Which Microwave Never To Buy Ever Ever Again?

Yes, that indeed is the question . But before answering I need to describe the "why?" never to buy the same one again. 

It was cheap, at a time when the budget was even cheaper, so I grabbed it because we needed one. For me, needing a microwave means "RIGHT NOW!" It's where I do nearly all my cooking. Not all my meals get cooked, like sandwiches, or munching on a peanut/Triscuit/fruit or yogurt/fruit combo. From my many years behind the wheel, pausing for a fast chunky soup from a can for lunch,  I don't even feel a need to decant the soup and heat it up. But other things need it. So when the old one showed its age, off I went to the store. $40 plus tax later, home I arrived with this one.

First thing - not a deal breaker - is it's a 700 watt model. We just adjust cooking times. No biggie. Next in importance is it's black. Sitting in a dark corner of the kitchen, it means we always need a light on. So much for some of the energy savings.  Even the light isn't that much help so we never actually learned what those tiny-print  buttons say. We cook everything on full, and in 30 second increments. Third, still not a deal breaker, is the door swings open from the wall side of that corner, into where your plate sits rather than away from it.

But I was cleaning the inside this afternoon after the mac & cheese overran the cup it comes in when it boiled. We can't tell in the dark so we always keep a napkin on the revolving glass tray, and clean when it's wet. The mac & cheese iss fine, by the way, especially after stirring in a packet of lemon pepper tuna. Anyway, I wiped and scrubbed the glass plate, lifted out the metal ring, and started scrubbing the floor of the microwave. Or so I thought.

I turned the full set of kitchen lights on. That black/brown dirt ring under the path the metal ring's wheels take just wasn't getting clean. Whatever that dirt was, it even was catching in my scrubber. Looking closer, it wasn't really dirt at all, at least not food dirt. It was the paint coating peeling up from the wheel track! The brown was rust, and the black? I don't want to know, just a bit scared to find out.

We'd used this machine for a little over a year, figuring for those months when we were snowbirds. 

I think I better hit the store before supper. Or at least in time to safely heat my morning water for mocha coffee. But the microwave I won't buy this time will the the one which is not the cheapest, not black, not a 700 watt instead of 1100 watt model, and given a choice has a door opening from its left front. The brand?

As I said when I started this post, that is indeed the question. I've searched the entire machine, and it appears the manufacturer was so ashamed of their product that they never put its name on it! Not anywhere! It's box of course long since went to recycling. It's receipt wouldn't have given a brand, just enough letters from "microwave" or perhaps "700 watt mic" so if I returned it the same day we'd almost know how much money I was to get back. (I've tried to interpret those store receipts when I add items for Steve in my list and he needs to pay me back. Not pretty.)

Best I can say right now is I'm looking for a recognizable brand with what we need for features. Something the manufacturer isn't ashamed of. Tomorrow is a big day for me in the club, and I really, really need my mug of microwaved mocha water.

But right now my mac & cheese is getting cold.

Dish vs. Direct TV: Transition Observations

 We just switched over - or should I say back, again? This time we dropped Dish after they doubled the price the second our contract ended, and we got a price from Direct a couple dollars lower than our regular bill had been from Dish. We tend to do this every two years. Both are owned by AT&T, but some kind of regulations keep them from offering identical services. As a result we have both satellite dishes on our house roof, pointing in different directions. Even after asking the first time we switched for them to remove the old dish, they refused. Apparently it's cheaper to leave the dish on the roof even if they don't know if we will be back. Oh well. When Direct showed up last week for resuming our service with them after two years, the installer spent several minutes on our roof making some changes in the equipment to bring it up to date. Our reception is great, clearer than I recall from last week.

We're getting used to the new-to-us-again-this-time system, and find some things better than the others, some not so much. Of course it would be ideal if both companies had the best of both combined, but that's not going to happen. But while I still have Dish's system using their remote ingrained as a habit, I want to compare the two. The remotes are different, so any switch means getting used to where our fingers need to go this time. We hit a lot of wrong buttons...  this is our excuse and we're sticking to it for as long as we need! Actually, this remote has curved sides instead of straight ones, so the the way it fits in the hand makes being in the right area punching keys much easier for muscle memory. We just need familiarity instead of needing to look through all the new buttons' locations.

