Pounding Glass

It wasn't how I intended it to go. I'd spent hours awake in bed on multiple nights figuring out how best to use a particular glass. There wasn't a lot of it, but it is exquisite in its blend of red and flashes of rainbow colors, transparent so light will go through and highlight every nuance. The two small pieces I had were not something I could duplicate from some other source, so I had to be careful. 

I finally found a plan. The larger piece was cut into 4 identical rectangles, the smaller one in two, both matching each other but smaller than the first set. The larger ones were to be corner pieces cut our from a white square, all sitting on clear glass and fused. The second process, slumping, would raise each corner up into the light so their colors would show. The two smaller pieces were to be set aside for another idea, somewhere, sometime. I held on to that plan for weeks, waiting for my skills to come up to the precision needs of the cutting required.

Turns out it wasn't my skills needing to improve, at least not that much. The cutting wheels needed new wheels. If you ran them with pressure over the glass and couldn't hear a thing, your glass wasn't getting scored and would just randomly break - the exact opposite of precision. Early this week our supply person replaced the glass cutters. Suddenly it was almost like cutting butter: score, apply the special tool, and snap! Straight line where you wanted your line to go. It was time for the special project

This morning I did my measuring of each smaller piece to fit the cutting plan and piecing together of my pattern. 7 Pieces of glass on top of my very last precut piece of clear in the right COE so they'd fuse. I did some light grinding on a tiny corner, scrubbed the cut pieces so all the markings (like COE so they wouldn't get confused with the wrong kind and shatter)  and fingerprints and even gummy residue from a piece of masking tape were gone. After fitting them on the base piece for a final check, a tiny bit more grinding was needed, scrub, rinse, repeat. 

Then I took them over to the board they'd stay on until tonight when their kiln was free for their fusing cycle. Do I blame the person who called out my name while I was in the process, urgently enough to  distract me from my task? Or just blame myself for not moving it in pieces and reassembling it on the board? Or both perhaps. At any rate, one of the precious corner pieces slid off and shattered on the floor.

Note that the club floor, despite all the arguing at the time the building was constructed, is a solid slab of concrete covered with a very thin coating of one of those semi-plastic multi-colored pour-on finishes, which, being back, tan and orange, is perfectly designed to hide absolutely every single thing that ever drops on to it. Maybe not a large piece of blue, perhaps. It also is as hard as the concrete which supports it. That small piece of glass  became - if I counted correctly - 17 tiny sharp shards of multicolored glass. Emphasis on sharp.

Now we do have a tiny dust pan in the glass room. It's about 4 1/2 " across with a rubber edge that manages to bend out of the way of whatever it is meant to scoop up. It does not have a matching whisk broom  or similar to help scoot said pieces into the tray. Luckily we have a large supply of old toothbrushes next to the sink for cleaning glass which do the job quite well, so long as one is sufficiently intelligent enough to realize that three complete passes over the floor is still going to leave several shards of glass on the floor. At least the stools which are too short to do anything comfortably while sitting on them are just the right height to keep one's butt or knees off the floor to get the clean up accomplished reasonably safely. 

And in this case, recovery. I had a use for all those bits. I wouldn't have thought of it otherwise, but since the glass was already in small pieces....

There is a very expensive product out there for decorating your glass called frit. It usually is very finely broken bits of glass, though it can come is various actual shapes. Colors are anything you want, including dichroic, meaning there is a side which is sparkly  - probably prismatic - and sparkles light all over. When one is (lucky?) enough to come up with a supply of broken glass with no other purpose, but which comes from a source with a known COE so you know where to use it, one is advised to save it. Safely, of course. Most of us already have enough holes from working with glass and don't need more, especially combined with whatever was on the floor and decided to hitchhike to somebody's wannabe work of art by way of a quick sip of blood. Listen, the stuff may be very fussy about how fast it expands/contracts in a kiln. It has absolutely no preferences as to blood type or various kinds of contagions therein.

Anyway, you have two sources of frit. A little jar of it can cost close to $100. Your broken glass shards were already paid for. They just need something better in the way of uniformity. In other words, you have to figure out how to smash it safely. Either source should, once sprinkled over the surface of pre-kiln glass, smoothly get absorbed over the surface of said glass sheet as it bakes. Dichroic frit is a whole different headache which I've already been coping with. But this was ordinary fusible glass, and already was to have been a part of this project.

