New Work

Chuck Norris - Acrylic on Canvas, 8" x 10"

September Jewelry for Charity Recap & October Kick-Off

It's that time again... time for a Jewelry for Charity update! Every month, I donate 5% of my gross sales to charity, and with your incredible support, I've donated $12,756 to various worthy causes over the last two and a half years.

During the month of September, I raised $540 for one of my favorite causes, Animal Place. I've been making a big effort to donate often to Animal Place in order to support the construction of their brand new shelter in Grass Valley. A big thank you goes out to everyone who made a purchase during the month of September, both from me and from all the critters at Animal Place!

For October, I'm featuring a charity that I just learned about recently; it's called No More Deaths. Their mission statement is as follows:

No More Deaths is an organization whose mission is to end death and suffering on the U.S./Mexico border through civil initiative: the conviction that people of conscience must work openly and in community to uphold fundamental human rights. Our work embraces the Faith-Based Principles for Immigration Reform and focuses on the following themes:

• Direct aid that extends the right to provide humanitarian assistance
• Witnessing and responding
• Consciousness raising
• Global movement building
• Encouraging humane immigration policy.

I became aware of No More Deaths' work in August upon reading about the sentencing of No More Deaths volunteer Walt Staton, who has been ordered to complete 300 hours of trash pickup on public lands as punishment littering after U.S. Border Patrol agents spotted him putting out unopened gallon containers of water, which Staton said were meant to prevent illegal immigrants crossing through the desert from dying of dehydration.

As a general rule, I prefer not to support charities with a religious component, and it appears that this is a part of No More Deaths' philosophy. I decided to make an exception because I believe it to be such an incredibly worthy cause.

If you feel inspired to join me in supporting their work, please consider making a direct donation, and/or make a purchase from my shop this month. 5% of my gross sales will go directly to No More Deaths.

As always, thank you so much for your support!

August Jewelry for Charity Recap & September Kick-Off

September already - can you believe it?!? Time flies...

Anyways, great news for August - with your support, I've raised $590.00 for WINGS-Guatemala, an amazing group working to provide education and quality reproductive health care for men and women in Guatemala. This brings my total donations to $12,216.00 since I began this program in May 2007.

Coming up this month, I'll be featuring Animal Place again. In case you're wondering why I keep featuring AP over and over, it's because I'm making an extra effort to support them in their upcoming move to a much larger and more temperate sanctuary. So remember, 5% of anything you buy from me during the month of September will go straight to Animal Place, supporting their incredible work protecting and sheltering animals.

July Jewelry For Charity Update & August Kick-Off

Once again, here I am to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who bought jewelry from me during the month of July. Your kind patronage helped me have a very successful month, and you know what that means - more money to donate to Animal Place! I just wrote a check for $550 in support of Animal Place's brand new property purchase. Few things make me as happy as being able to help such a worthy organization, and I truly can't do it without your help. So seriously, thank you.


July's donation brings me to a total of $11,626 in donations since I began my Jewelry for Charity program in May 2007.

Up for August, we have one of my perennial favorites, WINGS Guatemala. WINGS creates opportunities for Guatemalan families to improve their lives by providing them with family planning education and access to reproductive health services. 5% of any purchases that you make, either through my Etsy shop or elsewhere, will be donated to this awesome organization.


Here's one of many success stories from the WINGS website -

Wilfredo is 38 years old and lives in a small city in the southern Guatemalan province of Escuintla.

He works as a volunteer nurse, and also runs a pharmacy and a barbershop. Last year, Wilfredo participated in the men’s workshops that WINGS provided in his community. He felt that the information covered in the workshops was so important that when the workshops ended he volunteered to become a WINGS for Men peer educator.

Wilfredo was trained by WINGS as an educator in January 2009. He is now working in his community to distribute information about reproductive health, family planning methods, and sexually-transmitted infections, while also selling condoms at a reduced rate.

Last month he helped a young man with a sexually-transmitted infection find a clinic where he could receive treatment and provided him with information about prevention so that he would be protected in the future.

Throughout 2009, WINGS for Men will be training additional peer educators like Wilfredo who are committed to helping their communities through reproductive health education.

Preach it, Marji! :-)

Hey - I'm not an 'it'!

Marji at Animal Place just posted a great little discussion of one of the ways our use of language affects how we see the world, and the creatures who inhabit that world.

A quick excerpt (she's talking about her experience at a recent animal rights conference):

Which brings me to language. We, in the animal protection movement, still struggle with this issue. It pained me to hear otherwise enlightened animal activists refer to dogs, pigs, cats and other animals as "its" and "whats". They are not objects. We should call them "he", "she", "who" and never ever "it".

