High and low

The High: The Eagles concert was without a doubt the best live concert I've ever attended. The music and singing were top notch and the musicians - Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Tim Schmidt, Joe Walsh and company - were engaging showmen who connected with the audience. They sang every important hit from past albums and some from their current album, Long Road out of Eden. The seats were in the Premium Seating area so they were larger and more comfortable than what we're used to, even there in the Garden, the same venue where we saw the Celtics back in February. One of the most impressive parts about the concert was that it lasted more than 3 1/2 hours with no opening act, and the quality of their performance at the end was as sharp as it was during the first numbers. I tried to be mindful of the people nearby but it was almost impossible to refrain from singing along and standing to dance to some of the numbers I love so well. I'm so used to seeing them in more relaxed attire in their various videos that I have to admit it was odd to see them wearing suits and only changing their appearance by taking off the jackets and rolling up their sleeves later on. After a while, though, that distraction was minimal and their superb performance rocked the house. It's a night I'll never forget.

The Low: When we arrived home after 2 a.m. we found voice mail telling us that my husband's brother had passed away peacefully in his sleep in late afternoon with his wife and his daughter by his side. The funeral will be on Tuesday in Vermont. These next few days will be very difficult for all of us, especially the six surviving siblings, his two daughters, and his wife.

Back to Boston

Back to Boston for music this time...but not to see the band Boston. Tonight we'll be doing something I've wanted to do for years: we'll be attending an Eagles concert. I've listened to their tunes since the 1970s, I own most of their albums in one form or another, and their music was among some of the first I put on my little iPod, so I'm not just a casual fan.

In late spring I'd looked at their concert schedule for this year and thought about getting tickets, but I hesitated. I wasn't sure I could afford them out of pocket, so I put the thought away. Then yesterday I received an email from the company through which I've purchased Red Sox tickets and in checking information on the Eagles' summer tour again, I found that seats were still available at not completely outrageous prices. Couple that with a credit card that was down to a zero balance and I thought the time was ripe.

Ordering tickets online can be.... well, interesting. What you see on the screen is what WAS available a little while before you accessed the page, and just by ordering and receiving a receipt, you aren't assured of actually getting those tickets. With several attempts and several phone calls under my belt, I pushed the [purchase] button and thought I had acquired some seats near the stage, requesting that the tickets be emailed to me. I'm one of those who needs to have ticket in hand before I drive for 2 hours to a venue because I have nightmares of going to the window where tickets are held and them not having any for me. As the gal on the phone advised me, it might take overnight for the people at the ticket company to email them to me, so I sat tight.

Flash forward to this morning at 10:30 when yet another check of my email showed nothing from that company. Good thing I printed out the receipt. I went to the tracking site and typed in my tracking number only to see the message that my request was under review and if there was a problem, the agent would contact me directly. Well, I wasn't going to sit here sweating bullets while I waited for the agent to take his or her sweet time, so I called. "Sorry but those tickets were sold to someone else," I was told. Oh, I was so disappointed.

"Now what do I do?" I asked the gal at the other end dejectedly.

"You can go back to the original web page...blah blah blah...or...what I do is go to Ticketmaster.com because the performers release any tickets they haven't given away on the day of the event, and if there are any available, they're pretty good seats and at a decent price."

So that's exactly what I did, and lo and behold there were two club section seats just waiting for me to purchase them. Not only that but these were available to be printed on my own trusty printer! Wooo hoo! Success!

I now have sitting beside me two freshly printed tickets to club section 141 for tonight's performance, and I am a happy gal. I've picked out the clothing I'll wear, I'm searching for my Charlie (MBTA) Card, and we've discussed when to leave for the drive to Wellington Station. We won't spend the day in the city since I'm now putting myself on a no-frills budget and I'd be tempted to pick up a few unnecessary tokens if we wandered around Quincy Marketplace and Faneuil Hall as we did in February. We'll head down with an extra hour or so in the schedule because it'll be the start of rush hour congestion by the time we're on the road and we want to have a little time to catch our breath, buy a t-shirt, and get a bite to eat before the concert begins. I am looking forward to a very enjoyable evening!

Happiness is hammering

There's a small collection of things that, since childhood, I've considered appealing. Stained glass, irridescent stones, symmetry, harmony, and chocolate are on the list. Another item that joined the group when I was in my early adulthood is metal with a hand-hammered surface texture. Copper pots, silver cuff bracelets, wrought iron pieces and other such objects look better to me with a hand-hammered surface. (I specify hand-hammering because I do not include the pieces that have obviously been shaped by machine into planes and facets imitating a hammered surface. Those are as attractive as ice masquerading as diamonds.) Around the house I have a few hand-hammered pieces, decorative and useful: a copper mold, some silver earrings, a brass cuff bracelet. A couple of years ago I acquired a round peen hammer and a stainless steel block, hoping to learn how to make jewelry with that same type of surface, but my few attempts were not successful. I used the tools for other purposes. Then, when I signed up for and attended the first of four jewelry making classes, I found Hope. No, Hope is not the instructor or a classmate but the glimmer of promise in my quest for creating hand-hammered jewelry.

