Take Your Spider to Work Day
31 December 2022
I: Noise Noise Noise!
We have three weeks of class left before the furnace is shut down for winter break. Three weeks to finish our projects.
All around me is noise, noise noise.
In class, it's me jumping into extra Tuesday afternoons for 8 nonstop hours of back-to-back glassblowing sessions week after week after week. It's All the Glass rushing around with big projects that have me rushing around with him. It's hot glass spider legs drooping, cracking, crashing, bodies exploding. It's the Colonel telling us to be sculptural, to work as teams, to stop doing everything wrong.
At home, it's the full Window Sill of Judgment, the overfull boxes of glass on the floor, the need to get my winter sale up and running, me standing in the middle of the mess.
I told you so I told you so you took those extra sessions you made too much stuff there's no room nobody's gonna buy it not even five years and the house is full already.
I want the semester to end. I want the noises off.
II: Scraps
I need to make some standard-sized ornaments for my winter charity sale. I think I have three at home. Conventional wisdom states that it takes a few dozen to get back into the rhythm. I haven't had that kind of time. One Tuesday gets me four more.
The colors are from bags of unlabeled scrap frit I picked up cheap, along with bits of unlabeled rods.
One of the scrap rods turns out to be a funky lime green. When I match it to the online catalog, it turns out to be Gaffer, and there's even some in stock. Hooray!
Another scrap rod seems to be an orange-red.
When I use the scrap with some cherry red in a 2-color thread, they come out so close that it looks like one color. That's been the story this semester: the colors I choose either repel each other or blend themselves into oblivion.
A scrap of rod that looked like it was going to be yellow also turns out to be red (I have a Gaffer rod like that). Also, what is this shape? Reject!
Once more, this time with red and orange. The colors work, but it's the end of the night, I'm tired, and we're running out of time.
III: Playing with Paraffin
Adding to the noise is the paraffin-filled crock pot sitting in the hallway by the front door. When I want to use it, I carry the pot to the kitchen, set it on an old shower curtain liner, heat the wax until it melts, and get to work.
There's one cat left in the sale collection, a clear one. Maybe it'll sell if I embellish it a little. Holding it from the bottom, I dip the front and back sides into the wax a couple of times to give it a thick coating. Then I use a paint brush to dab wax onto the tail. The brush is a brush only the first time it's used. After that, it's a stick with hot wax on it.
There's a vase upstairs in the reject box. I cover the top with tape and dip it. Blub, blub. Wax pours inside, between the edges of the tape.
Now I have to figure out how to get that little finger of wax, and the droplets on the bottom, out of there.
Plain Jim says mineral spirits will do the trick. Great. More crap to add to the cold-working dung heap.
Things go better with a little candle holder I made last spring. I'd had to drill the opening because it wasn't quite wide enough to fit a tea light. The roughness always bugged me. If I sand-blast the top half, it'll blend in.
Having a sand-blasting chore to do on top of regular classwork puts pressure on me on class days. If I'm at the sand-blaster, I'm not helping my partner, and I'm losing valuable class time. One solution is to do it on class nights while everyone else is working. The other is to come in after work on a Thursday, which I've been doing anyway so that I can pick up Tuesday's work and live with it for the rest of the week. If I'm making three trips each week, I might as well get something useful out of it. Otherwise I'll have to go over on a Saturday afternoon.
The candle holder comes out well enough that it earns a spot in the house. For the photo shoot, I place it on top of a shelf. Its final resting spot is on the back of a toilet, where it serves as a night light. I use timed LED tea lights. They go on for six hours every night.
IV: Other Stuff to Make
Among my permanent collection is a series of vases for each season, sort of. I have winter, autumn, an autumn thunder storm, and spring. Spring is a mess. The others are long-neck vases. Spring is a teardrop with a messy top. I need to redo this, and then figure out summer.
My first try goes weird on me. I'm not sure if I'm going to like it enough to keep it.
The second attempt seems to go better, but when I see both of them together, it's the second one that I reject.
This is all Tuesday afternoon stuff. I try to keep the projects simple enough that I can do them more or less by myself. This is because the open slot I'm taking is paired with a beginner who might show up or might not, might stay an hour or might not, and who is otherwise a friendly kid. At the other bench are Low Key and Classmate's Partner, both of whom have told me not to rely on this kid. "We'll give you a hand when you need it," they've assured me. So I time my puntying-up and breaking-off to coincide with one of them having some downtime.
