Four Legged Parenting

It's been awhile since I posted here. Most of my writing has gone to blog entries on Farm2Yarn, or the Siyeh Glass website or Facebook page, or the Farm2Yarn website Facebook page or Etsy store, or the Finley Point soap Facebook page. I haven't had much Life leftover to post anywhere else. but now there's something that has to go here. Something that deserves more than a one-off on Facebook and is more private than an ultimately commercial chatty posting on Farm2Yarn. I am in love.

I was not expecting to fall in love again this year. Gallifrey in April was a special gift, the like of which I have not had for years—probably since Jessie was born (though obviously not to that level). And I never _ever_ saw a yak entering into my life. I’m not really a livestock person, you see. But fate brought Princess Buttercup my way, (she started out "Inconceivable!" and is now "As you wish.") and I am overwhelmed by how I feel about her. I am sitting writing this out in the backyard while she is curled up at my feet. She called me out earlier (and there is nothing funnier than a baby yak’s call: It sounds like a duck call that you would buy in a sporting goods store) not because she was hungry (she just played with the bottle), but because she wanted company and scritches. So I obliged and loved on her, and scritched her, and thought how I would like to clicker train her--and I know she is smart enough!

Today I spent the morning visiting a ranch in Kalispell as a possible forever home for her, and honest to God it felt like touring my child’s first school and interviewing the teachers! I looked at the  other “kids” there, and I listened to the rancher manager’s philosophy of breeding and developing their lines, and all I could think was, “They’re not going to appreciate her for the special being she is.” They value size, and she will always be small. When I talked to them about the way they price their calves, they said that if she had been theirs, they would sell her for the very bottom of their range no matter how good her coloring, fiber and conformation atet because she was bottle-fed so she will be smaller and is really just good for a pet. But she is so much more!!!

I looked at their animals—and I was able to look really closely as they are so amazingly gentle because that’s another thing this place breeds for—and their coats seemed of lesser quality than I had seen at the ranch where I got Buttercup. Maybe that’s something you sacrifice when you breed for a large (meat) animal, though they claim to breed for fiber too. I’m also not sure why they are breeding for larger size as that seems to go against the true domestic yak phenotype. The males aren’t supposed to be 1700 lbs, and the females aren’t supposed to be 800 lbs so why is that what they are going for? I can see why they wouldn’t want to add Buttercup to their herd and their breeding program because to breed her to one of their bulls would result in a calf that would be too big for her to carry and deliver. Their calves are usually 35-40 lbs when they are born. She was 34 lbs when she was a week old. She’s a month now and their two-week-old calves are her size.

And yet, the people who run the ranch are kind and generous and would love and cuddle her as we do, and I know they would seamlessly take over the bottle-feeding when we have to go back to Atlanta (she won’t be ready to wean for a month after after we’re gone). I have more confidence in them to care for her well than the other ranch option I have here—through she would fit in better there long-term as the rest of that herd is her size and I think she would be valued there.

It breaks my heart that I know I’m going to have to leave her—Atlanta is no place for a yak—and at the same time I know absolutely that I cannot keep her. This is a time out of time. This summer is not real life, and there is no way to integrate Buttercup into our real life even if Dave were willing to do so (which he is most decidedly not). Even I know that what I am doing with her now is not something I can sustain. I have homeschooling and a glass businesses as well as a life which is somehow just busier in Atlanta than it is here. She would be lonely and neglected with us—she needs her own herd that she’s with all day and night. Long-term I can't meet her needs. So I'm still looking for her forever herd. They don't have to be yak, they just need to live outdoors and be of comparable size and inquisitive, mischievous, energetic temperament.

"YFY seeks herd. Loves dogs, kids, wading pools, running full-out around the yard, playing in the sprinkler, dancing, and scritches. Not a big eater, quiet, social, very clean, and most beautiful eyes you've ever seen. Seeking high-altitude, cool dry weather, 24/7 companions to nestle in with at night and romp around with during the day that can stand up to being butted with horns."