I needed advice. No, the club doesn't have frit-making supplies, although they are out there. We rely on our members coming up with our own frit. Since my project is scheduled for baking tonight, I needed to come up with a substitute. All my broken pieces for travel home were wrapped up in multiple layers of paper toweling and then inside a zipper baggie. I was advised by our two premier glass workers in the club to get a pair of paper bags and a hammer. A really hard surface was implied.

Let me throw this at you. How would you feel if you went to the food shelf and came away with several empty folded paper bags? Fortunately for the person I took to the food shelf that day, they also did get a typical supply of food, including the nearly dead produce that needed to all be eaten within a few hours or tossed out. I'd suggest making compost but AZ isn't the best place for keeping enough moisture in it to work composting magic. At any rate, I wound up with the empty bags, and never got around to recycling them. They have been sitting tucked between the wall and the dog food all these months. They are very heavy duty bags, and I finally found a use for them.

With Rich's help I got the use of a 2 pound sledge, a comfortably reachable wooden table surface, and a flat low-lipped plastic container sans lid that the glass could sit in while being pounded. I started out with the glass bits in the paper bags but that was ridiculous. And since those two leftover original pieces had gotten mostly repurposed to replacing the one larger piece in the corner, I added the otherwise unbroken but now much much  smaller leftover bit into the smash-me pile. Instead of glass inside the bag, I emptied it, then folded it over into a size that nearly filled the flat bottom of the plastic container. The glass was piled under the bag, keeping nearly every piece from relocating from sledge strikes more than a couple inches from where it had been sitting. A few tiny pieces did pop out from the edges where the bag didn't quite cover, but they'd lost most of their intertia by then, and mostly stayed inside, landing on top of the bag instead of out on the floor or in my face. I had my glasses on anyway. About every eight or nine blows, I'd stop, examine the glass, scrape (carefully) the larger pieces back into a central pile, then feel through the bag  where the now covered pile lay before the next set of whacks. 

A two pound sledge is a damn heavy thing after half an hour!!!! 

Not all the pieces are as tiny as I'd wanted. Largest dimensions are about a quarter inch now. Lots are pepper grain size. It's all random, which is just fine with me. Tonight I'll head back to the club, remove the piece now fusing (in black, white/purple, and a diagonal band through it due to figuring out how to use a very irregular piece) from its kiln to finish cooling, spread the frit from its current home in a small jelly jar onto the white parts of glass and spread around randomly with yet another one of those helpful toothbrushes. (Gotta keep those fingers from getting blood on the project: it's the wrong shade of red!) It'll bake / fuse overnight, while today's fusing piece will get slumped tonight in a second kiln. Saturday morning the first slumped piece comes out, gets replaced by another fused piece to slump, and tomorrow night the last piece goes overnight into the slumping mold. Sunday I bring 3 new square bowls home. 

The stacks are growing. Decisions will get made as to which Steve and I'll keep, and which go out for presents. (Oops: did I spoil the surprise?) Well, since you haven't seen any yet, they'll still be a surprise, right? I'm looking forward to seeing how the one with the flattened marbles turned out. We'll all be surprised by that one. They are supposed to sink into the glass they sit on and leave a round piece of different color, flush with the rest of the top surface. And there's still more glass, more marbles, more ideas, and before I get sick of glass, I'm absolutely positive there'll be more homemade frit. Now that I know how. And why.

What Scared You (On TV) As A Kid?

I was just reading an online forum where one person asked what scared us on TV when we were kids. My kneejerk reaction was nothing: I didn't watch TV as a kid. 

That's not entirely true. The year I spent with relatives when I was 5 there was TV to watch. Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo. Nothing scary there. At least not to me. It wasn't till I was 12 that our small Minnesota town got its first TV broadcasting antenna on the top of the water tower. I believe it had a 3-mile radius, covering a bit more than the entire town, and carried only NBC. So we watched things like Bonanza, Gunsmoke, I Love Lucy, and a very puzzling show to me, Have Gun Will Travel. Paladin was a bad guy - good guy. It was more complexity than I'd encountered in my young life. Things were one or the other, lines strictly drawn. While I didn't quite know what to think about him, it wasn't scary.

