Those we just move on to the next speaker and the next one is Ezek Guardewa. I'll let you stay in the Baltic with the next speaker. Ezek will direct our attention to furnished burials in the Viking Age of Poland, in which traditionally are interpreted as Scandinavian or rather Misinterpretation. He maintains that instead a West Slavic interpretation must be considered, Yn ddweud y dwy'n gyntaf isch yn gwych wedi ei wneud eich rhad bwrth ymlaen yn y gymdeithasio'n cyhoedd eich arfer? Dwyser. Thank you so much for the nice introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, in my today's talk I would like to take a new look at some of the most iconic Viking age cemeteries discovered in Poland in the early 20th century. For a long time in Polish and occasionally international scholarship, rydych chi'n gweld yn y cemifetau efallai ymdweud yw'r cyd-dynaf cymaint. Rydyn ni'n gweld yn y pomeinion o'ch gwzbwyr a'r gwrs Pais yn ymdweud ddweud, Denmark, a Rus. Ieb amdano'r rhain yw'r cyd-dynaf yw'r piais. Gwbodaeth newydd yn gweithio ar hyn ac mae'r collegau i'r cyd-dynaf, yn ychydigrwydd Caerdydd Caerdydd Cymru, mae'r cyd-dynaf yw'r cyd-dynaf ond ni'n ddwy'n ffordd i'r bydd angen, o'r ffordd i'r ffordd o'r rhaglen, a'r bydd yn hynny'n ddysgrif iawn i ddweud o rhefnod o'r llwyddaeth Llyfrgell West Slavic. Felly, i ddwy'n gweithio'r bobl, wedi bod yn ddysgu'r bach gyda'r newydd, i ddweud o'r cyfnod, fydd y cyfnodau'n sgwmp i'r bach, i'r ffordd i'r ffordd o'r eu ddweud o ffai'ch byw. I will begin with a map for those of you who are not familiar with with Polish Geography, so this map shows Poland within its current political borders, and the sites I will discuss are underlined in yellow and include places like Cepwer in Pomerania, Luban in Greater Poland and Lutomiesk in Central Poland. I will begin with the northernmost site known as Cepwer or in German Warenhof. This cemetery was discovered in the year 1900 during construction work and unfortunately it was rather poorly documented and then during the Second World War most of the finds disappeared. All we have today from this initial excavations are those images. From the start one grave which you can see in the slide drew increased scholarly attention. You can see that the contents are very elaborate, extremely rich. It was an inhumation grave with a lavishly decorated sword belonging to Jan Patterson's type Z. Equally elaborate stirrups with silver and copper inlay, horse bits and other equipment. Since the moment of its discovery Polish and international scholars have been really battling over the ethnic identity of the deceased individual and some regarded this person as a West Slavic rider. Others in the majority considered this grave as that of a Scandinavian Viking, and until very recently the view that this was the grave of a Scandinavian Viking dominated in Polish academic literature. But I think anyone who actually knows a thing or two about Viking-age art and Scandinavian art of the time will immediately notice that there's actually nothing ostensibly Nordic in the designs of these weapons and riding equipment. The second site is the cemetery at Lubon near Poznan, which was also discovered by accident by physical workers in 1937. And this site was also in the 1990s hailed by some Polish scholars as the resting place of Scandinavian warriors, who again in the opinion of those scholars had served the Piast dynasty as mercenaries. This view was predominantly based on the military equipment these people were buried with, and in particular axes. So this T-shaped axe and this M-type axe that you can see in the slide. We know very well today that T-shaped or long-bladed axes as they are sometimes called, are actually not Scandinavian products and that they are quite characteristic for the West Slavic areas, especially greater Poland and Poabia. And they're actually extremely rare in Scandinavia, although they do occur in very interesting locations, for example in Denmark and Sweden, as you will see later on. So actually again, there is nothing ostensibly Scandinavian here, which does not stop some scholars to still continue maintaining this narrative about Scandinavian mercenaries in greater Poland. Now, the third case, which is very close to my heart and I'm totally fascinated by this site, is the cemetery at Lutomiersk in central Poland. The history of this site is quite intriguing and dark occasionally. It was discovered in the year 1940 during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and from the start German archaeologists desperately wanted this site to be a Viking cemetery. And despite their intensive efforts to find more proof for that other than the sword that they found, there was actually nothing that could sustain this idea. So completely upset with their excavations, they abandoned the dig. They only excavated about 15 graves and abandoned the excavation. After the war, Polish archaeologists re-excavated the site under the leadership of Professor Konrad Jaszewski. Jaszewski wanted to prove the Germans wrong and to show that the site was actually a Slavic place and he even invited the famous Swedish archaeologist Holger Arman to come and see the excavation and to prove there is nothing Germanic about it. And indeed, Arman came in 1949 and he said that this is true, there is actually nothing Germanic here. However, in the same year in 1949, the discoveries of two lavishly furnished graves labeled five and ten, and you can see them in the centre of the cemetery, caused a bit of an interpretational puzzle. They contained riding gear which looked very exotic to the scholars of the time. And because there were no parallels to those finds in Poland, it was immediately suggested that the finds had originated from Eastern Europe, from the Rus area, or even from farther away. Some people said that even as far away as the Urals actually. And therefore, with this Eastern Rus link, a link with Scandinavia was also created. You can see the contents of grave five in this slide, especially those really nice strap distributors and other riding gear and weaponry. Excuse me. And here you can see the finds from grave ten, as well as a reconstruction of this grave. And this was an inhumation grave. Both graves, as