So Much Going On!

If ever there was a morning that deserved to begin with a steaming mug of coffee in a big Starbucks skyline mug, it's this one. Sadly, I am too stubborn and too lazy to brew it. The stubborn caused me to balk at getting back on the coffee-go-round after so successfully ridding myself of my caffeine addiction (no headaches if I don't have any). The lazy meant that I didn't go make some after I passed through stubborn and got to the realization that I could brew decaf. Ah well, on with the day.

Yesterday we poured concrete at the studio again. It wasn't much and we did it all with help from two day laborers. They also moved the mulch path that runs from the house to the studio (it was dead ending in the hotshop as it was put in before the hotshop was conceived), and installed a french drain along the back and down one side of the hotshop. Oh to heck with this--I'm going to make some decaf. BRB.
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Decaf with heavy cream and a squirt of Hershey's chocolate syrup in the Chicago skyline mug, "Bad Things" by Jace Everett on iTunes. Had to use the heavy cream as it was all we had in the fridge besides 2%, and there's no way I'm going THERE. I made a whole pot so drop on by if you're in the neighborhood! The Jace Everett is in honor of my copyright violation warning on YouTube for the Glass Roll-Up video part 2. I noticed when I went there the other day that there was a link to buy the song from Amazon on the video.

I thought how great! I put the links to buy the MP3 on my posts with the songs but didn't have a way to do it through YouTube. I was disappointed, however, that only one of the songs had a link. Today I discovered that apparently YouTube sees the "ad" from Amazon as some sort of penalty. They don't take your video down, they just enable the other content to be made available for purchase. How great is that! Now what I want to know is why they don't enable you to flag it that way on the front end.

But enough coffee and music, back to the studio! (except for one more comment--I got a great version of Classical Gas live by Dave Edmunds from iTunes last night and it just came on iTunes. Wow.) Do you get the feeling it's going to be hard for me to focus today?

Yesterday I met with both Lee and Becky again to hammer out their requirements for teaching glass blowing and beadmaking in the studio. Becky, besides being my assistant extraordinaire, is the co-president of Southern Flames. We decided to outfit the studio with minor bench burners from Nortel. Becky and I spent the majority of our time on a where-the-heck-do-we-put-this-teaching-area discussion (Looks like I'm going to lose or at least have to redesign and share my office). We'll get to a class schedule later after we have equipment and ventilation sorted out.

Lee and I, however, put together the initial glassblowing class schedule through December. It's aggressive, it won't all fill, we don't care. We're going to offer very inexpensive intro workshops (ala John Phillips--thanks for the tip last week John!) and rely on our extensive experience, knowledge, material selection, and commitment to providing the best possible learning experience for our students to bring people back for more in-depth work. I made it public this morning, but you'll need to skip to next month to really see anything. I also put up the classes I'm teaching through Oakhurst Community Gardens through the end of the year (one at the gardens and two at the studio).



The grand opening of Siyeh Studio as an official Bullseye Kilnformed Glass Resource Center is set for the weekend of October 23. There's not much on the calendar before that as we frantically prepare a fully-stocked retail and fully-outfitted teaching facility. Oh yes, and I have production work to do too. Yet somehow I manage to stay calm and not overwork. Okay, enough chit-chat. Off to the studio to get a couple of kiln loads in and follow-up on my ARC loan application. (And to prepare for the imminent arrival of Ernie the Monstrocat).