There were shows I hated, but for other reasons. I found The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy abusive. I didn't quite have the words yet to label my dislike, but at least one of them was always being mean to another one. They were  supposedly "funny" - but not to me. Still, not scary. 

It's not that I wasn't scared of some things. I was, had a true phobia. Every one of those things was called a spider. I'd gotten bitten by one when young, never forgot it. If a spider was coming down its web from the ceiling, I would be pinned to my chair, since in order to get up I would have to get a foot or so closer than I already was to the spider. Even as a young Mom I had enough residual phobia left that when we had a nature book on spiders I made the kids turn the pages for me so I didn't have to "touch" the spiders. I did manage to get over it to the point I can kill one in the house if necessary, though I taught my kids how to do it first, claiming they weren't scary, so I didn't have to.

While I was reading through the many answers to the question, puzzling over why episodes of Star Trek or Twilight Zone or even the Wizard of Oz scared people, two things popped into my mind. First was another child being frightened while in my care. When I was doing family day care, I took our group to the local library story hour a few times. It was more than reading a kids book while the kids (learned to) listened quietly. Some times an adult was talking or showing other things. This time it was the clown. One person walked, in, already wearing clown clothing. Then the wig went on, the face got painted. The kids were absolutely fascinated. The final piece was a red rubber nose. Suddenly it was no longer a person dressing up. It was something strange and, apparently, horrifying, to one of the kids I'd brought. She started screaming and was inconsolable until we were all in the car and driving back to the house. At her parents' request, it was also our last visit to the library.

Then I remembered a movie that scared me with a long lasting effect while we lived in the small town. Before I describe the movie, I need to point our that the favorite gathering place for many of us on the block was a small gravel pit, dug down as a rectangular hole, covering probably one full lot where a house might otherwise have stood. It was mostly sand, and full of all kinds of rocks. One favorite occupation was breaking small rocks with bigger ones to see what was inside. In winter we brought our sleds there and safely sailed down into the center to our heart's content. The street was outside one rim so there was never danger of continuing that far up that side as to go out into the street and under a car. On super cold days the older kids brought buckets of water to quick freeze and make a bed of ice to slide down. Otherwise we had plenty of snow, and enough loose sand in places so we could climb up out again.

The movie - "Invasion From Mars" - started with a kid waking up and seeing a spaceship landing  in a sandpit outside his bedroom. Periodically various adults would walk that way, get sucked down underground, some machine would drill into their heads, and they'd emerge with no memory of what happened. However, they would have this mark on the back of their necks, and whatever made it was something implanted which controlled them. One night the kid snuck out and watched it happen, and there is at least one scene where his parents have both been controlled. While it turns out the kid was having a nightmare, the next night the spaceship really lands.

That terrified me. I knew where the sandy ground was loose enough that something could be under there, a hole might open, I might get sucked down. Of course, it wasn't real. However....

I spent about two years avoiding unpaved ground at every opportunity. Streets which were paved or concrete sidewalks were OK places to walk. I didn't have to think about them, except to stay on them. whenever I left the house. But open ground, even if well covered in grass, were uncomfortable places at best. The gravel pit? I still can't tell you whether I grew out of that fear  before we moved away or we moved away first. But I WAS NOT GOING TO BE SUCKED DOWN INTO IT!

It's Not The Heat, It's The ...OMG!!!

 We're used to whining in humid parts of the country about how humid it is, and how it makes you feel when you're out in it. 90 isn't so bad in 20% humidity, but 90%? Yikes.

That's what helps make living in Arizona more comfortable. Unless, of course, it gets way up in the triple digits. But sometimes not even low humidity can help.

On Valentines Day

This is a paraphrased version of how I opened the club membership meeting on the 13th. It wasn't written down then, just thought about for a bit ahead of time.

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. Some of us no longer have our Valentine. (Nods from some very senior members.) Some are lucky enough they still do, or  have had more than one Valentine. But we all can celebrate Valentine's Day for more than the romantic kind of love. There are other people in our lives that we had loved or do love, and people who have loved us. Let us reflect on those special people and what they have meant in our lives. 

