This fun project shows how to make themed decorative ice cubes for your parties using inexpensive chocolate or candy molds.

See: Decorative Party Ice Cubes

Ever have a situation when it was vital not to laugh, but nearly impossible not to?

About 25 years ago I owned a small tropical fish store. One evening a sweet little old lady walks in because her goldfish was sick. When I asked her to describe its symptoms, she explained that her fish was constipated and needed some medicine. As you might imagine I nearly ruptured some internal organs trying to hold back the laughter.

Being a true professional I managed to keep a straight face as I explained that they do not make fish laxatives, but she was quite insistant on buying something to help her constipated fish. So after a long hard look at my merchandise, I decided that a small package of a vegetable based fish food might provide the necessary fiber (I still felt bad about selling her anything for a fish that was probably not sick other than in her mind, but at least I kept it down to 59 cents or so).

Several days later she stopped in to thank me, saying that the new food did the trick and Rover (or whatever the fish’s name was) was feeling much better. After further conversation it turns out she may not have been as strange as my initial impression of her seemed. She had been feeding Rover a tropical fish food which is much higher in protein than goldfish food, although to this day I can’t figure out how she determined the fish was constipated.

To sum this up - Even when a customer seems to be irrational, they may actually have a legitimate problem. So always treat every customer problem or complaint as a legitimate problem. Sometimes they are using your product in a way not intended, it may be a defective product, or maybe they just know something you don’t.

Being an avid outdoorsman I spend a lot of time in the forests of New York (don’t look too suprised - New York is huge and encompasses much more than NYC and suburbs, there are parts where you could walk for days without seeing people, roads, or houses).

Over the years I have seen a lot of interesting stuff:

• Mountain Lions have literally walked past me (within 40 feet) on 2 occasions.
• Black bears have walked within 25 feet of me.
• Bald Eagles have hung out in my back yard.
• Owls have landed within 5 feet of me and hung out for a while on 3 occasions.
• I’ve seen  Red Tailed Hawks snatch up chipmonks twice.
• I’ve watched a Bobcat pounce on a squirrel and miss.
• An otter likes to hang out on a rock by my cabin and eat freshwater clams.
• I’ve watched Bald Eagles doing some fishing.
• I’ve had a pair of Porcupines walk across my boots.
• I’ve had numerous birds land on me.
• I’ve shared a snack with a red squirrel that was sitting on my boot.
• Several deer have walked to within touching distance (no I wasn’t stupid enough to try and touch them).
• Skunks have walked up to me several times.
• A skunk once entered a screen tent I was sitting in.
• I saw an Ermine in the wild carrying a field mouse it had just caught.
• Twice coyotes have stalked up on me.
• I have a family of flying squirrels living in the attic of my cabin (they are really cute and very rarely come down into the actual cabin, although it is fun to sit on the deck at night and watch them coming and going from the attic vents).

You may be asking yourself whats the point already. Well tonight I saw the strangest thing ever - a skunk that was over 3 feet long from nose to tail and nearly all white - just a thin black stripe down its back.

I know I am accurate on its size because I was looking straight down on it from my deck and it was at least 3/4 as long as my armspan and I am 6′2″ so I have a big armspan. At first glance I thought someone had lost a persian cat, but there has never been a persian cat this huge.

It just goes to show - you may see or learn something new every day if you are open to it.

As many of you are aware, I have been offering a free Introduction To Candle Making course on this site since 2003. That course is immensely popular and I have decided to expand the course offerings.

In preparation for the expanded course offerings I have set up a new domain to enable upgrading the course software without interruption of the existing course. The free candle making course has been moved to it’s new home and additional courses are now under development.

The new course site is Artisan School

Here is a direct link to the Introduction To Candle Making Course in its new home.

We are planning to expand course offerings beyond candle making as well. If you are interested in designing and teaching a course at Artisan School, look over the site then use the teach a course link to apply. We will consider courses in most artisan, craft, and art subjects.

Tonight while trying to research legitimate charities, I wound up at the FBI web site in the Freedom Of Information Act area. It was exceptionally slow to load, so I didn’t really wait for most of the stuff to download, but I did see a name that struck me as out of place - Audy Murphy.

Now for those youngsters reading this Audy Murphy was the most decorated hero of WWII and even a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Truly a man to admire and who gave above and beyond the call of duty to his country.

Imagine my suprise when the FBI synopsis of him read as follows:

“Audie Leon Murphy was born June 20, 1924, in Kingston, Texas. Audie was an actor and a Hollywood producer. During World War II, he served in the United States Army and was decorated with many honors. Murphy was also in the United States Army Reserves on “standby” status. Before achieving his stardom status, he was a sharecropper, a clerk and a gas station attendant. Murphy was appointed to the State Board of Examiners in Veterinary Medicine by Governor Edmund G. Brown. On his farm, Murphy raised quarter horses and cattle. He later sold his farm to Bob Hope. Murphy died in an airplane crash on May 29, 1971, near Roanoke, Virginia.”