I mentioned, included beautifully decorated bridles. Here in the reconstruction you can see what they may have looked like originally. In looking at the historiography of the Lutomirsk cemetery, you can see that there has been a serious identity crisis for the Lutomirsk warriors. Based on the grave goods these people were laid to rest with over the years. They have been labelled as Scandinavian Vikings, as Rus, as Varangians, as Pechenegs, all kinds of different nomads, essentially anything but locals, anything but Western Slavs, which is very interesting. The wind of change began to blow in the early 2000s when modern and meticulous re-excavations at the cemetery of Cepua were conducted by Zdyslawa Ratayczyk, anarcheologist from the Archaeological Museum in Gdansk. These have provided extremely important data that has allowed us to cast new light on the material culture and identity of warrior elites on the southern coast of the Baltic. The site has not been fully published yet, but we are working on a comprehensive publication of all the finds from this site, including specialist analysis of some of the equipment. Particularly groundbreaking was the discovery of grave 42, which contained high-quality military equipment and an elaborate set of riding gear. What is most interesting is that on the feet of this deceased person there was a complete set of Zawmorphic copper alloy spurs, identical to those found at Lutomirsk in those two graves five and ten. This is what the spurs looked like after conservation, and this is the latest replica that I commissioned from a Polish artist. Unfortunately, I don't have it with me today. It's difficult to travel with these kinds of things, but I hope this image speaks to the imagination. In a series of recent studies together with my colleagues, with Kamil Kaikovsky and Zdyslawa Ratayczyk and also Swedish friend Ben Cedderberi, we have argued that spurs of this type are of West Slavic design and that they convey important details about Slavic pagan worldviews. Essentially, we believe that the spur is a model of the Slavic cosmos. Unfortunately, I cannot go into detail here, but I'm happy to discuss this during the break, and I can also give you some of the literature we've published recently on this topic. Establishing the West Slavic origin of the spurs and deciphering some of their meanings has helped us to identify some of the diagnostic material markers. Ben is an expert on that of West Slavic elites. We can now say with confidence that in Slavic artwork, the Western Slavs used ornaments referring to animals like snakes, horses, cattle and birds. The snake, however, sometimes with additional wings, was probably one of the most important creatures for the Slavs and perhaps served as a kind of emblem of a very particular group of people, a family, a clan, maybe even a dynasty. So what impact can all this have on the international field of Viking status? I believe that this new work on West Slavic elite culture can substantially nuance our perception of cross-cultural interactions around the Baltic Sea and beyond, and we can now finally better identify West Slavic warriors using both archaeological methods based on material culture, and we can trace and see their mobility across a large geographical area. So here are just a few examples. Over the last years, metal detecting activities in Sweden and Denmark have brought to light a number of objects of exactly the same type as those from the area of Poland, especially from the area of the Piast state. The new investigations of West Slavic art, such as those that I've quickly summarised, are also helping us to reinterpret some of the old finds and demonstrate that they have been misinterpreted by some Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian scholars. This is just one example of new research together with my colleagues. We have recently published an article about a new copper alloy goat of the Lutomierschepw type that was recently discovered in Skogria in Skona in southern Sweden, and the presence of such a high status object, something that to my mind must have travelled with its owner, its original owner, close to Harold Lutwf's fortress, has very interesting implications, and this suggests to us close interactions between West Slavic and Scandinavian elites in this area. This is something we have not had before. Of course interactions are well known through the presence of pottery, certain types of objects, but this is something that's of extremely high status. Recent re-excavations of a well-known chamber grave at Birka have also revealed typically West Slavic T-shaped axe in an axe to this grave, suggesting perhaps that there are some West Slavic links there, or that Western Slavs of very high status were buried at Birka, or at least that their material culture of this high status was buried there. Now, a new look at the well-known grave from Velds, which you can see in the exhibition in Copenhagen, and a new look at the stirrups and comparing them with some of the finds from Poland leads to the, I think, unequivocal conclusion that their decoration refers to West Slavic pre-Christian ideas. You can see the two intertwined snakes on the stirrup and an analogous motif on a haptorgasol and emblematic West Slavic object from Biscoping, and there are many, many more examples. Other things in this grave and the decoration of other things in this grave also suggest that this actually is West Slavic and not Anglo-Saxon equipment, as some scholars have previously thought. So, to sum this up, I will just show a few slides from the well-known fortress in Cemetery at Treleborg. Already a decade ago, Danish archaeologist Anders Dobbat argued for a strong presence of Slavic warriors or strangers, as he calls them, in the realm of Harold Bluth and their burials had been identified using also isotope analyses at this fortress of Treleborg and at several other sites. What I want to point out is actually that one of the richest graves in the cemetery, labelled as grave 128, has a foreign isotopic signature and also contained this emblematic T-shaped axe. So, this is a very interesting example of the correlation of isotopic signature, isotopic data and artefactual data, with