Hey, y’all

28Jul10

I haven’t really settled into my new job yet. Everything’s still all up in the air, and I don’t even have a building badge yet, so I have to go through airport-style security scanners and be scrutinized and have my manager vouch for me every single day. It’s pretty ridiculous. I’m only home for a couple hours a day when I’m not sleeping or in the shower, so nothing is getting done there either.

What I do have, though, is a new laptop! And time on the train to write! So I may not have time to make jewelry during the week right now but I can think about it on the train and gather ideas for the next time I’m in the studio.

Honestly, I’ve barely even thought about jewelry for a month or more. Just too much stress. Ideas are starting to well up again, though, and I’ve been making sketches and brainstorming and finding inspiration. I’ve got a great idea for new Anapurna bookmarks, too.

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Oh my god, y’all. And not in a good way.

28Jun10

My brother L, who’s visiting, hubby R, and I were in Baltimore all day Sunday, and got back to Manassas around 9:45. As we turned into the development, the headlights picked out a man lying in the road, with no cars or other people around. Unconscious or dead, with a pool of blood at his head. Oh God. R carefully pulled around him and stopped, and I called 9-1-1 and reported a hit and run. Then handed over the phone to R, since I was getting the shakes, and the 9-1-1 guy talked R through checking to see if the guy was breathing (he was) and, upon learning of a head wound, told R not to touch him (thank God).

The ambulances were there within approximately three minutes, and the cops within five. The EMS guys swarmed the victim. I hadn’t gotten too close, and when one of the EMS guys shouted to another, “He’s gushing from his head!” I retreated back to the car. Augh. Eventually they got him stabilized enough to move him, took him to the local hospital, and helivaced him somewhere else.

At first everyone assumed we had hit him, which was distressing. Within ten minutes, though, they’d figured out it wasn’t a hit and run. No broken glass, no skid marks, nothing except the guy and his head wound and his sock and shoe lying over in the grass.

All this happened near the first row of townhouses in the development, so all the neighbors came out to see what was going on. And then stood there and chatted and smoked and let their kids run around. God, guys, it’s not your week’s entertainment, at least have the grace to realize there’s a real human lying there, with real-life serious injuries. When the ambulances left most of them went away, thankfully. I’m sure half the development thinks we hit the guy.

We had to answer questions for about five different cops, and write statements, and give lots of contact information. Out came the crime scene tape and they blocked off the entire development entrance, leading to some confused and slightly belligerent residents trying to get home. There’s a back entrance, though, so they got over it. No one treated us like suspects (which probably had a lot to do with us being Nice White People, for which I’m selfishly grateful), and although we did have to stand by the car for about two hours while they investigated with flashlights and brought out a K-9 and so on, a chatty policeman kept us company. I mean, I know he’d been told to keep an eye on us, but he made it a fairly pleasant wait, and he didn’t have to do that.

Said chatty policeman told us that it definitely wasn’t a hit and run: no other injuries than the head wound, no evidence whatsoever of a car incident, and the head trauma was likely caused by a blunt instrument like a baseball bat.

The wait ended when a detective came out and questioned each of us separately. Once again, not like suspects, but he asked some detailed questions about how the man was lying (perpendicular to the curb, feet near the curb, arms neatly straight down his sides) and whether we saw anything else suspicious (not a darn thing). And then he made sure someone had our contact information and then we went home at midnight and fell into bed. So grateful I didn’t dream about it.

I hope the guy will be okay. There was a lot of blood. The chatty policeman, upon learning that Lar was just visiting, said “and hey, you get to see a dead guy. Well, might be a dead guy.” *facepalm* I hope it remains a crime scene and not a murder scene.

One moment of levity: When the detective talked to R, R told him we’d been in Baltimore for the day.

“What for?”
“To see friends.”
“And what did you do?”
“Played games.”
“What kind of games?”
“Dungeons and Dragons.”
“And did you drink anything while you were there?”
“Nah, people don’t usually drink while playing D&D.”

And then the detective went off on a tangent about how kids these days don’t properly appreciate pen and paper roleplaying games, and agreed that the people he used to play D&D with didn’t generally drink either. Hee.

Okay, now I feel bad for laughing. Poor maybe-dead guy.

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oh hai

23Jun10

Hi there!

Let me tell you about the new job that’s been taking all my attention lately. I’m now working as a tech writer on an IT contract for the U.S. Department of Energy. This is awesome, but it involves commuting into downtown DC every day. From Manassas, VA. And getting up a lot earlier than I’m used to. I have three hours a day at home when I’m not working, sleeping, or commuting. It’s a big change. I’ve done nothing for a week and a half but work and sleep (and commute!).

However! I’m commuting on the VRE commuter train, and it’s nice. Enough room to use a laptop. (I don’t have my own yet, so I’m stealing R’s temporarily.) No wireless (yet), but the Smithsonian castle gardens are right across the street from work and the Smith has free wireless, so I’ve been going over before and after work to sit in the beautiful gardens and check my email. As I get used to all the new things, hopefully I’ll be able to post more that way.

