Aardvark Art Glass

On account of the projectile sneezing, I’m trying to keep America safe from my germs today by keeping myself spatially separate from people. Actually, that’s something I do everyday. It’s nice once in a while to have justification for my actions that can remotely be construed as being helpful to others. That doesn’t happen often. And, by the way, you’re welcome.

I’m kinda feeling better since I started eating food and drinking water like a normal person. My constitution sure lets me get away with a lot of nonsense before it breaks down. It’s like one of those plants that I like that doesn’t need special food or sun to keep doing it’s job, which is mostly just to remain green and not die. I can do that too.

A-ny-ways, since I can’t think of anything else to talk about and I’m due for a blog, I guess I’ll tell you about some random pictures I found in my camera.

I was hungry the other early A.M. and the most appealing fruit in the fridge was a potentially forbidden one–a half of a submarine sandwich that belonged to Don. I was really hungry so I weighed the moral what-have-yous of stealing someone else’s food for about two seconds before devouring it, then I set about the house looking for something of similar size to wrap up in the sandwich wrapper so it would look like the sandwich was still there. As luck would have it, I was there the next day when Don unwrapped the Santa head. I laughed and laughed and then I went out and bought him another sandwich.

Friday evening when Lost School was over, I noticed early on that a hammer had ended up on the same table as a ripe banana. I pointed the temptation out to people but no one ended up using one to destroy the other. Maybe it was just a temptation to me.

At the Mayan ruin gift shop, I espied this C.D. which featured a little salt mill riding around on the back of a big pink fish. I thought it would be a snap to find a description of what the hell was going on with that on Amazon, but it wasn’t, really. I did find out that the salt mill is magical and it sings but that’s about it. How does he know the fish, I wonder? Does the fish sing too? If not, why not, and for how long? I should have just bought the damn thing when I was there.

Well, there’s a blog for you. I’m off to make a couple beads.

My will to get things done was already dangerously low before I got the cold so, now the will is pretty much not there at all. I’m going to go to work and clean animal cages and make beads for the show and try to think of something to write about. In that order.

So, I’ve been working on drawings for a possible stained glass job at Great Dane 3, where Don works. Don’t know if it’s going to happen yet, but I hope it does. It’s over 40 square feet of glass honoring four main beer ingredients: barley, hops, water and yeast. Yup, yeast. It’s not much to look at but it’s just as important as the other ingredients so, over ten square feet for yeast. As a whole, this project is an interesting, interesting design problem–more interesting than you realize, probably, especially if you’ve never done stained glass. I did stained glass for what seems like my whole life before I picked up lampworking. In fact, fourteen years ago, before I had a computer or email or anything I did some huge brewing-themed windows for the downtown Great Dane. Know what I used for source pictures for the designs? Books! Archaic! You don’t know the half of it! I remember when all this was just a field! At least I could Google Image pictures of yeast for these, not that that helped much. If I get the job, I’ll pop back on Watch Me Create and write some stuff about it.  It will be interesting process.

Meanwhile, in other news, I guess I’m going to do the Art Glass and Bead Show here in Madison on March 28 and 29. I have exactly almost zero inventory at this point but I’m optimistic about getting some things made by then. My mate JC Herrell is coming up from Tucson for the show so that will be a gas. I suspect that my cash and check only policy is going to go over like a lead balloon but, what can I do? I threw off the yoke of the credit card service providers about a year ago and since I’ve been enjoying having one less thing to worry about. So, Bead Show, end of March, cash or check only. Stop on by!

Know what does not travel well, particularly to lands with humid climates? Delicious Wasabi peas. They are a fave of mine and I didn’t think I could get them in Mexico so I brought some from the United States. Knowing what I know now, I’ll wager that the reason you can’t find them in Mexico is that they simply do not do well in that climate. If you leave the bag open the pea’s seemingly impervious exterior gets really sticky. I think it undergoes a chemical change of some kind–I’ve never seen peas do that in the US. Anyway, that’s just a travel tip for you–save room in you bag by leaving the peas at home. There are other snacks.

Another valuable tip: Bring some Purell and have it with you  always. It’s a not-so-delicious irony that the finger food capital of the world is also one of the more difficult places to keep your hands clean. Primarily working against you is that rule about not throwing your toilet tissue into the bowl. In Mexico, due to extremely low water pressure, you can’t flush toilet paper down the toilet-you have to throw it away in the trash can. Two clear and present germ threats arise from this scenario: 1) You tend to use less toilet paper and 2) There’s that occasional “I think I can snatch that accidentally thrown away toilet paper out of the bowl before it hits the water” thing. Washing your hands with non-drinkable water after either of these events will not leave you with any peace of mind–especially if you’re in a restaurant and you’re coming back to a plate of fajitas. You’ll find that you’re much more willing to roll the dice with something like this if you’ve had enough colorful drinks to make a knife and fork seem like way too much trouble. Colorful drinks are another clear and present danger–I’m surprised I didn’t get sicker on this trip.

Anyway, those are my travel tips. Both of them. Hope they help.

I haven’t been at work much lately. It has been unseasonably cold and I’ve kind of got my fill of blogging and dinking around on the computer in lieu of producing things. Writing is fun and all but after a while, like, after several months, it gets to me. There’s a warm up coming so I don’t expect that this will be a problem for too much longer but, boy, I’ve been digging for stuff to do the past few days.

I guess, if most people had time on their hands, they would fix things on their houses or something like that. I don’t want to discourage anyone from participating in such a worthwhile activity by talking about this but, the number of times in the past three years that I’ve said “I’m glad we fixed that” is out weighed tremendously by the number of times I’ve said “Boy, I sure am glad we didn’t fix or paint or drywall over that.” Case in point: Kitchen ceiling. Rain from the haunted toilet in the upstairs bathroom came through the kitchen last week. Quite a lot, actually, when you flushed it. It took me an inordinate amount of time to figure out what was going on there. Once I did I spent an equally inordinate amount of time heartily congratulating myself for not pushing for a new ceiling to cover the large plywood rectangle that was temporarily installed over a hole in the ceiling after the last major plumbing event in ’07. A new ceiling would have been damaged, and that would have sucked. Killed a whole day doing that, I did.

Yesterday I went to work with Don in the brewery. That was weird but I’d totally do it again ’cause he’s got a lot of varied activities going on and it beats sitting around at the shop. To the unaccustomed outsider, “varied activity” is interesting and novel. It’s probably something else entirely when it’s part of your job description. So we did various things all day. I learned that threads on wood screws are spaced farther apart than the ones used on metal and that Sundays don’t count toward the fourty days of Lent. Before 1pm I learned both of those things. Yup.

Since the Dane is located about 25 feet from an ACE Hardware store and everybody needs hardware all the time I got to visit there twice. On one trip  atop a clearance pile I discovered what is probably the ugliest clock I’ve ever seen–it was cast resin and had a cat theme; a ball of resin yarn for the clock face and three resin cats at the top doing the “hear no evil, speak no evil…” thing. It’s atrocious. Even though it’s pretty big and heavy I’m thinking about buying it so I can wear it to a party I’ve been invited to that has a “bad taste” theme. I guess it’s supposed to be bad taste as it relates to clothing but, you know, something embarrassing is going to happen if you rely on me to define bad taste in clothing for anyone. Clocks are more cut and dried. So are lamps but those are harder to wear. We need a clock for our kitchen anyway. And it’s on sale.