I love this thing beyond reason. If you’ve ever done much cold work by hand, you know what I mean. By hand is a real problem for me. I have chronic pain in my arms, wrists, and hands. Coldwork by hand—say, 3,000 revolutions of a piece of glass over another piece of glass covered in grit—it ain’t gonna happen. The flat lap grinder, given some time and water and rather a lot of diamonds sprinkled over it, does things for me I can’t get any other way.

Cold work, which is essentially shaping glass with abrasion rather than heat, is most magical at the edges of things. Glass is all about light, of course, and the edges of a piece have a lot to say about how light is going to get in there and bounce around. You can fire polish a piece of glass, and it will be smooth and shiny and somewhat domed on the surface and rounded at the edges. And, usually, about 6 mm thick, because that’s what glass flows to. Or you can coldwork the surface and edges, allowing more light to get in from the sides. which changes the nature of the piece. And you can work much thicker.

I’ve always loved the beautiful work GlassFancy does. Her coldworked gems have silver inclusions and a distinct look to them. I see pictures pop up now and then and nearly always recognize her work. Once I started to play with jewelry blanks, I knew I wanted to work fat and deep this way. I’m taking shortcuts for now, to keep prices down…lapping to a medium finish and then a low fire polish. But I’m really loving these cute little fat blobs.

Working deep this way is hard on the hands, though. I chopped glass for a day or two a while back and wiped myself out for a week. So one more new arrival in the garage: a tile saw. [Yes! Yet another birthday present.] Most people don’t want to use a saw for glass cutting, which is usually a matter of scoring the glass–making a flaw in the surface to suggest where it should break–and then gently insisting that it do so. A tile saw, on the other hand, chews through the glass, and wastes the width of the blade and any attendant vibration. But if it’s a choice between wasting and not doing it at all, it’s an easy choice.

I know where to go to use a fabulous tile saw: Helios in Austin. There’s an MK-101 there, I think it is, and it’s a joy. It also costs well over $1000 and is about 120 pounds, not something I could handle myself. I went the opposite route: the cheapest and lightest thing I could imagine doing the job. I ended up with this:

Chippy McGee

It is so not a delight to use. But with a good blade, it cuts, grossly. And then I turn it off and move over to my lap grinder, and the joy returns.

I had the most fun with the cigar boxes. Everybody would check inside, hoping, I suppose, that a $3.00 box was full of $18.00 cigars. No joy, though. One old guy seemed convinced that if only he could ask in just the right way, T would sell him a fabulous illegal Cuban cigar from his stash hidden inside the house. He didn’t give up easily.

Organizational mode continues, and now I’ve got room and joy enough in the garage to really get some order going. Slowly. It seems pretty pretentious of me to call my space out there a “studio”—but really, it’s getting there. I’ve got a workbench (yay for pegboard) for cutting, a beyootiful glass rack, a large variety of cast-off shelves and cupboards, and best of all, a whole table and waffle grid for my edge grinder, and even better than best, my new flat lap grinder. [My birthday present. Yeah, that’s it. The drooling over the catalog just had to stop.]

Yeah, okay, it’s pretty pretentious for me to even have a lap grinder, but there it is. I’m sure there will be pictures soon enough, so you can see what it is and what it can do

Meanwhile, tomorrow I start a class on frits and powders at Helios in Austin. I’ve been holding my breath for this one for a YEAR. [It’s my other birthday present. I wonder how long I can draw out this birthday season?]

Think of me on Saturday afternoon for the next four weeks. There’s nothing like hanging out at Helios. The creative vibe there is just…food. And the people—they know you’re an addict, and they understand, because they’re addicts too. There is great joy and so much laughing. And light, of course, bending around and through glass.

Also, Band-aids.

Happy weekend to you, too.

And some of it surprised even us. Some silver I’ve had lying around that I remembered not. Table linens, serving pieces. Lots of fancy there. Why? I’m not fancy.