When it gets a bit cooler I’ll take some photos of the Smithsonian gardens. The temperatures have been in the mid-90s all this week and the whole DC metro area’s under an air quality alert. Bright sun, heat, and smoggy haze aren’t really good photography conditions.

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extremely shiny work in progress

03Jun10

Last September, I found two gorgeous necklaces in an antique store in Front Royal, VA. One was made of vintage crystal, and the other was made of vintage glass pearls. The prices were reasonable, so I bought them and remade them. The clasp on the crystal necklace was a huge rectangular crystal, so I used it as the focal for the new necklace. I really like the way pearls and crystals look clustered together, so I used a double-strand cluster technique on one side of the piece and kept the whole thing from being too overbearing by stringing alternating pearls and crystals on the other side.

Here’s the finished piece:

<img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4026/4630070872_33ff7915c4.jpg" width="500"

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Con Report: Balticon 2010

01Jun10

What a rough weekend. No matter how anything else goes at a convention, we always have a great time seeing our friends – authors, podcasters, con attendees, fellow vendors – and meeting amazing new people. But when sales are slow, the euphoria of the con social scene can be seriously damped.

As so often seems to happen at cons these days, the dealers room at Balticon was noticeably heavy on the jewelry. Since jewelry is more of an impulse buy at cons than a must-have (i.e. large purchases like swords, or specific purchases like games or tie-in merchandise), our customers don’t necessarily make a beeline for us. Of course, we love our repeat customers and friends who do head right for our table, but in order for new customers to find us this year, they had to run a hallway-long gamut of virtually every other jewelry vendor there. They – and their wallets – were often jewelry’d out by the time they got to us.

We weren’t the only ones hurting this year, but it was a sting to discover that not everybody was hurting. This was the first time I didn’t get a general consensus among the vendors of either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – some did very well, while others were on our level, with sales at about half of last year’s total. The trend, somewhat predictably, appeared to be that those who didn’t have significant competition or were new and exciting did well, while those who were just one in a large category or weren’t a new face sold less.

The economy, as always, was certainly a factor, particularly in the ‘luxury’ categories like jewelry. Recovery is slow, and personal fortunes are consistently dimmer. There’s never any one factor to blame for a poor convention performance. And, truth be told, we did well enough. We made our booth fee back – the absolute minimum for us at a con – and we made enough over to be able to place a much-needed order to restock our sterling silver supply. But it was still a frustrating, disappointing weekend.

We are so, so grateful to our friends, who made a rough weekend more than bearable. Dinners out, laughter, marshmallow catapults, baby snorgling, silliness, and long talks made this con – and all of the others – an experience we wouldn’t trade for anything. We’re looking forward to our next con – Darkover, over Thanksgiving weekend – and to making more great memories with wonderful people.

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Spring cleaning

31May10

I’ve been doing a lot of cleaning and uncluttering in the studio lately. I like to keep a few small shipping boxes around in case I need to ship jewelry (which Jamaila usually does), but I didn’t really need six or seven of them stacked in the bathroom.

Craigslist is the best for getting rid of things you don’t need/want any more, let me tell you. I put things out on the front walk, list them for free, and half an hour later they’re gone! I got rid of a bunch of things that way last week, including two icky old wooden medicine cabinets, scrap wood the previous homeowner left, scrapbook paper I’d been given that wasn’t my style, some ratty old silk flowers, and a dusty old cheapo Wal-Mart floor lamp. Love. I even sold a box of dirty, not-in-great-shape vintage toy trains and tracks for $20. They were worth more, but I hadn’t managed to sell them for their worth and I just wanted them out of the house.

I can almost see the studio floor again! Just need to haul a big empty storage box downstairs, and put away some other containers. At this rate I might even get updated studio photos up soon. I’m taking a week off – this week! – between the job I’m leaving and the new job, so I’ll try to get to it. My current plans for the week consist of sleeping and cleaning, so we’ll see what happens.

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my strange talent

29May10

I can find lucky four-leaf clovers just about anywhere there’s a patch of clover. I used to sit down in the park as a kid and come up with dozens at a time. The record was around 110 in an hour. Sometimes the clover would have more than four leaves: five, six, seven…the most I ever found was around nine leaves on one clover.

I still have lots of pressed four-leaf clovers, so I thought I’d do something nice with them.

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Dorkcat says hello

27May10

And to please get out of her patch of sun.

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Pretty pink coin pearl necklace

27May10

Coin pearls are so pretty. This one seemed to really only need a simple setting, so it was paired with a sterling silver loop and soft pink ribbon for a totally adjustable length.

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earrings for the ferret shelter

25May10

A few weeks ago, I made a set of earrings for the FerretsFirst ferret shelter in Annandale, VA. The shelter buys earrings and keychains from Anapurna at wholesale prices and sells them at retail; all proceeds go to the shelter. For this batch, the shelter director requested half silver plate and half gold plate, with ferret charms and nice bright beads.

To make the stand-alone tags, I created a table in MS Word and gave it nice bold edges, then pasted in the logo and added the text. I then printed them out on white cardstock and cut them apart. Here are some more of the earrings:

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