a very high status emblematic object. But what has so far been unnoticed, I think, is that it's not only the type of axe, it's not only the isotopes, but there's also the decor. And you can see that on one of the sides of this axe there is a representation of a winged animal. Perhaps a bird, but perhaps a winged snake, analogous to some of those snakes that we see in West Slavic art that has recently been reinterpreted. All these reinterpretations of West Slavic material culture and warrior ideologies are also helping us to track down the mobility of West Slavic elites or their warriors outside of Poland, Germany and Scandinavia. There is a growing group of curious finds from places like England, such as this Spurgo from childhood, which again suggests the presence of high status elite riders or warriors beyond this world of Scandinavia, Poland and Germany in the British Isles. In my view, and this is just very preliminary, also this sword guard from London, from Sherbourne Lane, which is usually interpreted as an Anglo-Saxon product, may have actually belonged to, or being produced by Western Slavs or in a Western Slavic workshop. You can notice the decor and the similarities of this decor to some of the finds from Llewthomierysg or Getch and other places. So to sum up this quick, very quick overview of latest work on West Slavic material culture and warrior identity shows the great and still untapped potential Central European archaeology can have for nuancing the picture of cross cultural interactions in the Viking Age. I think we certainly have to work more on strengthening and expanding our research networks and so I think we have to develop more collaborative and interdisciplinary projects together and events like this are great to start this kind of collaboration. We also have to find in ourselves the strength and courage to challenge previous vitrified misconceptions. I'm trying to find that strength although sometimes it's not so. Thank you so much for your attention.


From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. We're going to be talking about the Customer Obsession Mission Award winner. So happy to welcome for the program. First of all, welcoming back Joel Lipkin. He is the Chief Operating Officer of Four Points Technologies, which is the winner of the aforementioned award. And joining him, one of his customers, Ryan Hillard, who's a Assistant Developer with the United States Small Business Administration and of course, the SBA, an organization that a lot of people in the United States have gotten more familiar with this year. Joel and Ryan, thanks so much for joining us. Hi, Stu. Hey, Stu, thank you. All right, so Ryan, I'm sorry, Joel, as I mentioned, you've been on the program, maybe just give us a sketch, if you would, Four Points, your role, your partnership with AWS. Sure, I'm Joel Lipkin. I'm the Chief Operating Officer at Four Points Technology. Four Points is a value-added technology reseller focused on the federal government. And we've been working with federal customers since 2002. We're a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business, and we've been an Amazon partner since 2012. Wonderful, Ryan, if you could, obviously, as I mentioned, the SBA, a lot of people know for the PPP in 2020. If you could tell us a little bit about your role in the organization and tee up for us, if you would, the project that Four Points was involved with that you worked on. Sure, so I work for the Chief Information Officer, and I don't have this official title, but I am the de facto manager of our Amazon Web Services presence. This year, we've had a very exciting time with what's been happening in the world, the Paycheck Protection Program, and the SBA have been kind of leveraged to help the US economy recover in the face of the pandemic. And a key part of that has been using Amazon Web Services and our partnership with Four Points Technology to launch new applications to address those requirements. Wonderful, Joel, maybe connect for us. How long has Four Points been working with the SBA and start to give us a little bit more about the projects that you're working together, which, my understanding, was predated the COVID-19 incidents? Sure, we've been with SBA for several years now, and SBA was one of the earlier federal agencies that really saw the value in separating their procurement for cloud capacity from the development implementation and managed services that they either did internally or used third-party contractors for. So Four Points came in as a true value-added reseller of cloud to SBA, providing cloud capacity and also Amazon professional services. All right, so Ryan, bring us in a little bit the project that we're talking about here. What was the challenge? What were the goals you were looking to accomplish? Help flesh out a little bit, what you're doing there? Yeah, so most recently, Four Points partnered with us to deliver Lender Gateway. Lender Gateway is an application for small community-oriented lenders to submit paycheck protection loans. So some of these lenders don't have giant established IT departments like Big Banks do, and they needed an easier way to help their customers. We built that application in six days, and I called the Four Points cloud manager on a Saturday, and I said, help, help, I need two accounts by three o'clock, and Four Points was there for us. We got new account setup. We were able to build the application and deploy it literally in a week and meet the requirements set for us. And that system has now moved billions of dollars of loans. I don't know the exact amount, but it's done an incredible amount of work, and it wouldn't have been possible without our partnership with Four Points, so we're really excited about that. Yeah, if I could drill in there for a second. Absolutely, it's been an unprecedented, how fast that amount of money moved through the legislature to out to the end user. Help us understand a little bit, how much were you using AWS technologies and solutions that Four Points had helped you with, and how much of this was kind of a net new, you said you built a new application, you had to activate some things fast, help us understand a little bit more. Yeah, so that's a