OK, so I'm canceling my Vonage subscription today. I wish my parents could cancel THEIR VoIP service and get some reliable phone lines. And if what I'm seeing about Skype is any indication, I won't be the only one going back to landlines and mobile phones. Don't get me wrong--I see all the advantages of VoIP service and I know [...]
Significant reward* if you're the first to correctly identify this: In part II, I'll give you the story behind it. *A drink with me next time you're in glassland. I'm buying.
The newly renovated garage studio is starting to look like a weird kiln store; Oliver Wendell Kiln finally joined his brothers in the garage this afternoon (with a great deal of assistance from his chauffeurs). It's taken nine months to get him here so I kinda feel like I gave birth to a giant space heater today.
OK, glassists: What's the first thing we learn when we start working with glass? CAREFULLY LABEL EVERYTHING! Right? Sigh.
It is--at last--a cool grey day in glassland, not quite raining but wanting to, sweet relief from the last month's desert heat. I'm on the way home from an afternoon of errand-running, partly to get things done but mostly to feel the back-to-normal, tad-too-chilly northwestern air moving through the open window of my car. I pull up to the light only halfway in the world; my brain's musing studio tasks and content projects while NPR drones in the background. The reporter mentions the Cash for Clunkers program, and I finally notice I'm behind a clunker.
I'm moving through Powell's big downtown bookstore in a wierdly dreamy, deja vu kinda way, strolling the stacks and digesting the day I've had so far: making art, viewing art, and needing art...or rather needing to get real artistic, real fast, to make sure Ernie Monstrocat has a GOOD home.
I think the birds put out a contract on me. Warnings haven't worked, and they've decided it's time for more drastic action. And fast--before blueberry season is over. You see, I've developed a real taste for the blueberries ripening in my backyard--four bushes' worth of gloriously huge, sweet berries. The birds tell me they have prior claim and they've been waiting all summer for their berries to ripen...just as I horn in. Worse still, I'm taking all the ripe ones, and making big, smacking "mmmmmmmmm" noises when I do it.
Turning points, paradigm shifts, whatever you want to call them, there are maybe a dozen in my childhood and one was the night Dad bought a huge box of books for a quarter. That small thing started me on a writer's journey. I thought about it Friday as I stood in the line to sell a few hundred books to Powells. I tried to decide if I'd come full-circle back to that first box of books or was simply committing literary murder.
"That's a gorgeous sweatshirt," I said admiringly. David smiled, wide and delighted, with lots of teeth. "Thank you very much," he said, and stopped to chat, "I'm David." A frail-looking man in his 60s, he was wearing a black pinstriped fedora with fashionable glasses, neat brown oxfords, highly polished, and worsted brown slacks with the creases carefully pressed in. And the sweatshirt made the outfit.
It was the perfect end to a very glassy week. I've been to a few BEcons, and this was the best, IMHO. Of course, it helps that it was about casting, my current obsession, and that BE attracted some of my favorite casting artists as speakers. Gotta give kudos to the BE staff, not only for pulling this off at all, but for keeping 250 cats herded fairly efficiently.
