This week’s Flaming Hot Tips Tuesday topic is keeping a journal of your lampworking trials and ideas. I don’t exactly do that, not like Jennifer describes. What I have is notebooks. Gazillions and kaboodles of notebooks.

For starters, I’ll find and print out tutorials and the like from the web, and put them in an appropriate ring binder, along with various random instruction sheets. I must have a couple of dozen of these ring binders, on everything from soft glass lampwork to boro to journaling to bookbinding to Linux and PHP and Wordpress.

Then I have a raft of Moleskine Cahier notebooks, the biggest ones. I started using these for handwritten notes after I started doing lampwork. Two of them so far are notes from classes and demo days (yep, I filled one and had to start another). Others are for “research findings.” Some of the information is gleaned from the various forums, others are my own notes and discoveries. I have one notebook so far for the COE104 glasses, mostly with just various how-tos copied down.

Another, the most valuable so far, is my Boro Notebook, focusing on color behaviors and reactions. If I read something about a particular color, or family of colors, or how to get a certain color, I write it down. If I make a particular base glass + frit bead, or a twistie cane, and want to remember what colors I used (I usually do), I write them down. Then if the combo is particularly stunning (GA Persian Blue/Amazon Bronze/Amazon Canyon twistie, for example), or a PITA to work with (e.g. the GA Purple Luster/Persimmon Strike twistie that wouldn’t bloody strike), or just plain butt-ugly (can’t think of an example here!), I can add those notes after stuff is out of the kiln.

I try very hard to not just write down what works, but what doesn’t work as well — that’s even more important IMO!

written as a letter to myself on that day, from today, five years later.

Dear Julia,

Tonight you sit alone in Woodstock, in stunned shock along with the rest of the world at the events of this morning.  You remember that the day started as an ordinary day; you got to GPC about 8:40 for your 2D Design class at 9 a.m.  You sat there with Heather and Birgit, laughing and chatting as you worked, until Inna Dereshinsky came in late with the horrifying news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.  Cathryn Miles found a boombox from somewhere, and you three tried to keep working while you listened to the static-y broadcast.  But by 10:30 you had all given up any pretense of work, and at 11 Cathryn took pity on you and dismissed the class.  The TV room in the student center was jammed, but you found space on the floor and watched the news footage with Connie and Tina, seeing again and again the plane hit the second tower and then the collapse, one after the other, of both towers.  When you could stand no more, you left for your office, just before things turned ugly as Muslim and non-Muslim students got into an altercation.  Dr. McCurdy rightly shut the campus down and sent the students home, then the staff and faculty, but you could only wait until you could leave.  As more and more news and reaction came over the Internet, you fretted and worried more and more.  Randy was at Woodward — would he get home safely?  Nick was in Phoenix, due to come back the next day — what would happen there?  So you sit there now, trying to make sense of the senseless and failing.

As I write to you, it is five years to the day after that seminal event.  Although you didn’t lose anyone you knew in the attacks, September 11, 2001 becomes the first day of a period that will completely change the life you know now.  I won’t sugar-coat it.  The next two years will be hell, the worst two years of your life so far.  That well-known stress measurement scale?  You’ll be completely off the chart — divorce, illness, death of a beloved family member, Randy leaving for college, moving not once but twice, and that’s just the really big stuff. Those two years will be cold, lonely, uncomfortable physically and mentally, and make you question everything you have ever known, believed, or dreamed. You will have to draw on all the strength you have developed over the decades to survive it.

But…

You will survive, and in the end make the life you always wanted for yourself.  Don’t be surprised at the changes that occur in you.  Don’t be surprised at the unexpected opportunities that show up, the unexpected friends that you find.  In the end, you will be happier than you have ever been before, and you will find the love that you’ve long yearned for.

And five years from now, you will sit at the computer in your own home, and write this letter, and you will know how fortunate you are.  For you, the life you will have will be worth the hell you will go through.

But you will never forget, and you will remember those who died, and those whose lives were irrevocably changed by today.

Love,

The Julia of September 11, 2006

I haven’t been as good as I had hoped on the Daily Devotions project. It was tough getting started, since we were on the road on January 1 coming back from Melbourne. With DH doing most of the actual driving after I couldn’t keep my eyes open after lunch, I got in a nap and then did a journal entry for my Capricorn New Moon Wishes.

(That’s one of my goals for the year — to be more conscientious about the NM Wishes and do them every month.)

Since then I have gotten on the torch three days, but didn’t really produce anything particularly good at any session. So instead I will have to count the many, many hours in the past two weeks of setting up the Art of the Firebird Gallery and adding images to it. It’s a start — I will have to go back and resize many of the images to reduce their size or I will run out of web space far too soon. I also have quite a number of items still to scan/photograph and add in. But if I recall, I have done something on the website nearly every day, so I intend to count that for something.

Incidentally, all of the images I post from DD365 will be in the Gallery, not the blog, though I may post the occasional thumbnail here.