Still kicking...

Donald Duck reminds you to celebrate with caution this holiday season!

I hope everyone had a halfway decent turkey day. That was what, two weeks ago? I can barely stand to eat turkey more than one day a year, but invariably there are leftovers. And guess who got stuck with all the leftovers, including the carcass? Turkey has an odor that increases exponentially each day it lingers. We were going to have turkey soup (oh, joy) but it never happened and it’s too late now. Meanwhile, that poor turkey has another day or two in my fridge before Mr. Sarah gets The Sneer. He’ll know what it’s for.

Mr. Sarah is in charge of carving the turkey with the electric knife – Mom doesn’t trust anyone else to do it. I don’t remember whose assignment that was before he was around… maybe it was Grandpa’s. (EDITED TO ADD: On the phone the other night, Mom commented on what I said about Grandpa carving the turkey – it went something like “Daddy? Carving a turkey? Are you effing kidding?” She went on to say that my husband is the only man in the entire immediate family that’s been worth a damn in the kitchen. I agree, his pot roast is divine and so is everything else he makes.) Mr. Sarah approached me with the wishbone and I got the bigger half. I hope my wish for a better next year – for us and the rest of humanity – comes true. We always have ham at Christmas, which plays an important part in getting us through the Hellidays to the end of the year. Mom sort of overcooks it so that it isn’t slimy. The only thing worse than turkey two holidays in a row is one slimy ham.

I finally made myself update my website and add several pages to my 2012 gallery. I use Adobe Dreamweaver, which would be more aptly named Adobe Night Terror. Really, it isn’t so bad, but it has all this CSS business that I haven’t a clue about. I’ve tried to read Dreamweaver for Dummies, but CSS doesn’t make any sense to me. HTML barely did. CSS is supposedly more user friendly and gives the user more control and make short work of web designing. My cynical theory is that CSS is designed to make you want to hire someone to maintain your website for you rather than make any sad attempts at understanding CSS.  Luckily Dreamweaver works similarly to GoLive, and what I need to know to make it work for me is all I really need to know. And I got it all done, and that’s what matters. Have a look!

We also got a new video card for my computer. For the last year or so, my computer would randomly freeze up (with no access to the task manager) whenever I was browsing the internet. Usually at the most inopportune moments, like when I was doing Etsy listings or posting on my blog and I hadn’t saved everything yet. It was weird, though – it only happened when I was browsing the web, never when I was fiddling with files or Photoshop. I figured if anything could crash a computer, it would be Photoshop. We finally narrowed it down to the video card, but were reluctant to buy a new one due to the expense and the possibility that it was the slot the card was in, which would mean replacing the motherboard. The problem was intermittent for a long time, sometimes weeks would pass without any freeze-ups. We hoped the problem would resolve itself, but no luck.

My husband knows his way around a PC, and he hates every second of it, and I’ve come to feel similarly about them, having used them for this many years and watching him fix them. But the good news is, we found a card that has about twice the memory and power as the old one and I paid about half as much as I had expected. We’ve pushed it hard by watching videos and visiting sites that always crashed my computer (which was every site I visited toward the end.) Not one single crash in the last two weeks. Now I’m not going to dread surfing the internet, and I have a lot of gawking to catch up on…

waah – I kept looking at them and thinking “what’s that shmootz all over my beads? oh, right.”

Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time for gawking. I have been working tirelessly on boro beads since mid-November. Last Tuesday, an awful thing happened. I had gathered up all the boro beads I had made, except for two sets, and put them into a container and set them on my nightstand. I had to step out for a minute so I grabbed my scarf, which caught on the edge of the container, and all of the beads went crashing to the floor from about 4 feet high… along with a glass jar. The jar broke, of course, and each and every bead hit each other and the fragments of the glass jar, hard. The beads had impact cracks all over them – you know what a thick plate glass window looks like when it’s been shot with a BB gun? Sort of like that, but on a smaller scale. So in a matter of about a second and a half, two weeks, a tank and a half of oxygen, precious and rare borosilicate glass (and 50+ beads) were demolished. They aren’t sellable, and not really give-away-able, either. Mr. Sarah commented that I was taking it all surprisingly well. Who has time to lay down and die when there are more beads to be made?

So I’ve worked double, maybe even triple time recouping what I lost over the last week so that I could get back to the soda lime and fulfill my other commitments. I had to tell my boro people what happened, and one of them asked if there was any type of insurance that would cover such a loss. I thought, Hm, that would be nice, but all the premiums and paperwork and fighting with the insurer to get them to pay up would be a much bigger hassle than just going back and doing it all over. And it’s not as if this happens frequently, this is the first time it’s happened to me. So I just got back to work, and truth be told, most of the new versions turned out even better. I would have liked to make more, I had given myself another week if I needed it, but I had to stop because I literally ran out of several of my staples. I can’t even remember the last time I bought borosilicate glass, and it looks as though the time has come around again.

I guess I’ve just been incredibly busy, and you know how time flies. This is probably the worst possible time of the month of December to contemplate Etsy listings, but contemplating them, I am. I have several soda-lime orders to catch up on and plan to squeeze in a few me-time beads for Etsy over the next week, and there will be a boro set, as well – one of the only two sets (and a few stragglers) that survived because they were in another location. Lucky beads indeed.

I hope you all are well and eaking some enjoyment out of this year’s holiday season. Thanks so much for checking in. I hope to not be such a stranger once I get my schedule back on track…