I'm still chasing that carafe shape. Sometimes I hit it, or close to it.
Towards the end of class, Low Key has to leave early. Classmate's partner helps me make a spider. I'm on the seventh leg when I notice that the glass up on the pipe (the "moile") is starting to crack. We have one leg to go. We hit the pipe with the little torch to try to keep it warm. He thinks we can make it. He goes to get a bit for the final leg. I go to the glory hole to flash the spider. The body explodes.
All the Glass comes in. It's 4:30, half an hour before our evening session begins. We start the evening session early.
I drag out the threading machine. All the Glass knows my two-thread routine the best. He picks up the first color while I'm shaping my bubble. By the time that's ready, he's ready to load the second color on top of the first. We switch off. He babysits the bubble while I melt the second color.
Tonight I'm mixing that groovy lime green with an equally groovy gold topaz. From what we can tell as the color spoools off the punty onto the bubble, there's a definite switch from the first to the second.
What we don't see is an odd reaction between the two colors. Maybe it happens in the annealer. There's definitely topaz up top and green below, but a third band of bronze has appeared. Alchemy says it's a redox reaction.
For something different, I try using the box mold, which I haven't done since the little candle holder last spring. Low Key is a pro at this. She always saws off the tops, and now I know why. My opening is round but hella off-center.
I do like the chill marks, the concentric circles on the sides. I'm going to saw it off above the chill marks, and then do something with paraffin.
We also try another spider. This time, All the Glass wheels the big torch over. When he's not fetching me bits for legs, he does his best to keep the spider warm. We almost succeed: she loses part of a front leg to the glory hole and another two break off when we put her away. Her body has a crack in it.
"This is a three-person project," I tell Thread Sherpa as I put my pipe away.
"Five people in one session means everyone has less time to work," he answers. He's totally missed my point, but I get his: If I'm going to try this again, it won't be on a Tuesday night.
On Saturday, I go to the classroom to do some sand-blasting.
"Your spider didn't make it," Tall Vase says. "Some of the legs are broken."
"I know." She's already wrapped in my bag. "I'll glue them back on."
After her surgery, she hangs in the window. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep her. A friend really wants the first one I made. The second is destined for the bin. The third exploded. This is the fourth. Broken as she is, I need to hang onto her for now.
V: More Playing with Paraffin
The vase with a sway gets the paraffin treatment. I've decided to accentuate the off-kilterness.
Another one gets covered with stickers and reinforcements (remember those from loose-leaf notebook days?) for a dots-and-spots treatment. This vase is destined for an artist friend far more talented than I. It would suit her. I hope.
The vase with the wax that dripped inside got sand-blasted, then sat outside in mineral spirits for a day. What a slimy mess that was. In the end, I didn't like how it came out, so I'd covered some of the clear spots in tape and blasted it again. I still don't like it. It goes into the reject box.
VI: Fall Glass Sale
There's another trio of boxes that I need to deal with: the sale boxes. One by one I lug them outside for photographs and measurements. Each gets a sticker with an item number and price.
Here's the morning light casting colored shadows of three of the giant ornaments posted for sale last spring. They're still here.
I spend another afternoon uploading the photos to Etsy and adding detailed descriptions for each one. It makes me feel icky to promote my sale to my online friends, but I do, several times. What I don't sell I'll mail away. Ever since I started glassblowing, I haven't had to do any Christmas shopping.
VII: Mad Scramble
I figure I haven't kept all that much of what I've made this semester. Then I start counting. There are 11 vases and carafes on the shelf at home. That's not much, I guess. Oh, but then there's that cherry red vase I put on the other shelf. And the three spiral ornaments upstairs and outside. And the two spider ornaments. And the stuff I brought to work. And the spiders. When I get to 20 I start to lose count.
Fuck. This can't go on.
The Colonel has promised me he'll help me make a spider on a class night. He thinks I should bend cane to make legs, and then pick them up all at once, the way he did when he showed us the cane demo. I'll leave heating the cane to him.
A few years ago I bought a cheap pack of encased cane, assorted 6-inch colors that I only used bits of. I pick some out and bend them with the little torch.