Think of all the ways we have told another person that we care about them, that they are important to us. It might be that special smile, perhaps even a baby's first one. It might be a special private word or phrase you use, a private joke. It can be the kindnesses you share with each other, as simple as reaching out to see how they are doing, passing along a joke you just heard, knowing just where to scratch that itch they can't reach, a call to ask for a few minutes to share your problem because you know they'll listen, or offer to listen to them. It can be the way you care for them when they need it, or how they care  for you when you do. 

Spend a few minutes remembering all those special people you have had in your lives. If those people are still in your life, let them know they are important to you. We all need to know we matter to somebody.

Better Living Through Chemistry, Eh?

First, let's qualify that. We tend to adopt new chemistry, particularly where human use is concerned, assuming everything is known before we see the products, and discover some consequences later. This story is going to be a before/after one.

I've been dodging getting a colonoscopy for over a decade now. Ever since the last one and how it went wrong.  Worst part of that is I don't believe the doc in charge back then had any clue whatsoever, and never checked in to find out. In other words, he didn't care to know. He won't be doing this one. An 1800 mile relocation on my part helps guarantee that.

Still, he used standard medical practices, so I switched to using Cologard to keep track of that part of my health. It's kind of fun, after all, to poop in a pot and mail the results back to the company. I take the box to UPS and wonder if they actually know the contents or not, or are just keeping a poker face so as to keep the account. I've changed enough thousands of diapers in my life to have gotten past squeamishness, and soap is still always handy. But I haven't ignored the issue, since Daddy had colon cancer in his upper 80s. It was removed during the colonoscopy which discovered it. The first sample I sent back was just fine. The recent one came with a positive result, which they've tried to reassure me doesn't guarantee cancer, just some kind of abnormality which needs to be inspected. 

If you're of a certain age, you know what that means. Laxatives, lots of liquids, no nuts, no dyes that change gut appearance, all the usual pre-surgical prep besides. I start a week early. Fun fun. Then I spend time on a table while the doc checks my insides  for whatever might be a problem. My first one was when I turned 40 and I asked the doctor afterwards if he was disappointed not to find my tonsils in the process, since I didn't have any left.

It wasn't fun. At least not for me.

The most recent one was when they supposedly had a better system for knocking me out and my feeling no pain. They got one out of three right: I was paralyzed during the procedure. I know because I was trying to tell them they'd gotten it wrong. I was awake, feeling everything including the occasional snipping. I couldn't even vary my breathing enough to make any noise, hard as I tried. Of course I'm not sure if they would have anyway, with conversation happening over background music. Don't ask me what it was about, but it wasn't about me and how I was doing. I was just there.

After, when the doc came out to "check on his patient" he did a fly-by comment that I was awake awfully early after the procedure. I was given no chance to respond because he was already gone. Caring, right?

Remember that bruhaha when lethal injections became  controversial because the chemical cocktails left several death row inmates awake for however long it took the rest of their drug cocktail to actually kill them? Conclusion was they were awake and immobilized for their 45 minute torture, or however long it took. Cruel and unusual just wearing a different costume. The medical profession said "we won't help you do that" and rather than stopping capitol punishment they switched to other methods, or possibly other chemical sources. 

I get it.

When I had the pre-procedure, meet-the-patient appointment last week, I explained my last colonoscopy experience. I was listened to. She (not the surgeon) knew what I was referring to. They used what they called "twilight sleep" back then. For reasons not explained, though I can guess, about 10 years ago they switched to full anesthesia, using propofol. Same as I had for my cardiac procedures, or even the sebaceous cyst removal last year. Out. Completely. Wake up when it's over, no throwing up, no memory wipe from starting the trip down the hall to when you wake up. None of those things I've experienced during  various surgical precedures from my tonsillectomy at 5 to the time we left Minnesota. 

It's scheduled for mid May, since the docs are still backed up from Covid stopping "optional" procedures for so long. Now it'll be propofol. No pain! No side effects. So maybe in this case at least, I'm ready for better living through chemistry.

But you can believe they'll hear from me if it doesn't go right!

