Cloudstone Ahoy!

Coffee in the Chicago skyline mug, "Cloudy This Morning" by George Winston on iTunes. Just got off the phone with a guy from Smith Barney who cold-called me about financial planning for my small business. If I had been drinking coffee instead of answering the phone when he said that I would have snorted it out my nose for sure. Do I want a loan? No thank you, I would prefer not to fail to pay back someone else's money than my own. Do I plan to grow my business? Well I have an assistant/apprentice starting tomorrow and it looks like I have an intern (an intern!) starting in May so it looks like it will grow whether I want it to or not. Be careful what you wish for.... Then I got blood on the slipcovers from a cut on my finger as I was putting them back on the couch cushions and I had to tell him it was Not A Good Time for me to be talking on the phone.

The book ramps again. I got a rather frantic call from my copy editor yesterday saying she is going to ask the editor for an extension to the editing deadline... that sounds ominous. She has been all "what a great book you write so well" up to now, and now I write poorly enough that she isn't going to be able to edit the chapter on kiln forming and the projects in 3-1/2 weeks? I *really* wanted this done before I leave for Philadelphia. Compartmentalization is good. Finishing one thing and then being able to focus on the next task is good. And maybe it has nothing to do with me or my writing at all. She has a life. Maybe something has happened in it.

I started out languorous and happy this morning and now I am crabby, crabby, crabby! What's that all about? Jessie was even up and halfway dressed when I went in to get her for school. Maybe it's because Dave didn't put the slipcovers on after he said he would. Maybe I am just a pissy, cranky person. I know--I am reading-deprived! Until last night it had been a week since I finished my last book (book 5 in Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series for children 9-15). Last night I begged Dave for a boon and he bathed J and put her to bed by himself leaving me to take my own bath. I took Laurel K Hamilton's latest in the Princess Meredith faerie series in with me, "Mistral's Kiss". I added more hot water once and left the bath 2-1/2 hours later having read 212 pages--the entire book.

Nothing in the previous paragraph is glass small business studio artist related, but how you feel at the start of a day drives your work. I would love to curl up with a book other than my own today and just read and sip tea. Maybe that is what retirement is like. So back to the business, studio, glass, and artist. Tomorrow there will be pics of the studio as it is almost CLEAN. Well, it's almost straightened. There are still dust bunnies the size of small countries lurking under tables and on bottom shelves, but at least I know where all my STUFF is and it is mostly all boxed up in dust-proof bins. Today I clean off the last wild country: The Desk.

The Desk came from a previous life when I was at Northwestern University. It was surplus furniture stored in their version of the attic (the unused third-floor classroom) from who-knows-when. I refinished the top of it and have been carting it along on moves ever since. Dave swears it is made of neutronium, and it took two of us to barely carry it up the stairs and into our first apartment. It is solid oak from the early part of the last century (I would guess the 30's) and all one piece except for the drawers. The Postman Could Ring Twice on the top of that desk with the fat lady from the circus and it wouldn't move, if you know what I mean.

The suspense is killing me. I did a Tuscan Cloudstone yesterday for the first time since I made the original sample. If it turned out, it will be the bowl for the Art Institute in Chicago. If it didn't turn out, I will try again. I now go look, brb.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have Tuscan Cloudstone! The original sample is shown at right. Tomorrow, the finished bowl. Tomorrow also, The Apprentice and the Intern.