Good-bye 2013, Can You Please Take the Beginning of 2014 With You?

I had meant to write a year-in-review and a looking forward-to-the-new-year post as December slid into January, but Life had other plans for me. Now as I attempt them I'm not sure how to do it without it turning into a whiny pity party. But there's no other way to put it--2013 was a really crappy year for me. I was tested on every front, and, by the end of the year, all I could do was exhaustedly long for a better year to come. But just because a puny human sees a break in time, a point for change aligned with the changing of a month and a calendar year, doesn't mean the universe will go along with it. Clearly. This year--all 12 days of it--has been mostly as bad as the worst of 2013.

in 2013 Mom's surgeries and recovery were emotionally, mentally and physically draining. Dave started a new job which necessitated him staying in Austin for months at a time leaving me to move the rest of the household to Montana for the summer, deal with major home maintenance projects there, provide home healthcare for Mom and take her to her twice-weekly physical therapy and wound care appointments in a neighboring town, take care of Jessie, and manage as much of the maintenance as I could on the family lake property--turning on water, cutting the grass, preparing for use, cleaning out the spring. I also spent most of the year finishing my second book--the writing project from hell. While I was in Montana the hotshop at the studio was hit by lightning, and, as I looked forward to a fall of continuing to care for my mother and beginning to homeschool Jessie, it became apparent that I was not going to be able to keep everything going. Something was going to have be let go, and I chose to close my kiln glass resource center and the hotshop, and to take a hiatus from teaching.

However, even after summer was over, we were back from Montana, Dave was back from Austin, and the studio was closed, the fall was tough and it plodded into an even bleaker winter. The first semester of homeschooling was full of fits and starts as Dave and I worked its scheduling into our work days and the rest of life. It neither went as well nor as poorly as it could have. I am optimistic that it will be better this semester (because I have to be--there is no good alternative). Teaching Jessie how to manage her own time, assignments, responsibilities, and to self-motivate continues to be the biggest task.

Last year ended with freezing cold in the northern parts of the country that disastrously affected my mother's house in Montana. Right before we went on vacation I got word that one of the pipes froze, broke, thawed, and flooded the entire house. The kitchen floor and lower cabinets are ruined. The subfloor upstairs is ruined. Part of the ceiling in the basement came down. The entire basement (our bedroom and Jessie's bedrooms and the rec room with the new sectional couch and flatscreen tv) were flooded and the carpet was ruined. The restoration company is still working through all the damage, and I will have to go out the beginning of February when the first stage of clean-up and restoration (walls and ceiling) is done to take care of the personal effect damage and replacing the carpet and kitchen floor.

The new year started with the flu--not a cold, but the actual tested-positive flu--for me, Dave and my mom while we were trying to enjoy a Christmas vacation with Dave's family in the Florida Keys. Then Mom's hip (replaced on 10/18 for the third time in 2013) became infected, and by January 2 she was back in the hospital. She's since had two surgeries to clean it out as best as can be done without removing the entire prosthesis (not really an option after the three previous surgeries and the current state of the attachment to the bone), and came home Friday after eight days in the hospital.

Dave was out of town last week so I was back and forth between the hospital and home. I had lots of meetings with the infectious disease specialist, the home healthcare providers (who will be coming out weekly to do physical therapy with her and change the dressing on her PICC line), her surgeon, and the wound care people, and I also had Jessie's homeschooling to manage. J and I hung out at the hospital and she worked on her reading, writing, and the website and Facebook page for Finley Point Soap (her company). It went as well as could be expected--it would definitely have been easier if I had been just shuffling her off to school every morning for someone else to deal with all day and getting her back in the evening--but that's not the road we've chosen. And there's another post in the making.