Some glass items collected over the years, before I was into my own. They were but the dim expression of my obsession…not very interesting to me now. But if the right collector comes along, it’ll make her day.

We found a Furby in the back of one cupboard. That was pretty funny. T put in new batteries and turned it on. The cat watched it for a while, and then attacked with teeth and claws. Too bad we didn’t record it; we could have had a YouTube hit.

Then we found the four Moomin plates that T’s mother sent us from Finland a while back. They’re awfully cute, and awfully Finnish. She’d sent two Christmas mugs from 2004, which we have in use, but we set the plates aside in their boxes to wait until we had broken some of our other dishes. They’re pristine, so of course I had to have a quick look at eBay prices. And almost choked. The mugs are “semi rare” and selling for over $200 on eBay! Unused ones, of course. I don’t think I’d better mix any more instant coffee in my Moomin mug…only the finest Colombian from now on! The plates are less rare, but one is discontinued and worth some pretty big bucks to somebody. It all seems crazy to me. Tepa, would you be very offended if we sold your plates—if we promise to use the cash for plane tickets? I don’t know, though; the more I look at them, the cuter they are.

Moomin is a topic for a whole blog post, really. Maybe the thing to do is buy the limited Christmas design each year and hoard it away for a decade. If we got the timing right, we could pay for a trip to Finland every year. At any rate, nothing by Arabia (the factory) is ever going into a garage sale in Texas—precious as Iittala and Marimekko to me, and few of these good ol’ boys and gals are going to understand.

Anyway, it’s all piled up all over, waiting for next Saturday. Order soothes my inner voices. All this chaos…it makes me fret. But really, who can take such a problem seriously? Too much stuff. Too many blessings. Not even I am going to spend another moment listening to this kind of whinge.

The house is slightly askew! To the panic room! –Ned Flanders

Tuesday we’ll be breaking our record here of most consecutive days over 100 degrees. And there’s no real end in sight yet. I was away last week, and coming home, parking in the driveway, emerging, my first thought was that the trees here are perishing. And they’re Texas trees. They’re supposed to be tough.

It’s past the middle of August. In two months, it’ll be practically Halloween. And two months more, Christmas. I don’t have the luxury of waiting out the summertime anymore. To be sidelined by heat three months out of the year is no longer working for me.

Cold is worse, and more painful. Maybe? I know this for a fact in February when I am enjoying beautiful days and the rest of the country is paralyzed by snow. But…isn’t there any place perfect? Three months of each season, and enough water, and…I lived in a place like that once, but I don’t want to go back east.

On the other hand, my children are on the move. One has removed to Kentucky, of all places. What I know about Kentucky? Horses. Nothing else. And the other is talking grad school, and that could end up being anywhere. So. Maybe. I don’t need to live in Texas. If only I had a real job and real direction and a sense of a future.

In the meantime, it’s hot. But it’s time to live as if it doesn’t matter. I guess that’s an answer, there. You can live as if it doesn’t matter, as long as you drink plenty of water. It’s not like winter, actively trying to kill you.

Glass cuts better when it’s warm.

We’ve lived, T and I, all this time in this house—for eleven years now—amid a motley collection of garage-sale finds, parents’ castoffs, and even, I admit, curbside scrounges, which we called our furniture. A few bits and pieces came in purposefully, and we did furnish most of the living room in one go, way back. But until I overhauled my office last year, nothing much was planned. Everything just evolved randomly, or came together, clashed, and subsided into benign neglect.

But suddenly, T got the itch to fix up his office—well, I think he mostly got the itch to buy a big honking TV and he had to make it look good—and then the bedroom looked pitiful, and the kitchen is a disaster, and all we do in the dining room is trip over the stuff we dump in there (we don’t dine, that’s for sure). And concurrently, the sheer weight of stuff is oppressing us. We have a perfectly lovely house for the two of us, about 1800 square feet, and if that’s not enough space for all our junk, then some it has got to go.

