Having a long time to prepare to leave can have interesting effects on both emotions, seesawing between about every emotion except anger, and behaviors, switching between bursts of industry and total down time. The first place those are showing up are in the club.
Let's start with obligations there. Rules require 8 hours of volunteering each month you are there and using the facilities. For most people this means monitoring, being the person who greets people walking in the door. Members get reminded to check in on the computer and put on their name badges. Visitors either get attention in the store or if interested, a tour of the club and its possible activities. In "spare time" the monitor wanders around and makes sure equipment is being used properly, both for the well being of the members and the equipment. Whoever takes the opening shift has other duties, plugging in certain equipment, making sure particular water levels are correct at different stations, noting what's been cleaned or ignored, etc. It's a long list. Final shift involves overseeing proper shut down, unplugging certain equipment, turning out the lights and escorting the last person out before locking all the doors.
Note that I don't know all this because I monitor. I've been an officer for most of my years there, since before I was mobile enough after knee replacements to wander around all over and stand long enough to, say, make a sale in the store for a dawdling, fussy customer. Before then they needed to find a way I could volunteer while on a scooter, and one place that doesn't work is in a tiny room full of glass cases, aka the jewelry store, so I became an officer. It is assumed that officers put in well over the 8 hours a month in volunteering time and are excused from monitoring except when nobody else is available. No, I know all the duties because I wrote the most recent now-laminated list of duties, and teach them to new members. It says plug or unplug the pickle pots, for example. They need to learn both what/where those are, and how to refill the chemicals when low. That's just one thing on the two-sided full pages list.
My first position was secretary, not just taking minutes, but keeping track of rules and schedules just because I kept track of any changes in the minutes as they were decided, and kept getting asked about them. Two years ago I became the 5th person since I joined the club to be president. There was Gary, Terry, Mary, Becky, and now me. Next week it will be David. It changes with the calendar, unless something happens to a serving one. I've known that to happen once to an officer, when the care of a spouse demanded total attention at home. We've had former officers move or die, just not while serving. Several former officers remain in the club, working on projects they didn't have time for while serving. Several of those teach other members. Some of us teach even while serving.
So here I sit, seeing endings. I'll remain in the club no more than 2 1/2 months, because my rec center membership expires March. 15. I may be in town for some short time after that, or the house may sell quickly like the one next door did, in 3 days, with "we want possession next week" in the deal. However it goes, it would cost $575 for the next year or whatever tiny part of it we'd be here. That won't happen. I have a finite and shortening time to use the club, and plan to make the most of it, despite needs at home for sorting, packing, selling, tossing, cleaning, etc., plus supervising painting and repairs others do.
With the books out of the library, the shelves are currently being used for organizing club stuff, formerly scattered over four different rooms, and impossible to locate what was in my hand two minutes before. (Repainting those shelves will have to wait.) There are a lot of unused remnants scattered all over, whether stones and beads, sheet metals or wires, instruction sheets or booklets, and of course glass. I plan to use up every scrap of glass, and I do mean that literally. All those small scraps get cut into tiny pieces, popped into a kiln, and turned into hemispheric pieces to be fused to larger pieces of glass. Larger scraps, the ones which manage to avoid filling my current needs for projects, will get donated to the club. Or in one case, to a good friend who happens to be having health issues resulting in financial issues and thus can't afford to buy her own. I made it simple, giving her all the 90 COE glass. I'm still busy with a lot of 96 COE and the two cannot be mixed. She's been working with 90, so having everything new match it prevents possible disasters. I showed her a few new techniques I've picked up since she was last in the club so when she does feel well, she can try those and have more fun.
We occasionally have vendors receive the club's OK to bring their wares in on an advertised day, spread them out on a table, and sell - no pressure - to anybody who is interested. One sold all turquoise, then promised us everybody who walked into his store wearing their club badge would get a certain percent discount. Another couple of people have come in with faceted gems. Prices tend to be very low for us, since we're wholesale buyers, and often the person bringing items in is cleaning out a relative's house and have no other ideas where to get a reasonable price for "all that crap". Often what can't/won't sell is simply donated to a club the original owner belonged to because the thrift stores won't touch it and much of it really is crap. We always thank them, set the low value items (plastic) out for anybody to pick through. That can include teachers who start pupils out on very inexpensive materials while they gain skills, or members making jewelry for small children who will lose or destroy it rapidly anyhow. Workshops always start in copper before our skills justify graduating to sterling. The irony there is copper wire is more difficult to work with than the sterling is, kinking more easily in your hand, and keeping us convinced our skills are still pretty lousy. So once you believe you're ready for sterling, you likely actually are. If you can afford it and make what sells, likely you won't go back. Unless you're into coloring your metal, and there are lots of interesting ways to do that with copper.
Where do I fit in to this? First, I made two sterling sales to another member, things I'll never use. One is scrap sterling, as we are taught to keep even the tiniest bits we cut off a piece of wire, for example, for later sale. My one pill bottle held, at today's prices as weighed in the club's scale, nearly $150 worth. I know somebody who is doing lost wax casting and can use it. She also happens to be the previous president to me. I offered her first right of refusal, and she took it on the spot. A few days later I found a chunk of sheet silver. When it got weighed, since she'd just bought the other, she couldn't match the price, but since she'd bought the other, I offered her a "garage sale price" and she bought that as well, just so long as I'd wait a couple of days for her to have the cash. I've already cleared it with the incoming president to come in next year as a vendor and offer leftover supplies to members in an on-site garage sale. That way they don't have to find the house, nobody needs to help set it all up, and I'll have an educated market who can appreciate my low prices. I just ordered small ziploc bags to separate quantities of beads, or cabochons, or rock slabs, or findings, or metals, or chains, or....... I wonder if the hundred will be enough bags. Rich says he has need of the clear plastic divided sorting boxes that I'll be emptying, since hardware is just as full of categories as jewelry supplies are, so he'll get those I don't still need.
