An eBay dilemma, and glow in the dark stuff

Okay, so I had this brilliant idea that I should get some glow in the dark yarn. I had seen some on sale at Michael's last year, but by the time I got to the store they were all sold out. So I didn't get any last Halloween, but I didn't think that was my only chance at getting the stuff. I thought that either it was just a new product and I would see it later, or maybe it was a seasonal thing that they only sold at Halloween.

Turns out that I was wrong on both counts, and that Michael's probably got that yarn at a discount because Bernat was discontinuing the product. So there was no glow in the dark yarn for sale later in the year, and it did not re-appear on the shelves in October like I had thought. A few online places still had some, but I didn't have the money for all the yarn I wanted and the shipping.

While I was waiting for there to be more money available, the online place sold out of half the colors, mostly the half that I wanted to buy.

Then I found some on eBay. I didn't want to get in a big bidding war over a product I hadn't even tried yet, but I did get a little bit for a reasonable price, and then the shipping wasn't bad (though not as good as just being able to pick it up at the store and not pay shipping).

So I have nice things to say about the eBay merchant, but the yarn itself was a total disappointment. There was a reason the stuff was discontinued. It doesn't work. Or at least, it doesn't work very well. I bought yellow, and it was more like yellow with an off-white streak. Only the off-white streak glows, not the whole piece of yarn. And then it doesn't glow for very long, maybe about five minutes.

Of course, it says that it will glow five minutes right on the label, so maybe if I had bought it at a store I would have noticed that. And maybe if I had bought it at a store last year I would have taken the stuff back for a refund. As it is I am keeping the stuff, cause it isn't worth the postage to send it back if I could get a refund.

A few other companies sell glow in the dark yarn, but most of them sell to sports stores for stuff like catching fish, and I have heard that it doesn't smell wonderful. And there is one company that sells directly to clothing manufacturers, but unless someone has leftover stock to put on eBay, I don't see how I'm going to get any of that either.

So before I totally gave up on the idea of having glow in the dark yarn, I decided to try getting some glow in the dark paint from Michael's and trying to make my own glow in the dark yarn. Not that I was going to make a lot of it. Not like I was going to make a whole glow in the dark sweater or scarf, but I might want some glow in the dark letters or glow in the dark cat eyes or something like that.

Okay, so I can make tiny bits of glow in the dark yarn with paint from Michael's. Except that it is very stiff when I get done making it, so it isn't going to be easy to knit with. And it isn't especially pretty in the daylight. And it lasts longer than five minutes, though maybe not as long as I might have liked.

So, I tried ordering some glow in dark paint on eBay. This was supposed to be some great new stuff that would glow much longer than the stuff from Michael's. And it came in more colors, and I would really like blue, and Michael's didn't have blue. So, I bid on a few things.

Now, if you buy something on eBay (or from anyone else online or from a catalog) you have to pay shipping and handling. Now, this might just mean whatever the actual postage is. Or, more likely, this is the actual postage plus the cost of the box (or envelope) and the packing materials. And sometimes it means the actual postage plus the cost of the box and the packing materials, and something for the time of the person having to pack the stuff, cause they don't work for free.

Here's where it gets interesting (and really, really upsetting if you bid on something before you read everything). On eBay, eBay gets paid (by the seller) fees for listing the item and for having pictures of the item, etc...and maybe there's also a percentage of the final sell price. The listing fees are smaller for items with lower opening bids. So, there are items with opening bids of one cent or ninety-nine cents, and while the bidding usually goes higher, sometimes the items actually sell at the opening bid.

Okay, for the most part, sellers on eBay are not running charities. They don't want to pay thirty cents in listing fees so that you can buy something for a nickel. They don't want to sell stuff for a dollar and not make any profit. And they for sure don't want to lose money at the end of the day, even if you are a really nice person and just love whatever they are selling.

So, maybe, that silver ring that you won for a bid of fifty cents has a shipping fee of six dollars. That means that you just bought a silver ring for six dollars and fifty cents. A silver ring for six dollars and fifty cents doesn't sound too bad. If it sounds like a good deal to you, that's great. If that isn't what you wanted to pay, too bad, you should have read that stuff before you bid on the ring.

Of course, the actual postage for the ring was less than a dollar. The box and/or envelope and packaging materials were also less than a dollar. Maybe the seller actual paid a dollar or so for the ring. So if the seller's expenses were about three dollars, then the seller made a profit of three dollars and fifty cents from your winning bid of fifty cents.

I don't think that is so bad. I don't think the seller is evil. The seller is just trying to make some money, and that is probably not an unreasonable amount of money.

If the shipping was fifty dollars, that would have been an unreasonable amount of money. But you should have read what the shipping was before you bid on it. If you bid on things first and then try to negotiate less shipping afterward, it is probably you who is being unreasonable.

Sometimes a seller will do combined shipping. Maybe the first silver ring is shipped for six dollars, and up to three more rings could be shipped for an additional four dollars each. The seller is probably going to make an additional three dollars profit each on those. But that is the limit. The seller really wants that three dollars profit. You can't assume that the seller is going to get you a better deal than that, even if you buy more stuff.

And if you really think that the seller is going to put two dozen silver rings (especially silver rings that you had winning bids of about fifty cents) in a flat rate box that would only cost six dollars to ship and then only actually charge you that same six dollars for the shipping...are you really that dumb? Why would anyone send you a box of two dozen silver rings for eighteen dollars? Did you think someone really had a business set up to give away jewelry like that? Did the seller suddenly decide that silver rings were so unpleasant to have around that he would rather pay to have them sent away than to have them around anymore?

Several years ago I bought a lot of jewelry from this one seller. Opening bids were usually a penny or a nickel, and I usually stopped bidding between a dollar or two. Shipping was five dollars. They would combine shipping for up to three items at no extra cost. If I won something that I really wanted for two dollars or less, I would then put minimum bids on other things until I had won two more items, so then I usually got three items for six or seven dollars. So I usually got the items for an average of two dollars and twenty-five cents. Most of them I wanted, but once in a while I bought either something that I already had or a ring that didn't fit me. I figured that I could either sell it myself or give it to a friend. I got a lot of my Christmas shopping done early that way.

I was probably not that seller's favorite buyer, at an average of two twenty-five per item they were not making much money from me. But I usually got what I wanted and it was delivered in a reasonable amount of time and all of that. I left them positive feedback, and they did the same for me. Unfortunately, after years of mostly positive feedback from people who either had a brain and read the listings, or else didn't mind paying five dollars shipping, the seller got a lot of negative feedback and they don't sell on eBay anymore. I hope that they got a new name and tried again. I really liked them. Not that I need any jewelry at the moment, but it would be nice if they were around if I wanted something later.

Back to the glow in the dark stuff.

I had seen a few sellers on eBay with this glow in the dark paint that is supposed to be much better than the stuff I was buying from Michael's. I noticed one seller a while back, and I planned to buy stuff from them as soon as I got some money. Most of their stuff started with a ninety-nine cent opening bid, and they wanted six dollars shipping for the first item, and three dollars for each additional item, up to whatever you might buy for the next fourteen days.

By the time I actually bid on anything, the shipping had gone up a bit. Six ninety-five for the first item and three fifty-five for the additional items. Still, not too bad if the product actually does what I want it to do.

