Friday, August 3rd

BEBEH HEADS. I can hear Barbara now… “You’re sick, Haldeman.” Hee hee hee. I’ve also already ordered a mold for one that not only comes with disembodied hands, but he’s crying as if he as a toothache. My plan with this head is to keep making vases, in different colors. For the one I just ordered, when I pour it, I’m going to slap it right-side-up on a small plate and turn it into a candle holder (a la these). Only on a plate, to catch the drips. And crying. And with hands also sticking out of the plate, as if he’s stuck in quicksand. Hee hee hee. THANK YOU, I’LL BE HERE ALL WEEK!

And while I’ll be here all week, I’ll be working! However. I feel like I’m completely off my work schedule (er, maybe because I am?). This last week I’ve barely touched ceramics, the only yarn I’ve dyed is yarn I’m running out of for a project… mostly I’ve been making and wrapping soap. I’ve got the alien and skull soaps up, and should have the guest soaps up (hopefully) some time later today. Then in a couple weeks I’ll have acorn sets, and maple leaf sets, for Fall. Followed by Thanksgiving guest sets… followed by Christmas sets. I can’t believe I pulled out and cleaned all the Christmas soap molds last week. It hasn’t dipped below about 89 degrees except at night for months…. and here I am making plans for Winter Holiday soap sets. On one hand, it makes sense — I make things by hand, I need to give myself time to make them. On the other hand, I’M MELTING FROM THE HEAT.

Last thing about work — I posted this on both Facebook and Twitter last night: I’m contemplating mugs with my logo on them. What color, though? Plain white? Pumpkin Spice? Pale Yellow? Lime Green? and the response has been really interesting. Most people are suggesting plain mugs but with different colored logos on them — something that had definitely not occurred to me when I was envisioning them. I have to start small, though, so I hope people don’t mind that I’m not coming out of the gate with a million offerings. I have four travel mugs and six regular mugs to start with, and I need to figure out a good combo from that. Something that straddles the line between a good selection and not too overwhelming for me to do. When we had the yarn store, our favorite rep would sometimes talk about the difference between going deep (a lot of colors in a few lines) and going wide (few colors in a lot of lines)… that’s what I’m trying to decide on with my mugs. I have ten to offer right now; do I want all ten to be different? Or maybe two each of five different offerings? Or make all the travel mugs one thing, the regular mugs a second thing, and then when I order more supplies, branch out then….? This is all something I’ll be thinking about today while I’m straightening up my ceramic studio and pouring greenware.

Something else I’ll be thinking about while I’m working today is my shiny new laptop!!! That’s right, I was finally able to get a new computer (thank you, mommy!) and really, it’s just in time. I was getting some really disturbing error messages and freezes on Molly, who was six years old. That’s practically geriatric, for a laptop… with added damages from getting knocked around a bit from having been taken too and from the yarn store every day for six years. ANYWAY. Molly was an HP, and I was kind of looking at ASUS, but all the online “what laptop is good for me” quizzes weren’t asking the kinds of questions that are ones I think are important. For instance…

– A deal-breaker with me is “does it have a numeric key-pad on the side?”. Yes, I know you can buy one to stick on the side. Why should I do that when they make laptops with them already? I do a lot of number typing, between adding up sales tax, entering addresses, and putting in weights and dimensions of objects. I need that ten-key.

– More on design: I want one that doesn’t have the damn automatic movie-play button up on the top of the keyboard, where the cat runs across – I was getting sick and tired of being in the middle of typing a sentence and having the cats chase each other, and suddenly I can’t type but the computer is telling me it would love to show me a movie but there’s nothing in the drive. SIGH.

– Also, it looked from the online pictures that keyboards have changed a little — some of what I was seeing looked like the keys are affixed in a plate rather than loose with a bit of air-space around them (I’m not describing this very well). It was looking on pictures online that a major problem for me (cat-hair and yarn-fuzz getting in-between and under the keys) might be a non-problem depending on what laptop I went with.

– Lastly, I wanted to be able to have more than two programs open at a time without the computer overheating.

I wasn’t too concerned about memory (Molly only had 60g but I would move stuff over to my really, REALLY old desktop computer, that I basically just use now for storage with the 400g drive Tim got for me a while ago). I wasn’t too concerned about RAM, or operating system, or even what programs it came with (I had already planned to switch from expensive Microsoft programs, of which I use maybe 6% of the features, to LibreOffice, which is free). I wasn’t even overly concerned with what brand it was, although my friend Greg recommended ASUS, and I knew I didn’t want a Dell, since that was the brand of my laptop before Molly (Sojourner) who just up and died on me with no warning one day. Fucker. I’m still bitter.

So after Barbara’s birthday dinner the other night, I asked Tim if he’d mind going to Best Buy with me. I decided I wanted to look at some in person (but not come home with, HAHAHAHAHA you already know where this is going) and see how the keyboards looked and how heavy they were, etc. etc. SO THEN. Now I have this shiny new laptop! She has 8gigs of RAM, and 1000 of memory (meaning I can take all the photos off the old desktop and store them on this laptop with pretty much no worry of running out of room) and already I am seeing so many differences. I kept her on all day yesterday, and she wasn’t even warm (Molly, after a couple hours, is so warm that I worry she’s going to burst into flame, or melt). And she’s lightning fast. And she has a ten-key. And her battery has a … I don’t know how to describe this. It’s a knobby thing, so she kind of sits up at an angle. Makes it really nice for my wrists, when typing – and it keeps the bottom up a bit so air circulates underneath. I’ll take a picture later, because I’m a dork like that.

I kind of want to name her Kaylee, because she’s shiny. But she’s also pretty bad-ass, so I think I might go with Zoe.

1236 words! Did anyone but Sonya finish reading this?!?! 😉