Our first project is to design a pendant that will have a cabochon of our choice - selected from a collection that the instructor offered - in a bezel attached to it. We could use copper or, for an extra fee, silver. I decided to begin with copper until I had a good feel for the job and do a second project in silver if time permitted. Imagine my thrill when part of the first lesson was the demonstration of a variety of means of texturizing the metal to be used, one of those techniques being - you guessed it - hammering! My heart soared. The design that I made didn't come to me quickly, but I knew I wanted at least part of my piece to be hammered. It ended up having three surface textures: smooth, hammered, and almost a leather-looking texture that was created by running the copper plate and a piece of loosely woven fabric through a press. Of the three pieces to the pendant, the one I took greatest pleasure in making was, of course, the hammered part which runs the length of one edge of the piece. When I'm finished with it, which should be next Monday, I'll try to post a picture of it here, my first try at attaching an image to my Blogger posts.

As we were working, the instructor set up a laptop computer on which she displayed a slide show of former students' work. I noticed a simple pendant that I liked and would have done one like it if I'd been going for simple techniques the first time through. I'll do that another time. After mostly ignoring the display while I cut the three metal pieces, I watched it as I let my arms and hands rest, and I saw some really nice pieces made of hammered metals. A bracelet of loosely triangular pieces connected by pairs of rings and a matching toggle, a pair of shield-shaped earrings, a simple pendant of a rectangle of texturized metal at the top that flowed down into a plain polished surface, and more. At the end of the class I spoke with the instructor who said oh yes, all of those were very doable, mostly because there was no soldering involved in any of the pieces I showed her. Hooray!! I think I've finally found a little niche for myself: having the ability to hand hammer plate metal to make jewelry that I deeply enjoy, and having an activity that allows me to vent not only artistic but occupational tensions in a very productive way. Woo hoo!

Fair day

After a week of wild, rainy weather today was nicely warm and mostly sunny. I had to get up earlier than usual on a Saturday to schlep a tent, tables, notecards and jewelry about 14 miles away to the craft fair held on a town common. It's the longest continually running fair in the state...or so they say. (They also used to claim that it never rained on this particular fair, but they had to stop saying that after last year's downpour.) It's also the fair that I've attended as a vendor for the longest span of time, the first one for me back in 1996. 

Part of its allure is the social aspect. Many friends and former students make the rounds, stopping by my booth to say hello and introduce children and grandchildren. I get the news from vacationing colleagues, and I get to see them looking relaxed and tan, quite the contrast from our school year appearances. 

Last year I sold a record amount of product because the rainy weather kept people from spending the day on the lake or at the beach; this year, however, the warm weather worked against us and my take was less than half but still a reasonable amount. The eyeglasses necklaces sold well as did watches (I make the bracelets that attach to watch faces that I purchase) and some of the new pieces sold right away. There were fewer people who bought on impulse and more who made some kind of purchase significant to them, like a souvenir or a gift for someone else. I'd say the poor economy has influenced the buying public, so I'm fortunate to have done okay while there were others who sold virtually nothing. 

The bad thing about this fair is that I almost never have a chance to shop at it. Some years a friend of mine helps me set up and sits with me for part of the morning but she's out of state this year, and each year my husband runs a road race held a few towns south of us on the same day, so I was on my own. The kind folks in the tent next to mine helped me open my tent and set it up. The editor of the local paper who came to see if I had a Lake bracelet she could photograph delivered a hamburger and iced tea from the food booth for me. But I never did get to wander the grounds to see the booths that weren't near mine. Maybe that's better because I didn't have the chance to spend my hard earned cash, but it would still be nice to see what others were offering for sale. 

At the end of the event, my husband arrived to help me break down and pack up my things, and he even helped to unpack and store the tables and crates of product. Just think: I get to do it all over again this coming weekend, and for two days instead of one! I hope business is as good as or even better than it was today.

Crosby, Still & Nash are beginning to show their age, but, man, can they make music! Stills plays guitar like nobody's business, Nash still relates so well to the audience, and Crosby's voice is beautifully clear. They played for two hours, a variety of old classics and newer songs, some of them political and all of them appreciated by the audience. We were grateful to have seats in the covered reserved section row 13 and 8 seats in when the rains came, but they didn't last long. The exit parade took us only 31 minutes, much better than the previous couple of times. It was a good evening.

More good news: by making my poor dead computer (Mac Mama) a "target disk" through a firewire cable attached to my laptop, I was able to copy every file I wanted that was stored there onto a backup disk. Hallelujah!!  Life is good.