Most obvious is the change in which channels are at which station numbers. All the broadcast channels are the same. 3 and 5 are still CBS, 8 is PBS, 12 is NBC, 15 is ABC. Oh yes, easily forgotten is that 10 is FOX. Other favorite stations have different numbers, and since Direct didn't come through on their promise to email me a station guide, we have to hunt for MSNBC, Cooking, SCIFY, and Animal Planet networks as just some examples. Once we locate and set a timer we can go in to any recorded program and the info gives us the number we can go to the guide for if we want to do further searches on that channel.  Or we do what I did and wrote the number down once we found each station. I did take the precaution of writing down all our set timers on the Dish DVR before having it disconnected, so we'd remember to set them all on the new one. Both systms have the problem of not setting any timer on a program not aired within about 8 days, and January is a great time for many regular programs to be on hiatus. PBS offers the additional complication of broadcasting many favorites in 6 or 10 episode seasons, and then replacing them with something else. You have to know to look for shows returning on a regular basis to set that timer the first time in either system after a switch. Setting a recurring timer on Direct is easier than on Dish. Direct just need a second tap of the key you just pushed to record. Dish offers you a menu to go through, not onerous, just a bit extra.

One bonus of Direct is that some of those PBS programs wind up on Ovation ( for one example) and it hunts them down and records them too. Dish requires you to know everywhere a show airs and set another timer there. I'm currently watching early seasons of some favorites I only discovered recently, so not only are they available, I can catch up on the characters' early history. It also solves an ongoing problem with one particular program, Midsomer Murders as  aired on PBS. Ovation records it as a single program lasting 2 1/2 ours, adding commercials. (I can avoid those with fast forward.) PBS airs it as two consecutive programs with the same title and Dish would only record the first, ignoring the second even when there was plainly the "record" symbol on it, thinking it had already just recorded it the previous hour. It gets frustrating only getting half a program every time. I'd have to be paying attention and record the second half of a future airing. Mostly I gave up. Now it's recorded as a unit, so I just have to be sure to watch when I'm not sleepy because it can be soporific and I can miss it all anyway.

Dish actually made timers easier in a few ways. We had access to a list of timers already set, and variations we could add to them, such as start time and end time variations,  whether we wanted all airings or just new programs, and could get a list of everything scheduled to record for the upcoming day or two. We could stop any particular program without killing the whole timer. 

If we wanted to turn closed captions on or off, on Dish it was two button pushes. Direct makes us go through about 15 button pushes - when I have more patience, I'll actually count. It's into menu, down to the bottom of the list of options, across another 8 buttons to "accessibility", tap the arrow down, select, retreat back to the major options list, before you can exit and return to your program. Unless you do it during a commercial you want to skip, it also requires pausing the program and reversing that once you return. Come to think of it, it's gotta be more than 20 buttons. As I said, when I think about it, I'll actually count. 

We tend to have captioning on during scripted programs, and off during any thing live, like news. Scripted programs print out what the script called for, giving us a chuckle when actors go off script, or accidentally swear, but making what we read make sense. Steve's hearing is not as good as mine these days, so he relies on it more, and I appreciate not needing the volume blasting while he can still know what's going on. Both of us appreciate it when somebody has an accent, a soft voice, or speaks in a foreign language like "Anika", a new favorite crime drama on PBS with a main character who is autistic and still learning to cope with lots of people and whom those people are learning to appreciate on her job. It's all in French, so all subtitled anyway. With its conversation pretty rapid-fire, rewind is also appreciated. News programs on the other hand never manage to keep up with what is being said, so hilarity or frustration trump understanding in their captioning. When closed captioning covers whatever news banners the news networks offer, neither is understood. Both company's captioning is the same, just the length of time to change back and forth that is different.

We have some new channels with Direct that we have missed with Dish, like BBC and National Geographic. I haven't found yet what we may be missing in exchange. Meanwhile we're looking forward to seeing the newest seasons of Doctor Pol, Dr. Oakley, and whatever else we find. After watching those, and how real vets treat real animals, we tend to criticize how TV dramas get it wrong. It's like real cops picking apart police shows for all the awful ways they get it wrong.

