Trip to the USA

It’s official. I will be traveling to the USA in OCT. I know we will be going to California, most likely staying in Los Angeles. Am 99% sure I’ll be there on the 10th & 11th of OCT and attending BlizzCon in Anaheim. At this stage, I’m not sure yet what other days we will be there, or for how long, but I’m pretty sure we will get to do lots of fun touristy things while we are there. That’s all I know for now,… and I am very excited. Whooooooohooooo! and nervous at the same time,lol.

It’s been a while….

It’s been a while since I last posted. I’ve been very busy as usual (being a mother and partner) and I’ve not had much time spare to play with wire or fire :},.. whenever I’ve had a small chunk of time… it’s usually very late at night and I fear that if I were to play with wire or fire that late at night, I’d most likely poke an eye out or burn my head in the flame as I nod off.

Recently however,. things have calmed down here somewhat and I’ve been able to get back into the swing of things. I made a dangle bracelet for my son to give to a friend for her 15th birthday (forgot to snap a photo and only remembered after it was wrapped). I haven’t played with my Bobcat torch again yet… but I visit it now and then up in the studio and fondle the glass rods a bit,lol.

I can’t wait to get back to playing with hot gooey glass on a rod again. I need to find myself an affordable annealing kiln first, because I cannot help myself,.. I just have to make those big fancy beads (I’m a wannabe fancy lampwork bead maker hee hee) and they will just crack in half if I don’t anneal them in a kiln. So,.. I’m looking for a kiln,..but not looking too hard…these things are expensive and I don’t really want to find a kiln that I might love,..and I cannot not get it,. and it will cost me and arm and a leg.

In the mean time,… most of my free time is spent upgrading (read re-coding) my website. Ok,..I feel the perfectionism has crept in and is holding me hostage in XHTML and CSS code, validating it and removing errors. Oh but wait… what’s this for a change,… I have upgraded and made some changes to this blog today and aaaaaaar it’s PHP. So anyway,.. I’m still working on the first three pages I started a week ago,lol but am almost done with the home page. It’s looking good,..(and I mean the code is looking good) and working well in several browsers. The other two pages that I have started on already,.still have a tonne of recoding and validating to do, and look a little untidy in the browsers as the links and texts have lost their uniformity etc and I have to go back into those pages once the conversions a complete and fix up that uniformity again. I have a long way to go, to convert the rest of the website from HTML to XHTML and CSS, but I think just knowing what I do now,.. the rest of the pages will be easier and quicker.

A new look blog

As you can see, things are looking a little different here,.. and very messy and erm.. just wrong ;). I’m playing with things right now and my blog will look a little disjointed with odd looking for a while with strange looking links/titles/categories and so on. I’ve also upgraded wordpress to the latest version but in the process, I can see that a few posts have gone strange with the entire post becoming a link etc…. and I’m sure there will be more anomalies found as I get into it more.

I hope to have everything all configured nicely transformed in a few days time…. but it could take a little longer,.. having done this before with wordpress… it’s fiddly and time consuming.

Hope you will like the new look and more regular updates,…. I’ve been busy over the past 12months,.. but I hope to have time this year to blog a bit.

Wow,.how time flies.

It’s been a while since my last post,. and when I really looked at it,..I was amazed to see just how long,.. scary!!!

I’ve had to put a few of my loves on hold, while I concentrate all my efforts into caring for my loves at home. Mothers (and fathers) I’m sure can relate to times during their child rearing years when there never seems to be enough time to ‘do it all’.  

Personal interests and activities we once enjoyed and had abundent time for tend to get squished and pushed aside,. then slip right down the bottom of the pile, and you’re too tired to do them anyway if you ever got a reasonable sized chunk of time to partake.

For several years I tried to ‘do it all’,..grabbing a few minutes here and there between loads of washing and running the kids around in the car,..to do a bit more on that bracelet, or make one bead etc,.but it was frustrating beyond belief trying to do these things in minute parcels of time.

I faced a constant stuggle with this,. and even desperately wished that I was a normal mother, who was content to rear her children and not have any other time demanding interests.  I really wished I was born without a creative bone in my body (most of the people I know around me are like that and they are perfectly happy), and that I never had the urge to be creative again. Getting the sudden urge to whip up some nice lampwork beads based on the jacket one of the kid’s teacher’s was wearing, but know it will never happen because you wont get a chance to do it any time soon in the next month or three.  Or the sudden urge to try and capture in watercolour the streams of rain coming out of those amazing sun lit clouds that I pointed out to the kids on the way home from school because it seemed to me to be a fantastic challenge to paint something that in its natural state, looked so unnatural and as I explained to the kids, that even if I were to paint that exactly like it was,.my painting would look wrong because the subject looked wrong and like they were painted badly in the sky.

I decided to stop fighting it and accept that there are just times in ones life when we have to put other things aside for a while, and pick them up again when time allows. So having done that,. I was able to remove the frustration of always looking but never quite finding that minute to spare to do something arty in piece meal chunks. Creativity was sadly stifled anyway,. it’s not like a tap you can just turn on because you have five minutes spare between chores,. then switch off because the kids are grumpy and wanting to be fed again *gasp*.

So, the kids have taken all of me, over the past year pretty much and they have all benefitted from having a very attentive mother,. and I admit it has been nice concentrating fully on them for that time. I did promise myself however, that when they start back at school this year,.. I will try again to ‘do it all’,..well at least let a little creativity back in . 

If all goes to plan,. I hope to write a few more tutes this year,..and hopefully begin one within the next week or two. I plan to fire up the Bobcat torch and play with glass again soon too,.. and I have a nagging urge to dribble some paint onto some watercolour paper. Nothing special,..just wanna mess around and play.

But slowly does it,.. one thing at a time,..I don’t want to go back to how things were.

Just want to say hi to everyone and hope you’re all happy and well.

Cheers,

Remy

Picasso Jasper / Picasso Marble

Uploading a pic of the nuggets to show Lori. Purchased a few years ago under the name Picasso Jasper,. but I have also seen this same stone referred to as Picasso Marble.
Hope that helps.

Testing this theme

by adding in a photo of my little helper, Holly…hmmm  Are the modems ok Holly?

Time for a face lift.

Right now I am working on my journal and have chosen a new theme as the base for it.  While this theme is gorgeous,. I think it is too different to the rest of my site and as I would like to integrate my journal within my website,. I’ll need to work on getting it to blend more. So sorry if it is looking a bit odd right now.

When I’m not here. - erm, ok I was testing something

 
Oh good gwacious! I don’t drop in for a few days and the place is overrun by rodents. …….skitch!,..gorn!…git outta eer!!!!