two short notes and two short rants

Notes

1.  Last year I wrote an article on how to do pate de verre casting for a glass magazine called, oddly enough, Glass....craftsman.  The editor of the section of the magazine this article was a part of has been after me to write another on working with wax for lost wax casting.   Now, in between jobs, I’ve finally sat down to write it.   Organizing my thoughts, figuring out how to describe things I do with my hands while I work on a model, thinking about sequence, thinking about which tools I like best and why.  This is a very different way of writing than I am accustomed to.  Usually, I just open my mind and let it flow.

2.  We’ve finally been getting some rain in the city but the country house is still parched.  We watch as the rain clouds pass over us.  Everything is in a permanent state of wilt, you can’t water it enough.  And now, last weekend, I noticed my two maple trees are not doing well at all.  The leaves at the top are burnt and the others are yellowing.  I tried doing some deep watering for them but I’m afraid if we don’t get some real rain soon, we will lose them.  Those maple trees are one of the reasons we decided on a smaller and narrow shop building.  Wouldn’t that be ironic if they died anyway.

Rants

1.  I’m getting rid of the moon widget.  It’s pissing me off.  It never loads completely and is always attended by a scroll bar.  Who wants to look at the moon phase with a scroll bar?  Not me.  And why does it only happen on my blog?  I see it on others and it always loads completely.

2.  My reading list on the dashboard of my blog disappeared about mid-day yesterday.  Gone.  Sorry, you don’t follow any blogs.  WHAT?!  Who do I complain to about this?  After scouring the whole blogger site for hours, I still don’t know who or what.  So I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to track down all the blogs I follow that I had failed to put on my sidebar in a timely fashion.  Shit.  I’m still missing a few. 

getting in gear

This past spring, I was contacted by The Mint Museum of Craft and Design in Charlotte NC about their annual Gala fundraiser.  They were very interested in acquiring a piece of ours for their silent auction.  We get requests for donations to fundraisers three or four times a year, every year.  We do not, for the most part, donate work to any of these fundraisers.  The reason being that the artist gets nothing, giving away expensive (in the case of glass) materials and loads of (in my case) time; the institution gets money and the collectors get great work for cheap (because who in their right mind would donate a piece of crap they couldn’t sell...a bad reflection on the artist).  Many collectors wait for these fundraisers to add to their collections thereby cutting the gallery and the artist out of the loop.

What made the Mint Museum’s request different is that they offered to pay wholesale for the piece.  This I am happy to participate in so I promised them a small bowl, one of the oleander series.  I called the gallery that had it and, wouldn’t you know, they had just sold it the week before so now I am having to make them one.  I’ve only had all summer to do it.  They need it by mid-September at the latest.  

This is actually a good thing for me as I have not done any new work for nearly a year and it is getting me back to model making.  The longer it was, the harder it was for me to get in the studio and start on something.  Now that the ice is broken, so to speak, hopefully I’ll get started on the new work.

I finished chasing the wax yesterday.  Since the shop is not built yet, we have to do the casting here in the city.  Marc went out to the shop this morning looking for the set up he uses for doing the casting molds and can't find it.  Obviously, it has been taken down to the country house and we did not remember or notice this past weekend so it's back to Wharton today to get the rest of the stuff we need to get this piece done.  I will be so glad when we finally get EVERYTHING together again in one place.  After putting this off all summer, I thought we still had plenty of time.  At this rate, it will slide in with a day or two to spare.  Typical.

the second

It is the final long weekend of the four.  Jade, the eldest of the twins, the second grandchild, who claimed going last, is spending her four days with us.

Jade is funny and smart and talkative and creative and did I say smart?  She is a Math Genius.   She scored 100% on the math portion of her forth grade TAKS test (for those who don’t know what the TAKS is it’s the test students have to take every two years to advance to the next grade level).  She sees the big picture.  Individual elements will sometimes stymie her but she can look at all the components of a thing and instantly see how they all go together.  She can visualize a scene or scenario and rattle it off so fast you have trouble keeping up but jotting it all down on paper is more difficult.  She’s basically a happy kid when she’s not viewing her life as a glass half empty, which is all too often.  She tends to want to give back what she receives instead of giving what she wants to receive.  We’re working on that.