Dish let us organize recorded programs into folders for the one person who wanted to watch it. Since it's just the two of us, it's not really a loss. We both know only he likes the cooking shows and only I like the political ones. Mostly we both like the same dramas, though Steve will go through marathons of certain old programs that I've already seen the first three times but he's not tired of yet. (Hint: Chicago Fire.) Since we communicate well, it's not an issue, and we negotiate either way on which ones get watched when the other isn't in the room and which we plan to watch together without needing a folder to tell us. When we're up in Paul's house, it comes in very handy, and he keeps Dish with its folders. (Side note: Paul added extra sound equipment to his set-up, as well as a PlayStation which runs DVDs, so there is another relearning process for the extra buttons on his remote.)

Dish also gave us a day to retrieve a program that got deleted from its "trash" cache. Direct gives us a couple seconds to push a second request to delete something, in case that button was accidentally pushed or somebody wanted to recheck something first, but then gone is gone. Making it easier to delete something on Direct is actually an advantage when we don't want to skip through the last three minutes of commercials at the end of the program, or for any reason, run all the way to the end before deleting. We just have a little red delete button on the remote and it's gone right now.

Speaking of skipping content, Dish gave us a straight 30-second jump. Blink! Direct gives us a view, very fast, of what was in that 30 seconds so we know when to stop skipping because the program is back. Commercial breaks take up more or less time than we anticipated, likely to fool whatever system we have developed to skip through them, and we now know immediately and by how much. If we needed with Dish to make a large jump either way, we had a 300 X speed option. Direct is a little slower. But since most of those super fast jumps were to get to the end to delete it, we mostly don't need it.

There was a decided difference in getting things started up. Two years ago, Dish had an actual printed channel guide, with full lists of what was included in basic and each step up in choices in programs. Options were discussed without pressure. This time Direct was determined to sell us the "Entertainment" package because it gave us football, even though I told the India call center person on the phone that we don't watch sports and just want the basic. When out installer showed up, it was promised that "when they got back to the office" it would be fixed for us. Following up on that, I discovered it hadn't been done, so another long call to the call center. Those always annoy me because their personnel are so totally scripted that once they think they know what you need, they are off and running with some long paragraph. When their answer doesn't match your question, yelling "Shut Up!" as a last resort to interrupt them is the only thing I've found that actually gets their attention. I presume some supervisor is standing over their shoulder making sure they "do it right" by the script. I did finally get what I needed, the cheaper package which fills our needs, and welcomed the email requesting feedback with a box for a written (unscripted!!) explanation of why you answered the way you did.

Our installer came in with an "account manager" from ATT who was determined to sell Steve on switching his phone and network to ATT and it would be cheaper. Turns out Steve would have an upgraded phone for less than a couple dollars difference. That was still OK with Steve, but his current company wasn't willing to work with the ATT guy who kept insisting he was Steve but had to pause and ask Steve for each piece of information needed to make the switch over. Seriously, if you hear "I am Steve" followed by "How do you spell your last name?" or "What's your birthday?", wouldn't you be a tad reluctant to make changes on somebody's account? The ATT guy promised to call later that day to finish the process. Steve called him much later and there was an excuse. But "tomorrow after their meeting, say 9:00" and no call, then in the afternoon, the "meeting was still going on" and no call even over the weekend. On Tuesday Steve was still trying to connect, despite the improvements on the ATT phone being in software he doesn't and won't use, and the savings being nearly nil. He took his phone to bed with him late that morning, waiting for the latest promised call back. We agreed if it didn't happen it's not really worth the hassle.

However, that same guy promised, as an "upsale" a three month free trial of three movie channels which we could / should end just before the time ran out so they'd stay free. Of course the hope is customers forget the date and they get charged the premium rates, or actually decided to keep the upgrade. After our other issues, do you want to venture an opinion on whether we even have those channels yet? Yeah, I don't see any pigs up in the sky either.

I'm just wondering how to get ahold of the right people at ATT and let them know just how "helpful" their account manager really is. We have his business card. Perhaps he shouldn't leave that behind if he's not going to come through with what he glibly offers.

Meanwhile in less than a week the remote is becoming habit and we're settling in.

In A Big Hurry

I was trying to get out of the house. I'd promised yesterday to let another club member in on Saturday, since I needed to be there too, and she didn't have a key.

 Sometimes when you are working with glass it's a matter of when glass goes in the kiln, size of the project, exact type of project, which step you are in, and your window of kiln access, all together, which rule when you need to be there.  She was in between fusing and slumping, had a limited window for kiln use before another person had reserved it, needed to pull her fused piece out and put the next step in motion. There is only one large kiln for glass and hers is a large project. I'm lucky in that my project pieces are fairly small and I can fit multiple pieces in either of the two smaller club kilns. I was working with both of those over the weekend when nobody had those reserved. (I pull my latest batch of glass out tomorrow morning so the next person can use one kiln.)