I started biding. I bid too much for the purple, but at the time, I really thought I wanted it. After that I would bid a bit more than the opening bid, and if I didn't get it, no big deal, there was something else to bid on tomorrow.

I didn't win something, but I got a second chance offer to buy it for just under three dollars. I probably didn't think about that too much before I agreed. Then I won three more. So I won five colors for about eleven or twelve dollars, and the shipping I had agreed to was like nineteen dollars, so I actually spent just over thirty-one dollars. The actually cost of postage is under three dollars, a bit more for the bubble-wrap envelope, and about fifteen dollars went into the seller's pocket. The seller is not really interested in my artistic efforts, the seller is trying to make some money.

So that was a bit more than I wanted to pay, but if the paint does what I want it to do, it would be worth that.

So the items came yesterday, and I am supposed to leave feedback. The seller has already left me positive feedback for prompt payment and so forth.

I am not sure what I am going to do.

The clear-day/green-night paint, which I bought as an afterthought due to the second chance offer, is excellent. It might actually glow all night as advertised. I meant to test it, but I forgot and turned on the bathroom light this morning, and now it is slightly recharged. Anyway, even if it doesn't glow fourteen hours as promised, it does glow quite a lot, and I think that it will work very well for me. I want more of this stuff.

The other colors aren't what I had hoped for.

Still in the tube, the other colors don't do much of anything. I am trying not to rush to judgement, and I have read that the colors glow better once they are actually painted on something rather than just in the tube, and that they glow better after the paint has dried for a few days, and that the paint is best over something white and doesn't work very well on something black, and that the painted item might need a thicker coat of paint or a second coat, and that if I want it to stay looking really good I should put a clear coat over it.

So I have done a test strip with the blue and the aqua. They do seem to glow better after they have dried, though they do not look as good as the test strips from the stuff I got from Michael's. They will probably need a second coat, which will mean that I will only have about half as much finished yarn to work with, or I will have to buy twice as much paint. And while the yarn isn't as stiff now as the other test strips, it will be stiffer after a second coat. As for putting a clear coat on top, that might make the yarn mostly unusable.

But my problems with painting yarn are my problems, not the seller's. The seller didn't tell me to try to paint yarn.

Anyway, I think that I'm going to have to test all of the paint, two coats each, and let them thoroughly dry for about a week before I can really see what I am getting. But here is what I can tell from the two test strips so far. The blue and the aqua do not glow blue and aqua. They glow that same greenish yellow that I got from the clear-day/green-night color, and it just looks like most every other glow in the dark thing that I have. So that is very disappointing, even if it does eventually glow for a long time as promised.

But they do look very blue and aqua under black light. But I wasn't really planning to carry a black light around with my knitting projects, and I doubt that the people I might give the finished projects to would carry a black light around with them either.

Okay, I am not returning the items. That is not even an option. If I had bought them in a store, I would probably take them all back except for the green and exchange them for more green. But I didn't buy them at a store, I bought them online, and if I asked for a refund I wouldn't get back the shipping, plus I would have to pay three dollars to have the items shipped back, plus I would probably be charged a restocking fee. So that would eat almost half of what I would get back anyway.

And I really think the green is pretty good, and I might want to buy more of it later. I don't want to leave really negative feedback, or they won't want to sell me anymore paint. And I'm not going to complain about the shipping, because I'm not an idiot, and I get that the shipping was really for the profit that they should have made from the paint itself. I just don't know what to put about the item being as described. One of the items does seem to be exactly as described, but I'm just not sure about the rest.

Monday Morons--these numbers don't seem right to me

Okay, so when you go to check your email, all this news stuff pops up. Like, wouldn't you rather read one of these stories before you read your email. Actually, no. If came here to read my email, then I want to read my email. If I had wanted to watch the news, I would be in the other room watching the news, or maybe I would have Googled a particular news story when I came in here.

But once in a while I do go back and click on one of the stories. Yesterday, there was something about making money in your spare time, and I like money just as much as the next person, so I looked. I have looked at this sort of thing before, and it usually turns out to be nothing that is useful to me.The particular thing I read yesterday is here. And I got a little annoyed, because I happen to know a little bit about a few of these things.

The first item suggested that if you become a part-time baker that you could sell cupcakes for $2 each, and that if the business was successful that you could make an extra 40K a year for working ten to twenty hours a week, and that if you really wanted to get into that sort of thing you should consider renting space in a professional kitchen.

It doesn't say anything about actually needing a professional kitchen, because the Health Department probably won't give you a permit to work out of your house. I've never wanted to be a professional baker, but I do happen to know about that because the Health Department came and canceled our little community bake sale, even a month after we asked for a temporary permit and we were originally told it would be okay. And I doubt that the ten or twenty hours per week includes the time it actually takes to sell the baked goods, or the time it would take to transport the items to someone who would sell the stuff for you, and then of course you would have to split the profits with other people. So an average of ten to twenty hours a week making an average 40K sounds a bit unreasonable, even if you do happen to have a professional kitchen and have permits and such.

The second item suggested becoming a professional blogger. Even after saying that few bloggers make enough to earn a living and that most earn nothing at all, it then suggests that writing for a few hours everyday you could earn an average of 24K a year. What numbers are used to come up with this average? All bloggers, or just those that consider themselves "professional", or all those that happen to make any money at all? My husband tried to make money blogging. He had a couple of blogs that he spent a lot of time on, and he ended up with about five hundred dollars a year. One year he really put some extra effort into it, had five blogs going, and wrote about not what he cared about but whatever dumb thing was on Google Trends, usually something about "naked pictures of ___________" to get more people to look at his blog. And it sort of worked, even though he didn't even have the "naked pictures of __________", he just mentioned that people were talking about it. So more people came to his blog, and he made about a thousand dollars that year. He's now back down to five hundred, and only working regularly on the one blog.

So we know from experience that writing a few hours a day is unlikely to result in making 24K a year, and I suspect we are not in the minority.

The third item was also something that we have tried. The article suggests that for several hours a week you could sell stuff on eBay and have average sales of 22K a year. At least it did say average sales and not average profit. At one point the eBay stuff was taking almost as much time as our regular jobs, and the profit never got much over four thousand dollars a year.

I know nothing of being a professional flower arranger, but the article suggested that for three to twenty hours a week an average of 21K in sales was possible.

At home jewelry making on evenings and weekends and spending between five hundred and two thousand dollars on materials and tools was said to result in an average sales of 30K per year. I know someone who does this sort of thing and doesn't do anything near that. Also, I used to have a reader in England who had a degree in art and had planned jewelry making as a career, and last I heard she had no luck with it.

Pet sitters were mentioned as making an average of 22K a year, mostly on weekends and holidays and some evenings. While I do know that some people are paid a lot of money to do this, the people who make the big bucks are practically nurses. You usually don't get paid a living wage to go and play with someone else's dog, but you could make some money if you were able to give shots to diabetic cats and such.

Then we come to part-time photographers who make 26K a year, mostly on weekends and evenings. Now that is something we really know something about, as my husband has been a full-time photographer for more than ten years now. Until about three years ago, he made less than 26K a year, and that was for between 40 and 70 hours a week. You're probably not going to make that much money in addition to your regular job. And of course, if your regular job is as a photographer, your probably already working evenings and weekends for somebody else.

