Another Hump Day

Coffee in the Denver skyline mug, "Had Enough" by the Who on iTunes, no updated word count, but it will happen today. The words of the day: Sleep Deprivation. Lightning storm at 2:00 am caused deerhound #2 to come up the stairs all a-twitter. By 2:30 neither of us had been able to get back to sleep so Dave got up and coded. At 2:40 J came in to join me. She had nightmares accompanied by teeth gnashing (what a creepy sound THAT is) and flailing until 4:30 or so. I managed to doze between 4:30 and 6:00 when Dave came up and spatulaed her back to bed. He then went to fill my car with gas for me (no, he doesn't usually do this--I am not that spoiled--it was a trader for my not doing it last night and delaying watching the two remaining episodes of House on our Netflix dvd). Of course I was convinced he ran out of gas and I stayed awake tensely waiting for the phone to ring until I finally broke down and called him. He was fine, almost home, and thought I was a sweet twit.

What does all this have to do with glass? It is the context for the day to come. Today is primarily a writing day. It has to be. I have four more pages due tomorrow than I have written. Oops. Not a good start for the whole writing part of the book project. Yesterday and Monday I packed the big kiln to the gunwhales (I love that word. I always want to write "gunnels" so that it looks like it sounds) with pieces for Marietta this weekend. Last weekend I was within a hair of canceling doing Marietta, and now I am glad I did not. That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Sleep deprivation encourages use of cliche and metaphor. Today's writing ought to be... interesting.

Overall I am still confident that I will be done with the manuscript by November 1 and no one will have to die. That confidence is especially reasonable if I make a move to take a new apprentice today. I am running a couple of pieces in to be drilled for the weekend and the man who owns the place where I have my glass drilled's wife would like to apprentice with me based on the work she has seen him drill for me. Could be cool, could be a disaster. People are so risky and messy. I try to avoid them on the whole but I might have to make an exception in this case.

Today the third attempt at a box comes out of the middle kiln. I have great hopes for it and am not going to rush it in ANY way. I do not understand how they start to crack when they are still a faint bit warm but when they are cool the crack doesn't continue to run and the piece feels rock steady. Anyway, it will be a cold day in the kiln before I touch this piece (see? Another mangled cliche. Oy.)

Finally I have what I consider to be the perfect piece for the Art Institute's spring offering and I am sending it off to the buyer today in response to her request for pieces. It is a new departure for me in the Morceaux de Verre style. I have done colored morceaux before, but I have always screened the colors after crushing them and used only one size of the crushed color (the large morceaux). This time I did the crush of each color separately and then used all of each color. I like the look and will be debuting the colors and the style at the Buyer's Market in Philadelphia in February. Now that's thinking ahead.

(639 words in half an hour. Why can't the book flow like that?)