…or whatever passes for it around this place. 😀
This morning it occurred to me that nary a single List has ordered my days since the present “cancer” panic arose. The result of this?
The daily snowfall of paper has mounded up in great dunes atop the desk. Untossed newspapers litter every corner of the house. Dog toys litter the floor of every room. Laundry sits unlaundered. Pillowcases remain unironed (and the cleaning lady is due tomorrow to change the sheets!!). New sheets of mustard algae cling to the pool walls. The wicker chairs I dragged indoors during the no-longer-recent rainstorm still clutter the dining room. The potted rose on the east side is almost dead from missing one day‘s watering. Food is running low. Worse yet, booze is running low. Bills are unpaid. A fistful of diddly little checks from Medicare and Medigap gather dust on the desktop. Grit tickles the bottoms of my feet as I walk around the house. Empty ant traps, covered with an old fan cage and weighted down under a heavy brick to keep them out of puppy mouth’s reach, still sit on the deck. The untrained puppy is turning into a little Nero.
Lordie, but things go to Hell on a skateboard fast!
So what have I been doing while I wasn’t doing all the things that need to be done to keep the Funny Farm humming along?
This:
and this…
and these…
As usual, click on the images for a larger, sharper view.
Today I’ll deliver about a half-dozen of these to the church, whereinat we hope to sell them to raise funds for the choir. I expect we can offer them after the summer’s over and normal people come back into town and start to show up at houses of worship. And my friend Carol, who is RC and a cantor at her church, recently volunteered to organize a fair to raise funds for that church — she suggested we rent a booth there and see if we can drum up some interest among their parishioners.
I wish my camera would do justice to those glass crosses, handmade by our extraordinarily talented Doug Thomas. One of them is just amazing: it’s made of dichroic glass. When you lay it down or simply hold it flat and look at it from above, its color appears as this incandescent red-orange flame, with an abstract blue cross over it. Pick the thing up and look at it, and suddenly it’s a sky-blue transparency.
Sort of like this…
…and this.
Kind of. But not exactly. Stupid camera.
Some months ago, Carol gave me a stone cross of unknown provenance. It’s been waiting to be made into something…and so, why not?
If rosary it is to be, the challenge is to avoid clunkiness. This critter starts out chunky and invites a certain macho swagger.
Designing these things is a process of trial and error. I find myself spending a couple days on each one, fiddling with beads and spacers and color combinations and sizes. Just now, I think simplicity is going to be the soul of this particular rosary. At the moment, the proposed combination consists of 10 mm fancy agate (I think that’s what they are) pater beads with 6 mm rondelles of African jade for the decades. The rondelles are separated only by a single gold-colored glass seed bead. I’m not sure that sets them far enough apart for the supplicant to pray on them…but add even a couple of very tiny silver spacers, and they get loosey-goosey and out of proportion.
Gr. The colors are so much prettier than this! Oh well.
It’s hard to guess what they’re going to look like before you actually string them. The effect is always different and usually better than the rough design laid out on your board. Here’s the invitatory section (albeit still in draft):
I think these will be nice with the stone cross, kind of manly and cowboy-looking. If there are any manly cowboys out there who pray the rosary, this is the set of beads for you! 😉
LOL! So much better than working.
But alas, I’m afraid the vacation is over. And a new to-do List is in place:
• Pick up house
• Pay bills
• Enter data in Quickbooks
• Inflict bookkeeping on accountant
• File piles of paper
• Ride herd on subcontractor: WHERE is that index?
• Get in touch w/ client: WHERE is new copy?
• Get in touch w/ other client: WHERE is their new copy?
• Call associate editor: arrange to take her out to lunch/dinner ASAP
• Relight fire under designers
• Figure out how to upload to CreateSpace
• Drop off rosaries at church office
• AJ’s: fruit, salad stuff, other edibles
• Michael’s: look for and examine peridot-colored Swarovski crystals
• Order peridot-colored Swarovski crystals from Fire Mountain
• Scrape down the pool walls again
• Check pool chemicals
• Figure out the best time to can the pool dude, hevvin help us!
• Water outdoor plants NOW not later
• Finish writing current scene in Fire-Rider, Book II
• Figure out how to negotiate pen-name for Fire-Rider publicity. How to make THAT work?
• Find a template and ask Jesse to set up website NOW not later
• After dark, walk pup, practice leash-training
Oh, dear God. Why can’t I make a living stringing beads?
RC…? Roman Catholic? The rosaries are beautiful…brings back my alter boy days…Back in those days we used the rosaries to keep track of the prayers being said during “high holidays”….as memory serves they were basically three like beads for “Hail Mary’s” and then one bead for an “Our Father” and so on. Is that the lay out of your rosaries for sale? I’ll second….Mr. Thomas does a great job with the crosses….
Yup. If you’re interested in purchasing one, let me know.
“Booze is running low” – priorities, woman. 😀
Heh… Yeah, that definitely should’ve been at the top of the list. 😀