A New Way To Connect Glass!

I've been running out of sharp drill bits - the high quality kind, that bite right in and, when new, can drill the glass through in 3 minutes. Not 20 or, worst case, even more, including never.  Going online my sources of high quality brand bits have dried up. There are still lots of pieces to drill, and I just bought more glass.

Go figure, right?

 

 I hadn't started cutting and baking them yet on Friday. I had time to try something different. I knew just whom to ask. While we have lots of people in the club who make fused glass jewelry, I'm the only one currently making wind chimes (and preparing to start teaching). But we have a couple - literally, a married couple - who do lots of different things with glass. I had gotten a suggestion from Mary on a different way to get baked glass to connect to other pieces, back a couple months ago. I hadn't paid  more attention than to note the possibility, as my glass on hand had all been baked already. They still all had to be drilled, dang it! This new  option gets done between cutting and baking. With my newest glass delivery, it was time to seek her out and find out the details.

She had two ideas, one of which was more work than the other. It involved cutting a narrow piece of a special kind of foam that goes across the glass and extends on past the ends, then laying a short piece of glass lengthwise over it so that when melted/fused the top small piece of glass touches the large piece on both sides of the foam. The work comes after baking, inserting a stiff wire or something to poke all the remaining foam away, leaving a channel for a string or wire or whatever to go through. That wire or whatever would then hook up in whichever way one wants to the next whatever. I say "whatever" because possibilities are limited to imagination, materials, skills and desired end product.

Mary warned me that poking out the foam was very time consuming. I was looking to avoid both the cost of new impossible-to-find diamond bits and the time required to drill them. A typical morning in the club gets between 6 and 10 pieces drilled, depending on one or two holes per piece. How about something faster?

 There are small U-shaped wires specially designed to tolerate kiln temperatures. You put two drops of a clear glue on the end of your glass where you want to hook it to something, set the wire on it so the loop hangs out past the glass, then cut a tiny piece of either the same or clear glass with the same COE which covers all of the wire which is on the glass and a little bit past. Glass fusion in the kiln leaves a lump but securely holds the wire in place once cool. Mary let me use her clear glue for my first set-up tray, and also let me buy her package of the wires since the club didn't have them. Her husband is now in charge of ordering supplies so they will be available for anybody, and once she gets a price for them I'll pay her for hers and she can get more. Right now she's not using them, though she brought a sample project she'd previously made using them, just to show me the result.

I've reserved the kiln for the next 4 days. We have other kilns, but this is the one where I don't need to climb a ladder to set the program (whose silly idea was that in a club with all seniors?), or have to press 15 buttons - and that's if you stop at exactly the correct program number. It's very easy to get frustrated and lose count, tapping three extra buttons before having to stop, delete the bogus instructions you've programmed in, and start over. After a couple deep breaths, of course. I need easy in, easy out. Put in a ceramic slab 8"x8" covered with kiln paper supporting whatever glass pieces you can fit in without touching each other (or the wire sticking out past) during the baking, each day until you're finished. My first load is out, washed, ready to put into some more wind chimes. 

Two more chimes have been requested for presents. One will be on display in January at a community wide event where new residents get informed of everything wonderful that Sun City has to offer. Part of that is a stage presentation by the Rec Centers organization. The other is where tables are set up, on either side of the auditorium, one from each club which wants to be there, with displays of what they produce or do, along with literature to take home. A couple of people sit there to talk about the club. Some tables even offer a dish of candy! (Maybe they think they can bribe new members?)

After all that I can finally make the wind chimes I want for my own house!

End Of Another Year In Haiku

I've done this before. Each year end brings up different stuff. I will again credit the idea as coming from Rude Pundit's blog, here on Blogspot as it happens. "Rude" means he freely uses language NSFW, so be warned, but I pop over there regularly. If you  want to see/hear him he is usually on the FSTV network on Monday mornings on the Stephanie Miller Show, so yes, liberal politics.

I wrote these haiku while in a dark frame of mind over bad news from the year that doesn't seem to be going away, just getting worse. After giving them a couple weeks to settle and get reevaluated and/or rewritten, here they are.

The red wave turned blue,
Their real red still spraying from
Bullets, more bullets.

Plankton, first to die,
Cooked in their oceans, none left
To feed all the rest.

We hope each New Year
Will be better, but the earth's
Rotisserie burns.

Riding A Bicycle, 1960s Style

These days, and even back then, most kids got started with the three wheeled versions. The first were called tricycles, but by the time my kids came along, Big Wheel seemed to have the market. They graduated at various young ages to 4 wheels, better known as a bike with training wheels, then gained their independence from the training wheels. Often around age six or so.

I don't know when my brother got his bicycle. I just know that by age 12 I had no bike and didn't know how to ride one. The family was visiting Aunt Agnes in Minneapolis for some summer event. I can't recall why, just that it wasn't our usual Christmas visit, driving south 200 miles to see all the cousins, aunts and uncles that we could, on both parents' sides. This certainly wasn't that, because everything was green, sidewalks were bare, and I finally learned how to ride a bike.

I was bored, went outside, and found some neighborhood kids to play with. Or maybe they found me. I was restricted from wandering. They had bikes. I didn't. They were astounded to learn I didn't know how to ride one. 

But it's so easy!

Really? Looked scary to me. 

They tried to show me, and I finally gave in and got up on the seat. My feet were still tip-toed on the sidewalk, my legs being just that long. I tried to push on a pedal and the bike fell over. Repeat, same results. This bike had no training wheels, these younger kids being skilled riders, but they decided to become my training wheels. With a proper start, and encouragement to keep pedaling, I made it about 25 feet.