Interpreters and translators were said to make an extra 21K. I always thought that people who spoke a second language would have cool jobs and/or make extra money. But most of what I see are a lot of people who speak Spanish who have the same dumb job that I have or they work at Walmart or something. And they usually don't get paid extra to translate, they are just expected to drop what they are doing and come and talk to other people who can't be bothered to learn English. Lately some of the jobs I would have wanted have started listing Spanish preferred or even Spanish required, but the pay rate has not gone up, just with the new requirement I am no longer qualified for the job.

T-shirt vendors were said to make 48K a year after an investment of about a thousand dollars. I've never tried this, but again it sounds too easy, and I wonder how many people lost money trying to start a business so that the average ends up being 48K.

Web designers were also said to make an average of 42K. I know some people who do this, but nowhere near that kind of money or they would quit their regular jobs.

I think the people who are really making money from these part-time business are the people who sell the thousand dollars or so of start-up materials and equipment.

Christmas 2008 isn't over yet

Sometimes I get so into the club stuff that the holiday stuff I do with the club seems more like the holiday than the holiday itself. After the Halloween party on the fourth Saturday of October, I half expect the clearance sales to be the next day, even if Halloween doesn't actually occur until the following Friday. And in recent years I find that I have more to do for the club activities the weekend before Christmas than I actually have to do for Christmas itself.

This year, I had decided that I needed to try to tone down the holiday stuff. I started with Halloween, and decided not to enter the costume contest, but tried out being a judge instead. That went okay. So then I needed to find a way to tone down the Christmas stuff.

Without getting into all the details, my family has decided that due to the economic problems and other changes this year, we would not continue the tradition of buying gifts for everyone in the family, and we would limit the gift buying to about forty dollars. Last year I spent almost that on each person.

And I expect that there will be changes in the coming year that will result in my either having less money or less free time or both. So I've been thinking that I should tell my friends that this might be the last year I do the whole Christmas thing with them. In the past few years, I've enjoyed the unofficial gift exchange with my friends more than the gift exchange with my family, cause I usually have a better idea of what to get for my friends. Except for my sister, I don't really know what the rest of my family wants.

This wasn't always the case. We didn't always exchange gifts. But one year, we just all seemed to get the same idea at the same time, and found something that we just knew that someone else would love to have, and without planning it ahead of time, we just brought presents. So for the past five years or so, this has been a major part of Christmas for me.

As in last week's episode of The Big Bang Theory, there is this whole problem of gift giving, and which friends should you get gifts for, and how much should you spend on each person, and if you get someone else a gift are you expecting to get one in return. To quote Sheldon, "You haven't given me a gift, you've given me an obligation," to try to give the other person "a gift of commensurate value and representing the same perceived level of friendship." It isn't supposed to be like that, you've supposed to just give people gifts because you like giving gifts, but there doesn't seem to be this expectation that there is this exchange of gifts.

There are exceptions. For instance, I expect to get gifts for people who will not be getting me gifts, not because they don't like me but because they have some problem and therefore either don't have the money or the time to go and get gifts. Like I don't expect someone to get me a gift if someone in their family is dying of cancer, but unless I've specially been asked not to, I go ahead and get them a gift, because when I'm out getting all the other gifts I decide that I just don't want them left out. Or if the person is widowed, especially if recently widowed (within this year). Or if they've had major medical bills. Or if they've been out of work. Or if they've had major vet bills. Or if they've had a car wreck. Or if their house was flooded or hit by a meteor.

And my current money situation isn't very good, so I think that I could have begged out of the thing this year. But I really didn't want to. What I wanted to do, was go ahead with it this year, and maybe beg out next year and maybe for a long time after that. But I had already started getting people stuff, and I didn't want to not give those gifts, and I didn't want to get some of them gifts and not give other people gifts. So I got gifts for six of them, knowing that I might only get gifts from two of them. There's someone who was recently widowed, a couple with a lot of unexpected bills, and a buddy who doesn't have a steady job. And then I go ahead and give a seventh gift to a buddy's wife, cause we're friends even though she doesn't usually do club stuff.

And then on top of all that, there is the official gift exchange, and I usually don't end up with anything really cool, but to be fair, I think maybe it has been a while since I've put in anything really cool. I brought Bath & Body Works stuff and took home a DVD collection of Japanese monster movies. But that is just so much fun to watch, since it is like the Chinese gift exchange, and people steal stuff. There was a lot of stealing this year.

Okay, so the recent widow says that she won't be joining us for most of the evening, cause she has to be somewhere else. I got her some bath stuff anyway. I give bath stuff when I don't know what else to do, but in this case I actually know that she prefers bath stuff. I haven't yet made her a scarf or anything like that, cause I'm not sure she'd like it and I can't bring myself to make a scarf for someone unless I'm sure that they would like it. But I'm absolutely sure that she'll use the bath stuff. And she says something about having gifts at home for people, but not having the time to wrap them and such. But I wasn't expecting anything from her anyway.

And then I made a scarf for my buddy who doesn't have a steady job. And he gave us all cards. Really cool cards with blinky lights. We like gadgets and blinky lights.

To the couple with the unexpected bills I gave a scarf and a school art project. This was the main reason I did not want to beg out this year. Every year for the last five years I've given a scarf to one person I thought would really want one, and I still needed to give this last one. So now all of that original group has a scarf, except for the widow and the pilot's wife, and I'll make more for them too if I ever here for certain that they really want one. As for the school art project, this is exactly what the couple would have wanted, if it had been perfect, which I knew that it wasn't, but they didn't seem to notice.

I gave up trying to think what to get for the pilot, so I gave him a DVD for a movie that I found on sale and I really like, and then I gave him a gift certificate to get another DVD from Blockbuster. And then I added a bath thing for his wife, because they don't always have the same taste in movies. He gave everyone knives. Mine is especially sexy.

For K I got a stuffed animal and knitted some leg warmers and arm warmers. She gave me a really cool T-shirt.

And then the pilot and K remembered my birthday. I did not get them anything for their birthdays, but K got me jewelry and the pilot got me some tools. The tools were possibly above the "commensurate value and representing the same perceived level of friendship." But I didn't have extra bath stuff in the car to make up for it.

I've said that I want to be excused from Christmas next year, but this was really a lot of fun. Especially the part where the couple was going on and on about the school art project. But I'm not planning any school next year, I don't think that I'll have much in the way of extra money, and now they all have scarves. I can't knit much other than scarves, and somehow I don't think that the pilot and the other guys want leg warmers.

But my brain is already at work, thinking up different kinds of scarves, and maybe some of them would like painted eggs. I don't think that I've ever given any of them painted eggs.

So that was Saturday. I wasn't going to do the charity thing Sunday, for several reasons. One being that I didn't put anything until the charity thing (except for one dollar when they passed the hat), I didn't do the usual candy stuff so I didn't have a speaking part anyway, I couldn't find some of my costume, and we usually go to dinner afterwards and I knew that I shouldn't spend any more money. So I wasn't going to go, but then I heard that we were going to be short at least three costumed people, so I decided that if I could find enough of the costume that I should go anyway. I didn't find my boots and I didn't find my vest, but I did have my dress and cape and scarf, so I put on just regular shoes and went anyway. Afterwards, the widow offered to buy me dinner as my Christmas gift, so that all worked out okay.