great question. So we have five major systems in AWS today, and so we're very comfortable with AWS's service offerings. What's interesting about Lender Gateway is that it's the first application we've built from scratch in a totally serverless capacity. So one of the hard technical requirements of the Paycheck Protection Program is that it has huge amounts of demand. So when we're launching a system, we need to know that that system will not go down, no matter how much traffic it receives or how many requests it has to handle. So we leaned on services like AWS Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, all of their serverless offerings to make sure that under no circumstances could this application fail, and it never did. We never even actually saw performance degradation. So a massive success from my perspective is the program manager. Well, that's wonderful. Joel, of course, you talk about scalability, you talk about uptime, those are really the promise that the public cloud has brought. Ryan did a good job of keying out some of the services from AWS, but help us understand architecturally how you help put that together and the various pieces underneath. Yes, Stu, it's interesting. Four points is really focused on delivering capacity. Our delivery model is very much built around giving our customers like Ryan full control over their cloud environments so that they can use it as transparently as though they were working with Amazon directly. They have access to all of the 200 plus services that AWS has. They also have direct access to billing and usage information that let them really optimize things. So this is sort of a perfect example of how well that works because SBA and Ryan knew their requirements better than anyone and they were able to leverage exactly the right AWS tools without having to apply to use them. It was as though they were working directly with AWS and the AWS environment on the technology side. And I will say SBA has been really a leader in using a variety of AWS services beyond standard compute and storage, not just in a tested environment, but in a live, very robust, really large environment. Yeah, Ryan, I was excited to hear about your Lambda usage, how you're building with a serverless architecture there. Could you just bring us through a little bit, how you ramped up on that, any tools or community solutions that you were leveraging to make sure you understood that and any lessons you learned along the way as you were building that application and rolling it out? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think one of the mistakes that I see program managers make all the time is thinking that they can migrate a workload to the cloud and keep it architecturally the same way it was. And what they quickly find out is that their old architecture that ran in their on-premise data center might actually be more expensive in the cloud than it was in their data center. And so when you're thinking about migrating a workload, you really need to come in with the assumption that you will actually be redesigning that workload and building the system in cloud-native technology. The concept of Lambda is so powerful, but it didn't exist for, it didn't exist 20 years ago when some of these systems and applications were being written. And now being able to leverage Lambda to only use exactly the compute you need means you can literally pay pennies on the dollar. One of the interesting things about the PPP program and everything happening in the world is that our main website, SVA.gov, is now serving, I think, 100 or 1,000 times more traffic daily than it was used to doing. But because we lean on serverless technology like Lambda, we have scaled non-linearly in terms of costs. So we're only paying like two or three times more than we used to pay per month, or we're doing 100 or 1,000 times more work, that's a win. That's a huge victory for cloud technology, in my opinion. Yeah, and on that point, I think the other thing that SVA did really amazingly well was take advantage of first reserved instances. But I think it was the day that Amazon announced savings plans as a cost control mechanism. Ryan and SVA were on them. They were our first customer to use savings plans. And I think they were probably the first customer in the federal space to use them. So it's not just using the technology smart, it's using the cost control tools really well. Also. Yeah, so Stu, I wanted to jump in here just because I'm so glad Joel brought that up. I was describing how workloads need to morph and transform as they move from legacy setups into more cloud native ones. Well, we were the first federal agency to buy savings plans. And for folks who don't know, savings plans essentially make your reserved instances fungible across services.  And when your workload is ready to be moved from EC2 to something a little bit more containerized or cloud native like Fargate or Lambda, then you don't actually forego your reserved instance. I see program managers get into this weird spot where they bought reserved instances so they feel like they need to use them for a whole year so they don't upgrade their system until their reserved instances expired. And that's really the tail wagging the dog. We were very excited about savings plans. I think we bought them four days after they came out. And they have enabled us to do things like be very ambitious with how we rethink our systems and how we rebuild them.  Yeah, it's been a really interesting discussion point I've been having the last few years is the role between developers and that finance piece.  