Whereas, all the kids like to help in the kitchen, Jade wants to learn how to cook.  She came with one of her mother’s cookbooks and we went through it and picked out recipes for each night’s dinner and dessert.  So I am teaching her how to cook.  She is doing it all while I instruct and supervise and lend an occasional helping hand.  I haven’t spent this much time in the kitchen in years.  

Before we start cooking for the day, we have been going around exploring some of the weird little shops out here and garage sales or she’s been busy drawing, coloring and cutting out accessories for her scenarios.  She made her chef’s hat (and one for me that said ‘chef’s helper #1’).  She’s had the camera mostly so I have used some of the pictures she took of herself.

7. the Renaissance Festival

I notice it’s been months since I did an installment on becoming a glass artist.  Likely most my readers now haven’t read any of them so you can catch up here (but you’ll have to read from the bottom up).  The entries are all fairly short.  I’ve been looking for a photo that I know we have, have seen it floating around for years, to illustrate this next installment (originally divided into two), but what with the move and all, I can’t find it anywhere, so I give up.

 In 1976, we started doing the Renaissance Festival, six weekends in a row.  We did this Festival for seven years and it pulled our butts out of the fire more than once.  The way we got into the Renaissance Festival is that a friend of my parents had the drink concession there and he got us in, a really good spot too, number three on the right as you came in.  As a participant, you had to build your own little ‘store’ or booth.    

That first year (the second year for the Fair), it was crude.  We built a little corral out of reed fencing and had a table.  We strung wire across and hung small framed etched glass panels suitable for hanging in your window like a sun catcher.  We met the guy next to us, Wylie Ponder, a very talented fellow Texan who did watercolors and with whom we are still friends.  They had a glass blower there, blowing really crude stuff from cullet he got somewhere.  And they also had demonstrations from the Society for Creative Anachronism.  Let me tell you, those guys were serious about their game.  Didn’t take too well to jokes.  The whole fair itself, in the piney woods,  started out small and crude and it rains a lot in October and so by the end of the 6 weeks it was pretty much a mud hole.  We had to be in costume too.  I hadn’t given up sewing yet so I made ours.  (man, I wish I could find that picture)

It was fun the first few years.  The guy in charge, King George he called himself, strove to make it bigger, better and more authentic every year.  You had to improve your booth every year and people started building actual little houses and store fronts and if you wanted to keep your primo location and not get banished into the back half, it had to look really good, like the wealthy part of town.  We skated by our second year with a barely improved corral and our third year we got our friend Gene of the stained glass to do it with us and the real building started.  Over the years, Marc and Gene built a two story three sided building that we lived in during the weekends.  It had stained glass and etched glass windows.

Doing the Fair started to become a hardship during the last couple of years.  Our commission work was growing and it was taking us away from what we really needed to be doing and besides, it had quadrupled in size and King George was imposing more and more rules and restrictions.  That last year we did the Fair, 1982, he decreed that next year everyone had to talk in that stupid fake cockney olde english accent or suffer banishment.  That was it for us.  We sold our little structure for $6000 to the next sucker.

crap TV

illustration courtesy of naturesgraffiti.com

TV does not really capture my attention, with one or two exceptions.  Mostly I find it inconvenient.  Even though I am not paying attention to it, it is on most the day.  Since we stopped taking the print version of the paper, Husband turns it on in the morning while I am blogging and it never seems to get turned off.  He is partial to the news shows which he watches in the afternoon as well.  Me, I’d rather not know most the crap that is fed us as news and I’m usually in a different room.  We have resisted cable all these years having tried it once and found it to be just more crap that you have to pay for.  Finally though, they got a hook in Husband.

“Special offer,” he says to me, “basic cable for 99¢ a month for a year, after that we’ll cancel.”

“Basic cable is crap.”  I remind him.

“Special offer.” he says again.

“Foot in the door.” I tell him.

“99¢ a month.” he repeats.

“Camel’s nose in the tent.” I reply.

His eyes have glazed over, rolling up.  “Cancel” he mutters.

“OK.  Whatever.”  I sigh, “but every time they call trying to sell more service, I’m giving the phone to you and when they start charging full price, you have to call them.”

The sales calls started right away and they started charging us full price 3 months later.  Husband calls and reminds them of the deal.  Three months later, they charge full price again.  Husband calls and reminds them of the deal.  This went on all year.  When Husband called to cancel, they gave us a date that the technician would come and terminate the service and charged us a fee for it.  The day came and went.  Our basic cable continued.  