And then the pilot's wife gave me a plant. I like plants, though unfortunately it seems like I end up killing most of them that I receive as gifts. She said that I'm the only one who remembers her as a separate person and gives her a separate gift at Christmas, so she got me a separate gift too. Hardly necessary, especially after the expensive tools, but a nice surprise anyway.

So that was all really great. And it isn't really Christmas yet.

Sort of bad news

Sleepless near Seattle came back once after the previous post but did not leave a comment. I think I have scared my new reader away.

Okay, that's not the sort of bad news.

The sort of bad news is that I was hoping to make an art sale before Christmas, but yesterday I learned that the person I was hoping to sell the art to is declaring bankruptcy or something. So I guess that I won't be selling anything to her.

I have written about trying to sell my art before. It just doesn't seem to work out. Not that I really want to sell most of it. Most of it I made for me (or specifically as a gift for a friend) and if I like it I want to keep it. If something went wrong with it and I don't like it, then probably no one else would want it either.

Once in a while someone will ask about buying something, and if it is something that I wouldn't mind parting with or something that I think I can mostly duplicate, I tell them how much I want for it. (That is, if I've kept up with time and expense and such to even answer the question I tell them how much I want for it. Otherwise, I have to do some math and get back to them.) I have to figure how much I spent on supplies, and then I have to figure how many hours I actually spent working on the thing, etc.... So if I've spent twenty dollars on supplies on something that it took me twelve hours to make, then I'm going to say maybe a hundred and fifty dollars. And that's only if I'm sure that I can make another one, or if it is something I can live without. If it is something that I really like and I don't think I can make another one, I won't sell it. But at this point I probably won't sell it anyway, because the person wanting to buy was probably thinking less than fifty. Less than fifty is not going to happen unless I really don't like the piece, and I can't picture anyone offering to buy a piece that I really don't like.

The hundred and fifty dollar price tag tends to shock some people. So either that person has never bought from an artist before, or else the person bought from an art student who just had to sell stuff either to get back the money for the supplies to pay for the next semester's supplies, or else the student has accumulated so much artwork that he has to start selling stuff at a huge discount just to get rid of it to make room for the next semester's stuff.

Non-artists just have no concept of what goes into making art. Either they don't have a clue how much art supplies cost, or they think that you make the art really fast and won't charge that much more than the cost of the art supplies. Or they think that since you are an artist that you enjoy making the art and that you shouldn't charge that much for your time.

This is a bit baffling. I don't think that they expect this of people doing other kinds of work. I'm sure that mechanics like cars, but most people don't expect mechanics to work all day to fix a car and then just charge ten or twenty dollars above the cost of the parts.

If someone is taking an art class and spending 150 hours a semester working on art projects, that's 150 hours that they didn't have to do other things, like getting a job. But, still, people wanting to by art don't get it that the art student would rather give all that hard work to his mother or donate it to charity rather than sell it at a price that would work out to a dollar an hour.

Anyway, it looks like I won't be selling that vase before Christmas. Which means that I've been working on the new leaf vase for no reason. And now the professor seems a bit unhappy that I am in the lab working on the thing anyway. The class I'm officially in ended a month ago, and all that we are supposed to be doing now is drying, firing, and glazing. Except for that, we're supposed to be done, and here I had started a new piece.

So, I wasted about fifteen hours on a piece that I really didn't need to make right now. And I didn't get it done in time for this semester's high fire anyway. And that and a few other things were distracting me when I maybe could have been out looking for a temp job or something.

It kind of sucks.

I think that I have had it with school for a while

I went to school twice this week. I went once on Tuesday, and after a break of more than a week my brain was fried, and I couldn't seem to get anything done. So I left early to run some errands, which turned out to be a really lucky thing since I needed to run those errands and I got a bit sick and didn't feel like doing them later.

So I went to school again on Friday, and except for having a bit of trouble actually getting into the building, that went a lot better. That is, everything went better with the clay. I'm almost done with the green work on the second leaf vase, and I'm thinking that I should go in on Monday and finish up. The main purpose of this project is just to see how long that it takes, so that I'll know how much I should charge for the other one. So far I've spent about nine hours on it.

The bowls and such that I threw still need some touch up work. But, some of them are too dry, and they will just have to do as they are. I'll try to finish the rest Monday or Tuesday.

I really should have done all of this before Tulsa. I don't even really remember what I was doing before Tulsa. I didn't have a cold yet, so that wasn't it. And it obviously did not have anything to do with making the house spotless. Anyway, if I had put in another nine hours or so two weeks ago, then I would have been done with it all by now, and the teacher would have enough stuff to high fire and everybody would be happier now.

I'm not happy. I was thinking at school how this stuff isn't making me happy anymore. I have felt like that before, when a project wasn't going well, but this one is just fine and it still isn't making me happy. I had thought that I would like taking a non-credit class better, that it would be less stressful without having to think about grades and such. And I has been less stressful for the most part. But I do sort of have to think about deadlines if I don't want this semester's work to have been a total waste of time. Right now this just feels like another chore that I have to get through.

Raiders of the Lost Art?

Yesterday I went to school for a bit. My husband was home yesterday, even though today he works in Oklahoma and he should have left yesterday. But the financial situation is pretty bad, and he decided that he couldn't afford the extra fifty bucks or so for yesterday's motel room, even if they are going to pay him back for it in a couple of weeks. We just don't have the money now. So he stayed home an extra day.

But since he didn't tell me he was going to stay, I had already made plans to go to school for a bit, so I decided that I should go ahead and go. I had recorded about ten hours of television for my husband while he was gone last week, so he could entertain himself with that while I was gone. And as it turns out he spent the entire time sitting at the computer, and probably wouldn't have said three words to me if I had stayed.

I have already recycled most of the school's clay and have enough for me for the rest of the next class period, and I don't think that I will need anymore for the one after that. Actually, I'm not planning to go to the last class, since it is the same day as the Halloween Party and I will probably be busy. So I worked an extra hour last week, and then I worked an extra hour yesterday, so that will make up for a missed class.

Anyway, I have recycled most of the school's clay, except that there is a bit left to do that is on the floor, and a bit that got too dry so I put it back in the recycling bin. So I think that someone else can do that last little bit. If it is still there in a couple of weeks I'll come back and do it myself, and just keep it for later.

But I had found some more of this same clay that I had at home, and while I had worked on it last spring and it should have been all ready to go, I instead found that there was a hole in the bag and the clay had all dried out. Maybe a mouse put a hole in that bag while looking for food, or maybe it was just some accident that happened over the summer, but either way I had to soak the clay in water again, and it was all ready to go into the mill.

So I did that first thing Monday morning. Well, not quite first thing Monday, as I did not quite get there early enough to get a parking spot next to the building. So I parked in the next lot over, which isn't very far away at all, except when you have to carry something heavy, like a bucket of clay. So I got a bit tired, and my arms got a bit sore, but I managed to get it all to the building okay. And after an hour or so all of the clay that I brought with me was recycled, so I put it back in the bucket and covered it with a plastic bag.

Now, sometimes when I have to load or unload something in the car, and I can't find a good parking space, I will borrow a teachers' spot for just five or ten minutes. And I think that most of the teachers can figure out that I'm not really planning to leave my car in the teachers' spot all day, just for ten minutes or so, and they don't have a cow, especially if they are art teachers. But most of the teachers' spots were taken too, and I didn't want to use a handicapped spot, even for five or ten minutes. And that left the maintenance parking, and I'm not on the best of terms with maintenance, so in the end I decided that I could just carry the stuff back to the car. It hadn't killed me to carry it that far earlier, though it had been more difficult than I had imagined it would be.