Is there somebody on the finance team from the SBA? Is it four points, you know, being aware of savings plan, it was something that was announced at re-invent, but it takes a while for that to trickle and oftentimes developers don't need to think about or think that they don't need to think about the financial implications of how they're architecting things. So how does that communication and decision-making happen? That's such a great question. I think it goes back to how four points is customer obsessed. One of our favorite things about using a small business reseller like four points, instead of dealing directly with our cloud service provider, is that four points provides us a service where every quarter, they do an independent assessment of our systems, how much we're spending and what that looks like from a service breakdown. And then we get that perspective and that opinion and we enrich it with our conversation with our AWS account manager, with our finance people. But having that third party independent person come in and say, hey, this is what we think has been so powerful because Joel and Dana and team have always had observations that nobody else has had. And those kinds of insights are nice to have when you have people who are suspicious of a vendor telling you to buy more things with them because they're the vendor. Yeah, thanks for that. From the lessons you've learned there, any final advice that you'd give your peers out there and how will you take what you've learned working on this project to other things either in the SBA or in talking with your peers in other organizations? So I have two big things. So one is go use a small business reseller. I would be remiss if I didn't use this opportunity to tell you as a member of the US Small Business Administration that there are some really, really great service providers out there. They are part of our programs like four points and they can help you achieve that balance between trusting your cloud service provider and having that third party entity that can come in and call bull and also call Yachty. So recognize good things and recognize bad things. So that would be number one. And then number two is moving to the cloud is so often sold as a technology project and it's like 20% technology and 80% culture and workforce change. And so be honest with yourselves and your executive teams that this isn't a technology project. This is a, we're going to change how we do business project and we're going to change the culture of this organization kind of project. All right, and Joel, I'll let you have the final word on lessons learned here and also about four points and congratulations again for the customer obsession mission award winner. Great, thanks Stu. We're so appreciative to Amazon for their recognition and to Ryan and SBA for giving us the opportunity to support such an important program. We are a small business, we are very much focused on delivering what our customers need in the cloud and it's just such a tremendous feeling to be able to work on a program like this that has such payoff for the whole country. All right, well, Joel and Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your updates. Such an important project this year. Thanks so much. Thank you, Stu. Thanks. Take care, Ryan. Stay with us for more coverage from the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.


A joint pavement evaluation has been undertaken by the Indiana Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration, and Keystone Engineering and Indianapolis Corporation. This pavement evaluation will consist of dry milling three slots in the pavement within each wheel path, cleaning the slots, placement of an epoxy coated number 10 rebar, and back filling the slots with a high strength rapid setting mortar. This video will briefly illustrate the series of operations which were necessary to properly install these retrofitted load transfer devices across random transverse pavement cracks which occurred between the 40-foot joints. This evaluation is located at Interstate 465 and Interstate 70 on the east side of Indianapolis. The pavement evaluation was conducted on the I-70 ramp from westbound I-70 to southbound I-465. The pavement was a 10-inch thick reinforced concrete pavement with 40-foot joint spacings. The first operation was the simultaneous dry milling of the three slots in the wheel path. These slots were milled to a depth of 5-1.5 inches approximately 2-1.25 inches wide and were centered over the pavement cracks to achieve a 24-inch long slot at the bottom. The milling head was designed and operated by Keystone Engineering. The roto mill plunges to a depth of 5-1.5 inches, advances approximately 18 inches and then is withdrawn from the slots. The tracked milling machine then advances to the next location. The second operation involves cleaning of the milled slots. Handpicks and shovels are used to remove the bulk of the milling debris. A front and loader is used to collect and transfer the debris to a dump truck. Since this is a dry milling process, an air lance is used to blow the fine dust and other remaining debris out of and away from the slots. This leaves very clean slots which require no further surface preparation. Once the slots are clean, the backfilling of the slots begins by placement of a small amount of high-strength mortar in the bottom of the dry slots. This is followed by the consolidation of the mortar. The number 10 epoxy-coated rebars are placed and driven to the bottom of the slot. The remainder of the slot is then filled with high-strength rapid-setting mortar consolidated with a handheld vibrator and finished at the pavement elevation with a trowel. This process was continued for the length of the ramp. In an eight-hour day, the milling machine was able to cut over 330 slots. Traffic was maintained in the adjacent lane to minimize any inconvenience to the motoring public. Curing compound was applied on the surface of the mortar patches after they had set sufficiently. This work was accomplished by the coordination of the Division of Materials and Tests, the Greenfield District's Indianapolis Sub-District and Keystone Engineering. The intent of these installations are to establish load transfer across the pavement crack to avoid pavement faulting in the future. Restrain the crack from future lateral movement and allow the retrofitted load transfer system at the crack to function as a hinge. Thus, all future pavement expansion and contraction will occur at the pavement joits where epoxy-coated dowel bars are in place. Field monitoring of the pavement performance over the next three to five years should reveal if this pavement evaluation is successful. If successful, this pavement repair technique will give the pavement engineers another rehabilitation tool to extend the life of our Indiana pavements.


