing strongly I hold my hands to my mouth and I start blowing the energy out into the ethers helping it flow out by moving my pulling it with my hands. I do this thrice. So Mote It Be.
Okay that part wasn’t so stealthy but it’s amazing, no one has ever walked by when I set up a little circle to do this. I also had wards set up which are partly responsible I’m sure.
The new thing was to use food to do this. Take an apple for instance, a very magical fruit, fruit of the goddess. For those who don’t know, when you cut an apple in half horizontally, side to side, and open it up there is a five pointed star. The apple blossom is a five petaled flower and since the fruit forms from these five points, the inside remains five pointed. A natural pentacle. Pretty cool. And very beautiful. So take the apple, relax, and ground, and start thinking of the well being of the person etc you are helping. As you eat the apple, let every bite be a blessing, send your energy out with each large bite and then take in the juices, the pulp, and make it a part of yourself. Make the eating of the apple be a ritual as you concentrate, with focused intent, on the healing or blessing. Leave the apple core for the critters, put it in the compost, or if you are the kind of person who likes this, eat it.
Stealth Magic. My favorite kind.
While cruising around looking for cool and goovy new photoshop brushes I followed a link and ended up at the Daisy the Curly Cat blog. Enjoy!
wonderful day.
I had an interview this morning that I wasn’t looking forward to. I hadn’t spent too much time wondering why I wasn’t excited about it. But it went really well. It’s a great company, agent actually. The woman I met with was fun and the whole office had a definite funky coolness about it that I liked. Just like the company/agent I met with last week. But why have I felt so, hmmmm, out of it. I do know why and after this great meeting I was able to look at it.
I? Have been feeling not good enough. Not smart enough. Not hip enough. Not artistically talented enough. Not skilled enough to get a choice job with hip, smart, skilled, and creative people. Shades of drinking days, adolescence, yuk.
It’s been difficult to decide what to wear. I was raised in the professional world of law and banking. You wore certain types of clothing. As web designer I have found that certain amount of casualness, even sloppiness or freak, is accepted. But how to dress for the interviews? I just didn’t know. Last week I wore black linen pants, a black t-shirt, a lime green silk sweater jacket, hose, and sandals. And felt totally out of place in the bright golden orange big fish office. Fish every where, in tanks, posters, art work. Tattoos, capri pants, jean jackets.
I knew I had to find something a bit more casual and yet clean and professional. So cords and a black sweater, same sandal clogs but no hose. Big black leather bag. I think I nailed it. And for the first time ever I felt comfortable, physically comfortable on a job interview.
Oh, and did I tell you all that I cut my hair again? Tis very short. Was still obsessed with getting rid of the hair from the last two years, too much grief in it. As well as still didn’t like my first new haircut. It felt like a gray football helmet, conservative. Like a soccer mom hairstyle. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It just ain’t anywhere close to me. The girl with neon pink hair in 1980. I hated it and no matter how much my friends told me that it made me look younger and it was cool, I just knew it wasn’t what I was going for. I got almost all of it cut off. An inch long on the neck and perhaps 3 on top I can do all kinds of groovy things. It might even be a little too long on top. But I feel much better.
So, today? Was a completely different meeting. The first thing she said was that I have a great resume and a great portfolio. That what makes me very special and what ought to help me get work (depends on how much comes in for them too) is the fact that not only am I designer but I do back end code and it’s hard to find folks like me who love to do both (I do). And that more and more clients are hoping to get this.
But that wasn’t what I was seeing in the ads I’ve been running across. I’ve been seeing folks who want desingers who do major back end code applications like Perl and C+. I do all the basics like html and css and dhtml and javascript and am very familiar with php although I don’t write it myself. But I was getting uber depressed. It ain’t writing php and Perl or VB. Not only did it look like folks want programmers who can design (now there is a juxtaposition, how many of them are there really??) but the salaries I’ve been seeing are pathetic. One place wanted a brand new design, database, and php and were offering, wait for it,..
$12-18 per hour
Naturally I didn’t apply but I was getting worried that I was seriously behind the times in my skillz. And that I might starve.
To have the agent tell me that I am a hot commodity with a hot resume, including years of program and project management, just made my day. And to tell me that the salary I’m requesting is right on the nail head. I requested double my salary of my last job. Oh this is good news.
The weather is glorious too. The interview was in downtown Seattle and I’ve avoided downtown for years. No one was more stunned than I to discover after leaving the interview that I felt incredibly energized. Bouncing on the clouds. The city, when I was in banking, just bummed me out. But coming from this more recent, more edgy, more creative point of view, perhaps it’s just the place for me. My last job, most of the folks I worked with were statisticians and researchers. Not very juicy for the creativity I can tell you. They did not GROK me in any way. The techies sort of did but even they were a bid staid in their modern techi-ness.
I’m rethinking things a bit here. Being around others who are in my field and bouncing creative ideas and new technologies around might be just what I need…
Who knew?
The mantra of the week? Money comes easily and frequently. Has been upgraded to Money and satisfying work comes easily and frequently.
The last two days of the media have been all about how McCain has lied lied lied his ass off about Obama. If I had a tv I would be able to say that you can’t miss the media flood of bitchslapping. But I don’t have tv. I have A tv but I do not have any channels. DVD only in this house. But it’s now all over the interwebz and I am the happy!
I knew it. YOU knew it. But did the part of the world that thought McCain was a right standing man know it? Unless they have their heads in the sand, or up their, well, you know, then they can’t miss it! The beauty of the bust? Obama didn’t have to do much at all. Oh yez oh yez. The times they are a changing…
Stitch Witch Cottage 