So. There’s a garage sale of our own coming up. Makes me cringe, but if I don’t think about it too much, I think I can do it. And for the rest, there’s Ikea. All those great ideas for small nordic-style living spaces. Makes a Finn feel right at home. And a Finn’s wife is game for size down and efficiency up. I did grumble when a big black filing cabinet moved from his office to mine—my lovely, non-black office decor absorbing the blot because, after all, it accords with our efficiency requirements. And after all, there’s paint. Soon.

My little non-black filing cabinet is currently banished to the garage. There’s the upside to all this movement. The unwanted bits make their way out there and the glass studio gets next dibs. Great news out there, studio-wise. Blog for another day.

Meanwhile, T’s office is looking good. The bedroom is coming together slowly but at least there’s matching storage in there. The kitchen—can’t afford to overhaul it but at least we can make the sewing room half of it match. New kitchen floor coming one of these days.

Now that I’ve started noticing the things I’ve been neglecting all this time, I can’t stop. Endless flaws. Patch, mend, clean, prime, paint. I actually finished repairing the two holes that Mojo chewed in the drywall, on a freak binge, when I first moved into this house…eleven years these ugly and unfinished half-repaired spots have lurked behind the furniture. Today, finally textured and primed, and we even bought paint. Not my oldest project, which would be repair and refinish of a highboy dresser that’s followed me around since 1982…but a big win for the git-er-done list.

I can’t think about this stuff. I just have to do it. A garage sale, and a bunch of strangers pawing through my stuff: horrifying. My home decorating sense, hibernating most of the time, only grouchily emerging from its den now and then to snarl about the surroundings. My repairs, so inexpert and so clumsy. The only thing that looks worse, in most cases, is not to try. So I’m trying.

And I’m trying not to slide back into a book for a few weeks. Unless it be my own, another highly horrifying ambition that isn’t getting much exercise lately. Perhaps it too will have its day, some day. Get in line, great American novel. Right behind the highboy dresser there.

It’s a time of great rejoicing here in San Marcos writers’ land. My friend Heather just signed a three-book contract with St. Martin’s Press, and we are delighted. We, I say, my group of writing cronies and I, though perhaps I use the term cronies ill-advisedly. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of these ladies. Heather’s been in our group for several years, and she has worked hard, hard, hard, and now she’s got something to show for it.

She’s after me to do the same, and I have no objections–except for the working hard part. Partly it’s a question of time. There’s no substitute for butt-in-chair, fingers-on-keyboard time. And that’s what I do for a living anyway, so it’s hard to feel motivated to add extra hours and hours. And at the same time, I’m really wanting to spend more time outside, just moving, to keep my graying self from petrifying. Carving an hour a day to walk and a couple more to write is not going to happen, not often, and not regularly, while I have to do other things for a living.

Fortunately, I’ve got a tiny digital recorder. It fits in the palm of my hand. I can walk, and at the same time I can dictate…and what the hell, I’m a transcriptionist, aren’t I? I can come home and transcribe, if the words are worth setting down on screen. But I really don’t want to go wandering around my neighborhood muttering out loud to myself.

So here I am, walking the upper Purgatory Creek greenspace. It’s one of the natural areas preserved by the city. About 460 acres, lots of trails…it’s beautiful out here. Very rarely do I see another human. My companions are trees. They take little notice if I talk to myself. Here in central Texas, we have a tree called the live oak—I suppose because it’s an evergreen type that looks alive when everything else looks bare and dead in the winter. It’s an impressive feat of engineering, the live oak. They spread out low and send out massive branches running nearly horizontally. They develop craggy hollows. Other plants tend to hitch a ride. You may find a prickly pear growing in the branch of a live oak tree several feet above your head. The branches are often shrouded in moss. You can walk into these draperies and disappear from regular life. There’s one tree out here with a little door built into the split at the trunk, like a troll house. There’s a geocache in there, I’m sure. Strange little fairy rings of stones under the canopies. These giant mother trees tend to anchor the trails. Each is such an individual; if I can just learn the major trees, I’ll never get lost.