Say that it sounds like I heard something fall, but this is a big house but that happens. I never know what it is or where it is. Good morning everybody. It is 11.51 I think AM or something. 11.16. I got my numbers mixed up. Anyway, big surprise. Happy Halloween everybody. It's October 31st. And yes, in case you didn't hear that, we have crazy pants for the night. We kept her last night as I said in last week's vlog. So we took our time getting ready this morning, having our coffee and stuff. And now we're going to take her out for a walk before lunch. See what we can see. It's a beautiful day out. It's in the mid fifties. I have my coat on, but that's just mostly because it's been a little bit windy and the wind is cold. So we'll see. I'll probably be hot and no time for that, but anyway. All right. In the meantime, we are continuing to work on the new YouTube channel. I'm getting that straight and putting processes in place. And yeah, it's all good. I'll be back. I love the skeleton house. I want somebody to decorate my house that way. It's so cool. Hold on. I mean, I think every year I show you all pictures and every year they add more skeletons. Now they've got the big giant one. It's just, I mean, I need more skeletons and more pumpkins. He says no, I don't, but I do. You're getting me a diamond tree. So cool. Anyway, on to the next. A bunch more videos transferred over to the new YouTube channel for the patrons. And then I was making my bone broth in the kitchen and I've been meaning to for a while pull out one or more of the kitchen cabinet drawers and make, I usually at the old house, I used to do it all the time to make sure to catch things that maybe fall behind the drawer. And I don't know if I've ever done it here, to be honest. And I just found out I haven't. Yeah, I got confirmation of that.  Lysol cleaner with bleach got it right up. So no feeder there. It's all cleaned. And behind another drawer, I, they were cleaning the other drawers behind. But I found some medical paperwork for one of the former owners. And yeah, so anyway, we made sure to dispose of everything properly. And I'm going to now drink my bone broth because I'm not sure how I got on that little journey. But anyway, Bob is outside trying to do something with all the pine needles front yard and backyard. I did the front yesterday. Y'all saw it in the last vlog, but yeah, we live next to the woods. It's just a disaster all the time. In this time of year, it's just like a, yeah, it's a thing. All right, I'll be back. It's been a weird day. I already said that. And no, stay. We live next to the woods besides deer and raccoons and things. We also kick. But he was literally right there by where Bob is standing. I don't know if that's too bad. I have a feeling it's bad. And that's the second time in as many days he's been seen that close to our house. Now they're meat eaters. So I'm pretty sure he's after the cats.  And I'm pretty sure he's after the cats. He's not after the bowl. I leave out there because that bowl's got corn in it. It does not have meat in it. The only other thing he could be interested in is the grand dog, Lily. Well, we're keeping her inside. She doesn't come in the front yard anyway, but we're keeping her inside right now. Keep the dog inside. Yeah. Anyway, coyotes. Yes, evidently we have a whole pack of them that lives in the woods next door. They're called the pack, I think. I think coyotes are packed too. If you guys know, leave it in the comments below. Hello, everybody. It is 10.18 a.m. Monday morning, November 1st. I am obviously upstairs in the art room. I'm continuing work on the new YouTube channel and loading videos over there and also doing some work on the old YouTube channel, the public YouTube channel. I found a bunch of videos that were unlisted or listed as private some of which I don't remember doing that to them. So I'm not sure why they were like that over there. So you're going to see a massive influx of video suddenly going public and probably be overwhelmed and like, what the hell is she doing? I want to unsubscribe. That's too much. Please don't do that. Just take a deep breath. You don't have to watch them if you don't want to. You can catch up later, all of that stuff. So anyway, I am also now I have to edit the vlog. I only have 48 minutes of clips, which is surprising because I thought it was more than that because of the wedding and everything. I am going to do some editing to respect people's privacy. That's going to be fun. Hey guys, it's just after six and we're headed out for a walk. Did you all know that there's a limit to how many videos you can upload to your YouTube channel in one day? I didn't know that. I mean, it's a big limit. And guess what? I hit the limit on the new channel for the patrons and supporters and I'm not done yet. So I have to try again tomorrow. Hey people, it is 9.53 a.m. Tuesday, November 2nd. Why I want to say Sunday to you? I have no idea. What is my hair doing this morning? Great. As you can tell, we're in the car. Tuesday has become air and day, which I'm okay with. If I have time, sometimes I stop at my favorite thrift store in town because it is also senior discount day and I do qualify. I don't know that I'm going to do that today. I'm not just not feeling it and I have a lot of other things to do. YouTube is not letting me upload any new videos to the new channel yet. I have to wait 24 hours and it isn't quite been that yet. Let me upload a few more. So I'll just do a few at a time until I get it done. But I have a bunch of old Crazy Island family video, just my portion, that I'm going to