The phone rang a few days later.  It was the cable company doing a customer satisfaction call.  Their records indicated that a technician had been out to our place to terminate the service and were we satisfied.  I told them, sure, thinking that they would flip whatever switch and the cable would stop.  It never did.  We’re still getting the basic cable service.  It’s still crap but at least they have stopped billing us for it.

Basic cable only has one redeeming feature and that’s the food channel.  For someone who no longer does the cooking around here you’d think that would be the least interesting thing on to me but I find it to be very entertaining...the searches for the perfect (food of choice), the competitions, the throw downs.  Lately I’ve seen a couple of shows showing how products are made and mass produced and the thing that astounds me the most is the tonnage of raw materials that go into the product that only one plant will make in a year.  Like mustard.  Tons of mustard seed, which are tiny, by the way.  That blows my mind.  Where do you get tons of mustard seed?  It was all about bar-b-cue sauce tonight.  Tons of tomato paste.  That’s a lot of resources devoted to tomato paste.

Last night it was all about hotdogs.  We probably don’t want to go there.

not to be deterred

star of india

Not everything in the yards has been deterred by the hot dry weather.  This small tree (large shrub?) is about 7’ tall and covered with blooms.  It was very hard to get a good picture of the flowers because they are so white and the sun is so bright.  I finally had to settle for a close up instead of a larger view.

mexican petunia 

I love these wild petunias but they are extremely invasive.  Right now, after the neglect my yard in the city has received the past two years, they have spread everywhere.  In the morning it is a sea of purple.  These delicate flowers only last til about noon when they fall off and are replaced the next day by hundreds more.  These were also hard to photograph and still the color is not exactly right.

hummingbird bush

This large shrub is taller than the eaves of my house and is covered with these small blooms.  Come fall, when the hummingbirds migrate through it will be the scene of many a pitched battle.

plumeria

This particular small tree was a gift from a friend and it is a profuse bloomer.  I have other plumerias but none are matched by this one.  It probably has 20 clusters on it.

yellowbells

Another of my favorites, these shrubs can also get fairly large and can be pruned into small trees forms.

mexican bird of paradise

This one is actually in my sister’s yard and is as tall as the eaves of her house.  They love the hot dry weather.

dog days

there’s a kite in this picture.  can you see it?

The dog days are upon us and I, for one, am glad.  They can’t possibly be any worse than the two months we have already endured this summer and their coming means that summer is nearly over.  Not that I expect September to be any cooler really since it is easily as hot in September as it is in July, but the psychological impact has to count for something, right?  Right?  Oh, please tell me that I am right because I’m about ready to pack it up and head for anywhere it snows...permanently.  Although as irony would have it, the first two days of August were noticeably cooler.  By that I mean it barely got up to triple digits.  Actually, the past two mornings were rather nice.  I wasn’t hit immediately by a blast furnace of air when I opened the door about 7 AM to let the cat out.

here it is

It was a quiet weekend of cooking for the Granddaughter (I do the cooking when the grandkids come to visit, gives Husband a break) and the requisite cleaning afterwards.  Actually the cooking wasn’t that big a deal as all four of the g-kids love to help in the kitchen.  Then there was a water balloon fight with same which lasted about 2 minutes (she ambushed me, waiting for me to emerge from the house in my swim suit).  It took me half an hour to fill all those balloons!  Flew and lost a kite (it now hangs from the tree in the backyard of the neighbor across the street).  Went to my sister’s house for the Collecting Of The Eggs and Feeding Of The Chickens (kitchen scraps which we saved all weekend).  She wanted to make a paper machie piggy bank using one of the water balloons which, by the time we were through, she decided was an egg and not a pig.  And lots of reading.  Autumn still loves to have books read to her, chapter books, as she calls them. 

We made a further step in our oh-so-slow move to the country this weekend.  Since we are now spending 4 nights out of the week in the country, at least while we are between jobs, we moved the Real Actual Bed out there and brought the future guest room mattress back to the city.  We did not bring the extra bed frame though so the box spring and mattress are on the floor, kinda like being young and newly wed again.

My granddaughter asked me what we were going to do with the house when we got moved completely.  

“Just keep it I guess” I told her.

“You could let us use it” she says.

“Us as in who?” I asked her.

“Us kids,” she says, “we could have slumber parties there.”

Every teen movie that had a party while the parents were away went through my head.

“Sorry, hon,” I told her, “I don’t think that’s gonna happen."