That said, I'll mention that what started as a line of strong thunderstorms turned into a probable tornado that struck at least 100 homes southeast of here. For a disaster that struck so rapidly and without any warning, the loss of life is apparently incredibly small, although it'll be tomorrow before any official statements will be made. This summer's weather has been odd since mid-June. I hope next week brings more typical stuff.

Persistence pays

My old Mac desktop computer (Titanium Tower G4) finally died yesterday as an Apple tech support gal (Jami) and I were trying to figure out why the Airport signal from that computer to my new iMac fluctuated enough to knock me offline so many times. At first I'd thought the problem was due to the new cable modem that had been installed and I worked for an hour with those tech support people. (One of them named Farris was incredibly condescending, but that's another issue.) Not getting satisfaction there, I called Apple to have them help, and after resetting the PRAM, the poor Tower just wouldn't load its OS. We tried restarting, using the original cd, using Disk Utility (which did the repair and said nothing was wrong with the hard drive) and talking sweetly to Mac Mama, but she'd given up the ghost, sitting at the gray apple with the bite out of it. Fortunately, when she'd had a seizure several months ago, I'd been able to resuscitate her and offload anything important to an external hard drive I'd bought to use for backups. Therefore, I wasn't devastated when I had to acknowledge this lost computer. 

While Jami waited on the phone, I removed the parts of the Tower from the computer desk, and I moved the new iMac to that location so the ethernet connection could be made to it. She hung with me while I tested the connection, helped me with paperwork, listened while I explained how I'd set up the network that allowed me to access the internet without a router, and was as cheerful at the end of the two-hour conversation as she was at the beginning. I made sure to explain that in the follow-up email that Apple sent asking my opinion of the experience. She'd even given me the name of a local Apple technician who might be able to help me recover some of the information lost in the dead computer. I emailed the technician to find out when I could bring my poor dead computer to him and maybe purchase an Airport base station because I hadn't been able to get the laptop to connect to the iMac after an hour or more of attempts. I was all set to spend a couple hundred dollars on computer things today. However....

I am proud to say that I'm typing this from my laptop situated in my newly cleaned den, not from the iMac in the dining room. How? It took me a while but I finally set up the Sharing between the two computers correctly. My fried brain yesterday had neglected to look at one particular setting, leaving it the way it had been when the iMac was sharing the internet connection from the Tower which was backwards from the way it now needed to be. I'm not sure I could teach anyone else how to do it or even duplicate the process again now, but I seem to understand the principles and that's what matters. I connected the backup drive to this laptop and found a few crucial files that I'd want from the dead computer, and that made me happy.

So... I've decided to take the Airport card out of Mac Mama and let her rest. I now don't need an Airport base station because I've established a working network here. I'm thrilled that I don't have to spend any more money on technology....at least not now....and that's a Very Good Thing!

This 'n that

I don't think I gave a review of the retirement party part 2 yet, so here it is. This was the actual party-type party, given by the father of the "retiree" and attended mostly by blood relatives and friends from college days. There was drinking, dancing, wearing of straw pith helmets adorned with wiffle golf balls on erratic pieces of wire, "remember when..." and "let me get my glasses".... more dancing, a yummy buffet (garlic bread, caesar salad, fresh tomato and mozzarella salad, linguini with pesto, chicken marsala, and mussels diavolo), playing air guitar, lip synching to Dylan and Aerosmith, and more dancing to tunes. Most of the speeches, jokes and other references were meaningful only to the very long-time buddies so a lot of it went over my head, but there was no drama and people were all joyful so it was a good thing. The retiree and his crew were still rockin' when we left them in high spirits.

Sunday I had my shop open but no one came, so I was able to make a few pieces of jewelry to replenish my stock since I have a fair this weekend and another one the next. I do have to stop making pieces for myself, though.

This was day 1 of 4 classes I'm taking at the state art institute on basic jewelry making. This class focuses on techniques that are new to me, ones that are used in making the pieces - pendants, rings, chains - that are the essence of a piece of jewelry. Until now the only true jewelry-making technique I've used is wire wrapping beads and stones to make them into pendants, so I'm delighted to be able to learn this craft. The danger, of course, is that once I've taken this class I'll want to continue. It's an hour's drive south of me which adds to the cost, but when I'm hooked, I'm in all the way. The first project is a pendant, and I've chosen a small carnelian cabochon to set in a pendant with three finishes in a shape similar to a leaf or a paisley teardrop. If I can finish that one in good time, I'd like to make some hammered chain links in silver. The first class taught me a lot about metals and it challenged me as a blank piece of paper challenges me, but I'm excited to learn.

Responding with information to a question asked of me by an internationally known, Nebula-award winning author makes me feel pretty darn special. He could have found the information on Ask.com, but I think it was his way of staying in touch and of allowing me to feel a part of the book he's currently writing about a time traveler.