"That's gonna be a big spider," Glas Ninja says. I shrug. It's what I've got.
"Make extra," the Colonel says. I make another set just in case. Might as well add pedipalps.
We let everyone else take their turn. There's too much noise and chaos for either me or the Colonel to concentrate on our task. This is one trait we share. By the time people have taken their turns and cleared out, it's getting towards 9:00 p.m. At the other bench, a pair is still working. "Next week," he promises, "we'll go first."
The lime green tea light holder gets the saw and paraffin to good effect:
The paraffin accentuates the chill marks!
Rose is fun to work with. And she's really good at bringing me legs. We make a clear spider first, with no exposions.
Then we make a colorful one, with Classmate's Partner on the big torch. On the eighth leg, I tell them, "My heart is racing right now!"
"Why?" Rose asks.
"Because I have to get this right."
Together we get the spider into the annealer with only one broken leg.
When I retrieve her on Thursday, though, I notice that I'd put five legs on one side and three on the other! Maybe I can melt it over with the little torch. Classmates's Partner arrives to collect his work. He doesn't think my plan is a good one. He's right. Another leg pops off from the heat. I set it aside, and decide to cut the errant leg off completely. I can then glue everything back the way I want it at home,
Which I do. That last leg is janky, but at least it's on the proper side now.
So even if Wednesday's spider doesn't work out, I'll have something to show. The Colonel only wants us to bring five pieces at the most. Right now I have five spiders: the broken red one, the reconstructed speckled one, and these three modular ones.
If I sand-blast the legs, maybe it'll hide all the glue marks.
In all that leg massacre nonsense, I ran out of time to take photos of everything else. The Window Sill of Judgment will have to do.
Here's a box mold gone wrong and spun out. "I think you're gonna like it," All the Glass had said at the time. It'll make a good tea light holder.
Thread Sherpa had shown me how to make a witch's ball, an ornament with threads inside. "Not bad for your first try," he'd said. It's more square than round. I'll have to try this again sometime.
I'd tried the gold topaz-lime green combination again, this time keeping the threads small and separated. There were a lot of bubbles in the glass, and the pipe was a little dirty too. The result of all this is a textured vase that resembles the surface of Jupiter. I put it up for sale but keep it on the sunny kitchen window sill.
Feathering with frit is always a gamble, but with a half kilogram of Holiday Mix, there's room for threads as well as spider bodies and candle holders. This gets marked for sale too, and Rickety buys it.
On a white background, the holiday frit stands out. This one is sold to the friend who wants my first spider.
It's Sand-Blasting Saturday!
I hang around the classroom because Alchemy is there. While he, Old Man, Glass Ninja, and GGP work, I stand aside, bending cane for spider legs. I take the big ones and bend them in half to make two sets of smaller legs.
Glass Ninja has a tile cutter that I use to break pieces of long cane (from a Christmas present last year) into smaller ones.
In the process, I drop a few, explode a few, and wind up with four sets of legs.
Sand-Blasting Saturday isn't just for spiders. It's for paraffin-treated candle holders too.
VIII: Interlude: A Frosty Morning with the Outdoor Saints
Saint Vitreous:
Saint Orbitus:
Saint Polychromatus:
Saint Cullet:
IX: Off my Game
And here we are, the last day of class. I'm doing a double again today, in an afternoon session with Rose. We're all off our game.
I place a set of spider legs on the pipe warmer. I cover them with an arched piece of can to keep them warm. I forget to tell Rose to remove the can ahead of time. Things go horribly wrong after that: she almost moves the can with her bare hands ("No! Don't touch that with your hands!"), and then it slips in the tweezers (been there, done that), moving the legs. They crack when she tries to move them back. She's repeatedly apologetic, and I'm a bundle of nerves. I try to be kind through it. It wasn't her fault.
She takes a turn while I put up another set of legs. This time, only one pair comes away when I press the body onto them. Rose says she'll bring me the other pieces, but then the attached legs melt onto the body and I can't get them off.
"How about I bring you legs like before?" she asks.
"Nah. I'm done with this."
I make some other things, like a warpy vessel from a color I haven't used all semester but meant to. I need a little wastepaper basket. This will do.