So at least until the mosquitos hatch out and the heat gets brutal, you can find me walking upper Purgatory—but I hope you don’t—muttering to myself. It should do great things for my cadence. It’s hard to sustain those sentences I love with the eight clauses turning and twisting like live oak branches when I’m telling my words out loud.

You’ll know it’s working if these blog posts come along a little more frequently. I’ll know it’s working if I finish the next chapter of my petrified novel.

I finally feel secure enough in my slumping experience to say this: just because the slumping mold exists doesn’t mean that it should. There are some shapes you can approach in different ways with more or less degree of skill, and of course you can probably get something satisfactory out of them, one way or another…but never in the full form of the mold itself. Glass stretches, shrinks, falls, sags, weighs itself down; the exact drop-off from a horizontal plane to a void that your ceramic mold follows is not always going to be the way the glass goes, no matter how you approach it. You may be the Glass Whisperer incarnate, but some of it is just going to go wonky.

It’s not just you. Or me. So there. But I have a lovely spoon rest.

I think I’m about done with laying up a couple of layers of glass and making small dishes, anyway. They don’t sell all that well, for one thing—who wants one plate? Bigger serving pieces are more impressive, but that can wait until I’ve got a bigger kiln. What I see happening next here is more textural experimentation. And power tools. Definitely yes. Wet tile saw, lap grinder, and there goes my budget.

Because we all want to mix electric current and water in big messy ways, don’t we? Wait until you see the things I can make out of scrap glass! And just in time. The bins are overflowing.

It was not so big a change for me, already gluten-free, as for my bread-baking, potato-loving husband. The thing I missed most, in fact, was my diet soda, and that stuff isn’t even food. I broke my morning coffee habit too, since it turned out that what I really wanted was coffee-flavored cream, and we weren’t doing that. It took about two weeks for the impulse towards these things to go away. I finished January with an emotional climate of calm happiness. Calm. Happiness. You don’t know what that means to me. Part of it was just from having T on board and accomplishing a challenge together, and part of it was from food-as-medicine, I’m certain.

The Whole30 is not a weight-loss plan. We ate a lot, but we ate it in three meals a day. Keeping them low carb and high fat meant no sugar crashes, no nap attacks, just sustained energy burning until the end of the day. We got very hungry and ate very much and then waited to get hungry again. I think I snacked twice in the whole month. By the end of the day we both felt quite tired—got a pretty consistent 8 or 9 hours of sleep, lucky us.

Results? Within one day all my reflux symptoms went away. Within a week my gut was happy – holiday eating had left it not so much – and within two, a couple of annoying hot spots on my skin had resolved. I lost 5 pounds altogether. I lost fat, not just bloat, and had to buy a new size in pants. My face looks different; my rings are falling off. This was all without any significant exercise to speak of, because I’m still doing physical therapy for my herniated disc, and that’s all I feel I have time for.

Insulin is the key to fat storage. The control of insulin release is the key to fat loss. I’m more convinced of it than ever. (Did I mention Gary Taubes?)

Midway I got a bit tired of cooking…rinsing, chopping, cooking almost every meal…you can’t eat out easily without getting processed foods, and we didn’t try. On the other hand, we ate so well! (Our chickens did too.) Shopping is very easy: go to the produce section, buy some of everything, check out the meat counter, and done!

We had not been on a food budget before, and we didn’t spend significantly more money eating this way. That diet soda habit, the alcohol we were putting away, and various convenience foods all cost money for advertising and packaging, way more than plain food, and we bypassed all that. Admittedly we were eating conventionally-finished meat from the supermarket, not grass-fed. If you’ve been living on rice and beans, this way of eating is going to cost you. But I choose to think it’s pay now or pay later, like all prevention.

