…and it was the first day in at least a few to warm up above freezing. The highs will be near 50 this coming week. (Yesterday, I think I heard the weather man say it got up to 56.) I can’t believe it was 17 degrees just the other day. There’s still snow on my lawn from over two weeks ago, but there won’t be for long.
In other news, on Sunday, I woke up to Mr Sarah informing me that he not only downloaded the 30 day free trial Adobe CS 4, but also seamlessly imported/migrated my Go Live site files into Dreamweaver and it was ready for me to conquer. For dread. But as soon as I got out of bed and injected some coffee into my eyeballs, I had DW figured out within a couple of hours. Well, just the basics of what I need to know to continue maintaining my website and selling Superstars, and that’s good enough for now. It’s very similar to Go Live, but also heavily utilizes CSS. Whatever that is. Technically, I don’t know anything about HTML code either, but HTML has been around so long that writing code is as easy as dropping icons into document pages and dragging strings over to a folder full of files. I suppose CSS hasn’t yet been simplified to such a point of “any yokel can do it”, so it’s going to make making do a little harder for a while. I guess I’ll have to get out the For Dummies book. We can thank the World Wide Web Consortium, (yes, there really is such a thing, if you can believe it) for eliminating a cluster for professional website designers and creating an entirely new one for a bead-slinging “dummy” like me.
And I’m going to have to come up with $400 for this new software package within the next month, which I’ll probably never get around to using at its full potential before it reaches its obsolescence. That could be anywhere between 2 and 5 years from now, and if you’re living in a cave and not paying attention (like me), it really sneaks up. I’ll have to unexpectedly come up with another enormous chunk of change for the new version when the old version “mysteriously” becomes corrupted, and if I still have this blog-thing, you guys will be reading about it and wondering if you’re having a deja vu moment. But really, I can’t complain too much, since $400 for CS4 Premium is a steal of a deal. It normally costs $1800, but Mr. Sarah gets a discount. That, and I can make my website look exactly how I want, and not have to rely on some other monkey and their wacky ideas of “elegant web design”. (as if mine were all that great – I just like to be in CONTROL.) So, yeah, I’m totally coming out on top of this one, but I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t piss and moan about it a little.
And with this balmy weather, I was able to eak out a few beads on Sunday, even at midnight, without too much discomfort. I tried my new Reichenbach Raspberry Opal – which is too excellent. It’s a little foamy at first, but it calms down quickly. It’s also not too smooshy like darker opaque 104 pinks tend to be, so I was able to make a Fizz Tab without any remarkable distortion of the base bead. The only drawback I found is that it tends to swallow surface decoration, but not excessively, and you can barely even tell at room temp. (sometimes the flame reveals little imperfections that aren’t as visible when the bead is cool.) All in all, it is a beautiful, unique, and user friendly color.
The Mystic Pink is similar in color to RO, and appears to have a slightly pearly sheen (but my guess is that it isn’t quite as pearly as the pearl pink), is more streaky than the RO, and unfortunately, the longer it’s worked, the more devitrification it grows. Bah. Even after nearly 12 years, I’m still not sure what type of flame chemistry can be used to avoid devit (which is basically patches of chalkiness on the surface of the glass, in case you don’t know), or if it can be avoided at all in certain applications. Like Evil Purple, it will have to be a glass that I use in smaller amounts and is added farther along in the repeated heating and cooling/design process. But let me clarify, it’s NOTHING like Evil Purple. Evil Purple is straight up psychopathic, and Mystic Pink just has a couple of little grand larceny charges on her record. She never hurt anybody.
The Multicolor 104 COE – well, it’s nice, but I’ll just have to trust that it will give me a range of minty greens, blues and purples, even though it looks a little browny green going into the kiln. I was able to strike a little spacer to deep purple-blue, and it stuck through annealing. I need to work with it some more. I’m going to keep a close eye on these beads for several days for cracking, but I have a good feeling about it. I just do. I’ve done a little research, and haven’t found complaints about incompatibility clogging up the message boards, and that’s another good sign.
Okay, that’s enough blah-blah for now… I plan on doing some Etsy listings later today.
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