upload to the channel for patrons and supporters. So anyway, I need to drop off this today, expired inhalers. I also need to take my shoes in for repair. I also need to wait a little bit. Wait for it. Hang on to this in the front seat in case any of the patron mail came back. So far, none of it's come back, but I am expecting at least one back because I has got the wrong address on it. So anyway, if it doesn't come back soon, I'll just send her another one. All right, that's it for the minute. I think I'll be back. Okay, guys, I'm going to shout out a business. If you're in the Tualatin area of Oregon to Tualatin, she repair a little small mom and pop place. He fixed my shoes while I waited. He was only going to charge 15 bucks. I gave him a tip like I've got other shoes that either need stretching or need fixing at home. These were the easiest of the lot. So he did a great job on these. I think I'm going to have him fix the other ones. All right, I'll be back. When I was at the thrift store this morning, I know not only found some really cool drinking glasses, a style of which I've been looking for for a while. I also found this, this paper sorter thing, which is a great color for my art room. I love that color. And I kind of needed something to hold all of this stuff at that end of my table. And it was the right price. And it got seen your discount. So there's that. I put away a big stack of coffee dyed and distressed papers just now. And I've got a few more that are still drying.  I have the ones are for dirty brushes. I got ready to film a, we're all ready to film another messy journal or episode. There's a sneak peek of pieces and parts. I also need to film another RT Trio. I can't show you that this idea. Okay, we're headed out to go get some steps in. I haven't gotten much done except a little cleaning upstairs in the art room. And of course all the errands. That's a big thing. Tuesday has become an errand day. I can't do two things at once anymore. My branches doesn't work that way. Must make sure I like the house. Anyway, my knees are bothering me for those that don't know I have a bad knee. I have a torn meniscus, among other things. I have the softening of the cartilage disease. I don't know what it's called. I can't ever remember. Anyway, I've got my fun accessory on because yeah, my knees have been bothering me. It's not going to stop me from walking. I just can't go as fast. Anyway, I can't run. I can't run for so many reasons. Not just to me. I just can't run. Anyway, it's not really raining at least not yet. We got there. Don't squish me straps. I've got a flashlight in my pocket. A cough drop in my mouth. Let's go get some steps in. I'll be back. I miss the ducks. They flew right overhead but I couldn't whip the phone out fast enough. You probably can hear them very faintly in the background. Anyway, and yes, it's dark out. I'll lighten this clip up in the video editor. But yeah, I'll be back.  More birds. All the ducks are swimming for the swimming, swimming, flying, flying towards the reservoir I think so they can go for a swim. That's what I meant to say. So we have a reservoir not too far from here, protected part of the wetlands. And this time of year all the birds hang out over there. At least until it gets icy. Anyway, walking in the middle of the street in the dark because that's smart. All right, I'll be back before I get hit by a car. Better pay attention to what I'm doing. Guys, it's 108 p.m. Wednesday, November 3rd and I just realized I don't vlog today. Oops. I got up this morning with the attention of catching up on some drawing which I've done on getting some work done in preparation for filming the next Artsy Trio video which this next month is going to be my mood board and I have some sort of experimenting I want to do and things are drawing in that regard. I also tried to upload more video to the new YouTube channel but it hasn't been long enough time yet so I'll let me. I'm going to just wait until tomorrow and then I can do like 15 videos a day or something. I don't know, 256 gigabytes, 12 hours max. Something like that. Anyway, manana. So fun fact. So since we had massive deadness in the woods next door and if you don't know what I'm referring to, we had a deer pass away in the woods next to our house. I don't know what they died of if it was natural causes or if they were attacked by coyotes or maybe hit by a car and then came over here to die but they did feel safe enough to come do that right next to my house which there I'm okay with till it starts smelling bad. Anyway, it was a long story. We took a little bit but we got it taken care of and since that happened we've had some deer come back. Mostly we have coyotes. Lots of coyotes. Like every single day. It's crazy. Here is some ring video footage of last night's coyote who was just having a good old time relaxing in our driveway evidently. Yeah so anyway there's something about coyotes being your spirit animal and it being good luck. One second, let's see. The coyote totem is a good luck symbol for those who need to rely on their wits in order to handle a changing situation and other difficulty.   