In addition, I had a business to run. Said business came in in last place. to everything else and I am grateful to Dee and Todd for stepping in and picking things up for me. Dee ran Todd, glass for Todd, and Todd's work back and forth between his house and the studio so orders could ship, and she also organized and unloaded the Bullseye glass delivery on Friday (after two previous disastrous delivery attempts earlier in the week). She also cut glass for customers who came down from North Carolina to shop. Next week I am supposed to be going to Philadelphia to do the Buyer's Market of American Craft show--my only wholesale show of the year and the source of the majority of my annual revenue--but in light of the hands-on care I am giving my mom now that she is back home, I had to cancel. I am hopeful the Rosen Group will allow me to apply the majority of my booth fee to next year's show, but I don't know anything yet.

I received the color lasers from the printer on Friday and I have to finish editing them by tomorrow morning, but the changed that can be made at this point are so minuscule as to be nonexistent anyway. The new Siyeh Studio website is in progress and I expect to have it up next week with the first half of my work. I have needed this website for years but it always got pushed behind something else that had to be done for the studio--mostly for the kiln glass resource center--and never got done. It's good to have the time to work on it now, and, because I can't be at the show next week, it has moved to the top of the priority stack. I had Liam in to do photography of half of the work before I left for Christmas, and I hope to have him in for another day next week to finish. This will be a good test for how much business I can generate without doing a show.

And now we move into the immediate future. I won't beat around the bush: It's looking tough. For the next several weeks at least, I am--in addition to a wife, mother and business owner--a home nurse. I give medications, do daily IV and dressing changes, take vitals (temperature at least), as well as feed and clean up after my mother. The last medicines before bed are given at 11:00 pm, there is another set at 3:00 am, and then we start up again at 7:00 am. I've done it for a day and I'm already exhausted. This experience alone is worth an entire post, and maybe I'll do it in a day or two. For now, I'm tired, and I need to let my mind go for awhile. I need to hold onto the optimism that things really are getting better, because I don't know how much longer I can go on like this if they don't.

Who Knows What the Future WIll Bring

As the astute out there might have noticed, I have changed the name of this blog from Glass Incarnate to Life Incarnate. Life has shifted in focus for me over the past year and it's time for the blog to reflect the changes.

Almost exactly six years ago today my husband and I purchased a 1920's Craftsman bungalow around the corner from our house with a backyard adjoining ours in which to house Siyeh Studio and allow me to move my business out of the basement and into the light. A year later I expanded the vision for my business and opened Siyeh Glass--a Bullseye Kiln Glass Resource Center with a kiln-forming classroom, a 7-torch beadmaking classroom, and a hotshop out back for glass blowing. I added more people to the studio family to teach and staff the facilities. And the wild rumpus began. It was a wild ride and rumpus indeed, and it's time to get off.

So today I closed Siyeh Glass and the hotshop. I no longer have retail hours, regular kiln-forming classes, open studio every day, glassblowing date nights or classes, beadmaking classes, studio elves, or other regular teachers. There are many reasons why I felt compelled to take this step--first among them is a shift in my priorities to my family as my mother has had serious health issues all year and my husband and I are homeschooling our daughter for the first time. But the straws that finally broke me and forced the change now were the hotshop being struck by lightning while I was in Montana this summer (causing the furnace to go out AGAIN), and the website being hacked. I could have spent the money and time to deal with the one and the time and more time to deal with the other, but I just couldn't fix both on top of everything else.

Will I still have open studio? Yes, if someone emails me and asks to come in and work, I'll schedule time for them. Will I still sell Bullseye glass and other glass supplies? Yes, by appointment (again, through email), and probably through a newsletter for people who would like to get in on a large order from Bullseye. Will I still teach/offer classes? Yes, occasionally, and maybe even for a wider variety of media than just glass--I have been approached about leasing space to teachers in other disciplines so they could offer classes in a studio configured for teaching messy hand-crafts.

Mainly I will be focusing on my own production work and getting the website for it--Siyeh Studio--back up. I need to spend time developing new work and nurturing old relationships with my galleries.

Life right now, though, is about a lot more than glass. Deep breath in, out, and moving on...

