Happy Halloween

We went all out in the office this year. Black light bats, dancing ghosts,

spider webs galore,

and glass ornaments in orange and black.


But the candy I left out in a bowl saying "share please" was all still there when I got back from dinner. Where are the trick or treaters? I should not be left alone with nestle crunch with carmel, fun size or no.

Good things:

• Fun Decor
• Vendor visit working out well
• Tried new, closer Brophy Bros restaurant in Ventura and the beer boiled shrimp is just as good as in Santa Barbara.

Always Ain't Never

Well, it's moments to the witching hour, and I'm sitting here thinking of funny phrases. If you've been my friend for a while, you might have heard this before, but it remains one of my favorite combinations of words, which while perfectly understandable, makes one do a doubletake with the effrontery of the triple negative. I may have even blogged it before, but c'est la vie.

I once overheard a coworker telling the vending machine supplier that, "when I go upstairs to get me a Dr. Pepper, there always ain't never none there." WHOA! And yet I know exactly what she means - we're always out of Dr. Pepper. It's the thinking about it that hurts.

For whatever reason, I shared this with our visiting vendor while waiting for a tool to do something, and he wracked his brain and came up with an overheard comment (from Wales, FWIW), "Whose coat is that jacket hanging up on the floor". WHOA! Coat and Jacket used in the same sentence to reference the same object, and "hanging up" on the floor? And yet we know that someone wants to know who tossed their outer garment on the floor. Almost like when I moved from the midwest to the east coast and got my "pop" from the "soda fridge".

So while you're frantically sewing that last seam in your clown costume, take a moment to think about phrases you shouldn't understand, but do, and share them here. Meanwhile, back to my book.

New Books

Suzanne Brockmann's book "All Through the Night" is coming out tomorrow, 30Oct07. All the author's profits are going to support the Mass Equality Education Fund. Mass Equality works to get and keep equal rights, particularly same sex marriage, for the citizens of Massachusetts. It's a good charity. Hopefully other states will see the sky not falling and follow suit.

The book itself is an "extended epilogue" to Force of Nature, as Suz describes it. Centering around Jules and Robin, two men in love who want to get married, it highlights many old series friends and shows them living their happily ever afters, or not so HEAs. I don't think there's any "on screen" sex, unlike most romance novels, so that it doesn't gross out the gay or the straight readers who aren't so interested in the other side's details. It focuses on relationships and feelings between friends and lovers, and issues around those things, most of all. It should be very fun.

I feel strongly about supporting equal rights for adults to choose a spouse, so you might wind up with a copy of this book, even if you don't read. Cheers!

Not Rhoda

Just a quick update. The winds are slacking off, and the fires with them. The nearest one to me is the Ranch fire that is mostly confined to wilderness, although was approaching a little town on tuesday. It blows smoke our way in the afternoon, but is otherwise not threatening my physical space. (There was a closer fire, but it was stopped so fast we didn't hear about it until afterward.) I stopped wearing the respirator on tuesday morning. I did take pictures of the smoke in the sky, but haven't had a chance to post yet.

For those unfamiliar with the Gashlycrumb Tinies, it's an Edward Gorey alphabet poem. I use it to practice Cued Speech for speed. Rhoda was consumed by a fire; I was not. And thankfully don't appear to be in danger of it any time soon. Thanks for all the well wishes, everyone!

The Glass is a Go

Heya! I sell glass. I've turned a corner and decided to commit to it on a slightly bigger scale than just word of mouth. Now it's word of mouth pointing to my website:
http://glassbyerika.freehostia.com/

I've been eating my dinner in front of "The Big Idea" with Donny Deutsch for the last few weeks. Thanks to friend Janet for pointing it out when Alden Mills of Perfect Pushup fame, and occasional blog commenter here. I love this show. I has everything I want in my news - what's going on now, what's coming up, and what good things are people doing in their lives. It showcases success stories large and small, smart and ridiculous. But everyone is moving forward with something they want to do. And I've been farting around with something I want to do.

I've got a collection of scattered thoughts that relate to this and me, personally, that I'm going to try to make coherent. I think I'm afraid of success. Either that, or I have some lingering depression and fear not having enough energy to sustain success. Probably a combination of the two. Also, I don't have a great example of making a business work for me. My parents in particular seem adamantly opposed to the idea of taking responsibility for a business. Any time they get a great idea they could totally run with and make successful, they crawl back to their nickel-and-dime paycheck jobs and say "oh, I couldn't". It's extremely frustrating for me to watch such capable people get passed by because they won't do things they are both capable of and enjoy doing. Fortunately, I learn better from bad examples than from good. As inspiring as the good examples are, I can't seem to deconstruct them for lessons as easily.