The Missing Box

Last week in the club was crazy-busy. Three days were taken up in teaching the basics of glass fusion, with the end goal of taking home a wind chime for the participants. Luckily for me several of them didn't show up, because even with only 3 students, the class took 4 hours, mostly on my feet. With two students on the next day, the class "only" took three hours.  The gratification was not only in getting acquainted with new people but having three of them show up for the sale and stock up on glass for future use. The rest of the week was pricing glass for the sale plus all the usual duties. If I'm in the club, 15 people have  questions. I can usually answer ten or so.

We're going to have to do something about kiln availability, but that's a major project for next Monday when I try to persuade the membership to authorize the expense of a bigger faster kiln.

Monday this week, finally mostly recovered after one day away from the club since the previous Monday, there was another student to teach. I also had taken on the project of making a couple wind chimes for the club to sell in March at a new event city-wide, called "Italian Festival".  All clubs were invited to participate as venders, making this much like our post-Thanksgiving Fall Festival. We don't know how many tables we get yet for our sales. But we'll organize it like we do in the fall so logistics just need different names and numbers in the slots. The template is well known. And one member volunteered to be in charge this time. (Good luck there: three together organized the fall one.)

After discussion among members about ways to make things with an Italian theme, the idea of a flag pattern in wind chimes was posed. It means three strings of glass, one in green, the middle in white, the last in red glass. Just like Italy's flag. Pieces had been saved from the weekend sale in those colors, the club will also supply the rest of what is necessary, and I will do the actual work. The club will get the sale since I'm not paying for supplies.

I suppose by now you are wondering where does a missing box come into this story? It's the small box I've used to carry my glass supplies and tools back and forth to the club. I need what is in it to make the chimes. I used it to teach the classes last week, and would again for Monday. When I was loading up my tote bag for the day's club needs on Monday, I looked for that box.  I checked out the library where my craft supplies are stored along with the books and the office stuff. it wasn't there. It wasn't in the tote bag. It wasn't on the dining table. It wasn't on the table next to my chair. I must have left it in the club. After all, I'd forgotten my glue for glass there after using it for the workshops. At least I had that. But maybe the box was somewhere in the glass room or the office for the club. 

It wasn't in any of the places I checked there either. I used club supplies for that day's student, and decided I must have overlooked it somewhere in the house after all. You have to know, of course, that I came home later and checked again. And went to the club Tuesday morning and checked again for this box. And returned home yet again empty handed.

I was beginning to wonder exactly who I was mad at. Obviously somebody had assisted my box in leaving the club. What it contained was very light and it may have innocently been tossed in the garbage. We do have members who periodically go through on clean-up / clear-out binges. We need them, but occasionally discover that that one weird thing that nobody knew what it was for or why is had been saved (with no label or note of explanation) is now the missing thing desperately needed by the person who just happens to know why it was where it was and how it is needed. 

Oops.

The other alternative I was thinking about in a less than gracious mood was that somebody had looked through the box, recognized its contents, and decided they had the right to appropriate them for their own use. After all, there was no name on the box, right? Those are the same unidentified people who assist in de-cluttering the club of hand tools after a class so they can continue working on something at home. Somehow those never make it back into the club, of course. I didn't say anything to anybody about my suspicious turn of mind, of course. It'd cost me about $15 to replace the total contents, so more annoyance than anything. However....

This morning I got up early as I usually do, and after the dog and I do our necessary duties, we  tend to combine forces in my chair at keeping the chill of the room at bay. A combination of TV watching and napping happens during the several hours before I have to be somewhere outside the house. When the clock demanded I start getting mobile and prepared for decent company, I started to set my/our lap blanket on the floor. Unlike most times, I'd sat up fully first, instead of untangling the blanket from the chair and dropping it before setting the chair up. The result is I had a clear view of the floor where the blanket is always dropped in a heap. My hand was already open as I watched the blanket drop and cover that little white box I'd been searching for.

Because of course. 

Everything I'd been missing was in it along with a few other things from the  workshop that I hadn't put away afterwards. Those were mostly visual aids of many of the different things different glass does in the kiln. That's part of "The First Rule of Glass" on the top of the worksheets for the class.