So of course halfway to the car I dropped the bucket of clay. I'm not totally that clumsy, but the handle on the thing broke. It's a cheap bucket and can easily be replaced, and the clay was still covered by the plastic bag so nothing really bad happened. It was just so annoying, and my arms hurt a bit more, but I got everything back into the car.

Now in between getting the clay back into the car and working on the wheel for about an hour, I was looking for this piece that I did last year. Technically, it is a vase, but I doubt that anyone will ever put flowers in it. One of the other teachers actually said that she would be offended if anyone ever put flowers in one of her vases. I think that extreme is a bit silly, but really if you just want something to hold flowers then you'd probably just get something from Walmart. If you have a piece of art pottery, then you probably want to look at the pottery and not flowers.

So I was going to look at this vase, because the teacher had mentioned that someone might want to buy it, and I said that I would probably sell it if I could make another one. I wasn't entirely happy with the way the glaze turned out on this one, so if I could make another one I could have one that I liked better and still have the first one to sell to someone who likes it just the way it is. The vase is put together of a lot of cut out little pieces, which takes a long time, but I was thinking that it would be possible to cut out the pieces at home and then take the pieces to the lab to assemble, and that way it wouldn't take up so much of my lab time. Only I did need to have a look at the original vase first, and I couldn't seem to find it.

So I thought that it must be in the professor's office, only he said that it wasn't. He thought that I had taken it home. No, I'm pretty sure that I didn't. And I know that we had stored a lot of stuff in the tool room, but I had already looked in there for something else last week, so I knew that it wasn't there. The last time I saw the vase it was in a certain storage room, but the professor didn't think it was there, but I looked anyway. Not there. And then he thought that it was in a different storage room, because he had moved a lot of things there. So I found four of my dragons, but not the vase I was looking for.

Are you sure that you didn't take it home with you?

I'm pretty sure that I did not, because I didn't want to risk something happening to it while I was doing the major cleaning and moving bookshelves and all of that. But I said that I would look again before I went and complained about the vase being missing. I have heard a lot of people say that they liked the vase, so maybe someone just took it. Stolen stuff is not unheard of, but it is usually tools that turn up missing rather than art.

Accidents more often happen with the art. Maybe someone broke it and just put the evidence in the trash before anyone else noticed. That has also happened in the past. And if I was that worried about it I should have taken it home right away instead of leaving it there over the summer.

We give up looking and I work on the wheel. And then the professor remembers that it is in a display case. I didn't know that we were having a student show, and I was pretty sure that I had looked at the display cases Saturday, so unless someone put up a new show on Sunday, I didn't think that it was in a display case. But the professor remembers that someone borrowed a few things for the library. Okay.

So after I got done with the wheel, I walked over to the library, and there it was.

And I like that glaze even less than I remembered. So I'm really hoping that I can do another one and sell that one.

Some odd comments from some people who mean well

I am living in my house and trying to figure out what to do about my situation. I know the general bit of what eventually must be done, but I haven't a clue about the specifics. Sometimes I think that I should get on with it anyway, and maybe I will figure out the rest as I go along.

So I try to get on with it, and then something happens. I maybe have a bad job interview. It's maybe a bit silly to get one's hopes up to that degree over one interview, but at the time I was really looking forward to getting a job, and getting a job at this place in particular.

Two things went really wrong at this interview. Actually, the first happened a bit before the interview. While I was not quite walking around the house singing, I did feel a bit better having come to a decision and having a job interview scheduled and a few other such things. And then my husband tells me that he really wants to work on our marriage and that he agrees to do some things that he should have agreed to long before. The point of all that being that if we were going to do what we'd agreed to do, I'd need Mondays off, or maybe I'd just need Monday afternoons off. So instead of going into the interview with the idea that I should say anything reasonable to get the job cause I really need a job, I end up going into the interview thinking the I don't need a job but I should probably feel better if I got one anyway, but it would be best if I could get one that did not involve working on Mondays or at least having Monday afternoons off. I'm not sure that getting Mondays off was really a problem, since the whole thing is rescheduled so that people get off Fridays during the summer I would think that a similar thing could be done so that certain people got off Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday during the rest of the year. And getting off Monday afternoons wouldn't have been any problem at all, as some people work in the morning only. In fact a whole lot of them work mornings only, since they have a strict policy of not having anyone in this particular job work over nineteen hours a week.

So it would not have been the perfect job in any case, even with Mondays off or afternoons off or whatever. But still, I would have liked it, and I would have tried harder to get it if I hadn't been asked to totally switch gears a couple of days before the interview. And that was all for nothing anyway, as my husband did not actually go through with any of the things he promised to do and I did not need this particular time off to schedule other things.

The other thing that went wrong during the interview was that while I was being asked the usual questions that one expects during a job interview, a question was asked that upset me just a little bit. One gets asks stuff like do you really want this job and can you handle this job and have you had a job like this before, etc.... And then maybe you get asked why you left your last job or why are you leaving your current position? And then you have to find something to say other than you quit because your boss was being an a**. I had this idea that this particular part of the process was going to go smoothly, because I did in fact have something to say other than my boss was an a**. I had in fact reasonable answers to why I left my last two jobs, even though technically I was let go from one of them. My last job was in fact, a temp job at the Halloween store. So there was nothing bad to say about anybody on that one, since it was just a temp job for a certain period of time and then the job just ended, and it wasn't a matter of anyone getting fired or anyone deciding to quit. The job before that was a sort of private daycare, and I was too much out of my element and was going to admit that and quit anyway when they decided to hire me some help. My help did such a good job that they decided she could probably do the job without me, and I was really rather relieved to be let go as I had planned to go back to school anyway. I really liked those people, and if they had anything for me to do other than watch the kiddos I would have asked to stay, but as it turned out getting fired right then was the best thing that could have happened to me since it lead to me getting a Pell Grant. The job before that one was a less pleasant story, more of the I was going to quit because the boss was an a** but they fired me first, but I had paperwork on the subject if anyone really needed to know the details. I was a traveling salesperson, and I rather got drafted into that job because my husband was a traveling photographer. I never wanted the job in the first place and had pretty much told them that I was quitting the job over arguments about the schedule in March, and I somehow got talked into continuing to work for them the rest of the year. And then after that I'm told that I don't have a job after November, because I'm such a terrible employee. Really, if I was that bad why did they keep me on seven months after I wanted to leave? It's hardly the same as really getting fired when it's seven months after you've already said "I quit."

But none of that really came up about why I left certain jobs, which is what you'd expect to be asked if you're asked about it at all. What did seem to get the interviewer's attention was that my last job had been at the Halloween store, and he didn't seem happy about that. He said something like, what made you take that job? He almost made it sound like, why did you waste your time there?

I don't think that I've ever been asked about a previous job in quite that way before. People need or want money, and other people need jobs filled, and the two come together and one person pays the other to do a job. Maybe the person gets paid a reasonable amount of money for the work done, or maybe the employee likes something about the job that he's willing to take a little bit less money than he would normally want, or maybe he's just so desperate to get any money that he ends up taking a job that he doesn't really want and he'll leave as soon as he can get something better. But I don't think that the employee should be expected to explain any of that to anyone else. I wanted a job, and there was one available, and I took it.