Good-bye Montana

Good-bye turkeys

Goodbye lake so crystal clear

Good-bye deer

And the Moose Drool Beer

Good-bye stars

Good-bye cars

Good-bye Smokehouse

And good-bye bunnies

Good-bye grizzlies

And good-bye cherries

Good-bye Going-to-the-sun

And good-bye Wild Goose Island

Good-bye big horns

And good-bye alpaca

Good-bye Hippo

Good-bye snow

Good-bye Fair

But hello hair

Good-bye Montana, wish we could stay there

turkeys

lake

deer

Moose Drool beer

cars

bunnies

grizzly

Going-To-the-Sun

Wild Goose Island

bighorn sheep

alpaca

Happy Hippo

snow

new hair

Western Montana Fair

Summer Winds Down

Sitting in a sky chair on the back deck in Polson, birdsong, a distant motorcycle and a barking dog for my morning music. Today the new contractor comes to fix the mess the last contractor made of the roof over the deck, and so the summer ends as it began with construction. This is the first morning I have been up and out on the deck this early, and it is truly wonderful. We got rain last night for only the second time in a hot month, and it cleared a lot of the dust and smoke from the air.  The fire danger has been listed as Extreme for over a month now and fires have been popping up all around us. Fires have been started by people mowing their fields, hitting a rock with the mower blades, and causing a spark--that's how dry it is. And there's the doorbell...

Three hours later, I pick up this post, and now my music is the sound of a compressor, hammering, whistling, and the grunting of contractors (no kidding, real grunting interspersed with the occasional imprecation). Add the bass note of the mower in the front yard run by the lawn service guy, and my symphony is complete. Apparently I have lucked into the magic circle in Polson in terms of neighbors (now friends) and professional service people. Our next-door neighbor Ed knows (and thinks highly of) both the current and the previous lawn care guys, and the lawn care guys and Ed all know and think highly of the new contractor. The city building inspector also knows and thinks highly of the new contractor. It's been one, big happy reunion up here today.

As I look down the last two weeks of summer it's time to plan and prepare for fall. Seems like a perfectly good waste of summer to me, but that's the way life works. It wouldn't do to land back in Atlanta with no idea what to do homeschooling the Sprout, no websites for either Siyeh Glass or Siyeh Studio, and nothing planned for the studio going forward. Though at this point I would be perfectly happy to stay in Polson for the fall, put a small studio in here (I am already having the wiring done for a big kiln and I could just put in an order with Bullseye for frit and clear irid), and just keep going on as I have been.

The summer is ending way too fast, as it seems to every year. I brought so many projects out to Montana to work on, and easily 80% of them I never even got started. There was no work done on the quilt I started in a class last spring. I made no jewelry from findings and shells (though I bought the materials), nor did I finish any of the silver pieces I had left over from my Spruill jewelry classes (in spite of the lovely jewelry bench gifted me by my spouse for my birthday and shipped here). I did not get the garden weeded. We (J and I) did no pottery, nor did we dye either fabric or yarn. The sewing projects I had lined up with Jessie never happened. I still don't know how to do kumihimo or use a rigid-heddle loom (the Cricket).

However I learned to spin, bought 13 alpaca fleeces and have made good progress in processing them for spinning (well, except for the one that I accidentally felted). I built my own table for blowing off the dirt and learned to use a picker box (think sandwich of slanted nails that the fleece goes between to get fluffed and picked over) and a drum carder in addition to the spinning wheel.

My head is awhirl with thoughts of woolen and worsted, yarn for knitting and yarn for weaving, dyeing (not the alpaca), blending (silk, merino, angora and bamboo), and all the possibilities opened with creating one's own yarn. In my boundless enthusiasm, I would like to take it a step further and raise my own alpaca and angora rabbits, but my spouse has employed both the stick ("No! No more animals!") and the carrot (talk of living in different exotic foreign locations as we homeschool--not a realistic goal with a lot of animal dependents) as a means of putting down that revolution before it even had a chance to get started. So I plan to assist Rosemarie in shearing back in Atlanta as much as she will have me in exchange for fleeces. Fleeces don't eat, drink, breathe, or poop and can be left in a bag (if well washed) for years until you can get to them (lucky for me).

