What do you say when there's nothing to say?

Well, it's not exactly true that there's nothing to say.  I already blogged about my torch, oxy-con, and regulator that have been shipped; and I've blogged about the glass labeling I've been doing; but now I can talk about the annealing we did today.

I'll be the first to admit I was wrong about my hubby chickening out of doing the annealing this weekend, but it didn't happen on Saturday as I had planned because, after going garage sailing Saturday morning, we ended up hiking down to Queen's Bath.  We'd never really tried finding it, and had always heard it was a really hard hike, but when I saw that steps were sort of cut into the hillside I figured I'd give it a whirl.  I had no idea what we were in for.  Three hours later, soaking wet from the swim, sweating from the climb, parched from the heat, and ripped up from the broken shells in some submerged rocks we encountered, we emerged from the jungle physically broken and bleeding, but emotionally triumphant from our successful, invigorating, exhausting journey.  I can't wait to go back, but with packs filled with several bottles of water, gloves and reef shoes, and hiking boots on our feet.  Oh, and swimsuits.  Definitely need to remember the suits.  I'm sure there were several people that day that would like to forget some of the sights they saw.  Oh, and there were sea turtles!  Huge ones!

Needless to say when we came home yesterday we were in no condition to set up the kiln, but we did get a rain/sun shade set up, and today Jon annealed a batch of beads.  I should have looked more carefully before starting this post, but it looked like some of the beads ended up getting devitrified in the kiln.  I didn't even know that was possible.  Jon suggested it might be the reduction flame the plumbers torch puts out, and if so, that's yet another nail in the coffin for the cheap gas kiln idea.  I don't know how many beads were affected, but I'm kind of afraid to look now as this was no longer a test run, but a batch of some of my nicer beads.  I'll do an inventory and post again later.  I'll even take pictures!