Although I am rather suprised that the FBI felt a need to keep tabs on this patriot, what I find appalling is the way they summed up his life. No mention of the CMH, or the fact that his true claim to fame was not acting or farming - but the that he was an outstanding soildier and patriot.

Really, the Congressional Medal of Honor is so rarely awarded that nothing he did before or after could possibly mean more in the eyes of of US citizens. Except perhaps his own, since heros rarely view themselves as such.

For years I have been saying that candles touch people on a primal level and truly believed it, but tonight really drove that home.

I am on vacation and my cabin is somewhat remote. It sits on a small lake near the top of a mountain 200 miles north of New York City and normally you don’t even see airplane lights. Tonight is overcast and not even a star was visible so after dinner, so I  lit a bunch of candles on the deck railing (in glass holders) and turned off the house lights.

It is amazing how comforting those candles are - especially when no other lights are visible in any direction. The silence was deafening so I cranked up some Jefferson Airplane, Yes, and Pink Floyd - the primal rythms of my generation.

It’s a coccoon of warm light and comforting sound. Probably not far removed from what my distant ancestors experienced in cave dwelling days. As a modern day caveman, I can close my eyes and envision a fire and drums beating.

Call it racial memory or instinct, some things the human race will never outgrow.

While watching TV tonight a Lunesta commercial came on. Now I understand that this is nothing out of the ordinary, but what was out of the ordinary is that I actually paid attention to it. Since I sleep like a rock, this is not a product that normally captures my interest.

As you might expect from a sleep medication commercial, they pointed out the following sage advice:

1. Take immediately before bed - it is fast acting.
2. Don’t take it unless you have 8 hours to sleep (sounds sensible).
3. Don’t drive or operate machinery until you know how you will react to Lunesta.

What? Did I not hear that correctly? But another watching confirmed it.

Apparently there is a portion of the population that drives and operates machinery in their sleep! Sometimes I have to wonder who writes this stuff - and for that matter, why no one else seems to find stuff like this sort of absurd.

We have expanded our line to include ten Ice Sculpture molds.

The full selection can be found here.

A new article containing hints and tips for using and decorating with ice sculpture molds can be found here.

Do an American’s rights under to U.S. constitution not apply if they are of school age? Or for that matter are our schools not part of the U.S. and governed by some other laws? Of course not, but some shool districts and administrators seem to think that their particular domain is in an alternate reality and not subject to the law of the land. Even more frightening is the apparent spreading of this type of thinking to entire communities.

Now before I get a lot of complaints, let me say that I feel that overall our school systems and staff are doing an admirable job (although I would like to see shop class make a comeback in more schools). There are a few bad apples however, and since the educational community likes to point out that they are shaping the leaders of tomorrow - why isn’t there a better system in place for weeding out such individuals from the educational community? Is the stress of rising to administrative level in school systems causing them to lose all sense of perspective or giving them some reason to believe they have God like power?

I recently watched a show about how a student was suspended from his high school sports team for trash talking an opponents team (nothing profane). Now, I’m not big on sports but trash talking is as much a part of it as hitting a ball and certainly not something that should incite a coach and administrators to such actions.  The real kicker is - he made these comments on the internet while seated at his home computer. Not at a game, not on school property, not even from a school computer.

After having his day in court, the judge agreed that the school violated his right to free speech and ordered that be allowed to return to the team.  But it didn’t end there - after the court ruling - the team’s coaches quit (in protest I assume). What maturity - quitting because a student proved beyond doubt in a court of law they were wrong.

There is more to the story including a second bout in court with the accusation that the school did not try to replace the coaches in order to not comply with the previous ruling. The team was disbanded and neither the student or his team mates got to finish the season. Everyone came out a loser, but the student came out a loser with a 60k award for damages.

Now what if this had been handled from the beginning with a bit of common sense? It may have gone like this:

Principal A - Did you see what (student) wrote on that message board about us?

Principal B - Yes, it is the talk of the town.

Principal A - What can we do about this?

Principal B - About a bit of trash talk between sports rivals? You’re joking right?

Principal A - Hmm, well I guess you are right about that - not like we didn’t do the same back in high school.

And it would have ended there, with everyone a winner and the student 60k poorer.

A new article has been added to the web site showing how to make sugar skulls for November 2 - Dias de Los Muertos. A popular Day Of the Dead tradition, this large heavily illustrated article has step by step instructions for making your own sugar skulls using chocolate molds.

See: How To Make Sugar Skulls