It's a sign that you're beginning to observe your life from other perspective. If you're under stress or you're worrying too much, seeing a coyote is a spiritual message that you need to adjust or evolve. It's good I think. It's been happening a lot since massive deadness which was well before my mother passed away but it has been happening since my mom passed away too. So I guess it's a good thing. Maybe it's not? I don't know. What do you all think? Leave something down below. All right anyway I am catching up on my drawing. I'm waiting for one to dry. The watercolor-y part to dry so I can add some more marks to it. Patrons and supporters get first look at the sketchbook before I put them on social media so if you want to first look at stuff like that go join Patreon. It's very cheap. My Patreon is very cheap anyway and I occasionally send you snail mail or digital downloads or something. I have a bunch of new designs that I need to finish drawing and send some over. Anyway that's it for the minute. I think I feel like there's something outside. I started to go out and get the mail. Got some more sketching done. Talking to my sister Karen about some creative stuff. She saw this really cute TikTok about a scarf that when you roll it up looks like a sushi roll. That shit's cute. I don't need another scarf but that's cute. Anyway yes she's also a creative. She does TikTok. We're all creative. We grew up with aunts on both sides of the family who were creatives. Both of whom went to school for that. One of whom is gone now and grandmothers who did different things. My dad's mom especially. She was a needlework, what I would now call a needlework artist. She did a lot of hand stitching. If it was involving a needle and thread or hooks and yarn or she knew how to do it. Tadding all of it. I don't know how to tat. I wish I had learned.  She's going to be working on some acrylic pours this afternoon I think. Anyway my knee's feeling okay. I do still have my brace on. I'm going to be wearing it for a while. It doesn't seem to be getting any worse which is usually standard modus operandi for me and as long as it doesn't get worse it's fine. Seems to be getting slightly better. Of course I might just be thinking optimistically but we're going to be babying it for a good while at least a week or so and if it doesn't get better I guess I'll have to go in. I don't want a cortisol shot. I really don't. Anyway all right that's it for the minute. I've got to do my word brain puzzles. Got to keep the old noggin sharp right? So I'm going to do my word brain puzzles while I'm waiting for Bob to get off work and then we can go walking. I think that's how that's going to work. I'll be back. Hey guys I really really really need to see if I can replace the light part of the ceiling fan in this room. It is so yellow and it's an LED light but yeah anyway how are you today? It is 9.38 a.m. Thursday November 4th. Obviously we're upstairs at the art in the art room at the desk behind me the computer is loading a few more videos to the new YouTube channel. I can only do a few a day very few and I reached my limit pretty quickly and badly so I guess that's just going to take me a long time to get all the video out there for you patrons and supporters so sorry. But I do have stuff I want to do up here so I've been doing vision boards all year and I've been doing them in this moleskin notebook. I'm not sure why I chose this notebook to start out with. I have no idea. I am thinking to stop or to do a few more and then stop because I'll show you why. So I already expanded the spine once because and now it looks like this and I have to go tape a few sections because despite me expanding it it's starting to do see that yeah and so I'm going to put some tape in there. I may it's also getting too big to kind of do downstairs and kind of unwieldy so I think at the very least what I'm going to do is go ahead and just do the rest of the vision boards maybe this afternoon and just get it finished and completed and take pictures of them and then share them periodically between now and the end of the year because that just makes sense. I do sort of want it as a reference book to like go and look back at and so and I do like the idea but a year of vision boards I don't know what I was thinking that's a lot of vision boards so anyway but it did get me to use up a lot of bits and pieces so I am also going to because I don't think I'm going to do this journal downstairs anymore sorry the phone is like precariously perched and every time I like move it like shakes sorry. I'm going to take my tools in a femur box that usually lives downstairs and I'm going to sort of clean it out and maybe add a few new things to it but some of the stuff that's in here is for the vision board so I'm going to take those things out and use them up and then replace them with other stuff so I'm going to get going and I'll be back. This is another cloudy rainy day in Oregon welcome to the land of much water many bridges and no direct route anywhere uh anyway yes we're in the car we are headed to the beach it's going to be rainy cloudy stormy do we care it's the beach we don't care so we're going to go spend the weekend at the beach don't have a problem telling you all that because by the time you see this we'll be back um and anyway we're going to go have some fun and hang out at the beach the car is full probably we overpacked but you know that's what happens when we drive instead of fly so anyway we are going everybody it is 11 30 ish am november 6 saturday we are in canon beach Oregon it's just what stormy days at the beach still a good day at the beach hang on i'll show you it is king tide so super high tide so we can't get into those but yeah hold on so do you all hear that it's hail hail hail it is hailing so hard we're outside rag and bone in seaside really cute little um junk shop um i'd recommend going there they have a great selection of stuff but allow yourself some time because you gotta look around anyway we almost got stuck in there because yeah all right i'll be back