It felt great! Scary too. They encouraged me to go again, but I was nearly out of block to go down. That's when they suggested what was to them the obvious, that I could turn the corner, keep going, and get all the way around the block and return to them with the bike.

Well, I knew I wasn't allowed to cross the street, but surely nobody had said I couldn't go around the block without crossing any streets. Right? So off I started, half petrified all the way. Corners were scary, almost making me fall, but somehow I didn't. Each upcoming corner was still just as scary even though each time I'd had another one successfully navigated. Some of the sidewalk blocks were missing, cracked with holes, or tilted leaving a bump either up or down to the next one. I navigated them all without incident, terrified to stop for anything because I knew I'd never get going again without somebody to hold the bike for me to start.

I was lucky there were no pedestrians out walking during those few minutes. Not on this block at least. Finally arriving back, both relieved and reluctant to hand the bike back to these new friends, exhilarated and proud at my accomplishment, I knew I needed my very own bike. Right now!

I'm pretty sure I returned to the house in just a tiny bit of trouble, though I don't recall the details. Most likely it was my failure to understand that not crossing the street also included not going out of eyesight. That kind of thing was parental logic as I grew up. I was supposed to know ahead of time what I wasn't allowed to do. But I wanted a bike and stood my ground, reminding them I was completely unhurt. And besides, my brother had one, didn't he? He didn't have to stay within eyesight in our small town up north.

If you think I was persuasive, you'd be wrong. He was a boy. I wasn't. As if that settled anything in my mind. My best friend across the street, Charlene, had her own bike already for a while, her younger (male) cousins had their own bikes, and just about every other kid I knew had one. Once I told Charlene what was going on, she offered to let me ride her bike. It didn't have training wheels either, but she helped me start it. Without sidewalks, the only place to ride was the street, but there was almost no traffic ever, all the other kids rode there, and frankly, I didn't bother my working parents by asking permission. One only bothered them at work for emergencies, and things like getting picked on by one's older brother I very early found out DID NOT MAKE AN EMERGENCY!

So off I went on Charlene's bike. I went from her corner  about two blocks, turned around  carefully, and started back, no problems. Neither of us counted on her cousins. They were pretty mischievous, but mostly in trouble with their own parents for incidents between each other. I clearly recall once when Charlene's dad was butchering one of his many snapping turtles in the back yard (as good Catholics, there were meatless Fridays and turtles weren't officially "meat") and watching him butcher one became frequent neighborhood entertainment for us kids. One of the boys picked up the severed turtle head by poking a stick in its mouth. Being dead didn't mean the turtle heart couldn't beat in a bowl of water for another day, or the jaw muscles couldn't clamp tightly on a stick. Or the kid's finger, as it turned out. The whole neighborhood heard him when the head he'd tossed straight up in the air by the stick in its mouth managed to land exactly on one of his fingers and he ran screaming home.

I was given reason to remember that fondly. As I was returning to Charlene with her bike, the boys ran out into the street, thinking it would be fun to watch this novice cyclist once they stuck a couple sticks in the front spokes of the bike. I went head over handlebars, scraped my knees and elbows, and hit something just under my mouth that went through my lower lip and into my jaw just under my teeth. The bike needed repairs of course, but that was settled between Charlene's dad and her uncle. The boys were soundly punished, and I was absolved of responsibility by both families.

But not by my own! When I arrived home bleeding, there was hell to pay. By then I knew to expect it, regardless of the cause of whatever disaster I was involved in. My parents backed off a bit when the neighbors came to apologize for my injuries. It still didn't do anything along the lines of getting me my own bike.

A year or two later I wasn't letting up on my demand for a bicycle. The answer was still no. I'd begun to observe, however, that my brother wasn't riding his any more. He had a couple of friends who drove everywhere they wanted to go, or at least that was my younger sister's perspective. I figured maybe my parent's objection was financial, so I came up with a plan. 

I carefully pointed out how my brother no longer had a need for his bicycle and hadn't been riding it for ages. I promised to take good care of it. Steve tried to argue it was his bike, but amazingly, I won the discussion with my parents. I had a bike! It was a boy's bike with the high center bar across. There were balloon tires, making it capable of going practically anywhere. My favorite part was the fact that the brakes were engaged not by weak fingers, but by pedaling in reverse with my strongest muscles. It had a single gear, which meant my speed was controlled by my legs, and it coasted beautifully just by backing off the pressure on the chain. In practically no time I was riding hands free, using balance shifting to steer. Suddenly I had a level of freedom and a means of exercise like never before.

I managed to ignore the fact I also had won myself an angry brother.

I could ride to school, and did so as often as possible, weather permitting, and despite dress codes mandating girls wear skirts to school. I didn't snag my hems in the chain or embarrass myself with my skirt up on the bar. That was easy to figure out. There was one mishap however, that I believe I successfully hid from my parents.

I had to go home over lunch break. I left important homework behind that morning, if I recall correctly. With a very short lunch hour I was in a hurry and let that rule my choices. I was on the sidewalk, just hitting the downtown area, and had an alley to cross. There was a building flush with the alley and the sidewalk on the side I approached from, blocking my view. I reached it at full speed at the same time a pickup truck pulled out, and crashed into the front door of it. The driver was terrified, particularly when he saw the tiny bit of a scraped knee I had. His aim was to get this poor kid some medical attention, or clear himself from responsibility, or everything else one does when vehicle meets bicycle.

