Under Presure

One o eight!

How did it get to be one oh eight? Well i have only one more chance to catch a bus home, and i am almost out of o2 and propane so staying here all night is not all that practical an idea. Really the morning bus routs are only five hours away, but i do not want to run out of fuel in an hour only to be left to sleep on the back seat of the van that happens to be sitting in the basement.

It is nice to know i have options though.

Options are nice.

Did i tell you that Tyler and Cody came to visit me? You should come visit me too! I can make you a pendant for your necklace. Though i have no string of my own. I should work on that. And getting a second o2 and propane tank. Running out sucks. You are just getting into the rhyme and rhyme ( yes two, now three rhymes,) when the glass kind of stops melting, and then the flame gets a little bushy, and then it just blows itself out. You look down in dismay from behind your welding goggles and realize you have to spend another hundred dollars on something else before you can even get started again. Snags, oh there are snags. It is a god damn forest out here and i am in silk and high heals.

Well i really should go stand outside for the bus. Sometimes they are early and this is the last one after all.

Sean

Less than Ten Minutes (+20)

Before the bus gets here, so I just thought I would let you all know how I am doing.

I cannot get into Hotmail, or on to MSN. I am not wholly sure what the problem is, but it seems to be something to do with permission certificates and windows being a whore.

I am making progress with glass. My marbles have fewer bubbles with each attempt, and my pendants are getting increasingly more intricate. I have started working with hallow forms, and should be on to things more practical shortly enough.

I have been writing on the laptop at my house instead of here, mainly because i would rather be working with glass when i am here and there is nothing else to do at my current bed location.

When one comes to work with the intent of wasting glass, it is amazing how much glass you can really waste. I try not to think about how each of the twenty odd rods i used today cost me almost five dollars each. Plus gas.

Still though i made some pretty pendants, and got a lot better with my coils. I even managed to blow a blue coil into the inside of a clear coil making it all pretty and filled with bubbles.

I have to run.

Sean

Twenty more minutes.

I managed to run out to the bus on time, only to find i forgot my wallet back at the studio. The bus driver was nice enough to just let me on with out it, but i turned him down as I would have no way back here tomorrow with out it.

So i have another twenty minutes to write something with!

I put the pro in procrastination. I had to take it out of professional.
See the whole thing was a con; but I used it for a new start, so this is my confessional.

get it?

incorrect use of a semi colon.

For once i managed to make it across the street to the privately owned grocery store before it closed and after i was hungry. Two things that have been narrowly missing each other for the last week or so. It left me with microwave popcorn, chef boyardee, and a chocolate bar that had the white crap chocolate gets when it has been sitting above room temperature for a while. Still it cured the hungry part of me so i could better focus on glass, and less on my own withering form.

I made a really big marble today. I am excited to see what it will look like tomorrow. So long as it has not cracked. Sometimes they crack.

Well i am going to take off, have another sleep in tomorrow and come back to waste some more glass.

What a life.

Sean

o2

So after hardly a week the o2 ran out. It did not last nearly as long as i had hoped, but now thanks to mr.credit card i have a tank three times the size of it, so it should last a little longer. It came with a call at eight this morning informing me that the delivery fellow was waiting for me at the gallery. What kind of delivery guy is working at eight in the morning? Coffee from seven eleven and an apple marked my breakfast, but i found myself down town in due time. I had trouble moving the smaller empty o2 canister and this newer bigger tank has no handles to grasp onto. Mobility is an issue, but there are helping hands.

So i am on the other side of well rested. and the ventilation is still not up. so i grumble grumble. I keep saying i will do it myself, which is answered with mumblings and moving on to other subjects. I know how to use a drill, and i looked up how it is all done on wikihow.com

I am already starving, must i suffocate for my art as well?

the hotel has been rather busy lately, and every one seems more than happy to make sure i get all of my hours. It has come away from the mass engagements involving thirty staff and broken down into smaller two or three staff events. i have even had to run a few rooms on my own, which is a nice enough change of pace, but there are fewer people to blame when things go wrong.

Glass Dreams

Uggghed.

Chest pains make life hard.

I spent last night on the ninth floor of the Fort Garry hotel. It was pretty nice, I even managed to get room service to bring me breakfast. I only wish it had been under less strenuous circumstances, as I worked ten hours, and then had only seven hours before I was to be back working again so they gave me the room to nap in. It took me two and a half hours to fall asleep, but I did manage to use both towels and all the little soaps supplied. I figured they would have known it was me if I took the bathrobe home.

Something smells funny around here and I am not convinced that it is not me.

On further inspection, it is the garbage.

