Setup

Today I finally set up the torch I bought a year ago in my friend's basement! And her flame is beautiful! One of the pendants I made this afternoon - I think - turned out very clean, but we shall see when it comes out of the annealer. Here are some pendants for you to peruse. The ones in the boxes will be auctioned at a silent auction on April 1 to raise money for the Warehouse Arts project, a new venture which one of my friends from Alfred and some of his friends are trying to get off the ground.

Read Me

Because I'm in the midst of so many great literary-related things, I feel that I should share them with you. I went to a Zine and Craft Fair this past Saturday where there were indeed a lot of great Zines and Crafts people had put together, and now I have a hankering to bind some books out of repurposed paper and make bottle cap magnets. Not to mention make a zine. They're so straightforward and informal and I think that's great, though they might be a tad wasteful as far as making a bunch of copies and such. But still!

Books I am currently in the middle of and would so far recommend:

"The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan
"The Universe in a Single Atom" by the Dalai Lama

Books I just received from Amazon.com:

"Ideas and Opinions" by Albert Einstein
"Concerning the Spiritual in Art" by Wassily Kandinsky

Book my friend recently lent me, which I have not yet started, but am excited to read due to the fact that this friend lends me particularly delicious books:

"Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas" by Tom Robbins

Lastly - Does anyone have any periodicals they subscribe to that they really enjoy and feel they absolutely get their money's worth for? It would be nice to get a magazine or something that is just chock full of substance and not dry, but still interesting. I guess I don't have a specific genre I'm looking for, so throw me whatever you got. :) I'm gonna go read. Goodnight!

Windows

Pulling three days a week at the stained glass job on real-person-9-to-5 hours is whipping me right into shape! Tonight I have blisters and a few cuts on my fingers, and my whole right arm aches. Rending opening and hefting crates full of lead is one type of physical strain, which I actually find satisfying, but then there's also the smaller, repetetive motions of cementing or dismantling windows that you can be at for hours at a time, trying to go as fast as you can without breaking anything - and after a while you reeeally feel it in your wrists and forearms. Well, all over your upper body to be honest.

But don't get me wrong, I am actually quite enjoying this job. Lately the physical effects have just been making themselves apparent. Today I did something new in the shop - I used a soldering iron to remove rebars from a window. Not hugely glamorous or anything, but it's a good example of how every step of the process is a balancing act between being physically forceful and handling everything gently, keeping just the right threshold on the amount of pressure you use at any given time. To illustrate, the heavy soldering iron (in this case the largest one we have) needs to be held in just the right place and a specific angle against the rebar, maybe a centimeter above the surface of the lead so that it doesn't burn through the lead, yet not so high up that it doesn't do the intended job and melt the solder - and the same thing on alternating sides of the rebar until it lets go. A relatively small job, it would seem, but one slip of the iron and you're gonna break some glass. Using that type of muscle control for eight hours can really work your shoulders into knots.

So I went in on Wednesday with freshly painted nails left over from the weekend and left work with about a third of it gone, as anticipated, from dismantling a window with my hands bagged up underwater in latex gloves that were continually poked with little sharp bits so that tiny holes were created and subsequently filled in with water, which sat inside my gloves until I noticed and got new ones. Trench hands, anyone? And I didn't have blisters yesterday, but boy do I today... still, I'm happy with the progress I've been making. I feel like this job is going to make me super stained-glass-literate fast. Bring it on, windows!