For my part, I needed to get back to school. I was still in a hurry, still fully functional, my bike unfazed for practical purposes, and all too aware of this being my own fault. I brushed aside the driver's worries, ignored any need to retain me, absolved him of all harm, and dashed off on my bike. No way was I giving him my name, as for sure it would get back to my parents. I got back to school successfully, cleaned myself up, and pretended nothing had happened. Once home I was totally ignorant of any possible reason for a little scrape on my knee. There may even have been a tiny tear in my red and black striped dress I had no knowledge of once questioned some days later.

In '64 the family moved to St. Paul. The bike came with us. I have wonderful memories of riding south to nearly the end of Snelling Avenue, steering hands free down the street between parked cars and impatient traffic which never managed to hit me by some miracle. My cycling memories end when my parents found out just what my favorite route was and put a quick stop to it. I would have loved a good bike in later years but there were never any like it around by then. Brakes migrated to the handlebars, gears were added, tires became thin, and seats were impossible to find a comfortable place to sit on for more than 15 minutes. No matter what I tried, nothing compared to all my memories.

By the way, I can still see and feel that scar under my lip, both from inside and out.

2022 Holiday Card & Letter

Some of them are delayed this year, going out with cards packed in boxes with presents. This lingering cold is draining my ambition to finish, wrap and mail the last boxes, and shopping trips are limited despite my masking to avoid exchanging all the various virus particles others are already being overly generous with this holiday season. I'm not one to brag about all those family "We're so proud..." moments, showing off to the world that one's life is so amazing, one has the best  children accomplishing the most extraordinary things in the most amazing places (that money can buy, usually), but everything below is from this past year. I thought I'd post both the card and letter here:

 

            

                                     Cherish The Moments
The card photo captures a very unusual moment. It lasted perhaps 2 minutes, late last August, right after sunrise at Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. We’d gotten our pass to get in at 5AM and did, drove to the end of the road in the dark, headlights just showing the curves in the road and the stripes for parking in a world of black. We sat while more cars arrived, a few intrepid hikers laden with expensive equipment headed in to take the dark trail, and light gradually grew on the eastern horizon. At just the same magic moment, about a dozen cars emptied out and many of us gave it our try. Steve opted to sit in the car. I made it just to where the trail turns west along the north  side of Bear Lake, trying various shots while all the other hikers passed, when I looked up at the sky. The clouds were orange on a blue backdrop, and I took different  exposures to capture the orange rather than washing it out. I’d just finished that with some success when I looked down at the water. This photo is the best result of my shooting. I could have continued the hike, but I knew nothing I could shoot along the path now the sun was fully up would compare to that moment. It was mine alone.

We have learned to cherish those infrequent moments, whether it be a photo, watching an elk herd wandering past the door to our motel room, a meal with family and friends, a flower blooming for a single day, the oriole teaching its fledgelings to fly into the cherry tree laden with ripe fruit. It’s when that new experiment with a recipe works out for Steve, the tug of a fish on the line, the hours spent sharing the river with your good fishing buddy, seeing another friend coming out of a years-long depression and reach back out to you, watching young children compete jumping off lawn chairs. It’s the day you’re no longer sick enough to have to quarantine, the hummingbird drinking from your backyard bush, the laughter when the door blows open at the same second you bend over to move a block into place to keep it securely closed, and your head and doorknob meet unexpectedly. It didn’t hurt, honest. Not much. It’s that moment you find a very old favorite TV program on some cable channel and set a timer to record it for later watching. It’s trying to watch a wedding you can’t attend over somebody’s brief attempt to send it from their phone, and getting it just well enough and long enough you can tell the people involved you love them.

It’s the few moments you have the privilege of spending with your best friend of 40 years during her last days in hospice, bending over to give the hug she can’t quite rise up for. It’s seeing the bubbler lights on the tree again for the first time this season, finding that they still work. It’s the moment you solve that pesky problem, or find a new enthusiasm, or share a hug in the kitchen as you pass each other. It’s finding that special silky spot in the dog’s fur and her deciding to let you stroke it for 20 minuses.

It’s realizing you are blessed enough to still recognize the value of those moments, and retain the ability to call those memories up later whenever you want or need them. And it’s knowing you can share them with other people you care about.

Notice and enjoy your special moments.  Cherish them in memory. Share them.
Steve & Heather

Still Loving Christmas Music

You know, if you've been following me, that I'm not religious. Raised Methodist, turned staunchly agnostic. Not atheist, agnostic. I don't buy into much of any theology, finding it more useful for threatening followers than being useful. It's political, paternalistic, and patronizing. Many of the basic ethics from my early education are well rooted, like treating others as you would like to be treated. Basic kindness and helpfulness, in other words. The bit about "needing to know the right words in order to be saved" is total crap as far as I'm concerned. And yes, I met somebody who spent hours trying to convince me he knew the right words and I didn't, so only he would be saved, spoken in that smug way of the unjustifiedly prideful.

However, for a few days of the year, I love listening to carols and other traditional songs. I don't pay that much attention to the religious part, the "virgin Mary"  stuff, but most of the music is beautiful. People were their most inspired when they wrote those. They tried to convey love, hope, and magic, projecting light into a season when the planet was at its darkest and people weren't yet assured that light would return. Now that we know it always does, it's less hope for light than celebration of the season's turn.

I used to sing all the singable Christmas songs. All of them, in school choir, in church choir, listening to the radio. I memorized them, learned the new ones, enjoyed the stories of my father singing "The Messiah" and wished I could have had the same experience, and even went out caroling from house to house with a group of friends.

