Slowly but surely. The floor guys need to come back to finish the stair that goes into the sunken living room, but that is about it.

We had a birthday party to go to yesterday, and another one today. I am feverishly putting together inventory to put in a gallery tomorrow. And then I need to make MORE. MORE MORE MORE to fill out my offerings, and to put some others back out at the coast, and then try to get some up on Etsy, too. STUDIO TIME: NEEDED!

We said goodbye to a dear friend 2 days ago, our cat Lolita, who was 20. She moved in with DLJ years ago in Oakland, California. Her physical descent was quick into kidney failure and we brought her to the vet to stop her pain on Friday. It was a sad day, but I feel better knowing she is no longer declining. She wasn’t eating at all and every day looked worse and worse. She wasn’t Lolita as we knew her, so I know we were doing the right thing.

Life goes on. Halloween, we are finishing up Derek’s costume today, and need to carve one more pumpkin.
With that, we are quite busy today. I sort of envy the snow storm in the east, I know the power outages and such are not fun, but there is something cozy about a house with all that snow…. if you have power and heat somehow, of course.

Happy Halloween/Samhain!

I love my little dude!

I sold a lot of excess glass today, and my first flameworking torch. Sniff. But it had been sitting on a shelf. I repainted my studio Saturday, finishing up painting over most of the pale yellow areas a light blue. And now, suddenly, even though the paint job was quick and imperfect, I am on this minimalist kick in there. I took down posters, postcards, etc., in order to paint, and now I don’t want to put any of them back up. So for now they are stored away until I decide if I want anything in there again. Funny.

I just signed Derek up for his summer swimming lessons, so I think our summer schedule is now complete. A gym sports kind of class on Tuesday mornings, swimming on Thursday evenings, speech therapy on Fridays (he is doing very well with his stutter these weeks. Except when excited, it is almost nonexistent, which is very good progress and bodes well for the future with this and eliminating it completely) and then hopefully Friday playgroup. Oh, and a playgroup at his preschool in the forest on most Wednesdays. That leaves Monday for shopping, one day for a babysitter, and the rest of the time for playing with friends, hanging out at home, zoo, etc.

In other news, we bleached the hell out of our bathroom today. The shower pan is so old that the sealant is gone, and we can’t get it back on there (its a pebbled shower pan, huge and heavy.) So we can bleach it and leave it for two weeks. That means we shower downstairs for two weeks. Excitement around here, I tell you. Oh well, it will feel exotic, showering in a “new” location.

Thrilling, huh?

Lime Swirl Pendant

I need to make the time to do it.

How did my days get so busy, so full, so hectic? Web stuff, straw stuff, preschool stuff, little boy stuff, house stuff, preschool auction stuff, health stuff, DLJ stuff.

Well, I must get back to the STUFF. I will try to write something with decent content in the next few days.

I made this one yesterday, quickly, to test a theory. The swirls are not a glass that is called Aurora, made by Bullseye. I sort of accidentally made my own Aurora, using Bullseye glass. It has a lot more color, I think than the bought Aurora.

Fascinating. Wish I had more time to play with it, but life is hectic these days….only more so soon, when I start my yoga classes twice a week. That will cut into studio time, for certain, but good for the soul in a different way.

This year it was special fun, since it was our first year since 2006. It was a nice end to 2010, which was in many ways not my favorite year of late. There were many good things, and in the big picture, not many bad, but….it was a mostly off-kilter year. Can’t win them all.

One nice bit, though, was making a new friend in the band’s trumpet player. For years I had admired his work (and that long hair) onstage and after over a year and a half of emailing, convinced him to hang out in early May. Since then, we have gotten pretty close as friends. He is not around much, with the touring and various other travels, so instead of seeing each other regularly we would carve out like, 8-10 hours in a day, and just do it all at once, roaming from activity to activity, meal to meal.

So seeing the band, and now, seeing a good friend up there, spending NYE with him from the darkened Schnitz, was a lovely ending, and beginning of 2011.

Today we took down the tree, after Derek and I had slowly removed ornaments during the last part of last week. DLJ says it’s too cold to do the outside lights, but I like work like that, so I will venture up the ladder tomorrow to get them off the house, so we can pack everything back away in the attic and I can turn my sights to Spring. I know, winter just started….but I am always eager for it.

In the world of glass, often one starts working in the colors of the future. If I made glass hearts, I would be well into that for Valentine’s Day, already. So Spring will come to me, soon as I shift my working colors, to a degree, to the vibrant new growth colors of the coming longer days.

Tonight, it is cold. Brr. I hope to get close to the end of a sleeve on a sweater I am knitting for Derek, perhaps a small cup of cocoa, and a little tidying up. I’m reading William Gibson’s latest effort and the first chapters were a tad confusing, but I am now hooked in for the ride. So a little nightly reading will end my first day of the this decade.

I have some “resolutions,” but I will post those in a few days. My resolutions are really more like goals, I guess. Not promises to keep, but things to work and strive towards with optimism.

May the new year be blessed for all of you!

