PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

Recent entries july 4, 2018 - 2018-07-04 the triangle continues of courtney, boobear, & nyota - 2018-07-03 Cookie so cute telling, "Hello" to sparrows - 2018-07-01 lovebirb in love - 2018-06-30 wren with fluffffff - 2018-06-24 Read my new book, The 10 Best Things You Can Do For Your Bird at Amazon or at many other fine distributors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and more. By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets. A bibliography of my published books and stories. Here's a simple card-counting FAQ to get you up to speed on the basics. Here's the true story of the notorious DD' blackjack team, told for the first time on the fabulous internets. No other team went from a starting investor's bankroll of zero to winning millions of dollars. A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!! The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit the official fan site, Passages in the Void.. My Bird Lists -- My Louisiana State Life List, My Yard List and, tah dah, My World Life List. HEY! What happened to the Peachfront Conure Files? The world's only OFFICIAL Peachfront Conure site now features free peachfront conure coverage, including a magazine length Intro to Conures previously published in American Cage-Bird Magazine, now free on the web. I offer the best free Peachfront Conure information on the internet. If you have great Peachfront Conure info, stories, or photos to share, contact me so I can publicize your pet, your breeding success, your great photograph, etc. on my site. Thanks.

page nine: crystal and glass 2010-12-19 - 3:20 p.m. all photos this page © 2010 by elaine radford It isn't really a part of the mineral collection, but I might as well post a page of my glass and Swarovski crystal items. I have posted the glass and electroplate Hummingbird with the natural Amethyst crystal cluster base before, but maybe this photograph is a little better. I don't have many glass pieces, but there are some ritzy items included in the collection, so take care not to drool too much. Tee Hee. At a Christmas past, DH gave me the gift of Swarovski crystal parrots. The sculptures appear to be four lovebirds and a single large parakeet species, maybe a Ring-necked Parakeet, or something of that nature. However, it's our little joke that the four lovebirds represent our four conures, and the single parrot is Cookie -- Cookie in a life where he was slimmer and longer-tailed, instead of a chunky little Amazon. The pelican is a genuine Murano glass from the island of Murano, across from Venice in Italy. IMOM's sister used to import Murano glass, before it got over-exposed and over-distributed, and IMOM joined her on one of her trips. Can't miss an opportunity to travel in Italy, with someone who speaks Italian. I am assured that IMOM inspected each of 200 hand-blown purple glass pelicans so that he could select the very best. The jellyfish is, to my knowledge, the single most expensive item in my collection of glass and crystal. So why have I misplaced the name of the artist? I will have to find it out again. The item resists photography, but it's a magical piece of hand-made glass with a ghostly jellyfish swimming around inside of it. The photographs really don't do justice to the magic and delicacy of this piece. It was a gift from IMOM in one of those "boom" years, and I think it came from Lake Tahoe. OK, here's another Christmas gift, from me to DH, purchased many years ago on the Riverwalk when the Riverwalk was young. I mean, even before the days of the Flamingo casino, let alone Harrah's. There was a glass artist there who had made a collection of the various planets. I suppose I imagined that each year I could come and pick out a new planet. In fact, while I thought "earth" was by far the best, I had my eye on Mars as well. The trouble is, I have never seen the artist, or anything like it, ever again. If somebody knows who made this piece -- if YOU are the guy who made this piece -- send me an email. I'm very interested in more. My photo doesn't do the piece justice, but there are lots of tiny bubbles that evoke the idea of various small satellites in orbit around our earth. As for the piece being blown out of the ocean? Couldn't that be our moon? There is one theory that is probably not taken too seriously, but which gets floated from time to time as fashions come and go in astronomy, that the moon may have once been some kind of volcanic bit that blew out of the earth. I don't believe the theory, but it makes good art if bad science. OK, I think I've listed all the foofy, high dollar items -- I won't mention dollar amounts or estimates in public, since we're not planning to sell the pieces anyway. Now here comes some of the cute, cheap stuff. If you've seen my blue glass page, of the cobalt blue glass that I've posted from time to time, to catch the sunlight in my window, well...all of my blue glass is "cheap" stuff. But it creates the effect I was looking for, and that's what matters, right? Here are a couple of flea market treasures: I think they were both bought with gift money, but they didn't take the whole gift check, ha ha. The green Angelfish was a find from Pontchatoula. The Cockatoo was from one of those discount stores like T.J. Maxx that infest Mandeville near the Barnes and Nobel. In fact, this 'too may well be from T.J. Maxx. Although it could have come from Tuesday Morning... The Great Blue Heron candy dish is supposedly Murano. Whether it is or not, I can't say, but it came from eBay back in the day when you could still find cheap stuff being sold by "real" people, instead of junk importers from China and Hong Kong, and the price was right, so I snatched it up to hold my small collection of "fiber eye" spheres. Of course, oddly, the Blue Heron is not blue or gray, it's red, but so be it. I still think it's cute. I've got three glass hands that I picked up at various times in a flea market/consignment type store that I visit semi-often in Covington. I forget the name, something like Aunt Sally's attic, but it's one of these stores where different people rent different rooms and put their junk/finds on display, and only one person has to show up at a time to man the cash register for all of them. I'd say each hand ran in the $12 to $15 range. This purple one, which holds a Quartz sphere, is my favorite, but I also had a clear glass and a blue glass hand, both of which are used to hold my rings. Thhe Mr. Peanut cookie jar came from Pontchatoula. America's antique city. Just ask 'em, ha ha. But it was actually well-priced. If you're patient, you shouldn't have any trouble finding some nice bargains there. You can find some greatly over-priced stuff too. It just depends on how determined you are. I don't know if anyone wants to see my blue glass again. Folks probably think I'm a weirdo on the subject of blue glass. But it's part of the collection, so here goes. Both the train set and the ship were found in Pontchatoula. I have some other spheres of stone and glass from Jim Meeker, here's one of my favorite glass spheres: back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford