Travel Channel

Don't miss this episode of Treasure Hunter: Kirsten Gum. Part of this show was filmed at my house! Check out the news article in the Half Moon Bay Review about the filming. My friend and business partner Aileen Cabral of The Art of Sea Glass did a sequence showing Kirsten how to make jewelry with sea glass. You might even see a couple of seconds of me, if I didn't end up on the cutting room floor!

Travel Channel Jan. 31 9:00PM ET

(60 minutes)
Treasure Hunter: Kirsten Gum
Treasures of the Deep
TV-PG

This week Kirsten searches for Dungeness Crabs. She'll come face to face with rough seas and dangerous equipment. She also kayaks to a hidden beach in the middle of San Francisco Bay and battles the dangerous surf off Santa Cruz in search of Sea Glass.

Comcast-Half Moon Bay-Channel 71 at 10 PM

Direct TV-Channel 277

Check your local TV directories for channel and time. It varies depending on what service you have.

Boxes

We drove down to Southern California to visit with relatives a couple of weekends ago. Now that we don’t have kids at home, we packed our car with room to spare and took off for a long weekend. I had one box of jewelry to return to my friend and business associate, Aileen. I sold some of her sea glass jewelry over the holidays. But somehow when we packed the car to come back home it was stuffed to the gills with boxes. It seems every house we went to had stuff for us to take home. I think we ended up with about five extra boxes. My husband growled a bit about it.

My mom had a set of encyclopedias that my dad and his best friend bought the year I was born. They were young and the door-to-door salesman convinced them what a good investment those books would be over the years. As it turned out, they were. I couldn’t just let her throw them out. I spent many hours with those books doing my research and reports for school over the years. Kids today don’t even know what an encyclopedia is. They just "Google" it. I actually plan on using them in my collage art. I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to tear them apart but they do inspire me. I’ll keep you updated on what I do with them. I can always scan the images and use them.



At my brother-in-law's house we ended up going through boxes in his garage. I was looking for a few vintage photographs of my husband’s grandparents. My brother-in-law couldn’t remember if he had them or not. We started going through the boxes and finding all kinds of fun things. Not only did I find some of the photos I was looking for but we found the original stuffing recipe in my mother-in-law’s handwriting. I blogged about this recipe at Thanksgiving. There was actually a photo copy in the folder that she probably made about the time we asked about the recipe. So I took some photos of the originals and took the copy. I plan on making a collage with it and putting a copy of the recipe in our cookbook. What I didn’t realize as we were looking through all of these memories was it was my mother-in-law’s birthday. My husband and his brother finally did realize it and I think their mom was guiding them through the boxes. We found things like menus for every holiday meal since 1958 when she was pregnant with my husband, and things she jotted down that my brother-in-law said when he was three. If I had remembered it was her birthday I might have had goose bumps the whole time I was looking through the boxes.



My plan this year is to do some collages that capture the essence of some of our family members. I’ll be scanning and using the memorabilia I have collected over the years. I am also offering this art form to others if they have someone they want to capture in an image. It’s easy to put things in a box on a shelf and forget about them. It’s healing to pull them off that shelf and remember the good things and where you come from.

If you want me to help you with your memories, send me an email! I can create a custom piece for you.

The Power of Bummer

"Bummer." This is a word that I used to raise my kids. When they would call and say I forgot something at school, I would say, "Bummer. What are you going to do about it?" I would give three strikes from the start of the school year. Since I worked near home and school it wasn't too much of a deal for me to go back and get something for them. But it was annoying. So we set-up early on the three strikes rules. It had to be something they really needed and then they only had three times a school year for someone to bail them out.

Try it. "Bummer" works for a lot of situations while raising your kids. "Mom, I lost my book." "Bummer." Then you just look at them. After a while they get the hint that they need to solve the problems they cause for themselves.

After my daughter was out of high school, we were sitting around talking and the issue of drunk driving came up. My daughter piped in with, "I never drink and drive because I can see myself calling from the police station and telling my parents I had been arrested and them saying, 'Bummer. What are you going to do about it?'" That's a good parenting moment. You know your words are in their heads and sometimes they actually listen to you.

But the best moment was just this past week. My daughter is watching a little ten year old girl. She gets her ready for school in the morning and is finding out just how hard that is sometimes. She called me to complain that the little girl keeps forgetting things and she's had to take her backpack and lunches up to the school. So my daughter sat down with the parents and told them the "Bummer Method." They thought it was great and fit in with their parenting style. They decided on two "get out of jail free" cards. This little girl will be learning the power of bummer. More importantly to me, my little girl is passing on the power of bummer and understands it's value. What more can you ask as a parent but to see your methods played out and actually have a positive outcome?