Rose has some blue aventurine. I ask to try some and make two ornaments. The first, a standard-sized one, has the color on the outside. It doesn't sparkle, but it has texture. I put the aventurine on the inside for the second ornament, a larger one, that does sparkle,
What should I do with all the broken legs? I place them on the pipe warmer and pick them up onto a hot bubble. They're all different colors and thicknesses, and they pull the glass in strange directions when I try to work with it. By the time I open it up, I know that the only thing I can do to save it is to spin it out into whatever weird shape it wants to be.
"Sick rondel!" Classmate's Partner says as Rose and I put it away.
These things take up so much space. Maybe I'll hang it on a wall.
The only thing that's worked so far today is the first thing I made, a little vase with honey yellow powder, yet another color I wanted to work more with this semester but didn't.
Rose leaves me with a dollop of blue aventurine when the evening shift begins.
My spider-coveting friend has purchased a spiral bowl I made last spring. I want to make another one to take its place. This is going to be a fool's errand. I haven't made a floppy bowl this semester, let alone one with color on the inside and white on the outside (so I can't see what's going on).
I drag the threader out and we go for it anyway. All the Glass is good at spinning things out. He helps me gauge when it's time to spin and flop. It works!
All the Glass says he's off his game too. He has something in mind, and we power through it three times to get it the way he wants it.
Meanwhile, I take my second turn making spider bodies. The fist one is a pinched bubble and it's all kinds of wrong. The next few are clear or with a splash of color inside. "Keep going," All the Glass says. "You're on a roll."
While he sets up, I make some more legs to go with the new bodies. This is going to be all about glue. Our final is a week from tomorrow.
We're both tired and it's getting late. I want to make one last two-color thread piece. There's something weird with the pipe and I can't get air into it for a long time. We load the color on anyway. When I blow it out, the bubble goes sideways. I roll with it, making a giant ornament with an off-center, two-colored swirl. Goofy as it is, I like it and I'm going to take it to work with me.
X: More Glue than Glass
On Wednesday night, there's a lot going on. We have to get ready for the student glass sale we only found out about a few weeks ago, and only got details about two days ago. An outside craft show will be on campus Friday and Saturday, and they're giving us students some free tables. Everything we sell goes back to our Glass Club, where the money we earn pays for supplies (I know, really?) and guest artists.
In the classroom, a handful of people sort through the bins and start pricing pieces.
"That's not enough," the Colonel says. "Ornaments should be at least $20. There will be other glassblowers there. They'll see your faces. You don't want to undercut them." A $20 vase gets bumped up to $45. These match my Etsy prices. I feel relieved.
But the Colonel and I have to make our spider. There's nobody else in the hot shop but Glass Ninja, who is sitting off to one side. I know full well that I'm not worth his time. On the other hand, it's class night and the Colonel is adamant about teamwork. I ask him for help. He agrees.
While the Colonel warms the pastorelli plate (a thick slab of ceramic on a steel frame) and sets the legs on it, I get the body started.
"No color?" Glass Ninja asks.
"Nah. I just want to get this done."
Following orders from the Colonel, I heat the body when he tells me to, get Glass Ninja to bring me a hot bit when he tells me to, and place the body on the plate over the warm legs when he tells me to. A quick couple of flashes in the glory hole see the legs stay fastened at the base and moving around a little on the ends. We break it off, Glass Ninja brings a bit for the hook, and we get it in with just one broken leg.
After that, we go back to the classroom, where the most of the sale glass has been sorted and priced. I realize that there will only be two of us working the table on Saturday. That's not enough. I go back to the hot shop to cajole some more people. Classmate's Partner and That Kid volunteer.
I spend Thursday night with spider bodies, spider legs, and glue.
I think it's cheating. And also not glassblowing. And that I'm spending far too much out-of-class time on this cold-working business.
Friday at work, I have an idea. Several early ornaments are hanging above my desk. One is flat on top. I free it from its cord, carry it into the lab, grab a file, and hack off the hook (which is surprisingly easy to do).
The spider with red legs gets a real abdomen...
...which is so heavy that she hangs like an orchard orb weaver.
But first, the glass sale. I get to campus early to fetch Wednesday's spider, who now has two broken legs. Great. More work. I'm sure now that this was not worth the effort.
