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Six years and it feels like not a single thing has changed...

I have this fantasy in my mind of who I want to be and what I want to do and I always keep thinking I just need something to get out of my way to let me do it. Let me have a few more hours in the day, let me have a little bit more money, let me have a little bit more cooperation from others, but in the end the only thing that keeps me from being the person I want to be and doing the things I want to do, the only thing that gets in my way is me.

I really don't want to be an accountant anymore, the disappointment of being forced to continue that for the time being is pretty grave and every day I get more and more frustrated that it takes my very limited energy away from the things I want to do, but when that is finally over and all my responsibilities at my j-o-b are passed on to other people, if it ends up that I don't figure out how to get out of my own way I will end up just sitting on the couch watching TV all day and resenting myself deep in my soul.

I think maybe I'm procrastinating finishing this bank reconciliation and the end of year close because once it's done I will be passing on my work to somebody else and I won't have any other excuses to do those things I keep saying I want to do.

Who am I really if I have no excuses left to hide behind?

I think I'm so stuck about doing glass research partly because the part of me that wants to do the work is battling the part of me that wants to do the least amount of work required to "pass the class". My anxiety might stem from not having a teacher around to ask, "What are the minimum requirements to write this research paper? How many sources do I need in the bibliography? How many pages? How many words? What font size? Or, also, with an entire internet's worth of resources, and not having anyone to tell me "5 sources, 10 pages, 10pt font" I end up with a pile of sources on my virtual desk about a mile high.

It's not exactly that I want to do the least amount of work possible, it's that I'm getting lost in not knowing how much work is required of my project, so how do I know how many sources to use in my research? How do I know when to stop looking and settle down and start writing things down? I guess what I need to remember are the lessons my college teachers tried to get through my thick head for so many years, which was that of "scope". It should be kind of like a scientist's hypothesis. What do I want to write about, answer, discuss, prove, explore, or teach about in my paper? What is my scope? 

For my work in the SCA I want to learn how to make replicas of medieval glass beads, when and where they come from, what archaeological dig they were found in, what techniques were used to make the original beads and what techniques I used to make my replicas, and where the beads were made, who made them, why they were made, how they were made, who used them, where they were used, how far from their origin they were taken, how they got there, where the glass came from, how was the glass made, and what were the sources of the particular ingredients of the glass.

See, that's not so much to research, is it?

The long, slow slog through medieval lampworking research...

The title of this post makes it sound like I don't enjoy doing research in medieval lampworking, but I really do love learning about the way people have made glass beads throughout the millennia. It's just that there are so many sources of information out there, and most of the sources are practically carbon copies of each other. One researcher publishes an article and twenty other researchers insert the text of the article almost verbatim into their own website. I am all for using other people's work and citing sources, but when you're trying to find new or unique information and everyone is copying from everyone else, it becomes more of a tedious exercise. 

I am hoping to do something slightly different than I have seen done. I want to find the nuggets of gold, cull the herd, and present the best research that I can find about my desired topic, the glass beads of early medieval Ireland. To save all our sanities,  I will abbreviate that as EMIB throughout my blog, cause seriously, talk about tedious, having to repeat Early Medieval Irish Glass Beads over and over.

Note:

The text of this post was originally written in 2016. It's taken me this long to sit down and look at this blog again, and you would not believe it but today I want to talk about the exact same subject. Medieval lampworking research. Well, here we go. I'll post what I want to say after having the exact same roadblock for the last 6 years in a different post.

Forgive me Blogger, it's been 659 days since my last post...

In February of 2014 my husband and I decided to move back to the mainland after being on Kauai for 5 years. You might not need to know or care why, but just in case you do these are the three main reasons leading up to finally setting a date for the move. I had been struggling almost continuously with sinus infections from the allergies I had in Hawaii and I was sick all the time; the school our daughter was in suddenly decided to close its doors leaving us and thirty other families scrambling to find a new school for our preschoolers; and at the same time the Hawaii state government decided to change the start date for kindergarteners to 15 days AFTER Emma's subsequent birthday, putting her a year behind her peers on the mainland where she would eventually be going to for the higher grades. Now it's 22 months later and we are finally settled into our new, yet old lives. New and old friends, new jobs, old small town, new apartment, old furniture & books, and new joy at being home on the Central Coast of California.