It won't be everything. I just bought a spool each in copper chain and wire for projects I can do in the living room while watching TV, wherever we live, needing no club, though maybe replacing a few hand tools for better quality bought from the club store before we leave. I will keep some beads to work with too. But as far as the glass is concerned, much as I'm still totally absorbed in working with it, anything still not fused will be donated to the club for its raffles. All labeled 96 for them of course. It won't be just sheet glass. There'll be stringers, named for their resemblance to a skinny piece of straight string in glass, stored in a clear 17" long tube so they don't break, in many colors and a labeled with their COE so they get paired with the proper type of glass. There will be jars of frit (itsy bitsy bits of glass down to powder size) left, and those little glass hemispheres I've not used, and decals. If there's any kiln paper I haven't used, though very doubtful, that will get donated as well.
If we weren't moving, I'd still be in the club, finding new things to learn and play with, because that's what creativity is: play. I'd still likely be president next year. I fit well in that role and it's the hardest one to find new volunteers for. I do not plan on driving 40 or more miles each way to either of the two glass studios available in the Twin Cities to continue working with glass after we move. So I will be doing everything I can to finish up my glass projects in the next two months, which actually involved a couple new purchases in order to accomplish that. I'm buying a pair of draping molds that the club doesn't have, matching ones so I can made simultaneous matching pieces. They will work best as presents in matching pairs. This means the new large kiln can run more efficiently with more pieces in at the same time on the same heat cycle, I can finish my projects faster, and other people can have their kiln time even as I'm cramming everything I can into any available open time slot. As with other molds, and following other people's examples, once I finish my use of the molds, the club will have them. They already have three slumping molds I donated, two of which are frit molds for making your own (larger) beads. The third is an oddball piece upon which you lay a square sheet of glass and it melts a pattern in one side as if it were cut glass. I then flipped that over, filled those patterns with contrasting color frit, and in effect turned it into its own frit mold. After that, pieces were cut off it and made into pendants - not, I'm sure, how it was intended to be used. But play, right? I think I'll teach our newer glass people that before I leave.
I'm already listing what I know and can pass on that members aren't getting elsewhere. Because that's my last contribution to the club, perhaps a legacy if you will. I have learned to do about half a dozen things really well. Nobody else does them, at least not for sale in the store, except for the way I taught myself first to make wire spirals as links in a chain. They don't do my wire tree ornaments. Nobody does celtic braiding with wire and beads. My herringbone weave, learned with an adaptation from another club member, is beginning to get used, either in bracelets or earrings. But at least one member now is taking off from how I taught her to make wind chimes, and making them with decorations added, for sale in the club, which in turn is teaching me how to do new things . What I'm doing goes past what she started and I'm showing the possibilities to my students, inviting them to pop in once they learn the basics and watch to learn it themselves. Once you have the idea, it's all accomplished with basic skills and patience. It's the best part of the club, each growing off the ideas and skills of the next. I just finished a two-day wind chime class, two students. I showed a couple newer ways of wiring them together than when I was first taught. Since I spent a few months just making as many chime pieces as I could cut glass for last year, I'll be taking them north along with wire and chain, plus new glass pieces to hang them from instead of branches vulnerable to weather, and keeping busy with those.
In all these things, I'm winding down, have a goal for each and a timeline to stop. Good-byes and thank-yous are being exchanged, questions are being answered. I'm hearing I've had value there, which is very gratifying, particularly after the chewing out months back I received from one member who needed to have a behavior stopped immediately and wouldn't listen so it had to be done publicly. Supposedly I was the reason the club membership was dropping, not covid, not another club in the system opening and doing much the same things. I made discrete inquiries of people cited and heard in one case that emergency home repairs had them relocated for a few months, unable to attend. They're back now. In another discussion, the new similar club opened much closer to where they lived and offered slightly different skills, more in tune with both travel needs and new interests. But there is a request to come in as a visitor and learn wind chimes from me. So the good feedback has been heartwarming. I'm realizing the cutting ties part, at least with people, is more of a process of solidifying many of the ties, making reasons to keep connected. It's with things where ties are getting cut.
The winding down also has me sorting through things and making choices of more things not to hang onto. Getting rid of 95% of the library at home was the first big one. With club supplies, if I don't have a specific job for something in the future, out it will be going to somebody who can use it, and with luck a little of my investment will be coming back. Yes, I'm talking money here. Meanwhile there'll be presents for at least the next two years for all the family and friends who get them. (Preferably hand delivered of course. Postage is.... !!!!) Much of that is planning the packing. Since I'm working with glass, and shapes are getting more elaborate, the pieces are more fragile, not at all stackable. I just ordered 8 cubic feet of packing peanuts. That should keep Steve's walleye mount safe to travel, and protect my glass so long as the box walls are sturdy. Oh, and cardboard separates the layers.
The online order was about half the price of what I found in a store a week back and chose then not to buy. That's helpful since Rich and I are heading out later to buy lots more paint, brushes, and so forth, so making the house more presentable can continue in a timely manner. It's good to have plastic in the pocketbook!
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