XI: Student Sale
We're set up at the far end of a long hallway in the Tyler Mansion. Our table is closest to the door, which means that shoppers headed for the tents outside will see our glass out of the corners of their eyes if we're lucky. (My contributions are at the far end of the table, hidden by the big stuff.)
I'm early, and so is Tall Vase. "Did you do that?"
The sale netted a few hundred last night. By 4:00, we've taken in $400 more. Some of my pieces, rejects all, have sold. It takes us an hour to pack everything away. We fill my car with glass and I drive everything back to the 3D Arts building, where we unload onto the shelf outside the classroom. "What a logistical nightmare," I complain. We'd had to make sure security wouldn't lock the building until after we got back. I put the cash box in my locker. There are still some Venmo sales that we have to convert to cash. We'll settle up Wednesday.
XII: Final, Finally
At home, I do more spider surgery.
This includes digging out a tiny, old ornament that I'd almost thrown out years ago.
There's one more thing I want to do before the final. I pull down the reject spider, the second one I made, accidentally breaking its legs when I drop it. That's fine, really, because I can use the broken legs to fix the red one with the missing front leg. I cut off the remaining legs with my new tile cutter, then figure out which one will be the best replacement. There will be some more glue surgery after work tomorrow.
It's a delicate thing to wrap six spiders for a final. On the way into class, I notice one of my reject two-color ornaments hanging from the cherry tree next to the 3D Arts building. Was this leftover from the sale? I know Tall Vase has to have been the one to do this. He likes planting our glass all around the outside of the building.
"It's one you threw away," he says. "It's been there for a while." Shows you how often I go in the front door.
I'm hoping there's time for me to use the sand-blaster. I want to do something fancy to the red spider. I want to sand-blast stripes onto her legs. The Colonel opens the room for me and I get to work.
Something is wrong with this machine. I keep getting shocks. I work as quickly and carefully as I can lest I wind up in cardiac arrest on the floor.
I know we're only supposed to have five pieces out. With the newly-blasted one, I have six. I set them all out anyway.
The more I look at the lock, though, the less I like it. I pull out my phone, search Amazon, and buy some circular, flat magnets meant for this sort of thing. Then I place an order for metal slide-on levers also meant for this sort of thing.
One leg falls off the green one. One of the red one's legs comes loose too.
We go clockwise around the room, meaning that Alchemy and I are last.
"Spiders," the Colonel says, turning toward my pile of critters. He picks the green one up. He says there's nothing wrong with glue, and that we need to get over our purity mindset. Even though I was going for biological realism, he likes the gangly-legged ones better: "They're more organic."
"You must have learned something from this," he says.
"I --"
From across the room, Rose calls out, "Yeah! Never make another spider!"
"What she said," I tell him.
At home, I glue legs back on. The red one becomes part of my permanent collection, not because she's well done, but because, of all of them, she most reminds me of the Neoscona crucifera I follow every summer.
She reminds me of Mercy!, the big, purple one who was the last of the 2022 cohort to disappear from my yard.
I guess I'll keep the green one, Mangora, a green-legged orb weaver.
These two? On the Christmas tree, I suppose.
This one hangs, nameless, in the bedroom.
XIII: Take Your Spider to Work Day
The one with the office-ornament body comes back to my office. One of the legs breaks in transit.
Fear not! In the lab we have an entire UV-cured glue kit, with bottles to meet every need. The setup takes longer than the surgery, which is accomplished with two drops of glue and a minute under the lamp.
She lives here now. I'll just have to be extra careful every time I raise or lower the window shade.
The Christmas tree goes up and the spiders go on, hiding among the branches, eating the lights.
Mangora comes downstairs missing a leg.
When I finally find it, on the floor below her wall spot, I carry her upstaris again, fix her legs, and put her back on the wall. I can't trust her to keep it together. If the Colonel hadn't helped me make this, she'd be in the trash.
XIV: A Different Kind of Cold Working
Class is over, but there is still too much noise. Along the one windowless wall from our dining room to our living room, we have four glass cabinets. All of them are hand-me-downs, the first three from All the Glass, the fourth being one of two I inherited from my parents' apartment. In all of them, the shelves are a fixed height. There is wasted vertical space, and wasted horizontal space between the cabinets. The inherited ones, from Ikea, are rickety, and the overhead lights don't work. I like them the best, though, because they're glass all the way around.
