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!