I haven't had anything to talk about regarding glasswork and beads because shortly after that rainy day in February I packed up my studio into a dozen bankers boxes and set them aside with everything else we were shipping home. It might have taken a while but I have unpacked the boxes, set up my studio at the local MakerSpace, and am happily melting glass again. My perspectives have changed in so many ways since the move and I have suprisingly found that my lampworking skills seem better than I left them, even after 22 months apart, and I want to focus this blog in many future posts on how the glass melts now.

But for now, looking at the highly polished surface of stainless steel, I see things from a different angle:

I did NOT understand the connection between Google+ and Blogger...

But now I do.

So it turns out that when you delete photos in Google+, you are also deleting them from your blog. *sigh*

I was trying to get some extra space out of my Google Drive so I deleted some pictures and then emptied my trash, and now I realize that some of my blog photos were also deleted.  I don't believe there is any way to recover the deleted images that used to live in this blog space.  Sorry for the empty photo spots.

Edited to add: Looks like the only picture I actually deleted then emptied from my trash is the image of the centipede. No one wants to look at a yucky 5 inch long centipede anyway, so maybe this is all for the good. I managed to restore the rest of the pictures, so YAY! :)

Getting up before the sun...

I recently changed my schedule at my J-O-B and am now going in 2 hours earlier than I was before. My 5:30 alarm pierces my dreams like a siren's wail, and I just don't want to get up. Don't you agree that changing your work schedule is like having jet lag? Whether it's imposed on you by your boss or voluntary, it feels exactly the same. You still get that tight exhausted the feeling in the middle of your chest when you drag yourself out of bed at 0-dark-30, with a hangovery headache and the screaming need for caffeine. Sometimes, I even have "the shakes", like a drug addict coming off a high. I stumble around the house in the dark looking for yesterday's load of clean laundry to find something to wear, trying to keep from waking everybody else up. I deeply feel the unfairness of it all and want to "accidentally" bang on some pots and pans to wake up my husband so I'm not the only one suffering miserably. Luckily, my sense of fair play prevails, 'cause I know that he stayed up doing the dishes and didn't get to bed til well past 11, AND it's his Christmas vacation, which he deserves to enjoy after doing so well on his finals this semester.

So, I wake up, get dressed, drive to work, and suck down an acidic cup o' joe with enough sugars to spike a bear's sugar levels, and I spend the rest of the day missing my maternity leave, when the only thing keeping me awake at all hours was a screaming baby.

Shedding the past...

Up until I found glass, I practiced every hobby I could get my hands on. It started when I was a teen and discovered building dollhouses. You need to be able to do many different things, learn many different skills, if you want to build and decorate a dollhouse from scratch. So for years I did a little woodworking, a little wallpapering, a little kit bashing, a little quilting, a little cross-stitch, a little sewing, a little pottery, a little clay sculpture, a little whittling, a little crochet, and a bunch of other little stuff. (Yes, pun intended. :) And then I joined the SCA, and being enamored with hobbies already, I learned how to knit, weave, spin wool, bake, dye fabric, leather work, more woodworking and sewing, book binding, cord making, outdoor cooking, and many other things, including mixing drinks. And, all that time, every time I wanted to learn something new, I bought all the supplies, so I ended up with mountains of craft supplies.

My husband and I like to say that our main hobby is collecting hobbies.

When I found glass, it felt as if all my life I had been looking for "the perfect hobby" and suddenly all the other hobbies lost their appeal. I never even look at my spinning wheel anymore, and that was the front-runner for quite a few years. Now I have all these supplies that I feel I couldn't care less about, and am getting very frustrated that all this junk is taking up space, space that I could be using to store glass and lampworking supplies!

But seriously, I'm ready to shed the many layered, dead skins of my past hobbies, but my husband (who has NOT found his passion yet) isn't ready. I feel for him, really I do, so I try not to make a big deal out of it. I just wish we had a Bag of Holding we could store all that paraphernalia in so it would leave more room for moving around the apartment. And for glass storage.