What if I could get the entire wall made as one long, glass cabinet? When I ask my contractor friend about it, he says it'll be far too expensive a job, as each piece of glass will have to be custom cut. He thinks I'm better off finding a cabinet online.
On the Monday before Christmas, I find a company that sells commercial displays. By the afternoon, I've narrowed my choices down to two. I run them by Jack. There is very little furniture in our house that we've ever paid for. Our decorating style is Used Bookstore. Jack has no problem with me blowing my December paycheck on furniture. Good thing I don't earn all that much?
On Tuesday afternoon, I place an order for two cabinets. Each has five adjustable shelves, top lighting, wheels, and a lock for the doors. I'm not so big on the lock, but the rest of it is exacly what I'm looking for.
I figure it'll be weeks at least before the cabinets arrive.
They show up on Wednesday afternoon, ahead of a cold front and a week off from work.
Forget the chaos inside. I have to get this teetering edifice unpacked and the glass indoors before the world drops below freezing.
With a lot of pacing around and, eventually, a crowbar, I get the mess unpacked and the glass inside. Jack helps me with the two largest panels, each six feet by three feet.
I rest the shelves on a table in our screened porch, then move them inside when I realize that all the components should be at the same temperature when I put the cabinets together.
It's the Thursday before Christmas. We're supposed to get rain that will turn to ice as the temperature drops from 50 to 10 degrees. Nobody is in the lab. I decide to work from home for two days, taking care of whatever little work remains to be done before the holidays.
In between sessions on my laptop, I pack away every piece of glass in the five cabinets. Jack and I carry three of the old cabinets out to the back porch.
I've asked my classmates what they do with all their glass. LT2 said, "I keep all of it, even my very first pieces." All the Glass has a shed and a room full of cabinets. Rose said, "I have an entire room for this stuff." She's a painter; she already had a room for her stuff. Glass Ninja once told me, "Boxes."
Nuh-uh. If I can't fit it into these two cabinets I'm about to build, it has. to. go.
Building these things is a bitch, and so am I, as I struggle to figure out how to slide the panels in while the bottom and rails are lying on the floor. With Jack's help, we figure out how to brace the rails against some magazines and slide the largest pane in. By myself again, having scared Jack away, I figure out that I need to use gravity. "Gravity is your friend," they tell us in glassblowing. Well it is here, too, because, as I gingerly raise the cabinet to vertical, the panes slide into their bottom slots. I slide a speaker against the back, to be safe, and run to get masking tape to hold it all together just in case, and then screw the top on.
I'm only building this one today. The other one's lights don't work. I've checked all the connections. I've tried several outlets. Nothing. I've already contacted the company. They promise a replacement "as soon as we get a SKU from the warehouse." Right.
Each shelf is held by four cylindrical pins that slide down the aluminum rails. Or are supposed to, if one of the rails isn't slightly bent. With a file, I give the pins some space to slide and then proceed to set the shelf heights.
Putting the doors on is a whole 'nother thing. Fortunately, it's the same system as the doors I had to install on a shallow cabinet where I keep glass other people have made. Unfortunately, it's the same system as the doors I had to install on a shallow cabinet where I keep glass other people have made.
Somehow, I get them on without shattering anything. But the doors refuse to stay closed. They swing open. I know the house isn't level, but really? Then I remember the lock. The only way they'll stay shut is if I lock them in place. Okay, then.
Overnight the wind gets fierce. I can hear clanging from the glass plates I have hanging one from the other on the screeed porch. They've survived high winds before, but not this time. The next morning, the bottom plate is in shards on the cement floor. I sweep them up. One fewer glass object, and a semi-reject at that.
There's even less day job work to do today than yesterday. The second cabinet comes together much more quickly than the first one. Even though the lights don't work and the top will have to be replaced, I put the top on just so that I can set the shelf heights and get all the glass panels off the floor.
I don't know how people do this sort of thing for a living. On the other hand, I slice mouse brains, so.