We had agreed on a time to arrive Saturday morning. I'd be arriving first, and  would open her large kiln door so her project would be as cool as possible before she arrived to take it out to work on its next step. The large kiln takes a long time to cool. It happens to significantly slow down one's progress when one burns their hands. Plus, it reflects poorly on the safety standards in the club. For those and other reasons, I was needing to get out of the house quickly.

My phone rang, and it was a friend I haven't spoken with for a while. Between various viruses and her battling depression and a family emergency, I missed her. So I'm tying shoes, locating all the things I need to gather before leaving, taking the dog out for a minute, and making sure all the things which automatically go into my pockets by habit make their way into my pockets right now while I'm carrying on a conversation full of details like when we can maybe meet, how's that family emergency, and would my old scooter be of use to that family member having an emergency if she could afford new batteries in it? All this happened in perhaps three minutes, with Steve in his recliner listening to my end of the conversation.

Suddenly my hand stopped, not finding the last item I needed sitting in my pocket yet. I looked in its usual space. Not there. I looked at the table, but it wasn't sitting there. Did I leave it in a pocket yesterday? Still trying to maintain my conversation, trying to figure out how to deal with two issues at the same time and make some kind of sense, it hit me.

Of course, I interrupted my own sentence to blurt out, "OMG, I've been trying to find my phone!" Her laughing reaction and the look Steve gave me made a perfect matched set!

Marrying Your Mother

They say - OK, they say a lot of things, many nonsense. But they also say that boys grow up to marry their mothers (aka somebody just like them) and girls grow up marrying their Daddy. Thinking about it over the years, I think both my brother and I wound up marrying our mother. We just picked different facets of her. He wound up the winner - if that concept applies. At any rate, he picked out her best traits, while I picked out her worst for my 1st marriage. His wife is smart, organized, competent, sociable, and rises to the occasion for the long haul when need arises, like Mom. My ex was controlling, critical, demeaning. We each, my brother and I, knew different sides of Mom. We were born only two years apart, and found two very different people to pick in a mate.

My relationship with Mom was complicated. Years later when I had babies she told me how much she loved me, but had read from "The Expert" Doctor Spock that it was a bad thing to give a young child too much affection. (On the contrary, when learning how to raise mine, I learned it was impossible to give a very young child too much affection. They cry because they need something. Even if it is "just" attention, that is a legitimate need.) I grew up needing attention, but getting scolded for most of what I did to get it. One of those things was telling stories, inventing whatever in order to achieve that goal. I still tell stories - go figure, since you're reading this - but much more carefully these days.

It wasn't just attention seeking that garnered criticism. It seemed everything I did, every time I managed to get Mom's attention, even doing my best to dodge her all-seeing eye, I was in trouble. I no longer have an idea where cause and effect overlap. I just got used to feeling like the black sheep of the family. That only changed when I finally was able to buy my very own home in my 40s: now I was an actual adult! It wasn't a linear change, but came and went. And the time I told my parents something that happened to me as a child, at the prompting of my therapist, before that conversation even ended they decided that maybe it just didn't happen. This was after filling in some of my memory blanks for me surrounding the incident, minutes earlier.

I did escape her for nearly a year. Mom got sick. I grew up knowing she'd needed electric shock therapy, having overheard a conversation she had with some other adults (who? don't know.) describing how it felt afterwards. Later she totally denied it ever happened, yet everything I knew after then points back to it as the most logical explanation. Mom was raised by a narcissistic mother and a very quiet father. (She "married her father", my dad being a quiet personality.) Grandma lied about a lot of things, and I heard once as an explanation for something about Mom, which I can no longer remember what it explained, because the explanation shocked my young mind and overrode everything else, that Mom and her sister were punished as children by being shut up in the dark basement cellar along with bugs and spiders and whatever rodents may have been there, for however long Grandma wanted to leave them there. Assuming half of this is true, it easily would explain her need later for that kind of therapy.

