The Dogwood was a very good show with one of the most hellacious breakdowns I have ever done. By the time I got everything in the van it was full dark and I think I left a couple of my tent bungees there. And I was one of the first ones to get to load thanks to the extraordinary help of a friend here who traded glass for muscles. Next year I will see if we can load out on Monday morning. Most of the artists are not local so there would probably only be a few of us wanting to do it and it would be *much* less painful.
Today, today, today is a bright and shiny NEW day. I rose at 7:30 to the doorbell and the builder for the shed. We reconnoitered the area and decided it would be better for him to come back tomorrow after I have the tree branches hanging in the middle of where the shed will go trimmed up. *Blush* I agonized for a week over the placement of the shed and paced and measured and paced and measured. But the one thing I didn't do was look up. I didn't see the tree for the ground... nope. (Hmmm I am not sure that was the idiomatic expression I was looking for...)
A little digression about search engines and sponsored results. Every now and again a word or phrase comes to mind that I feel the need to check before I use it (see "The Princess Bride": "Inconceiveable!" "You keep using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it means.") (Ren takes this activity to a new level). I wanted to verify "idiom" or "idiomatic expression" as an appropriate definition of the phrase "see the forest for the trees". It didn't feel like a metaphor, and it isn't an analogy. So I looked on dictionary.com for "idiom". Nothing. "Idiomatic expression" also brought nothing. But under each there was a 'search the web' button which produced the following:
Search results for idiomatic expression.
Sponsored Links:
| Idiomatic Expressions |
I had heard you could buy anything on eBay, but I was not expecting Chinese idiomatic expressions...
So the day began with a builder and continued with shipping an order and a purchase from the Dogwood, getting J off to school, chatting with the woman who owns the garden rescue service (that's not actually what it is called, but it is an accurate name for us as they are going to do an intervention and stop my cycle of destructive avoidance of garden maintenance tasks) and setting up an appointment for her to evaluate our mess, and begging a new groomer to take on the dogs. I have let EVERYTHING slide in the past few months (years?). I have so many balls in the air right now that I will be lucky if their falling does not cause some poor marginalized species to go extinct. Or maybe they won't fall. I could be that lucky...
What does this all have to do with glass? Well, when two straight weeks are taken up with glass--evenings and weekends included--the rest of life has to be slotted in where it can and this slot happens to be TUESDAY. Which is not to say there won't be glass today. There will. The firing schedule is tight with a gallery order a week going out for the next three weeks, and the first order from the Art Institute of Chicago coming in over the weekend at 70 pieces instead of 50. (Whooppee!) And 35 more to be made and held here in case they need them... They don't need to be there till the end of July, but I am already scheduling.
And I am being so proactive about my firing because there is a book contract and in the next couple of weeks I expect to have an editor who will be giving me deadlines and cracking a whip over my head about output. I haven't even reviewed the outline I wrote back in January for them. I have no idea what I am going to write.
On the plus side, I don't have another festival scheduled until Memorial Day weekend in Chicago. Then a solo gallery trunk show here in June and the next Buyer's Market in Philadelphia in July after which we all flee to Montana for a couple of weeks of R & R (and probably writing for me).
Now I'm off to get the load in the kiln, dig up a couple of hostas to move out of the way of the shed, and I will relax this afternoon with garden and pond planning and financial paperwork. It's so good to be home!
2 comments:
What's to plan in a pond? You just hand David a shovel and say "Dig!"
That was the first pond, no, I planned that one too. That was the SECOND pond. The third I hired out (and it was totally above-ground). This one will be above and below ground with separate areas for fish, plants and marginals and will have the heftiest bio-filtration I can design.
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