-Lots of WordPress messing around right now. Come the New Year it will be time to get back into Joomla, methinks, for other projects. I still kinda like Drupal *wistful*

-Derek and I just drove back from the coast, where the weather was wet and wonderful and wild. The sea was ragingly gorgeous, I wish I had had more time to just sit and watch it.

-I came home to find some glass goodies, some odd lots that I want to play with when I have time. Which will start again next week, hopefully when preschool gets back into swing.

-At the same time, I hope to start some yoga soon, I got some classes cheap, but It might be a good idea to let the New Years resoluters get their inertia sheen a little tarnished first, maybe. I don’t know.

-There is herring in sour cream in my fridge. Kickass.

-I need to go to the knitting store! So close to finishing my sweater, yet…I have issues, beginner knitter me. But so close to finishing!

-NYE is this Friday! Pink Martini and drinks with friends beforehand! Yay!

-Rain, rain, rain. My house still has a leak, but we are closing in on it. Yeah. Like we were 3 years ago.

-With only two cats now, we are letting them upstairs during the day. Ankimo is the only one right now who ventures up. It’s nice to have roaming (sorta) kitties again.

Derek is recovering, but out of 6 times getting physically ill, only one was in the toilet. Draw your own conclusions from that one on what I have been doing lately.

Our cat, Anais, is still in very bad shape. She is in the bathroom now, because she can no longer hold pee in very well. Subsequently I spent a chunk of Saturday on my knees with a blacklight and cat pee-removal stuff trying to save the carpet in the family room. I did the same thing on Sunday. Today I had an estimator come out to tell us how much it would cost to professionally try save things. Unless we remove the decorative boarding around the floor and redo the carpet strip tack, he won’t be able to get it all gone. Even then, if we pay to have that done, he cannot guarantee 100% it will all be gone, but it will be close. It’s either that or redo the whole room. We just had it carpeted in 2007. Great. So that’s $400 minimum to fix, and more definitely when you need someone else to reinstall carpet tacking and such.

Derek just freaked out on me and screamed at me, something new. It delayed dinner so now it is late.

Back in August, I asked Derek’s babysitter to save NYE for us. She agreed. I asked again in Sept. and once in Oct. to verify we had her for that evening. Yup. So we made plans. We planned to go see Pink Martini play on NYE, something we did every NYE until Derek came along. In fact, this is the first NYE we planned to go out since NYE 2006. My friend who is a member of Pink Martini offered to comp us tickets, sweet! So then I made plans with other friends so we could hang out before the show and have drinks, then go.

You know where this is going, right?
Last night the babysitter FACEBOOKS me to tell me she can’t come. Not even telling me to my face. I know I should not be too surprised or upset, she’s a teenager. But still. I made it so clear this was important, asked so many times while I still had time to get someone else. So I was pretty damned disappointed.

So I went immediately up the street and begged on my knees for a 14-year old girl to watch Derek. And she agreed. She has to come over first to meet him. They know each other, but I can’t leave him alone with someone he doesn’t know really at all, so this means an added sitter time before NYE, but hopefully all will work out on THIS particular item. I REALLY want to go out NYE and have fun. Plus G. already put our names on the list with his reserved tickets, and having to back out would blow after he did that for us.

Meanwhile, I am swamped with web work. A lot of stuff for Derek’s preschool, coming at me from two different directions with immediately deadlines and no time to work on them. There’s a lot of Dolby work right now helping fans get the new EP, technical support, etc., along with the regular forum monitoring and maintenance to the site. With Derek sick, there isn’t much time for me to sit and do work. He didn’t go to school Tuesday so I missed out on that time to work. I have a cold right now myself, so that doesn’t help. Too much, too little time, too many demands. I’m not amused at all. Meanwhile, just being a Mom and a wife and a glass artist and a straw maker.

Overdrawn. Wake me when it’s over.

Maybe I will just sell it as is…..no finished piece.

Currents

I am very busy. I am doing a lot of work on Thomas Dolby’s site right now, it is deep in crunch time on that one. And I just started working on a new site, another band called the Shanghai Woolies, a local band that plays hot jazz. And I have lots to do on the website for Derek’s preschool, as that is my volunteer parent job. And of course, the beads, the glass, the straws. Plus being a Mom and a wife. Busy! Very busy. I need things to settle down, but I am not sure when that will happen. The immediate crush should slow in a few days and not be so hectic.

I’m still in my pajamas. It’s been a nice, long week of DLJ being home. We were going to go to LA for Thanksgiving but it was canceled at the 11th hour, my MIL was very sick and didn’t want us to come. So we went to the coast instead. It was nice, we had two days that were cloudy, but also partly clear, with no rain, so Derek got some beach time in, we went to the Oregon Aquarium on Thanksgiving Day, which was a GREAT day to go. There were less than 200 people wandering the whole place, it was like it was rented out for a private party or something in terms of our freedom to roam around and see very few other people.

While life is very busy right now, I am grateful for the busy. It means I have work to do, art to do, ways to help friends with their work, and a great family to be a part of.