"Silent Night" still chokes me up the first time each season that I hear it. "Nutcracker", while not singable, has become a Christmas music orgy, returning me to some of my best memories with my young children of a time of Christmas magic, a full theater experience followed by a nighttime toboggan ride for my two-year-old when farm lights lit a wonderland of ice coated branches until everything disappeared in thick fog. The traditional carols take me back to a childhood when Santa was real, love was universal for a couple days, and I still believed in magic.

The old voicebox, unused for years, still is impelled to croak along in the privacy of my car or covered by the noise of my shower, running through my treasured catalogue of music from this season. Hope lives again for a bit, a welcome distraction from the onslaught of news of cascading climate change, racism becoming overt again, gun violence, homelessness. Beauty still survives.

Pretending Not To Freeze

Phoenix area, right? Heat zone of the continental US of A. We come down here to avoid snow, ice, blizzards, and all the nasty other things the cold temperatures can bring you. With global warming we even expect milder winters than the ones we enjoyed when we first arrived here.

You'd think, eh?

First, we do worry about freezing temperatures. Shortly after we moved in the house had a "slab leak". Water pushed up from some broken pipe into the floor of the house. Our choices were no water at all, contracting somebody to excavate out under the concrete slab the house sits on for mega bucks, or reroute the water pipe from the meter near the street to the water heater. Only mega-buck, not mega-bucks for that choice. But nice new copper, guaranteed to outlive us and then some.

Just a small hitch however. The new route goes through a dirt trench from near the street to the carport (filled over on top of the pipe once connected), then up along the outer wall of the carport, into the attic and across 3/4 of it until it descends through a hole in the ceiling to connect with the water heater.  Despite insulation in the attic, there really is no climate control. Seven months of the year no cool water enters the house whatsoever. One month of the year we get cold water from the tap.  The other months are potluck. We don't worry about those. That one month, however, the copper pipe is exposed to outside temperatures, which we have recorded at least once as going down to 17 degrees. 

Would you believe in these cool nights we get "no burn" warnings? Can't burn longs in our fireplaces. It seems they worry that the cold temperatures trap the pollutants from combustion close to the ground. Too bad nobody warned our ancestors, eh? They might have inhaled all kinds of nasty stuff from those cold night fires. Better they... uhhh... froze with healthy pink lungs?

The attic does not freeze our pipe. Enough heat rises from the house to keep it thawed. We wrapped the outside pipe with that foam tube one does in cold climes to keep pipes from freezing. Heat tapes would be extravagant. But being Arizona, the tape which holds the pipe wrap together decomposes quickly, the wrap decomposes and gaps, so on those really cold nights when a freeze threatens, somebody runs water periodically. Luckily between the three of us, somebody is usually awake at any given time. I could have gone to the store and resupplied, but by the time it was needed I was again mostly stuck at home from whichever bug this time.

Our weather experts continually told us we wouldn't have a freeze here these last two weeks when there are warnings for outstate. They lied. Last night supposedly it only dropped to 39. I did my most scraping so far this morning. One thing I was smart enough to do when moving down here is keep the car window scraper/squeegee. It's been getting used. There are early seniors-only grocery store hours. I'm due at the club by or before 9 AM to unlock the club door on my assigned day of the week. I don't have to stay, particularly when I might be contagious and noticeably coughing. But I do have to unlock the door. So I have to drive there. This means I have to actually see out my car windows. All of them, since I back out over a sidewalk loaded with dog walkers onto a street with regular traffic, none of which seem to have either manners, functioning speedometers, or sense. (I even get passed when I stop at signs or red lights!)

You guessed it, windows frosted solid. It takes time to warm the engine, the wipers only do so much even once ice becomes water. Rubber does not like our heat. But once all 6 windows have turned white and need scraping, no local weather-geek can convince me we didn't have a freeze overnight. The ground may not have frozen, but places with no warmth source did. Lucky for me, by the time I get to the club, park and go in, leaving the car sit in the sun, it's almost pleasant inside once I get back in it.

Almost.

OK, OK, I recognize most of you are dealing with polar vortexes lately. My sympathies. For the snow also. But hey, gotta entertain myself somehow between 3-hour coughing bouts, right? And fyi, I'm getting better. I've been able to spend the last two nights sleeping in my bed, totally horizontal, rather than out in my semi-upright recliner with a dog warming my lap from under the blanket, well anchored by too-long-ignored toenails, gripping my skin through my PJs. I would have dealt with that too, just before... well, you heard that already.

Just A Little Mischief In The Dairy Section

Steve and I often go to the grocery store together, but since we each get our own groceries, on our own budgets, and to our individual tastes, we go our separate ways and meet back at the car. I use a regular cart, he uses a battery powered one. It's rare when we meet inside the store.

I was just selecting some cheese when I heard a couple of women saying, "Thank you for your service," sequentially to a customer coming up the aisle behind them. It happened to be Steve, wearing one of his military ball caps. He needed room to get past me so I pulled over to allow his shopping scooter a chance to pass. After a glance to see which cap it was this time, I chimed in with my own "Thank you for your service, sir." Just a tiny smile covered  my imitation of a lack of recognition.

When Steve had passed the first two and came up even with me, he stopped, leaned over, tugged on my shirt, and asked, "Can I come home with you?" Two heads snapped sharply up.

I moved away microscopically, saying, "We'll have to discuss that later," and now having room, proceeded to pass the two women and continue towards the next thing on my list.

One of them whispered at me as I passed, sounding concerned, "Do you know that man?" Was I in need of protection? Being coerced? Pestered?