Amen! I am behind this sentiment 1,000%. How can we, as a society, begin to bring the issue of animals' sentience and inherent worth to the forefront, while still referring to these complex beings as 'its'?

Personally, I have been using 'he,' 'she,' and 'they' for years now when referring to animals, and to be honest, it sounds totally wrong to me now when I hear someone do otherwise.

I encourage you to read Marji's entire post here.

A fun weekend and a new family member!

Matt, Carlos, and I had a fun weekend - we went down to Animal Place for a little party and got to hang out with lots of great animals (oh yeah, and a few cool people too), then we met up with JP from CAPE, who introduced us to a very sweet little guy named Bruno... I'll start with the Animal Place Photos -

This was pretty cute - at first I thought that the turkey and the gray chicken (under the turkey's wing) were snuggling, but then I saw an egg pop out of the chicken's bottom so I think they were actually just jockeying for the primo egg-laying spot.

Food!

This feathery-headed guy was especially handsome.

Aren't these turkeys gorgeous?

Pretty birds.

A little rooster skirmish.

Oink.

I think the rabbit house was Carlos' favorite. I was pretty charmed as well by the bunnies.

You could tell that these two were majorly in love with each other.

The speaker for the event was Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of The Face on Your Plate, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, Dogs Never Lie About Love, and When Elephants Weep. He was very personable, friendly, and charismatic. Carlos was excited to meet him because Jeffrey stars in one of Carlos' favorite movies, The Emotional World of Farm Animals.

After our lovely visit to Animal Place, we were off to our next engagement - a meeting with Bruno, an adorable one-eyed miniature poodle! After a short visit, and with much pleading and cajoling on my part and Carlos', Matt was convinced that Bruno should come home with us. Hooray!

Bruno is part of a program headed by Compassion Without Borders, a nonprofit working to provide spay/neuter surgeries, vaccinations, and medical care to companion animals in Mexico. CWB identifies the most friendly, adoptable small dogs from all of the street dogs they encounter, and partners with Animal Place (to provide quarantine here in the US) and the Center for Animal Protection and Education (to provide foster care and permanent placement) to find permanent homes for these dogs here in the US.

Because small dogs are in high demand, and are often in short supply at animal shelters, these groups bring small dogs to the US to give adopters an opportunity to save a rescued dog rather than go to a breeder (or worse yet, a pet shop) because they can't find a small dog at a shelter. Great idea, huh?

Bruno meets Otis.

Hazel steals Bruno's bed.

After some initial growling and position-establishing behavior, mostly from Otis, the dogs seem to be getting along surprisingly well. Hazel and Otis seem strangely compelled to wedge their 50+ pound bodies into Bruno's 20 pound sized dog bed, which is oddly entertaining. I'll try to get some better pictures of Bruno and post them soon.

Say it Ain't So, Arnie!

(Is there an apostrophe in 'aint'???)

Anyhoo... just saw this reported on the Animal Place blog. I'm off to go call Arnold! Fellow Californians, please join me. This would be disastrous for animal rescue organizations, as well as an unnecessary burden on everyday people who are already having a hard enough time putting food on the table in these tough times. We already know that animal relinquishments to shelters are skyrocketing due to this darn economy; I can only imagine how much worse it might get if caring for our companion animals becomes even more costly.

CA: Don't tax vet bills

Governor Schwarzenegger wants to define taking your sick, diseased, distressed animal to a vet as a "luxury" item, imposing a 10.5% tax on veterinary medical services.

Since when is being a responsible guardian considered a "luxury"?

There are 15 million dogs and cats in California and dog and cat guardians spend nearly 2.75 billion dollars on veterinary services. Animal Place is no stranger to vet bills - we spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to provide optimal care to all the animals at the sanctuary. This isn't a luxury, these costs are a necessity for us and for the millions of people who choose to welcome animals into their homes.

We appreciate that times are tough, that we need to look at creative ways to stimulate our state's economy. But taxing necessary medical care for the 15 + million animals in the state is not only unfair, it's cruel. With unemployment rising, people should not have to make a difficult choice between what might be an affordable medical procedure for their companion and killing/relinquishing their animal because of the extra taxation.

You can help:

Please make a brief, polite phone call to Governor Schwarzenegger at 916-445-2841 and urge him to remove the Fido Fine from the budget proposal. When you call, please select your language choice, then press 5 to leave your opinion on a current issue, then press 1 to select the issue of extending the sales tax to veterinary services, and then press 2 to oppose this proposal. After calling, please send a follow-up email to your state legislators and urge them to reject the Governor’s proposal.

Contact your representative; tell them to remove the Fido fine from the budget proposal. (You can find out who your legislator is here.)