During that time, two very different things happened. I was sent to live with, sequentially, two of Daddy's sisters' families. I got to attend kindergarten, something not existing in rural Minnesota at that time, meaning my brother missed it. Being older and in school full days, he stayed with our father. I suddenly got attention. Adults talked to me, taught me. I learned to write my name, tie my shoes, make a bed, wash my face properly (ahhh, ivory soap!), cross the street safely. In school I got to play with clay and finger paint. Best of all, I was taught the rules by the adults around me rather than scolded for not knowing them yet. It was the first and last time I was given my very own Easter basket and a dressy set of clothes and new shoes for Easter. There is a very rare photo of me as a child, all dressed up, holding that basket.

The other thing that happened is Mom changed, or at least I think she did, losing a lot of her memories. There were no family stories, except from Daddy's side. If I asked questions she didn't have answers, and the message was clear: don't ask. The questions were to be avoided, they weren't important. Other things were. I needed to get good grades in school, put things away, stay out of trouble. That last was ironic as I always seemed to be in trouble. Any kind of conflict whatever, any breaking of a rule even that nobody had bothered to explain, was my fault. I knew better than to come to her with a problem since I knew it would be my fault. There was never advice, just fault finding, and the fault was always mine even when I knew otherwise.

The only exception to that stands out clearly. I had just started 4th grade, in a fairly new school since we'd just moved into town, so the school didn't really have an academic history of me. The teacher decided to sort kids into learners and non-learners by having us read from one of those two inch thick story books that were supposed to last the full school year. (I always had mine read in a couple weeks and spent reading time totally bored.) This time however she didn't get to me and a couple other students before she placed us in our groups. It was agony listening to other kids try to sound out a story, word by painfully mispronounced word. I was miserable. After a few days Mom noticed. I explained why, fully expecting like every other time I had a problem with a teacher that she'd tell me it was my fault. But when she heard that some teacher put her kid in with the slow group, she gave that teacher what-for and I got transferred.

In case you are wondering, most of my teachers disliked me because I was more widely read than they were in certain things and asked questions of the "but what about ______ who says _______ is true" kind. I wasn't trying to embarrass them. I genuinely was looking for better information and just wound up pointing out their gaps in information, or at least topics they weren't prepared for, instead. I'd just figured they had to be smarter than I was, right? How would I learn if I didn't ask, since so little was volunteered?

Bedtime rituals were constant. We'd get into pajamas, get under the covers in our own rooms, and Mom would come in, talk to us, and turn out the light. Her version of talking to me was telling me everything I did wrong that day. Then she wanted a hug. I was only 8 when I turned away from that hug. Somehow my young self figured out the hug was supposed to be love and everything else leading to that point was the opposite. It was dishonest and I refused to be dishonest in that particular way. It took decades to be able to explain it to myself. I certainly couldn't explain it to either of my parents, and they both prodded me about what was going on. I knew Mom was hurt, and I was still unable to change my behavior. I hadn't had enough of the world explained to me yet to know. Not a clue.

Fast forward to college, and meeting a guy who - finally! - was actually interested in me. I was warned against him by others in my dorm, but nobody ever said why. Both my parents were the same way, including not explaining what they saw in him. Since I didn't understand it, had no context for it, I didn't see the issue. I just explained it to myself as some silly version of romantic star-crossed lovers or similar drivel.Years later I figured out that he'd married me because I had all the traits he hated in his mother. He couldn't take it out on her, but I was naive and needy and he could take it out on me. She was grossly obese. He criticized every bit of food I put in my mouth, and of course I put on weight. She was smart and competent in lots of ways, so I couldn't be. She was a good cook, so he wound up making me to this day hate to cook because it was always wrong. If every I made something right, doing it again meant just not enough variety in his menu - we'd had that last month already. And on and on. I simply built up my walls in defense, as this was a familiar place to be. I built good walls. At least, until I saw what he was doing to our kids.

I finally got free of him, and spent years fixing myself so I could begin to fix my kids. Only they know how belated that was and whether it worked, or worked well enough. There's a difference between removing abuse and treating it. Not treating it leads to repetition. I've been dealing with the after effects for decades. 

So why write this now?

When a good friend of mine died recently, her daughter handed me the poetry books I'd written and given out back in the early '80s. I recently picked up one and noted that post-it notes were bookmarks for a few particular poems, and curious, read them again to see why. Then I went through the entire volume. At the time it all got written I was divorced, in a support group, and the non-judgmental support and healing I found there, the listening to other people in order to learn about me, all combined to start poems pouring out of me. A couple poems dealt with my childhood and my mom, highlighting a lot of pain, opening even more healing. Now, because I am who I am, it needed to be written down again, this time in prose, and put together as well as I'm able to in order to make sense of it all. In the process, I try to explain where needed, and maybe to forgive... where understanding increasingly allows.