Options flashed through my head. "He seems so harmless, doesn't he?" Or,  "(Big fake sigh) You know, I see him here occasionally, and every time he wants the same thing."  It would have been true. Misleading, sure, but true.

I opted for honesty. "For about 40 years." Whereupon Steve chimed in that we were married. After a bit more conversation, we went our separate ways.

We might have to do this again.

Can YOU Prove You're Not A Robot?

My email company dumped me onto Yahoo several years ago. They must have gotten tired of carrying email from former phone customers. It was enough "fun" dealing with the new format (though the address stayed the same), and adjusting to losing my archives. File was there, just empty. Apparently not everything transferred. Let's just admit too, that as a geezer I'm increasingly irritable at being presented with changes in software being sprung on me with no notice, no training, no knowledge of the new lingo and different techniques needed to accomplish the same things as before. Even worse when some of the things from before that I'd liked no longer have equivalents.

Not all improvements qualify as such.

Yesterday was one such example. I'm used to getting the "prove you're not a robot" challenges that spring up periodically. Usually they confine themselves to websites I'm not familiar with. I'm free to decide whether it's worth my time to continue on in my task or skip it. But this time it was just logging in to my own email. From my own computer. The exact way I've been doing it for... well since I was dumped over here by Frontiernet.net. So far the only real issue with the "dump" - since I don't even remember what I had archived so don't know if I miss it - is that more and more places do not recognize my address as valid and put up their own firewall. That particularly happens if I use a mail link. If I can get a full email address instead of a short link, I can get through. Otherwise....

Suddenly Yahoo demands I prove I am not a robot. (I've got a cold right now. Would a juicy sneeze do it?) What they give is a small  box of 9 pictures, 3 rows of 3. They are kinda dark, and pretty fuzzy. Really poor quality. It wouldn't matter if all the objects I am supposed to click on in the category requested were fairly full sized in the boxes. It does happen. But more often the object is a tiny piece of the background. Palm trees were a good example. You'd think living surrounded by them in neighbors' yards I'd be able to pick them out, right? I flunked. There were a couple shots of whole bunches of trees along a street, and there may have been a palm somewhere in the cluster. I couldn't tell. I couldn't find all the boats either. When they asked for cars, I had to dither for a bit wondering if some trucks in a dock area (I think) were technically considered "cars" or not. Or whether the front bumper of a school bus which squeaked into the next box of a picture counted as a bus? I thought yes. Apparently I'm a robot.

Anybody got some spare batteries?

I have had the misfortune of getting familiar with live chat "help" when I have a problem online. I gave it another try. When I got a window to type in I tried to complain politely, concisely, and clearly. I got a Brittany. She demanded to know my account number so she could help me.

Account number? What number? So far as I know I have no account number with Yahoo. Never seemed to need one. Could she explain?

It was on my bill.

Bill? I don't get a bill. Email is free. At least so far. So she wanted the old phone number - landline - my email was originally set up with. I knew the area code, the exchange, but the last 4 digits???? It's been well over a dozen years since all in the Minnesota house switched to cells and dropped the landline.

What was my email address then? (She couldn't ask that first?) I gave it to her, for whatever help it did.

I also asked why we had to go through that robot stuff. Couldn't we just chuck it? Waive something to get it removed? Nope, no joy there. She suggested, in that kind of a superior tone one hears when they know they are being talked down to by somebody more knowledgeable (true) that it would be a good idea for me to just zoom in on the boxes to see them better. 

First, why can't they send out clearer photos? Second, zoom in?  I added about 11 question marks after that to indicate my inexperience with zooming in on anything within my mailbox. Or my laptop, for that matter, aside from very particular websites. Her solution was to go use another search engine. Which did I have?  Keep in mind that she'd already told me not to leave her window. I was wondering how I could do both simultaneously, like the dilemma of when the cops tell you to keep your hands up and get out of the car at the same time, when first you had to unbuckle, turn the key off, unlock the door and push the handle. It was moot anyway, since I only use one search engine. It's the KISS version of using a computer, emphasis on the last "S".

Some of my answers / return questions to Brittany took a couple minutes. Invariably she'd send a "You still here?' while I was in the process. Finally I just sent her another long reply, informing her I was trying to keep my temper in our communication. Moreover I'd been raised to be polite and would she please stop asking, I'd let her know when I was going away. She finally suggested I do go away... just to try logging in to my email again. Use another tab while keeping her window open. (Already done.) So I went back and this time I found all the hydrants. Apparently there were no tiny ones hiding in the long distance street scenes. I'd never have spotted any if there had been. But lucky me, I got in! Good to my word, I returned, gave her my progress report, and encouraged her to pass along my strong negative feedback. Then I said "Good-bye." 

Now that I wasn't a robot any longer, I clicked on the X up in her corner and went back to my email.

Who knows about next time?

Another Scam In Wonderland

My cell rang. I answered. Pause. Click.  (We're off to a good start here. Typical pattern. Everybody buckled?) 

Me: "Hello?"

Another click. Hum. Then a male voice, unidentified accent. "Hello?"

My turn. I'm not giving anything away. "Hello." We could do this all day.

"Is this  ____________?" using my full name, though so many of them still haven't figured out that Heather isn't pronounced  Heee-ther, with a practically sibilant "th." I never bother correcting them.

"Yes." Make them work for it. 

"Hello, my name is "________ ______" ( entirely forgettable but sounds very American, in contrast with the accent) "...calling you from ______________" (medical sounding business name) "...about your diagnosis of _____________" (something I definitely don't have, never worry about, never had tests for, but hey, sounds scary. Must need immediate attention, right?)