(Note to self: Print more for new classes... next week.)

Faking The Weather Forcast... Again

It's been brutal over much of the country the last few days. Reminds me of the "good ol' days" of winter in northern Minnesota when I grew up, when -40 was pretty much expected each winter, and a groundhog predicting only 6 more weeks of winter was worth either celebration or derision, depending on your attitude. It always lasted a month longer.

It's a good reminder that global warming is not a straight line or the same everywhere, though it is  here and worse than expected and sooner. But that's another story for another day. (For a heads up, research Thwaites Glacier progress.) No doubting however the added energy we've gotten into our weather systems, along with unusual patterns.

It's the variety of weather that draws us to our local meteorologists and their representatives on our favorite TV news channels. They are getting better at good predictions, but there's always something to poke fun at. For example, our favorite channel for news here in Phoenix gives us a different report in the morning than it does in the evening. One will say x number of days above 70, for last week's example. The other will have them under 70, then the alternating one will put them back above. At least their inconsistencies aren't life threatening, or even an inconvenience.  And frankly, in summer there's not much difference between 110 and 115 for misery and danger, day after day after unrelenting month.

I was watching the 90-second intro to the morning national news the end of last week when they flashed a shot of an attractive woman (they're always pretty, right?) in front of a scene I was sure I recognized. But it was gone before I could make sure. A few minutes later it was back as a part of the larger super cold weather report from over a large segment of the country This time the introduction before giving her a speaking role verified it was indeed a very frozen over, ice draped Minnehaha Falls in southern Minneapolis. A significantly younger me visited there in winter, with a camera of course.

Our weather lady was nicely bundled up, though at those temperatures I'd have been bundled up in more than a short puffy jacket and stocking hat. But I rewound it to make sure I was seeing what I'd thought I'd seen. Sure enough, despite that cold weather, there was no fog coming out of her mouth to indicate the air temperature she stood in was actually cold, dangerously so. Her face wasn't red, or worse yet, with white spots inside the red. Sure, smart for her. I never wish those people to suffer from the risks they take... if they take them.

But try to convince us she was outside? With a "little white lie?" No wonder so many people ignore dangerous weather. It may be drama but it's not harmless.

Bless green screens for keeping our weather people safe, eh? But next time you want to believe your weather forecaster is out in the stuff, give it a second look. Rain better be running off their umbrella, not from a roof allegedly inches behind them, easily faked. Wind better be messing with their hair or blowing their script away. And the close part of the background, in this case the front short wall keeping folks from falling into the hollow carved by the waterfall, better have the same lighting highlighting and shadows as the person standing right in front of it does.

I call fake!

By the way, our local weather forecasters, when they give us those beautiful pictures of what the weather actually did or is doing, remind us these shots are green screened, or have very prominent frames around the green screen to show it is inside the studio, and usually thank the photographer. I like seeing real weather. I just like knowing if the accompanying person talking to us is there, or in studio.

Slumping

Right now that's me. Slumping, that is. It's been fun, sure, getting almost the entire club's supply of fusible glass ready for the Saturday morning half price sale. It involves digging into all sorts of corners, behind drawers, inside closets, locating the stores the club has. It's been hidden, mostly behind padlocks, where nobody has seen it so nobody buys it. And when somebody does have a project in mind, new glass gets ordered because nobody knows we likely already have some in abundance. I have now seen every single piece of it. The club has been sitting on likely a couple thousand dollars worth of unsold inventory. The solution reached was to sell it all at half price, spread across tables at a time when nobody is working at them, open the doors for 5 hours, and see how much we can get rid of.

Technically it's not been my job. However.... 

I started by volunteering to mark the prices down on each piece, as is. Nobody gets to cut a piece off a larger sheet at the sale, but has to buy what is there. Cut it later yourselves. Some prices are marked on already cut pieces from when they were stored away. Others have a $___ per square inch sticker. Those are the fun ones. If the borders are straight lines, I just lay it on a rubberized pad with an inches grid laid out. If a piece has broken, it's time to get a little creative, erring on the side of what's reasonably usable instead of exact area. Then there's our head of the supply room, who decided with one tote-full that they were originally way overpriced and my starting point before halving it should be different. Another day he thinks top dollar is the right starting place and half that is too low. Those changes usually come partway through a batch being marked. Prices are in Sharpies on the glass along with their COE of either 90 or 96. They have to be removed to be changed, and that can mean acetone. I emptied the last club bottle. At least there is a calculator to work with. 