What really upset me was that in previous interviews for other jobs, the main thing that seemed to get people's attention was the years I had not been employed at all. Like they didn't notice that I'd quit working for almost three years to go back to school. I had thought that going back to school would be a positive thing to potential employers, and instead I was finding out that no one cared that I now had a B.A. in English, and everyone cared that I spent a lot of time being unemployed.

So while I wanted to make a little money at the Halloween store, and I hoped that the job might be fun, my main reason for taking it was that I'd have a job to write down in that wasn't as far back as 2002. And it seemed a whole lot better to work at a temp job that had an end in sight, rather than say take a job at McDonald's or something and then quit after a couple of months. So it really upset me to hear this guy asking me why I took the job.

I did not get that job, and I didn't get called back for the five other jobs that were available at that same place. And that and some other stuff rather upset me, and I haven't been on any other interviews since then. But at the time I didn't care that much, since we were supposed to be working on our marriage and that was the priority, not getting a job.

People who mean well say other upsetting things too.

I've had people tell me that it is obvious that I'm only still with my husband because I need the money and that I should just get rid of him.

Despite what might or might not be obvious to other people, my needing the money is not the only reason my husband is still here. The money issue is, on occasion, a major priority, and sometimes maybe it is the main reason for the current arrangement, but it has never really been the only reason.

Still, if people think that it is obvious I only keep him around because I need the money, it does seem odd that they think I should throw him out. I need his money, but I should say since I only need his money he has to get out? I don't recall these people saying similar things to other people, like since you only stay at that job because you need the money you should quit. Or that people who stay in a certain apartment they don't like because it is the only one that they can afford to live in should move someplace else.

On a completely different note, I've had some people say some particularly odd things about selling my art. I've posted before about the difficulties of selling art, and I posted about the problems of trying to figure out how much to charge for the art and other difficults of trying to sell stuff on eBay here. Basically, there's a huge gulf in between what I want to be paid for my art and what the people want to pay for the art. I want to be paid for the supplies I used to make the art plus a reasonable amount of money for the time I spent making the art. What a person is willing to spend on the art is partially determined by how much other things cost that they would be just as happy buying at the mall. So usually, people do not want to buy scarves that costs $80 or $175 or $330 or even more if they can go to Target and buy a scarf that they like for $15 or $20. True, they might like my scarves more, but not that much more. So I have only sold two scarves, and had an order for a third that was cancelled. If I try to sell ceramics I have a similar problem. Usually what a person wants to pay doesn't even cover the cost of the supplies, and they don't seem to realize that an artist should be paid for their time just as much as a person who does "real work." People expect that if you enjoy making the art that you shouldn't expect to make money from it, though those same people don't expect doctors and pilots who enjoy their work to do donate their time.

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that we do sometimes sell our art for smaller amounts of money that do not take into account the time it took to make whatever it is. Let's say that you know someone who enjoys hand-knitting things, and the person is always knitting either socks or little squares that can later be made into pillows or blankets or scarves or maybe even sweaters. And this person always has some knitting project with her, so that if she ever has to wait for anything that the waiting time is spent knitting instead of just being wasted. So five or ten minutes here and there while waiting for class to start and waiting for the phone to ring when someone is going to call right back and waiting for the pasta to boil while making dinner can all add up to an hour or two a day, and in a week or two you can make a scarf or pillow or maybe even a blanket or a sweater without having to really set aside much for knitting. So when this person is selling a scarf she only wants to be paid for her supplies plus something for her time for the hour or two that she spent putting the squares together, and she doesn't think about all the time that she spent actually knitting the little squares. She enjoys knitting and it keeps her from getting bored sometimes, so she doesn't think to charge much for her scarves, just enough to pay for the yarn and maybe a bit more. She has no problem selling scarves for $20 or so.

But if that same person were to quit her job or give up school or whatever she normally does to become a professional scarf maker, she can't keep selling the scarves for $2o and expect to earn a living that way. The people who have been buying the scarves for $20 probably will not keep buying them if they have to pay more for them, and they can probably find someone else who knits these little squares in between doing other things and charges $20 for a scarf.

So I don't sell much of my art. Most of my art is a labor of love to make something that either I want to keep or I want to give to a close friend or that I specifically made for a charity fundraiser. Yes, I can make you one almost just like it, but it will cost you. It will cost you whatever the materials cost, plus a very reasonable rate of ten dollars an hour for my time. I think that a lot of artists do eventually sell some of their stuff for a lot less than that, just to get rid of some of the stuff. This is especially true of art students who had to make a particular thing for a class, but didn't really like the piece. They just did it for the grade, and once the class is over they have no use for the piece. It is just taking up space, so eventually you either sell it or give it away, and sometimes you even throw some of it out. So, yes, sometimes an artist will sell you a vase for $25, even though it costs that much for just for the glaze and the clay, but you just got lucky. I like almost all of my art and don't feel the need to sell anything just free up some space.

So I get these comments from people. You should sell these. You could make some money. But the people rarely know what they are talking about. If I made something specifically to sell, I would have to make a certain amount of money for it, and probably no one wants to spend that much. Besides the two scarves, the only art I can remember selling was one tile and two decorated eggs (and one of those eggs was purchased only because the purchaser broke the egg and had to buy it).

What really puzzles me is that one of the people saying this stuff is someone who actually was an art major in college. She knows all this stuff. She is an artist, and she doesn't make art for a living. Maybe it was so long ago that she doesn't realize how much supplies cost now, or maybe she's forgotten how much time it all takes.

Another odd thing comment came from my ceramics teacher. I was making a Sleestak head. The teacher doesn't like Sleestak heads. He says that I can't make anymore of them for class credit, and he's not going to fire anymore of them. So I said that I would make more next year in the non-credit class, when we're allowed to make anything that we want. I said that I would like to try to sell some of them to fellow fans. He said that he didn't think that selling Sleestak heads counted towards the "personal enrichment" goals of the non-credit class and he was still unlikely to fire any of them for me.

So I thought that was an odd thing to say. If I can actually sell some of them at a profit, I can buy more supplies and have tuition money to keep taking classes. He would have no problem with me selling vases or something like that after we make them in class, but he has doesn't want me to make duplicates of things that I might actually be able to sell at a profit. I am very unlikely to sell many vases at a profit, since most people can find something that they like just as well for less money somewhere else. I don't know of many other people selling Sleestak heads, so I thought that maybe I was onto something.

Men!!!

Finally got up off my butt and went to the ceramics lab to pick up a few things. I didn't stay long and I didn't get much of my stuff. And I didn't get into it with anyone about my probably not coming back in the fall. I'd still like to take that Saturday only class, but so far no one has signed up for it. Doesn't look good.


Both of the Martian things cracked, but one of them might be repaired. The Sleestak head has a few minor cracks, but it looks pretty good. And the Triffid didn't turn out too bad. I couldn't find my relief dragons. Maybe I already took them home and forgot where I put them.


So I collected the broken Alien egg and three tile molds and put them in the car. And then I talked to one of my fellow students and the teacher for a bit. And then I noticed J wasn't around, so I asked about her.


