(To) Labor (Or Not To Labor To Labor To)Day

Coffee in the (repaired--thanks honey!) Austin skyline mug, no music--the Sprout still sleeps. It's Monday and there isn't really a choice, I will labor--the firing schedule is finally done through the next two weeks and it's a doozy. Today sees four kiln loads--two slumps, two fuses including a *full* (as in packed to the gunwales) fuse load in Big Bertha.

Now to wax reflective, mournful and philosophic--all in turn.

July and August didn't exist for me. I look back on the summer and I see scheduled bits--the BMAC, vacation in Montana, and I have little memories of them... but they are little island vignettes in the vast Sargasso sea of the nothingness of being that was the summer. Come to think of it, I don't remember June much either. I remember acknowledging the beginning of summer in May. I remember enjoying all the pots of flowers and ferns on the front porch and the back deck. All but of few of those pots now overflow with dead, brown twigs grown moldy from the recent rains.

I cast back and I can't find an anchor in what was the summer. There is no binding holding everything that happened together. Jester's illness and death are the mist shrouding August. The extreme exhaustion from post ACRE and editing the color lasers for the book obscure June. As I spent much of my life on the educational calendar, summer was always the golden time of relaxation and recharge. And while it is true that I am (finally) recharged, I had to sleepwalk through the summer in order to achieve it. What a waste.

The past few days I have plugged back into the grid. I caught up on all the blogs I read. I updated my professional Amazon profile, I read and replied to a lot of posts on warmglass.com, I updated the Siyeh Studio main page and created a bibliography/library catalog of my glass books on Amazon as the Listmania List Glass Essentials (and linked to it on Glass Incarnate).

Now I'm off to get all the kiln loads in. I need another apprentice. Carol is very busy with her law practice and doesn't have time to hang with me on Fridays, and I am getting tired of refilling my 1 lb frit jars (from the 5 lb jars) and crushing and screening my own morceaux. Not to mention straightening, cleaning and organizing. I am *such* a slob!

This afternoon I am reviewing a couple of the potential studio properties and looking at three new ones. I should go to Best Buy and get a new digital camera, but that might have to wait till another day (maybe tomorrow). Though the big sales only go through today...

Tomorrow I will view the damage and post about a gallery glass disaster my work suffered last week. How much it costs me, I have yet to determine. And you'll just have to wait for the rest of the story.