I learned to play "Fate" (thanks a lot Kyla!) and have gotten to level 16, dyed my child's hair (twice) in rainbow shades of teal, aqua, magenta, and fuchsia, made (thus far--more to come) 25 qts of Everclear infusions from fresh, local. organic or wild produce (huckleberry, basil, rhubarb, and peach with rosehip, chokecherry, goathead peppers, anaheim peppers, backyard plum, and mint still to come). I have also begun (with my uncle) planning on a twin house (fancy duplex) on the lake property and almost put together family and business budgets. There has been passing thought given to redoing both my websites (damn robotic hackers injecting their silly malicious code into my sites--I fart in their general direction) and will actually follow through with action sometime later this week.

For three weeks of the summer I had three little girls instead of my customary one, and I took them on adventures as diverse as the Happy Hippo amphibious vehicle tour, boat tours, hiking, and the Park After Dark Astronomy gathering in Glacier National Park (with the accompanying junior ranger badges), bungee jumping and exploring the 4-H animal exhibits at the Western Montana Fair, and go-cart racing and laser tagging. There were also many days at the lake swimming and afternoons snacking on yummy frozen yoghurt.

In the spirit of home ever-improvement, I wrangled contractors and got two decks--one with a roof--built. The building included me preparing many of the boards, pickets, rails and beams with two coats of oil-based stain. I modestly conquered operation and maintenance of a riding lawnmower (for the lake property), researched, purchased and installed a portable air conditioner, and uninstalled a hard-wired dishwasher and prepared for the installation of a new one (picked and purchased by Mom). I have planned a new garden bed for the spot in front that used to be covered by the  old deck, but I don't think I'll get the retaining wall put up for it or the topsoil delivered to fill it--much less the plants chosen for it (that'll be a plan for winter when I'm cosied up on the couch in Atlanta dreaming of summer). I need to put in the 6-8 herbs, the 2 perennials and the 9 lilies I bought at the farmer's market (and I really should get the main big bed weeded!), but that shouldn't be too difficult. I did weed and tame the existing herb bed and I did plant six tomato plants that are beginning to bear fruit.

Before I sat down to post today, I would have said my summer glass was half empty--that I had not done anything I had planned on or very much worthwhile at all. But now I'm thinking my cup runneth over with beer (Sip 'N' Go Naked Apricot Ale from the Tamarack Brewery in Lakeside) and it foams over the rim of the glass with an abundance of fullness. Good thing I occasionally post so I can review and take stock honestly to keep my life in perspective!

I Run Amok

I take a deep breath and relax into the beginning of this post. It has been quite a time so far at Casa de Verano Griffith. In the spirit of Glass Incarnate, I'll start with the glass news first. But, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that glass business takes a back seat to loads of other things in the Montana summer.

A couple of weeks ago the J and I drove up past Kalispell to Whitefish and hand-delivered a big order to a new gallery (new for me) called the Purple Pomegranate. It is a lovely little shop on the main street in Whitefish--a quintessential summer and winter (lake and big ski area) resort town. I am looking forward to continuing my relationship with them--they're my first Montana gallery!

On the way up J spotted a monster truck (one of her obsessions) at the local Toyota dealer and we just HAD to stop and get a picture. She really wanted to go to the monster truck show over the weekend, but, lucky for me, she forgot about it.


Spent the first weekend after arriving in Missoula where I took a class in hand spinning from Janet Sullivan who owns Joseph's Coat Yarns and Fiber. It was a GREAT class as it was really a private lesson for the day, and I was able (finally) to get the feel for drafting (preparing the fiber to slip through your fingers and be twisted into yarn by the turning of the wheel).