Apparently I will not be seeing J again. Or, at least, it is unlikely that I will be seeing her again. She had to move. Not that she moved to another state or anything, but she's moved far enough away that she won't be going to that school anymore.


Seems that a few days after I last saw her, her boyfriend dumped her and told her to move out. There was no discussion, no fighting, nothing like that going on. She thought that everything was fine, and then he just announced that it wasn't working for him and she needed to leave.


Sounds familiar.


Different reasons though. Apparently, he needed his space. And since he got involved with an artist, the actual physical space might have been a problem. You would think that people would figure that out before they get involved with artists. But in his case it seemed to be more of the other kind of space. He didn't want to be around her all of the time. Again, you would think that people would figure this stuff out before they get involved like that. Just because you enjoy having dinner with someone doesn't mean that you should live with them.


That was one of the main reasons she was back in school. She had moved away from all of her other friends and family, and she needed to be out doing something by herself so that her boyfriend could have his space. Then after she's made ceramics such an important part of her life and signed up for classes and such, he dumps her. Great.


The three of us were supposed to have a show this year. I guess that's not going to happen.

Bad Economics

There's all this stuff going on that I see on the news, but I'm not really paying attention. Like the price of gasoline is going up and is now about $4 a gallon and might get to be $5 a gallon. I can't do anything about that, and off the top of my head I can't really say how much that will cost me. Other people have a better grasp of this, like they now spend $60 a week on gas just going to work and school and normal errands and such, while they were spending $45 a week when gas was $3 a gallon, but a bit before that they were only spending $30 a week when gas was $2 a gallon. Or maybe they don't live near work and they spend a lot more than that. And maybe now they take the bus to work, or if they have a Monday thru Friday 9-5 job maybe they're petitioning the company they work for to switch to a four day work week. Or maybe to make up for the extra money they have to spend on gas they've stopped ordering pizza and stopped going to movies or didn't buy the new TV that won't need the converter box next February, etc....

I don't really have any solid plans, so I can't say anything as concrete as all that. All I can say for sure is that the more expensive gas is annoying, and I'll just have to see how it goes from there. I guess the main thing that worries me is that I'll eventually have to settle for taking some job I'd earlier decided wasn't really worth my time, and then after I take the job and work for a few weeks I'll decide to quit because I really end up working for just about nothing. Like if a while back it would have cost me $30 a week to drive to a certain place and it would now cost me $6o dollars a week to drive to that same area, I couldn't take anything with only part-time hours like that Halloween job. That was $8 per hour then, which added up to about $160 most weeks, but then there was taxes and such taken out, and if I'd spent $60 dollars on gas instead of $30 that's just not worth it even if it was a bit of fun sometimes and came with free haunted house tickets.

The other stuff on the news is even more vague. Banks are closing. I don't think that mine is closing, but I suppose that eventually it could. Still, unless I win the lottery I won't have anywhere near $100,000 in the bank, so I shouldn't be out anything even if that does happen. And then there's the whole bit about mortgages and people not being able to pay them and companies that deal with that sort of thing closing. I don't own a house or pay a mortgage, and most of my relatives who do own houses don't owe anything on them. So that wouldn't directly hurt me or most of my family. But I'm afraid in the big picture it will end up being bad for me somehow, and I cannot possibly try to calculate any of that.

I vaguely wonder if things will be really bad. Would things be bad enough that those of us without much money should start growing our own food? I mean, I like gardening, but I more like just the idea of gardening. I don't think that I'd be very happy if I really had to live off of this stuff. Growing a lot of stuff would be a lot of work. And the bees really are disappearing. I don't think that I have seen one all summer.

So I can't really deal with any of that, and nothing is to be gained by actually worrying a lot about it. I'm just watching the news now and then with vague interest, and half-seriously thinking that if I had a bigger garden there would be less grass to cut.

Just regular day to day stuff is much easier to figure out. We're doing it wrong.

I've been thinking that I shouldn't take a regular ceramics class at college this fall, though I would like to take the non-credit throwing class if we get enough people to make a class. I've been thinking that I have several hobbies, and taking a break from this particular one would save money and gas and such. And if I'm not in a regular college class being totally obsessed with clay, I might feel up to getting some yard work done or I might think about getting a job, even if it is some dumb job that doesn't pay enough etc.... And if I find that I get too bored, I'd still have the knitting to keep me busy.

So I've found that I tend to buy a lot of yarn when it is on sale, so that I'll have it later when it isn't on sale, or even much later when that particular kind is no longer available at my local craft store. Which doesn't mean that I always know what I'm going to do with the yarn, just that at the time it seemed to be a really good deal, so I bought some.

So now I have boxes of yarn that I don't really know what to do with.

Last week I spent forty dollars on yarn that I found on clearance. So I felt I needed to buy it because a.) it was a good deal, and b.) since it was on clearance I wouldn't be able to buy those colors after it was sold out. But unlike my usual yarn spending sprees, I actually had a plan for this particular yarn. I'm not sure that I will end up doing this particular project, since it would require buying a lot of additional non-clearance sale color of yarn, but I have wanted this for about two years now and when I found two of the colors on sale I just had to have them. So I bought all of the one color that was at the store, went to another store and bought all that they had, plus bought an equal amount of the other sale color. At the checkout I noticed a coupon that was only good on Sunday from 4pm-8pm, and I was told that it would also be good for clearance items. But I didn't want to chance that the yarn I wanted wouldn't still be there on Sunday, so I went ahead and made my purchase. After taking the yarn home and adding things up, I figured out that I would still need just a little bit more of one of the yarn colors if I ever did start that project. So I thought I might as well go back to the store on Sunday and use this coupon.

Now on Sunday we went to see the Batman movie, which was at a theater that was nowhere near the craft store. After seeing a movie at this particular theater, we usually have a slice of pizza and a soda at the place outside the theater, and that costs another seven dollars, which is not a bad price for lunch or dinner. But after the movie was over, my husband decided he didn't especially want pizza, so he thought we should look for something else that was near the craft store. So we went to the craft store, and I bought four more skeins of the color yarn that I "needed" and then four more of a different color just in case I might want it later, and then I noticed that some other yarn in the color Sunflower was on clearance so I bought the two skeins they had left in that. Then I looked at all kinds of other stuff but ended up not getting anything else that I didn't "need". So while I'm proud of myself for not getting this other stuff that I didn't "need", I only ended up getting about twenty dollars worth of stuff and the coupon only saved me about five dollars. If I had put the other yarn back earlier that week and it had still been here on Sunday, I would have saved like another eight dollars, but I'm glad that I didn't do that because I "needed" that yarn and with my luck the orange would not have been there in Sunday. So I don't regret that, and I don't regret making the trip to use the coupon that only saved me five dollars. That's still a good deal, and that's about what I usually save with the coupons, unless I'm buying something expensive like a knitting machine.

What was not a good deal was afterwards spending $17 to eat at Chaps when I would have been just as happy eating pizza that costs $7. Let's see, $17 to eat at Chaps verses $7 to eat pizza is an extra $10, minus the $5 I saved buying the yarn with the coupon equals we spent an extra $5. So that didn't work out at all. But I guess the point was more that he really didn't want the pizza and he did want to go to Chaps.