I Need More Wire

 I'm just about through the big first-of-the-year administrative duties in the club. There are some leftover duties with a longer deadline that I have been putting off. For instance, purging jewelry. Just mine, of course, as everybody with stuff for sale in the store has to take care of their own. We have a club rule that items get two years being in the store, all other obligations being met. Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 28, everything unsold dated 2020 and earlier has to be pulled out by the artist. (Hey, we're artists! Who knew?)

I have a lot of stuff in the store. so for me I go around to the different cases, find things I recognize, and check the items' numbers against my cards  for before/after the OK date. Right now, any of mine with an item number of 475 or less goes home with me, after some paperwork and a witness. (I'm in the upper 600s now. Busy year last year.) I pretty much know what styles I was using back then, so I look for those first. If the numbers are in that range, it gets pulled. If not, I put it back in the case, displayed to its best advantage of course. I've made it through the revolving earring cases, the front window, the back wall cases, and the far end where copper hides out. That has taken parts of two days. It's labor intensive. It's always done during a day when I'm there for other things as well, so there's a limit on my energy and patience for the task. It's one of the reasons we don't demand everybody does it in a week.  Another reason is waiting to the end of February gives our snowbirds a couple months extra in the few months they are here.

Sometime this next week, if given time because of another busy schedule, I'll go through the silver jewelry cases. After that is when I'll finally pull the last of the cards for old stuff and go through them, one item at a time, trying to match my often incomprehensible description with the specific piece needing pulling. It's the hardest part, so that's why I start with recognizing my own stuff first. Those cards then go to the person in charge of deleting the items from inventory on the computer.

With all that needing to get done, I haven't been teaching any workshops, even after completely recovering from the "December virus", whatever is was (not covid). Part of me has been itching to make new stuff, play with new ideas, put in new stuff to sell. Once everything is back home of the old stuff, I can go through it and see what changes / improvements are possible before resubmitting it to try again. No sense wasting it all. Some pieces are set aside for giving away instead. Steve is now wearing a leather and copper cuff that either didn't attract anybody or not the person with the right sized wrist. All my other ones sold.  Some things in retrospect were priced wrong, or poorly executed, or just plain embarrassing as a bad idea.  Some will have parts recycled and others tossed as scrap, though sterling scrap is meticulously collected for exchange/sale to the company which sent it originally. That bottle is getting pretty heavy now.

Most improvements have to wait. It's not just time and energy. Some of it is simply cost. I tend to use up supplies needed to make multiples of a project I'm fascinated with for a while. New sterling ear wires are an example. I tend to make earrings till I'm out of ear wires, and even wholesale they cost by the pair. I have lots of copper ones left but I don't use those much any more. 

Perhaps I should. I taught a workshop a couple months back on a particular style of earring, made two pairs along with my students, both because they needed to see it being done, and becuase one pair is never enough to really teach some techniques. Mine were submitted for sale and didn't make it into the cases for display but got sold within the club first. Copper, green "seaglass" beads and dark green crystals on handmade headpins sure were pretty in the herringbone wrap over the large bead. I'd been sitting on those parts for a couple of years, used some in the workshop, getting no pay for them, so it was gratifying to get such quick sales for mine. I have enough supplies to make more pairs.

Sterling wire is another story. It's way more expensive than copper, and I tend to buy it by need-plus-extra for mistakes. I get more for a pair of earrings but sell fewer of them. Meanwhile what isn't getting used and sold promptly tarnishes quickly down here. Everybody says it's all the sulphur in AZ air. Whatever the cause, unused sterling needs to be in a sealed plastic zipper bag. If I buy a lot ahead, it just costs me money to let it sit.

Ironically, the wire I need a lot more of right now is copper. Really cheap. I've emptied two full spools in less than a year, and am nearly out of a third. It's been getting used both in my Christmas Tree Challenge (1st place!!!) and  in wind chimes.  I tend to make a lot of mistakes in wire wrapping the separate glass pieces, have to cut it off and throw it away because you can't re-use tightly curled wire and have it look like anything good. The first thing one learns in working with metals is that they cannot be unbent. So don't bend them wrong, or just toss and start over. It's the main reason we teach in copper and hone our skills before graduating to sterling.