Some days I play. Some days I just hang up. If I feel like playing, it can go something like, "Excuse me, but where did you get my medical information from?"

"It's right here in our records."

"What records?" 

"Your medical records."

"Those are supposed to be confidential. Who gave them to you?"

"I'm looking right here at your records, Heee-ther."

"I never gave you permission to see them."

"I have them right here on the desk in front of me." They never have a better answer than that, apparently hoping I'm panicked enough, or just plain stupid enough to buy into whatever they're trying to sell. I never have taken it far enough to find out. There are better things for my time. A hangnail, perhaps. Studying floaters in my eyes in bright light. Practicing a controlled belch, depending on my recent diet. Three dog hairs on the front of my shirt. Five more on my sleeve. No, the other sleeve. OK, both of them. I just checked. See? Important stuff to do.

Of course their scam never works. I have a firm grasp of my personal medical issues, who my Primary Doc is and what he may have referred me for within recent history.  (Practically nothing. Ever.) I also know whether I plan to follow through on some of those rare referrals if they're minor annoyances and/or intermittent. ( A definite maybe. Still thinking about it.) This company's wannabe scammer is definitely not on that short list. The only medical calls I do not personally initiate are scheduling ones from an imaging company, like when a mammogram is due, or a surgery center for something I'm very aware of. Those are more likely anyway to be via emails reminding me to call and schedule whatever. I always know the company name. And the surgery center is more likely to tell me what to bring, how long before the procedure I have to stop eating and drinking, which room to report to.

Today I wasn't quite ready to play. My cough was starting to signal me it was ready to kick in again, since I'd been talking a whole couple minutes. I pushed it back just long enough to snap, "Stop bothering me!" 

I'm sure that'll be effective, right?

Put it down on the calendar for expecting a repeat call in two or three months. Hope springs eternal in the scammer's breast, I guess. Likely another few dozen suckers will have been born in the meanwhile. With luck they can keep my scammers entertained during the interim.

What A Cold Feels Like

Stupid title, eh? Don't we all know what a cold feels like? For like the ten thousandth time already? 

Then again, I haven't actually had one in ages. Even before covid came along I'd quit being exposed to them. No toddlers around, those adorable little germ-wagons lovingly sharing everything they'd picked up in daycare, greeting you with wet kisses and sneezes every time they could. For years I'd lived in an extended time between generations, away from working where I'd interact with two dozen people a day or even more and at a time when nobody thought anything at all about going to work sick, because it was all just a cold, wasn't it? We got our flu shots, so it really was all just colds back then.

Once covid struck, hitting seniors the hardest, the world shut down. Masks got worn, mine still do mostly, special hours at stores were restricted to seniors, and we sheltered in place as much as possible. Shopping happened online whenever possible, and eating out was really drive through and taking home. Movies were whatever played on TV. In avoiding covid we also avoided the common cold.

We didn't miss them. Like a lot of things, if they're not present they do not exist. They need a reason to be noticed. It would almost be tempting to say they decided to find their way back to being noticed... with a vengeance. Our well refurbished immunity fell aside without exposure, and any returning cold had full rein in our bodies to do what it pleased.

Or at least that's how it feels. Maybe it's just that I'm this much older now and none of the above is true. Even though it is. But this latest cold is a humdinger. My nose is an unendingly dripping faucet. In two days I've gotten into my second box of tissues as well as my stash of fast food napkins in the car door pocket when I'm out and about. There's a hint of a sore throat, an occasional spike of about a degree of fever, a headache which wakes me up  from an otherwise sound sleep. My upper lip is so chapped it's split, and chapstick is barely helping. I started with four tubes of it laid in, left from last year, so at least I'm prepared. 

But since Steve got his cold first, I had to go out and buy 4 more boxes of tissues, and we're well into the second. Cough drops too. I buy those ahead, the sugarless kind because I can tuck one in my cheek as I go to bed for soothing and not worry about them rotting my teeth in the process. I returned south at summer's end with the two full bags I took north, ordered two more from a service Steve gets which provides him a budget each quarter for free pharmacy supplies, and still had to actually buy two more large bags yesterday. It's not that they stop the coughing. Any deep breath, or a normal conversation, will set it off. I presume because it needs to be done, clearing out the lungs of whatever is working to fill them up if one doesn't. Coughing is necessary. Mostly the cough drops just make it feel better I guess.

I'd forgotten the bit about those two or three days in a cold's life where you can't taste anything. Eating is done from habit. I might as well clear out the pantry of everything I hate the taste of now while I can't actually taste it. Of course I still pop that chocolate mint in my mouth or sprinkle extra garlic on something anyway. I even drank some of my very favorite diet root beer which I'd finally found on the store shelf after it disappeared back in September due to supply chain issues, then had to remind myself to use up the stuff Steve gave me because it was the wrong flavor for him too and now I won't even notice. It'll be just wet and fizzy either way. At least there's no temptation to stuff myself with holiday goodies at the moment.

All in all, aside from tonight's headache, possibly a side effect from the Nyquil I bought this morning and have been dosing myself with all day, and I almost never get headaches these days, all my symptoms are just inconvenient. The piles of soggy used tissues need dumping to make room for the next pile about every half hour, and I can't chat long with people I'd like to talk to, including Steve, Rich, and the dog. I have to remember to go to the bathroom more often than I think I need to because of the coughing. It's a very good reminder when I forget. And I try not to feel sorry for myself because I missed the club party last night. I don't know yet if my tree won one of the prizes or whose trees did. I emailed my very brief speech to a fellow officer (assorted thanks, that kind of thing)  to say in my stead, and didn't have to wrap the things I bought for the present exchange because they are still here. Somehow, I was smart enough to buy things I'd actually like to get for myself instead of coming home with something I have no use or desire for, so that's actually a win, I guess. Last year what I got was a string of Christmas lights with a battery to wear as a necklace. Seriously. So another win, staying home, right?