I ended the class by renting a wheel for the summer for her and hope to purchase one before going home. Gave Janet a ride home after class and we dropped a spinning wheel off at a friend of hers who is a rug weaver. She showed me her rug loom which she might be selling in the near future. Even I with my lust for new tools can't wrap my head around where to put this loom and how to use it. It's 16 feet long and you weave by walking back and forth across the front. You need a 32 foot side to side clearance for it just so you can get the hardware all in!

In addition to the spinning class, we loaded up on supplies not easily found in Polson including two new shower-heads for both bathrooms; semi-permanent hair dye in cobalt, fuchsia, magenta, orange, lemon, and teal (the pic at the right shows the first pass with magenta, fuchsia, teal and cobalt); fabric and thread for summer sewing projects for the J along with a sewing table and cutting mat; summer books for the J; a hand-sander for a couple of wood-working projects I have; a rented cello from Morgenroth Music for J--and while we were there we picked up a used Yamaha keyboard in pristine condition for a song.

The projects for the sander include a bit of grading-stamp removal prior to sanding my share of the new deck boards for the house and removing the varnish off the flat surfaces of a vanity I bought at a garage sale around the corner here in Polson right after we got here. It's a gorgeous little waterfall style laminated wood vanity with the original Art Nouveau brass handles from the 20's and it was only $10. I messed up a little on the sanding and went too deep into the laminate, but I got some retouching pencils and I will draw the grain back in before I finish it. Though we are having a contractor tear out the old deck and put in the new one, I am doing part of the staining to save a little cash and get the project done faster.

To make sure I had enough going for the summer I picked up some origami paper in Missoula and have been busily making paper cranes when my hands aren't doing anything else. I am going to turn them into a hanging sculpture--or maybe a light fixture. I also brought up the cotton crochet afghan I have been working on for Jessie's room for a couple of months. It's a great project for in the evenings while we all sit around and listen to an audio book (currently Mom J and I are working through Jim Butcher's Furies of Calderon series and are in "Captain's Fury".

Dave--who is here with us for the next couple of weeks before heading back to Austin--got me a jeweler's bench for Montana and I spent a day putting it together. It's SWEET and I am going to be able to get to it to use it as soon as I have finished staining deck boards and refinishing the vanity (which will be a desk for the J). Between the staining set-up, the furniture that normally goes on the deck but which is stored in the garage while the deck is being rebuilt, the vanity, the 13 alpaca fleeces I picked up from RuthAnn at her Racka Paca Alpaca ranch in Kila, and the glass/jewelry studio set-up, the garage is pretty full.


Though alpaca is my new favorite fiber as it is so silky, soft, warm, naturally beautifully colored, and clean (alpaca don't have the lanolin in their fleece that sheep do so the fleece doesn't hold the dirt in the same way), I have been preparing George Edmund's and Irma Amelia's fleeces for spinning too. I washed them, and now I'm picking and teasing them so I can card them. I haven't decided whether to try to blend silk, merino or alpaca with them to create a nicer yarn, or just to make up sock yarn with them. It will definitely be fun to experiment with dyeing and blending their fleece (during carding) before spinning it. And speaking of carding; looking at all of it that I need to do, how long it takes to hand card, and how hard it is on my wrists, I am thinking I may need to invest in a drum carder.

But back to alpaca for a minute: they are adorable, gentle, not too big, and make great pet/fiber animals. Best of all, they are not denied by City of Atlanta code. So what is stopping me from getting a couple? (You can't just get one--they need company.) While it would be fun to say something like "marriage is a compromise" or "my spouse", the reality is that I don't need to do anything to tie us down more geographically than I already have: it is difficult enough to summer in Montana with the chickens and bunnies back in Atlanta. I can't even imagine what 2-3 alpaca would add!

I end this very long post with a thank-you to the universe for a truly lovely July 4th. I got to see good friends from grade-school on with their families, Dave performed his annual marriage proposal ritual (I said yes again), and we got to set off a whole boatload of fireworks--and we still had the baby display here in Little Baghdad on the Flathead.

Happy Summer, everyone. Peace, Love and Joy.