Life is Full of Weird Sh*t

No coffee, no music, let's not even go there. I woke suddenly at 5:45 with the thought that I have three versions of the necklace for the book fused and I *could* do the surface decoration firing today and still have time to do the finishing silver work, photograph it and send it in to the eMerge competition. They are the only pieces I have even close to appropriate and finished. I spent the next 45 minutes lying in bed and working out the details, nevermind that spending the entire day chasing this wild hare would completely derail the project schedule that took so much effort to hammer into shape.

There's an expression for you, "chasing a wild hare". I have never seen it written, and in my mind right up to this minute I have always had it as "chasing a wild hair". But I realized as I started to type it that it made no sense to chase a wild hair and that the correct word was probably hare. There you go.

And there is a problem beyond mucking with my carefully wrought schedule--I am not a jewelry artist and do not wish to become known as one. Even if I should happen to win (let's pick ourselves up off the floor from the laughing now), the work would not be representative of my work--back to yesterday's post--and furthermore, it wouldn't be representative of work I would like to do. So what's the point?

All kinds of things sound 'really' in the pre-dawn morning. They can be either really good or really bad, it doesn't so much matter which. All that matters is that they are really and not just a little. Now that I am awake what sounds really good is coffee. And lucky me, there is a full thermos from yesterday that I did not drink as we went to Joe's. Off to the microwave...

It's a morning for odd discoveries. I just found my threshold for feeling obligated to microwave old versus make new. Our coffee maker has an idiosyncrasy where it often shuts off before all the water has passed through. Sometimes it leaves just a little in the reservoir, sometimes--like yesterday--it leaves two cups. When you only make six cups, a loss of two cups is a lot. It's 33% to be precise. And here is the weird thing: I cannot throw out six cups of coffee just because it is old because it is a full pot. But a partial pot... that I can throw. And when I went to the coffeemaker just now and discovered that it still had two cups of water in the reservoir, well it was a no-brainer to throw it all rather than push the button and wait for the last two cups to come through. Here's the weird part (there's more?) the amount of coffee used was the same no matter how much water went through, and it is the coffee waste (expense) that should count. Whatever. The fresh, new coffee is ready.

Enough about me, let's talk about glass. I spent hours yesterday working on the application for the new American Craft Retailers Expo (ACRE) in Vegas next May. They are doing an on-line application process and let's just say it's not Zapplication. Today I really need to Back To Work. Tomorrow is the Deep Fuse day. Every project for the book which is really thick and therefore needs a loooong firing schedule is going to be done together tomorrow. It will be interesting, and I hope I have thought the ramifications through thoroughly. One of those projects is a one-piece cast box and I really can't wait to see how it turns out. Now that would have been a good entry for eMerge. But there's always next time.

Last night I used the Best Mix for the first time and made the mold around the butterfly that I am going to cast this week. That is one project that may have to wait and be fired on its own instead of in the deep fuse as I don't think the mold will be dry in time. Initial thoughts on Best Mix: It is very sharply chunky and I am concerned that the size of the materials in it are going to interfere with the detail of the object being cast. We shall see. I also have a bag of 50/50 (hydrocal and silica flour) that I bought from Phil Teefy's Rainbow Glass works years (and years) ago and I should be able to use it to whump up a new mold if the Best Mix doesn't work out. That is, I will be able to use it if it is still good. I tend to buy things in expectation of the time I will need them with no or at best the most casual disregard for shelf life. When I was making the rigidized fiber blanket molds last week I found a bag of moist pack (fiber blanket with the rigidizer already applied) from 2001 on the shelf. I know that it probably is no longer any good, but of course I still didn't throw it out.

Today, thanks to my sojourn at Joe's yesterday, is really, really full. Three pieces still to design, three pieces to cut, one piece to tack fuse, the ACRE app to finish, and the jewelry piece to get done, photographed and in to eMerge. Just kidding on the last one.