In my case, certain of my skills are pretty good. I've developed better ways of wiring each piece of glass as I've made the wind chimes so they hang and swing freely, as well as looking reasonably decent. But the problem, or at least my problem, is that I get distracted. It might be the TV. It might be nothing at all except my concentration on making the pattern just so and have it all wound around perfectly... except for the part about forgetting it's supposed to hook into this other piece of wire in exactly this place and order.

Oops. Snip. Toss. Cut another piece.

That's going to be an issue again when I'm teaching that workshop. The glass cutting and getting the wires in the glass as an alternative to drilling holes in the glass... all that's the easy part. But I will also be showing different ways of hooking pieces together and to their top piece, whatever they choose for that to be.  I even will teach a way to make a glass top piece. In that process I'll be distracted by everything: conversations, questions of every step of the process and what other possibilities are, and interruptions by everybody else in the club at the time because we do not have a separate room with a door that closes that we can hold workshops in, since those classes can use any and every other bit of equipment and procedures used in the entire club. Everybody is constantly interrupted, whatever they are doing, more so if you are a club officer who's supposed to know everything. However, if you are using a rock saw or the torches, people do tend to hold back and wait for a sensible time to interrupt. 

I've still got several wind chimes to make for myself and lots of glass pieces to do it with. I'm really going to need more wire!

So What Are Your Favorite Things?

I was recently on a different blog online and a question thrown out there was "What are  your favorite things?" The model came out of "Sound of Music", recently on TV for the holidays. Maria is soothing the children during a thunderstorm by distracting them to think of things they really like instead. Replies online listed multiple items each, in all sorts of categories. So of course it got me thinking. In about three minutes I whipped out a list. Knowing me, and given more time, I'm sure it could have gotten much longer. But I had a bug, and there was lots of TV to watch, and club responsibilities increasing with the change in calendar. Thus there was a stopping point, and I'm fine with that.  So here's my list:

that silky spot my dog likes scratched
sitting in a drifting canoe watching eagles, deer, fish jumping
reflections of fall colors in the water
photography
going through favorite old photos
watching a baby learning to smile, to walk, to hug
that pat on my fanny as I pass my husband in the hall                           hearing anybody’s baby laugh
everything Beethoven
a family backyard bonfire roasting brats, marshmallows
the next good book
a phone call from my children
watching backyard birds
sandhill cranes calling as they come in for an evening landing
having escaped snow and ice
mountains with elk
sunsets, sunrises, and thunderstorms
seeing art glass emerge from a kiln looking like I imagined
wrapping presents
writing whatever I want to when I need to
seeing a new flower bloom
hummingbirds.

What's on your list?

I Don't Do New Year's Resolutions

I don't. I just do not make them. They are a promise to change behavior that I've settled quite comfortably into. 

None are going to make me rich. 

None will make the people around me any better off. 

None will make me new friends. I have enough people to keep track of these days, and who I am, however others see me, new friends come along on their own somehow.

None will make me sleep better at night since the things that keep me awake - beyond too much caffeine - are when the creative juices start to flow and in the dark and quiet my brain kicks in trying to figure out what I want and how to accomplish it. Usually I do much better just going and doing it, maybe trying and failing and trying something different. Or finding somebody who has the right knowledge, experience, and skill. When I'm not possessed by some relentless fledgling idea, I sleep just fine.

I don't need to stop drinking or gambling or stealing or beating my wife. All for the same reason.

I don't need to remember to be kind and helpful and thank people because that's my standard setting. Not inviolate, just standard.

I don't need to control my temper. It's been done, and most times it operates on a long fuse delay before activating when it's useless anyway.

I don't need to go to the gym or eat different foods to change my appearance to suit other's norms, or spend either more or less on makeup and clothing to make up for my appearance because what is, is.

I suppose many of you who know me can think of resolutions  you would like me to make. You see my flaws, wish for changes to match what you'd like me to be more or less of, or do more or less often. I'll let you make your own resolutions to be more patient with me, or to find another "project." I'd hate to contribute to your frustration or sadness when your wishes aren't met by my new resolutions, presumably in your eyes followed by "the right" changes. 

But I just, simply, do not make New Years Resolutions. I'm a little busy here. And pretty damn content. 

And by the way, I'd just go and break them anyway, so what's the point?