For several reasons we wind up with identical glass in kind and size but with different prices on it. Since we often ordered what we already had, the next batch may come at a different price from the suppliers. Or they look the same but had different manufacturers. We're just going to tell shoppers to shop wisely. In all, the end result will be at a loss, but the club will have more in the bank for whatever the next need is, rather than just storing glass and getting nothing.

There has been a lot of exercise involved, toting glass around, coming out of the office to talk to people, ask & answer questions, and going back to mark more, toting small loads back into their storage places waiting for getting onto the tables. Luckily I sent out an email asking for help in exchange for getting credit for an hour of volunteering time along with an advanced look at what is being offered. Many hands really do make light work. We actually sold glass today, now people were seeing it, as we have since this started, at full price, or double what's now marked. If you fall in love with a specific piece, you can gamble on whether it will be there Saturday, or buy ahead. Preparation starts with the full clear-off, clean-off of tables from that day's use, then toting all the glass out to the correct table (90 or 96), sorting pieces and laying them out so they are visually logical, like all the black in one spot, red in another, etc. It all took less than an hour.

There was another side to getting ready for the sale. It was getting members unfamiliar with glass interested in starting using it, and thus buying it on sale. That meant my teaching two workshops on making wind chimes. 8 people signed up, 5 showed up. It was still a workshop on each of two consecutive days, and each took nearly 4 hours. There's a lot of safety issues, where-is...? issues, choosing glass, learning to use the tools, and assembling the glass pieces with wires that will be embedded for hanging once they emerge from their kilns. Each workshop overlaps the next day because each kiln needs removal and cleanup of yesterday's glass before it's useable again. To complicate matters one of the kilns went on the fritz - either a rare hiccup or a bad thermocouple, but only another try will tell. Apparently it's happened and self-corrected before.

With all that going on I have been in the club for several hours every day this week, and today was longer than a full day there. So I was definitely slumping before walking out the last couple days.

But slumping is what's keeping me awake at night for over a week now as well. I first heard of it as something people do with empty glass bottles, and dismissed it as ridiculous. Who'd want that? A variation of slumping is a new technique I'm working on with my own glass for this year's major projects. It starts with fusion, because you want extra thick and heavy glass. This means cutting two pieces exactly the same, lining them up perfectly and doing the first fusing (baking) in a kiln. Some people add more decorations and/or detail later and wind up with 3 layers, but I've been to busy to get to that point yet. Anyway, the first fusing is always on a flat surface. Slumping involves a pre-made mold, coated between uses with a special product that keeps glass from sticking because kiln paper no longer works on curved places, then laying the glass across the top so melting and gravity combine to give what was flat a new shape. It either flows into or over the mold, depending on whether it's an "innie" or an "outie". Our club has various molds of both kinds which I'm just learning about. I haven't gotten to that step quite yet, not just from being extremely busy, but what I have in mind isn't one of the forms in the club. There will be shopping at a Phoenix glass store. I have fused one glass combination, now ready for its mold, to see whether I want to buy a lot more of those pieces, and the result is a solid maybe.

The part keeping me up is mentally reviewing in my mind the various pieces of glass I have seen, thinking how I would combine them into a two tone piece, wondering how many I can find or which other combinations I'd be making instead... over and over and over and....  It tends to happen, the sleep deprivation, when I'm in the planning phases of a new project. Once I get to the doing part and it starts working, sleep comes back just fine, and 5 hour nights become 7 or 8 again. Of course with the sale in the morning, actually later this morning, the one hour nap I had in front of the TV has combined with its stress to make further sleep impossible. I have to be there early, making sure last minute details are done, and ready to start putting my selections together while they are mostly still on the table. When I woke from that TV nap the dog had to go out and by the time I finished with that I was wide awake again. If I sleep now I'll likely be late. So I figured I might as well blog instead. By this afternoon I'll truly be slumping over slumping.