But I still won't know if one particular woman drank enough wine that, like last year, she got the courage to join a group of other women on the dance floor for some fun. (Why don't the men dance?) She had a particularly good time last year during "YMCA" with all the right arm moves, so much that it was repeated until they all ran out of steam. I had noticed that that song was on the request list in the club last week for songs from our hired DJ. I also won't know how much of a problem another member's husband may have been because of combined severe short term memory issues and his loud voice "compensating" for increasing deafness. It happens. Several members use the club to get temporary respite from caregiver duties. Most of them become widows after a few years or find a way to afford long term care. Or both. Few men lose wives the same way, but that happens as well of course. The annual party is often the only time we meet the spouses, though a few couples both join, and some members simply are single.

I do hope all had fun. I'm sure the potluck was fantastic, since it always is. Since I have a key I'll pop into the club during a time when nobody is there to bring home my tree without sharing my cold, and see what's what there. With luck and good self care I should be back in a week and find out how it all went.

Annual Hair Pulling

I have to be careful, as there is less hair to pull these days. But I go through this every year, under the delusion that it just has to get easier this time, right? I should be experienced. The process shouldn't change.

As if!

I'm referring to the annual holiday cards. The photo was picked out as a top contender the second I started shooting the very brief scene. The only other contender I've already posted here, so what would be the point? And, no, I'm not duplicating the card's photo here, even though I know how. I'll just tell you about the frustration.

I started out in Walgreens. It's closest. There is one photo machine, and it has a chair, which is a bonus. It also became apparent very quickly that it had super high prices for the amount of cards we want to send out. While I was letting the cost sink in, I got a recorded phone call from Walmart that my prescription, ordered just two hours earlier, was ready to pick up. That's my excuse for that decision being made.

Note that I've caught Steve's bug, though managed a milder version. It's enough that we'll all be missing the club X-mas party tonight, because I won't share it. One of the people I'd be closest to caught covid early and has had ongoing lung issues ever since. She can't be around people coughing , and by evening, I can't stop. Typical cold for me. Hospital for her.

We've also run nearly out of sugarless cough drops, tissues, and several other things needed to handle a second cold in the family, so Walmart was a planned shopping stop. May as well add photo cards to the list. After getting everything else on my list, and still managing not to cough inside the store yet, and not having my nose drip all over inside my mask, I headed to the photo department. Cool: 4 machines. Not cool: no stools or chairs. I decided to head home and not push my luck avoiding sharing my germs. While driving I finalized my plan for how it should look and what it should say in my head.

Now that is always an invitation for frustration. They never provide what exactly it is I want. The first thing every year is to avoid Christmas themes. We celebrate, but culturally, not religiously. A tree with decorations and sending gifts is fine. We even listen to some traditional music, with Nutcracker top of the list, and anything else for the nostalgia of it. We watched "A Christmas Story" on TV last night. Somehow it was much funnier than when I watched it the first time. But anyway, the card theme can be winter, or Happy Holidays, or whatever. Much is celebrated this time of year, including the New Year. So something for everybody.

Once that is selected for, I needed a 5x7 option rather than a 4x8 one. It's a single photo, not a collage. The photo is squarish, so the 5x7 had to be vertical. A horizontal presentation cut the photo in half and not the best half. Everybody insists that text goes across the top and/or bottom, leaving a narrow slice of the photo. I had to find something else. Up to this point is wasn't too difficult, although the Walmart website kept insisting on offering boxed commercial cards instead of something from the photo studio no matter which option from their menu I selected for. Eventually I decided to start my search by department and not item.

You think I'll remember that for next year?

I thought I found the right card - right enough, anyway - and started trying to put my text on it. Everything went wrong with that. It wouldn't give me a way to delete existing text. I couldn't type new text, or get it in the right place. It's default setting was to place it over the photo! My only choice was to shut down my laptop because there was no option to exit or cancel otherwise. After cooling off, waiting, then turning my computer back on after a forced quit, it returned to the exact same page. I just needed to go back to my Firefox menu and pick a totally new site to visit. Weather was a good choice. It's quit raining, for a while.

I decided to try Walgreens online. $Ouch! Then Target. Slightly cheaper $ouch! Back to Walmart then. This time I got into a different selection of cards, finally found one that would do. and fought my way through it. I do mean fought! It still didn't want to put things where I wanted them to go, made me fight for the size of font which reset my previous choices of where and what to say as well as sticking it back over the photo. At least this time I could detour back to a previous page, work my way through again, and eventually make progress.

Final choice: home delivery? Or store pick-up? I thought home delivery would be fine,  until I was just about ready to pay. That's when they got around to letting me know it was guaranteed to be here by... January 11! Luckily it let me change my mind. They want to text me when my order is ready in the store, but I didn't provide a phone number for a phone which doesn't text. It should be done right about now as I finish this. I plan to have lunch first, hungry or not and with no taste buds functioning at the moment, Then I'll ask Steve once he wakes if he's interested in coming along. Finally I'll see if my nose has dried a bit in the meantime or not. 