Today we had a new cable internet/phone modem installed, something that should help us to reduce some large phone bills. However, ever since about an hour after the dude left, I've been experiencing the worst flakiness of connection I've had since cable was first installed more than two years ago. I can't remain connected on the new iMac via internet connection sharing for more than about half an hour without it showing me as being disconnected from the internet, and yet nothing on either of the computers has been changed. The same problem exists with the laptop that I've been able to use out in the shop but now it can't connect to the network set up by the old desktop computer, the one that's plugged directly into the ethernet cable. I reset the settings and nothing improved. I am not happy and will be on the phone with my isp until this is straightened out.

The Artist is IN

Today I was the feature at a Meet the Artist event held at the bakery/gift shop that carries the exclusive Lake Bracelet that I make for them, and some of my jewelry and notecards. Remember the booth run by Lucy van Pelt in the PEANUTS comic strip that bears a sign saying, "The Doctor is IN"? Well, I feel like Lucy, the impostor, each time I'm billed as an artist. Designing and making jewelry is my hobby, a task I thoroughly enjoy. I collect beads that have potential or that are simply beautiful, and I combine them the way they look good to me. I'm no expert, but these people continue to treat me as if I am. Fine. If it makes them happy, that's fine...as long as they don't mind me chuckling now and then.

I had a choice of being set up under a canopy tent in the front yard beneath a huge old maple tree or indoors, in the entry way to the bakery itself. Bakery... ovens... poor lighting... vs. a forecast of scattered thunder storms in the afternoon? I opted for outdoors so I could enjoy the breezes off the lake, and that turned out to be a good decision. Even in the muggy heat I was fairly comfortable, and during the passing rains I was sheltered enough to keep working. One of the visitors was the editor of the local weekly paper who conducted an interview with me that may appear in next week's edition. ( Those "How did you get started?" questions are becoming easier to answer.) Some people stopped by because they'd heard or seen an article in the local paper about the event, some were there because the bakery is part of their routine, and a few just happened to see the bakery sign and tent and they were curious. I enjoyed the variety of people. I also enjoyed roast beef and fixin's on a toasted bulkie roll courtesy of the bakery. Mmm! By mid afternoon I'd replenished the bakery gal's stock of Lake earrings and bracelets, and I'd sold a few of my own items. Not exactly the sizable income of some of the craft fairs, but making myself known and distributing business cards are also valuable to my business, so I was happy with this event.

The good day was topped off by my husband taking his "famous" wife out to dinner where we sat on a deck admiring the landscaping of the yard and the relative quiet. I had ribs and he had steak tips. We were glad to be uncrowded at 7 p.m. on a Saturday evening, but I suspect the restaurant owners are unhappy with the lack of business. Dining out seems to be the nicety that some of the summer folks are forgoing as they're more careful about spending their money in this shaky economy. I wonder how permanent these changes are and what our local business community will look like 6 months from now.

Another retirement party

Tonight we'll be going to yet another retirement party, actually the second one for this friend and colleague, and given by his sister instead of by the school district. That's fine, I guess ... double what most people experience, but this "retirement" is a little odd for another reason: he's not getting done at his workplace. Yes, he will no longer go in every day...although on his former contract, I'm not positive he had to do that...so in that regard he's finished, but he has a pretty sweet deal with the district: an agreement to be hired as a consultant on a per diem basis - and at a hefty fee - for exactly the number of days it'll take to make him eligible for health insurance. Not bad. I know he's my age, so I know how many more years are left before we turn 62, and since it's more than one, I'm wondering what he'll be doing in the years after this upcoming one because I doubt this gilt-edged gift of an agreement will continue. I guess time will tell.

Why are we going to a second party for this guy? Well, it's being held at a place that has good food and beverages, the invitation mentioned dancing (something I love and haven't done for a looooong time), and I'd like a fun night out with some adults who aren't all about sports or hunting. The "retiree" and his crew are more bohemian and artsy than some of the folks we hang out with, so this is my natural comfort zone. I doubt that we'll stay late, but even an hour or two of socializing will please my palate.

...today is the first day....

...of the rest of my life, of course, and of this particular blog. My world and welcome to it!

I don't trust Yahoo! 360 as a secure place for my blog posts because it has too many bugs and those folks are not going to support it, so I'll migrate here.

As I spent three hours viewing, copying, pasting to document files, organizing and saving my 25 months' worth of writing, I relived - at a bit of a distance - for better or for worse - many of the events in the previous two years of my life, and I have to say that it's been an eventful couple of years. I've taken journeys, physical ones and emotional ones, from which I've grown and expanded my horizons. The upcoming years will undoubtedly be some of the same and much that's different, and I'm looking forward to experiencing it all.

I invite you along for the duration!