I live with three males in their twenties, and once again I find there is carpet in my kitchen. Not to call these boys slobs, but it should not take me to explain to you what spills can happen in a kitchen, and what evils lurk in the carpets. We also have to use a screw driver to turn on and off the hot water for the shower, so I am poised to start bathing solely at work. Even on days off. It has five shower heads and gets hot enough to remove skin for as long as you dare to let it scald you.

House keeping even supplies me with fresh soft towel every time.

My three marbles came out in a rather pleasing fashion. One one of them is a perfectly round shape, the other two are acceptable considering I am still with out my tweezers. Not having tweezers means I have to use other pieces of glass to hold the glass, so bits of the glass end up melting onto the marble making an imperfection. It is not an impossible situation, just a difficult one.

It is raining out side, so wondering around to look for suitable tweezers is an idea I am not keen on. The Gallery is not open for some reason, which means there is no one to show people the wood cuts and paintings and no one to let the electrician in to wire the power for downstairs. This means that the fans will not spin and I will slowly suffocate if I try to work for any length of time. I did not notice how stale the air had gotten last time until I stopped and came back to it after a few minutes. Propane burns cleanly enough, it is true but the flame takes the oxygen out of the air rather quickly, and a small basement window will not replace the air quickly enough with out the spinning fans. If I go home I will put my bed together and realize that it is still only six or seven, and have nothing else to do.

So I write this!

Still these marbles are hell of sweet. So far they cost me two grand each to make, plus labor. The poppy red is indeed very red. Most lampworkers 'dilute' their colours with clear glass so that they do not use as much of it when laying it down. I too plan on employing this trick, as colour is expensive, but when you just lay it on it can come out oh so very brightly.

Though, marbles are not all to practical. I have not played a game of marbles since grade three or four. I remember losing when I did. It would not be oh so hard to attach a loop for putting a string through affectively turning them into pendants. But I kind of want to save them and attach them to a bong.

I am only starting to feel the frustration from lack of talent. So many ideas, so little ability.

I also need some smaller tube. I have two sizes, big, and bigger. This makes making a good deal of smaller things difficult. I cannot make you a bowl for your bong, nor can I make you a marble with your name in it... well maybe I could but it would be a trial just getting the tube down to the right size. incasing colour in clear glass is also made more difficult for this lack of small tube. Hmmm... I could also use a PBF glove...

I think next on the list is some new buttons for my jacket. I lost another one at some point between now and the last time I did it up.

On that note, it is not going to get any warmer out tonight and I do have to put my bed together at some point.

Uehen
Sean
Imposter

Not Just Their Leader, He Is Also One Of Them.

I was sorting through the pile in my room when I came across my fathers old laptop. It is a 166mhz with no USB ports, and no Ethernet connection so it is basically a POS. It does however have a word processing program on it, (and a bunch of my home work from grade twelve,) but I soon found myself writing a post of almost a page in length. Little good will it do you though, with nothing but a floppy drive to get anything off of it. I have no 3.5's and am not likely to go out of my way to get one.

On the other hand, I did just spend the last three hours making marbles. I managed to break the tip of my reamer off inside one, turn one into dust, and combine two to become one. I also managed to take one that snapped clean in half and put it back together. They are all sitting in the kiln cooling down now.

At least I think that is what they are doing. The kiln only has three buttons on it, so the user interface is a little confusing. I am pretty sure I told it to cool down, but I guess I will find out in a few more minutes.

At some point between A, B, and C my tweezers went missing. This made me sad, because as much as I want to touch the white hot glass it is not something I can do. And you would be surprised how often you need something like tweezers for say, picking a glowing ball of glass from the floor, or pulling on something to make it connect to something else. They do the things your fingers cannot do lest you enjoy third degree burns.

My understanding of the way glass works is already starting to expand, which is good. I am wasting much glass in the process, which is bad. But also inevitable. The more I play with it the more ideas I get about what I want to do when I have some talent, which is a ways away yet. But one day... One day...

Ugh. Too many dayquils.

I need to go home and sleep.

Sean

It is called capitalism.

Woooooo... yeah! So I got the torch up and running and made some marbles. I did not want to do anything big because there is still no power in my room for some reason, so I could not turn the kiln on to cook anything.

When the artists get hungry, they eat eachother.

Yeah. Another thing I learned today is artists hate eachother. Everything is fine so long as they do not see eachothers work, or do not tell stories about money they made selling their love.

There is this guy Christian Worthington who had his work up at the gallery opening. He has been catching a lot of flak lately because he made five grand. I think he is awesome, but every one else seems to think he is a sell out.

Some people hate him because he has a sports car, some people hate him because he paints jesus'ish paintings, some people hate him because he never finished school. I think it is awesome that he does not have to work at a gas station.

I fully intend on selling out. I want to sell every last scrap of glass I get my dirty finger print on.

I feel like I may be getting ill. Time for bed.