But cards should be out this week. That will be the easy part of all this. Until the bad addresses come back. It's always people we can't contact any other way. One would think the list gets shorter each year, but it gets longer. Kids grow up, move out. New friends are made. If you think you are missing your card from us after another week, send one with a GOOD return address. We haven't moved.

"Dog-Boning"

While in the interim between the club's Fall Festival and next Monday's X-mas party (where official duties are I basically just attend and say a few words), I have been back working with glass. The pieces needed for me to finish the latest wind chimes for gifts are ready for assembly, one needing some wood finishing for the top support (saguaro rib) and the other with a circular top needing its plan for putting it together.

I had a good supply of glass left in large pieces, along with a request to teach wind chimes to fellow club members. With the newest diamond drill bits performing up to my standards, I was ready to take advantage of the hiatus by finishing cutting and baking pieces of glass to finish off the supply. 

Or so I thought. But the person asking me to take over the class she'd been teaching also donated a huge amount of large glass pieces to the club to work with for the classes. The original reason wind chimes had been developed as a class was a way to get rid of quantities of donated glass. The club had been doing glass fusion in small pieces for jewelry so far, but for that you MUST know the COE of the glass, aka coefficient of expansion. Glass expands and contracts during heating and cooling. It is after all, a liquid, just a mostly very slow moving one. It's long been noted that 100-year-old houses with equally old windows in them have glass that's thinner at the top, fatter at the bottom. It flows. Downhill. Wherever that piece of glass on a flat horizontal surface thinks that is.

We speed that process along at kiln temperatures. The glass goes into the kilns with cut edges, sometimes ground ones with the right equipment. But in the kilns, glass has a mind of its own as to where it is going to flow while it melts,  expands, and contracts. It flows, sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes comically, cartoonishly. A straight cut piece can curve into a crescent. Another piece won't move at all, won't get a top gloss, just sits and hardens, keeping any jagged bit that was left unless ground down later.

With all those different reactions, the second rule of glass fusion is to NEVER EVER mix pieces with different COEs. (The first is everything you need to learn about safety.) If you put a 90 on top of a 96 and hope they fuse together, most likely they will shatter upon touch once cooled. Or a 96 on top of a 90. It's not guaranteed, but very likely, so why waste time, glass, and the energy to run a liln to risk it?

Donated glass almost never comes into the club with any COE notations. We buy ours from a manufacturer's catalog to be sure, and mark it immediately before setting it out for sale. We can't combine unknown with unknown, so have to find uses for single pieces of it. Wind chimes are great for the task. We might also do slumping, where a large piece of glass sits on top of a coated, hollowed out ceramic form and slumps down into it, making a candy dish, candle holder, or whatever else the form was designed for. 

But even with flat cut single pieces, you get whatever the glass gives. Sometimes it's "dog-boning", forming whole new shapes. A long rectangle might contract in the middle and expand on the ends, like a dog bone. Hence the name.

The blue piece in this photo is a very mild version of this, barely enough to notice. The purple and cream again is very mild in reshaping itself, but also shows how, with known matching COEs from purchased glass, one piece laid on another can just sink in smoothly. Note that the "smoothly" part is not guaranteed, sometimes they just stick to each other and maintain height differences. The three green pieces are extreme examples of dog-boning.  The two with narrow necks and wide opposite ends originally were trapezoids, slight difference in width top versus bottom. The bottom left one was cut in a diamond shape. Everything shown had four straight line cuts before coming out of the kiln. You learn to live with a level of chaos. That, or go do something else.

Oh X-mas Tree, Oh X-mas Tree

 It's finally done. It's not as good in real life as it was in my brain as I put it together, but it's taken all the time I plan to put in on it. Tomorrow it'll be taken over to the club - Rich will carry it gently while I open the doors - and I can drop it off in relative privacy. It'll be identified, like all the other trees, by just a number for the competition. I just hope everybody looks and doesn't touch, since the tiny chain I used to simulate tinsel tangles in EVERYTHING! I've seen a couple of the early trees already entered as of Friday morning, and really like one of them. The other seems to rely on having some kind of light on its bottom for its special something. Not sure if that will show during judging, since that lasts over 4 days and batteries have limited life spans. The red paper at the bottom is the list of rules for everybody.

Here's the basic form:

 

Shadows turned out to be an issue, not noticed until I was taking the completed-tree shots, so there was no chance to do a better image of the form than this. It's 4 wires stapled on to a wood form, wired together again at the top, and curled around at the top with enough curve to prevent scratching while handling and hold any decorations added. One of the first entries submitted has 5 wire stars at the top, one hanging from each loop.

This is my final, horizontal wires rounding out the tree, colored wire chains winding around to define (loosely) the tree shape. A double facing wire poinsettia ornament is wired onto the top of the tree. Under that, a first wire garland is wound top to bottom as an impression of colored ornaments on green tree. A "tinsel" garland overlies that, and some wire stars and red/white wire candy canes are secured here and there on the tree.

Finally, a close of up the base, now covered with felt in two layers with cutouts in the bottom one to eliminate bumps from wire and staples. Then a fan of more candy canes, a box with a red wire bow, and a sleeping cat on the bottom, emerging from my Acoma pottery effigy collection  for a spot more welcoming than a plastic stand on a shelf.

I still haven't decided if this will be the holiday card photo for this year. Had it matched my imagination, no question. Even redoing the decorations a couple times didn't correct for what the mind demanded should be. It takes up a space about 16" tall on the dining room table, much more comfortable for me there than still inhabiting my mind as I try to fall asleep making mental improvements. 

I still have wind chimes to put together. And mail.