Surprise! A Sunday Post

Egyptian licorice tea in the Alaska skyline mug, the sound of water filling the bath upstairs for morning music. The leg has occupied far too many of my glass posts lately and it's time to get back on track. We're hurtling towards Friday--my official last day in the studio till the end of August--and there's still a lot to get done. I know, last week I crowed that I had all my orders completed through the end of August, but I kept mum on the fact that I haven't done any of my work yet for the Buyer's Market show... in two weeks.

So it's Sunday, and I have a very light day of work planned. First, the firing schedule. Bill and Elaine from Black Cat were here Friday night through last night and we laid out our (yet another) new display for the summer Buyer's Market. We have even more wall space than ever for this one, and for the first time all of my functional glassware and our small stand pieces will be hung on the walls. In order to minimize the effort necessary to hang all of it (especially since I won't even be there for set-up) we're going to try white plastic pegboard hanging panels over our foamcore with plate stands and shelves that hang on the pegboard. To get away from a garage look, we've minimized the amount of pegboard to just what's required to hold the plate stands and shelves.

We also left room in the booth for me to have either a chair and place to put up my leg, or a wheelchair. I'll have to see what they do to my dressing and leg brace system on Tuesday when I go back to the doctor. If they put me back int eh boot, I'll be fine with anything. If they leave me in this bandage-covered plastic splint thing 9that has no room for expansion when my leg swells) I may have to hunt down a wheelchair for the duration. just to have a built-in leg rest up high enough.

Most importantly, I, the control freak, have formally, officially, and (now) publicly promised to be happy with (or at least to live ungrumblingly with) however the display ends up, with whatever changes were deemed necessary on-site as I won't be there till the dust has settled and the first day of the show is over. I'm already loading up on the Xanax... (just kidding).

This morning Lee is scheduled to come over so we can etch the first of the awards. Friday late afternoon Becky and I put in the first of the color-adjustment loads (the red on most of the awards just wasn't saturated enough so have to add more color) and when I opened the kiln yesterday, two of the pieces had thermal-shocked in half on the way up so I have to make two more. this is bad news as Becky let me in on the news that there is only about 1/2 lb of 02 red frit and slightly more of the 01--not enough to do all the color adjustments, much less to make two new pieces. This is one of those times that I really, really, really wished I lived in Portland! Tomorrow I'd saunter down to the Bullseye Resource Center and buy a couple of 5-lb jars of red frit and get back to work. Instead, I'm going to have to use the as-yet-unnamed glass-crusher machine I got from Sarah and David in New Mexico. It's a small behemoth of a thing (really, I know what both those words mean and only by juxtaposing them can I convey the sense of hulk and even a bit of menace it has in its relatively small footprint). It reminds me a bit of something from Stephen King's "Night Shift". Let's try to avoid more blood, shall we?

Finally, got another nice order yesterday from a gallery that carries my work in Hawaii. They're opening a new location in a Grand Hyatt and are looking to place my work there too. I think I actually have everything they ordered in stock so I should be able to just send it out this week. Profit ahoy! Add to that two more commissions that are finally coming together, and it looks like I have a full week of firing--in my limited physical capacity.