It's the new cabinet that holds my best work. Somehow, it all fits. The LEDs from above are bright enough to illuminate the bottom row. On top are the two-color vases I worked on this semester and the family of cats surrounding a bowl (currently empty) of orange ornaments. Below them are all the feathered vases I've deemed worth keeping. Under them are the long-neck vases and the short-neck ones I made trying to figure out how to get the long ones. Then there are a couple of spiral bowls, some more carafes from this semester, and a series of floppy bowl failures in shapes I'll never be able to make again. The bottom two shelves are all floppy bowls, which each take up far too much space.
Now comes the task of putting all my glass back into their cabinets. The best-made one, given to me by All the Glass because nothing he makes will fit into the narrow space, gets moved to the front of the living room, next to Jack's collection of antiquarian books. I load in the blue shelf, the red shelf, the season and wave vases, the collection of cats, and leave the pumpkins and ghosts on the bottom. These aren't my best pieces, but they're the ones that can live hold their own in the dim light from above. Also, Maine #13 is at the top, under the light, for everyone to see.
I'm giving away one of the other two cabinets from All the Glass, but this one fits neatly into a corner. It holds my paperweights and orbs, a shelf full of first-year foibles, the overflowing collection of ornaments, and, on the botom shelf, two bowls, two flowers, and several cracked tomatoes.
On Christmas I notice something weird. The tall, threaded carafe seems awfully close to the door. I know I wouldn't have put it that close. I move it back. A few hours later it's close again. I move it back.
The next morning, I unload everything. It had never occurred to me that, even if the shelves don't rock, they might not actually be level. I only hope that I don't have to remove the doors to fix this.
I check the base; it's level. The shelves? Not so much. They all pitch forward at varying degrees. It doesn't take long to fix them. I check the other cabinet while I'm at it. Then I reaload everything more or less the way it was before, but with the heavier pieces in the rear, just in case. The doors still swing open until I get the magnets on.
On Thursday, the replacement top for the one with the defective lights arrives in a box the same as the other two sets were in, except that this one appears to have been opened before. There are slabs of Styrofoam that weren't in the other two boxes. When I slide the top out, one of the lights has come loose from its groove. I put it back in. I carry the top to the nearest outlet and plug it in.
Nothing.
Seriously? I check every connection. Nothing.
I start to doubt my intelligence. I send a quick email to the company, asking either for a partial refund or another replacement. Then I ask my online friends for the name of a good electrician.
There's nothing to lose at this point by putting the doors on the cabinet whose lights don't work. First, though, I want to tape the wires down. Otherwise, they stick up off the top and it's noticeable. While I'm up there, I see that a screw has come loose in the housing that fixes the power source to the top of the cabinet. I try to set it in, check that the wires coming in seem to be in place, and tape the cords down.
Might as well try plugging it in one last time. I flip the rocker switch. The lights come on.
If it's possible to feel relieved, mystified, and stupid all at once, I've just achieved that. And I make a note to myself never to touch the rocker switch again. The cord is plugged into a power strip that's on a timer. I make sure the mess of wires is out of reach of curious paws.
I'll keep the other top, the one that arrived today, just in case. I email the company again: "Never mind."
The bottom is basically a platform with wheels. It might come in handy as a dolly. I'll stash that in the garage too. When I pull it out, though, I nearly slice my hand on shards of shattered wheels. So much for that. Out to the trash it goes. Now I see why they ship this mess on a pallet.
There's another manufacturing defect with the top I'm using: the holes drilled for the door hinges are too small, and the plastic guides don't fit all the way in. This leaves too little clearance for the glass panels to slide to get the bottom hinge set. I pull the guides out and punch the hinges through a layer of masking tape instead, just to keep them from wobbling. The bottom hinges go on super easy after that.
From upstairs, I carry down two of the three boxes of Etsy sale pieces. The third box will go to the next student sale if they don't get bought online first. The magnets are holding the doors closed. The cheap little handles look so much better than the big, clunky locks. I have an entire bag of spare parts now, plus two extra locks.
XV: Noises Off
Upstairs, I can see the floor again. All of it. The Window Sill of Judgment is bare, save for one transparent, threaded tea light holder in the center. Mercy! hangs above, next to a few giant ornaments that look best here in this window.
Outside, I combine two hanging sculptures into one, replacing the broken plate with the series of upturned vases that have always matched the surviving plate. I think it looks better this way.
The semester is over. The chaos is gone. The noises are off. I can exhale.
XVI:
Until January 26.
