Hello! It feel so strange not to have been here all week. Lots has been going on, and none of it involved having a computer on in the evening, sooooo there is a lot of catch up for you.
I started work bright and early Monday morning. I have to say it felt good to be back and see all my buds, sit at my desk and dig into work I like. With in a day, it also felt like I never left, which is good and bad.
Monday is the first nice sunny day we had had in ages, and it stayed that way all week, so when I got home in the evening, I was able to do a bit of work here and there around house and yard. I did not do much, though. I have to say, getting used to going to work, and to getting home on time, takes time. I did have to set a calendar reminder at 3:30 to go home every day. , lol.
Wednesday I took half a day off (prearranged, no worries, I didn’t start slacking off yet!) to spend the day with niece B at her dorm. We spent a couple of hours getting her sorted and packed up, and then played a bit of Phase 10. She beat me. Twice. Unheard of!
Thursday evening was spent getting the guest room ready for her mom who was due to roll in Friday evening from PA, with niece C the younger. The plan was for the two of them to spend the night, get B early Saturday morning and head back to PA.
Friday, I stopped in to J and B Atlantic to see how things were going there – nothing has sold yet, but the first tourists aren’t here yet, so I am keeping up hope. I may do the display a bit differently but I haven’t quite figured out how I want it to go. I’ll think about that this week.
While I was heading home, the phone rang. Niece B. Would I please call her mom? Ut-oh. I did, and discovered that niece B was getting free from RA duties a day early, so she could be picked up and packed up Friday night, if all three of them could sleep at our house. Of course! Did they want my help packing? Of course! So, I raced home, fed the cats, changed my clothes and drove to Bangor. Spent the next two hours packing up the last of the things, and hauling bags and boxes out until we had stuffed one car and the back seats of two others. Niece B is on the ninth floor of her dorm. While the floors are counted weirdly, it is likely only 4 stories up (the dorms are built out from a central section, and the stairs spiral around, with floors going off in three directions)but there is no elevator. That is a lot of stairs. I am thankful those two girls are stronger and tougher than I am. Of course, B has been climbing up there all year, so she is used to it. By the time we grabbed sandwiches and got home, it was almost 9 o’clock. That is when the Phase 10 re-challenge began. By midnight, I had redeemed myself and we went off to bed. Now, normally, I don’t mind staying up late with the kids when they are here, we all love playing board and card games. But I had a special day planned for Saturday, so had to get up and out the door by 6:15. I did it somehow, although it meant not seeing the kids in the morning.
Saturday I spent at Haystack Mountain Crafts center. This fantastic place is perched on a granite hillside above the ocean, and offers the most amazing arts and crafts adventures. Normally, I can barely afford to look at the catalog, but they have several events in the early and late season for local people. Even those events are often out of my budget – and I have always gotten the impression that they are for people who are serious about their craft, and very artistic. I have seen the finished products – they are amazing! Anyway… last winter, one of my tax volunteers asked me if I was going to sign up for Island day. I hadn’t heard of that one, so she made me a copy of her letter, and it was intriguing! There were several workshops offered, covering writing, blacksmithing, quilting, paper jewelry, pottery, wooden box building, glass bead making. Wait a minute, glass bead making? I backed up and read the details. $35 got you an all-day workshop and two meals. A beginners class on making lampwork glass beads. Open to residents of Deer Isle and the Blue Hill peninsula – which they NICELY defined as including my town! Entry was by lottery, but they had spaces reserved for people who had never been, so I signed up, way back in March. Not like me to get something in so promptly. I was selected, and I got my first choice class, bead making. So I spent the whole day on the island making glass beads, or as I was calling them by the end of the day, glass blobs. I won’t know how they came out until the teacher finished processing them, as they were not cool enough when we finished. But I think they will be very blobby in nature. We worked from about 9 until noon, had a fabulous lunch, then worked until 5. By 3:30, I was done (remember, I only got about 4 hours of sleep) so I wandered around looking at what everyone else was making, and the teacher, Sihaya Hopkins, did some demos, so I got to see what it looks like when you aren’t making blobs, but creations. Then we had studio walk-through, where we could go see what everyone else made, and they could come see ours. Only ours were in the kiln! So we painted water colors of what we thought we had created, and called it a day. Of course, I never was any good at painting and drawing, so I painted colorful blobs. Which, now that I think about it, might be accurate renditions of my beads.
After that, they gave us dinner, also delicious, before sending us on our way. I was home by 8:30, absolutely exhausted. But what a fun day! I saw a couple of people I know (and met a few more whom I really liked. The energy that was in that cafeteria when all the groups were together, eating family style at nice sized tables was amazing. They were filled to capacity, so you HAD to sit with strangers and talk to them, but it was good anyway. 🙂
I bet you can guess what I am doing today – NOT MUCH! Some laundry, a bit of yard work, some knitting, napping. That should cover it and get me ready for another week at work. I’ll try to post more often this week so I don’t bury you under words when I finally get to a keyboard.
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