I'm still very much their child in that I prefer to pass up the million dollar risky deal to take the hundred thousand dollar mostly-sure thing that comes with a steady paycheck. (And true to form, my brother is their and my antithesis.) I can take risks, but not with financial security. But the thing I don't want to do is pass up the hundred thousand dollar deal because I'm not willing to put in a little investment. The trick is sorting out which things will be an investment which will pay off, and what are just expenses.

MIT was an investment. I was not willing to go to a cheaper school that would give me an education, no matter how great, because I had the choice to reach up to MIT and I felt at home there. I think both then investment factor and the feeling-at-home factor were equally important to me. And I worked like crazy (although my roommate will tell you what a slacker I was :) to make sure I graduated. I met plenty of people who didn't. I was a solid B+ MIT student and I learned a lot and I met a lot of friends and I graduated.

Thanks to the educational investment, I now I have my day job that gives me a regular paycheck. I can make ends meet even if I bitch about how hard it can be. But I'm getting tempted by the lure of being in control of my business. I'm a little stymied by how I could grow my glass art hobby as a business, but I think I'm going to focus on the here and now of making enough money to keep funding the hobby. Even making that decision was tough though. By committing to the glassblowing, I'm saying I won't be doing other things. And I had to dig deep and decide to go all out for this hobby because it's not a cheap one and I had to invest in both the hobby and commit myself to reaping the rewards of that investment.

I had to buy tools. I have to keep a supply of color. I have to raid the cardboard dumpster at work for gently used boxes for shipping. I have to schedule and rent studio time. For anything but ornaments, I need to find teammates to blow with. But I feel so good about doing it that I know it's the right choice. And I have some wonderful friends helping me out with the stuff I don't do as well - namely the website! and business cards/ graphical tags and spreading the word. So now, ready or not, I'm selling my glass to the great wide world, ready or not.

This totally didn't go the way I meant for it to go, but I think I said what I needed to say nonetheless. Ask me later how I was influenced by Stephanie Plum, fictional bounty hunter.
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And speaking of ready or not, one of my new friends is evacuating San Diego to come here. Guess I get to clean the dining guest room up now.

Edited to add: Scratch that. Friend has cats and found a more cat friendly venue. I like cats, my immune system - not so much. At least I was able to give him a driving destination and hope of a bed while he scrambled to get in touch with other friends.

Ashes, Ashes

Last night I could smell fire, but it smelled like a faint trace of fireplace fire so I didn't think much of it aside from wondering why people need a fire in 75F weather. After lots of sleep, I went outside around noon to cure some UV-setting glass glue and the sun was bright and the air was clear, although the wind is gusty enough to rip the dust cover off my patio bench for the first time in months. Around 3pm, I could smell more fireplace-smelling fire, and the quality of the light on my patio put me in mind of a solar eclipse - dim, reddish light. I went outside to check on the 'eclipse' and found the air full of orange smoke. I could stare right at the sun, which was a dark red to my eye, but a red corona for the camera.


The pictures kind of show what I see, but don't quite capture the ash falling from the sky. I've pulled out my sandblasting respirator to take with me in the car, just in case, while I run errands. I keep mentioning the fireplace smell because the last time a local hill was on fire, it smelled Nasty, not cosy with an urge to roast marshmallows. Although this is starting to be very heavy smoke, none of it is coming out of my chimney, pictured here.


From the pictures I just saw on the news, the fire is still over in Malibu and not likely to jump several mountain peaks and come eat my condo. There are several muliti-million dollar places and a mountain range between the fire and me, so I am hopeful that I don't have anything to worry about. I haven't heard any of our state bird (helicopters) flying overhead, which means it's too windy to fly, or the fire isn't that close. But the smoke certainly is. All the lights that turn on when it gets dark have turned on. Yet as I look outside, it's getting brighter, aka less smoky, as I write this.

Veggie Burger with Bacon

One of my co-workers ordered this sandwich from Fud.ruck.ers yesterday during our group outing. The non-veggie-tolerant folk would start to look horrified when he said "veggie burger" until he tacked on "with Bacon", and the dichotomy made everyone giggle. Another co-worker went all out to make a salad from the condiment bar, and I had a little burger and chips with vinyl cheese to dip them in. And since we paid individually, I stuck with water instead of iced tea or soda.

Since I'm fighting those start of winter blahs, and it seems everyone else is too, here's more funny stuff - I added a friend's new blog "New Door Knobs" to my sidebar; Check out the funny shopping trip.

Hrm. Trying to come up with more funny and failing. I hope next week is less blah.