I’ve added butter and cream back in now that the Whole30 is over—I missed them. Tried a cup of coffee and got a stomachache, which I had forgotten about but immediately recognized: oh yeah, the coffee stomachache. Why did I drink this stuff again? So that’s not coming back; tea will take its place. The diet soda is banished—as incentive, I’m brewing kombucha, which I love. It’s fizzy and it’s real food. It’s also somewhat insulinogenic since I don’t like it vinegar-sour, so I have to limit it and not drink it like water…as I shouldn’t have been drinking the diet soda, either.

Interested in trying the Whole30? First, get on board with the idea that saturated fat is not your enemy. (Good introductions to this topic on Mark’s Daily Apple and Kurt Harris’s Panu blog.) Next, sharpen your knives and find an extra cutting board (two is not enough). Get acquainted with Mel and her Dino-Chow recipes, maybe take a trip to Penzeys.

Eat.

Don’t do this for weight loss. Don’t weigh yourself during your 30 days. Take a set of before and after measurements. Keep a journal and write down how you feel a couple of times a day.

You may surprise yourself.

I fired up the torch. This is good, because it’s been so long since the last time that I was feeling scared of it. Once again, I had to unearth surfaces. The great thing is that I sat down with no end product in mind, just the intention to practice pulling stringer out of scrap glass. So it was free, really. And I couldn’t do it wrong. I did it ugly, sure, but it’s still stringer, and it went into these little doo-dads for Valentine’s Day:

I think I’ll put myself through stringer and twisty school for a couple of weeks. It’s funny how perceptions change. When I used to work at beads, I was always conscious that they weren’t coming out as well as I wanted, and I was wasting glass, and it was so expensive…and now, hoo boy, you think that was expensive? I’m surrounded by an inventory that cost ten times more than I ever spent on bead making.

I’ve managed to put a few words together nearly every day. Again, no big result. It’s the process, I keep reminding myself.

And we’ve reached Whole14 here and we’re on our way to the Whole30. I’ll have to do a WholePost on this one of these days. It turns out my worst addiction was diet soda…there’s something evil about that stuff. And there’s something wonderful about doing my grocery shopping in the produce section and at the meat counter and then walking out.

Lotta cooking going on. Lotta little therapy exercises, trying to recover my cervical spine function. And next, one of my favorite lottas: throwing stuff away! It’s time to do my taxes and weed out tons of paper files. Clean the rest of the surfaces around here and throw out the junk in the way. Heck, I can throw out at least 8,000 things on my computer, without even getting up off the sofa! Nothing like shedding a thousand pounds of digital and junk weight for the new year.

I’m not arriving at anything. But I’m pretty happily tripping down the lane.

Surely I can improve on the last two months of 2010. Sidelined by a herniated disk and then a garden-variety cold that laid me low, I’ve got quite out of the habit of doing anything at all. It’s like the old joke; whenever I get the urge to accomplish anything, I just take a pill and lie down for a few minutes until it goes away.

It’s like drinking, like that. And honestly that’s a battle I think I’ve won. So how doubly annoying to find that I’m not getting anywhere lately.

I’ve got a lot to think about. I’ve got time management issues. Anxiety management techniques to put back into play. Vast sequences of baby steps that lead to small and then larger accomplishments. I can see them all, spreading out before me, little puddles to splash, waves to make, wakes to ride.

The gulf stream can flow through a straw, if the straw is aligned with the gulf stream. I can hear the ocean out there. I can smell it in the air. All that’s required is to start, and then, to do the next thing. And the next.

Meanwhile I’m recovering from a night of doggy terror, and resolving to shake the vet down for some Xanax next fireworks holiday. We’ve taken down the Christmas decorations. Removed the wreath from the door. I put the No Soliciting sign back up; we don’t want Girl Scout cookies this year. T. and I are going Whole-30 for January.

Speaking of food, Gary Taubes’ new book, Why We Get Fat is out. It’s a distillation and more reader-friendly version of his earlier Good Calories Bad Calories, so if you’ve read that one you may not need this one. If you haven’t, please start with this one. Really. Just read it.

Really. Consider it a favor to me. And then you can thank me when you’re done.

[Blog post = New Year’s WIN. On to the next thing! ]