Still, if I'm thinking that things are maybe going to be bad, I should start thinking different things entirely, like I don't "need" any yarn at all no matter what a good deal it is or what I might intend to make with it, and I don't "need" either a pizza or Chaps. But without more solid proof that things will get bad, I still "needed" to see the Batman movie.

BBC says no more knitting

Looks like I missed a bit of excitement about two months ago, both in the world of fandom and the world of craft-related websites.

For a while now, my husband has been saying that I need to start a new blog, one that is entirely about knitting. I haven't done it yet, for several reasons. One, the husband has a bunch of blogs that he tries to make money from, and he thinks that I should do the same, while I think the idea of making money from blogs is mostly a boat that has already sailed and don't really want to bother with it. Two, there are already a lot of other knitting blogs out there written by people who are really good at it. Three, if I did ever do such a thing, I would want to do a good job of it, and that would take a lot of time and maybe a lot of work, and I hate to put that much work into something on the remote chance that I might make a few bucks. If it was something that I enjoyed doing and could create something that I was proud of, and then it happened to make some money, that would be different.

Anyway, I got to thinking that I could set up another blog and start writing stuff on it, but for now just not publish any posts. So I've done that. I created a new blog that doesn't have any published posts. I started writing a few things, but they are only drafts at the moment and only I can read them.

So I haven't embarrassed myself yet, see?

Okay, so while I was working on the thing I thought that I might as well have some links, and that I would want to link to doctorwhoscarf.com, just as I have a link to the site on this blog. And I haven't visited the site in several months. Probably I haven't looked at it since before Christmas. But yesterday I went there, just cause I was about to add this link to the new blog. And there was this message from about six weeks ago saying that the guy was afraid that the BBC was going to order him to shut the site down, and that we should all make copies of any patterns we wanted, just in case.

The reason he was afraid of being shut down was this story. Apparently the BBC saw that someone was making these little knitted things that looked like aliens from Dr. Who and then selling them on eBay. So eBay pulled the listings for the items. The BBC then went to the website where a fan had posted the knitting patterns for the alien things and told her to stop. She wasn't selling the patterns, she had created the patterns herself and was giving them away for free to anyone who wanted to try to make them. Someone else was trying to sell stuff on eBay. Not quite sure if they just politely asked her to stop, or if the BBC did some legal thing, but either way the woman pulled the patterns off of her website.

Anyway, fans have been making their own Dr. Who scarves for about thirty years now. There was an "official" scarf many years ago, but they only made it that once and they didn't make enough to match the demand. So if you know how to knit or you are friends with someone who knits, you make your own or you have someone else make one for you. Sometimes someone makes a lot of them and sells them on eBay or even on their own websites.

Which is not saying that the people making these scarves are getting rich. I've seen the scarves sell for about a hundred dollars. Even if you have a machine to do a lot of the work, for the most part a knitting machine isn't something that you push a few buttons and then go to lunch and come back to find a completed scarf. So even if you have a machine you still spend a lot of time on it. And of course yarn isn't free either. If I wanted to sell a scarf, and I wanted to make a reasonable ten dollars an hour for my time, I would need to sell the scarves for at least $175. (That's for season 12. Other seasons are longer or more complicated and would cost more.) So I figure that the people who sell the scarves on eBay are a bit better at this than I am, but they are still working for about five dollars an hour.

Anyway, while there are copyright laws and all of that, and the BBC probably has the legal right to make someone stop selling things that came from the show, and they might even have the right to ask someone to stop telling people how to make their own toys and/or costumes, for the most part you're supposed to know not to enforce this particular right on fans who are not getting rich from knitting and who are not in direct competition with anything they are selling. Fan made stuff is free advertising, so the fans are usually left alone.

All of this was almost two months ago, and the Doctor Who Scarf website is still there, so I'm guessing that they are not going to do anything about it.

So why all the drama over some knitted toys now, while we've been knitting scarves for decades without anyone bothering anybody about it? My husband thinks that it's because the alien knitting patterns were designed on something from the new show, and the people in charge are more serious about such things now than decades ago when the old show was on. My theory is that the recent toys are the image of characters, while the scarves are just scarves. We try to copy the pattern of the scarves, but there's not anything like a Dr. Who logo on them and the don't say Dr. Who on them or anything like that.

Anyway, I had a look yesterday, and Dr. Who type scarves are still available on eBay. So I guess for now only the toys are forbidden, and maybe that will be the end of it.

Taking a break now

My week of having the house to myself is just about over. I didn't quite get done with all the work that I'd hoped, but I got just a tiny bit of gardening done and I did lots of other useful stuff. Like laundry. I did tons and tons of laundry. At this point I'm thinking that I should maybe even get out some of the winter stuff I put away and wash that too, and then I'll have washed just about every article of clothing I own, except maybe for the costumes.

And now I'm debating should I put clean sheets on the bed now or wait til tomorrow. And I am wondering if my husband is coming home or not. He was nice enough to call me last night and tell me that there was a slight problem and that he might not be coming home til tomorrow. But then he doesn't follow up with a phone call today telling me if the problem is resolved. I'm currently going with the assumption that he is coming home later tonight. I should officially call it quits for a while on the cleaning and the sorting and just change the sheets and have a bath and call it a day.

Again, it is much like a few weeks ago. I took bags of trash to put on the curb, so why don't I see more empty space in the house? I did make a little progress. Before he left, my husband bagged up some clothes that he didn't want anymore, and this morning I donated the unwanted clothing to a garage sale. And then I threw out a bag of my own clothes that I decided wasn't worth donating.

So I made some slight progress, and then I started to over think things again. Like should I keep these candy tins from Christmas? I know that some really beautiful things can be made with polymer clay and other odd things such as little candy tins. But I'm not especially good with the polymer clay yet, and while I'm into ceramics I probably won't take time out to learn about polymer. So do I want to hang on to the tins until such time as I want to work with polymer? On the one hand, the tins are small and not really taking up that much space. On the other hand, it will start to add up, and some of this stuff needs to go.

I did a lot of work Wednesday and Thursday, and I even managed to get some work done yesterday after the mammogram. I was the first one there, and they let me go in a little bit early. Today, I felt a little bit sick, and spent most of my time watch DVDs. I was not really sick enough to excuse the inactivity, but I guess I've again gotten to the point that I just don't push myself to do something when I don't expect to see much for my efforts.

It's early, but the clean sheets and a bath really sound like a good idea.

Cool. I'm rich

Okay, not really. But I got a check in the mail yesterday. And the check was about nine dollars more than it was supposed to be. I sold a scarf and something else to a friend, and then I went to the post office to send the package, and at the last minute I had a feeling that I should have the package insured for a hundred dollars.

The scarf arrived okay, but the other thing was chipped. But my friend decided to keep the chipped item rather than claim the insurance. Then he sent me the agreed amount for the scarf, and the agreed amount for the postage. And he also sent me the two dollars for the insurance, which he did not need to do since it was just my last minute idea and he did not ask for insurance.

And then he decided to add seven more dollars for my time of driving to the post office, which I wouldn't have asked for, and it isn't even December or April when it is a bit of a hassle to go to the post office. And it's not like I had to drive to Dallas or something to do it. This took all of maybe fifteen minutes to do.

Seven dollars for fifteen minutes work is cool, don't you think? At that rate it would be twenty-eight dollars an hour. What I could do if I had a regular paying job at twenty-eight dollars an hour.

Okay, that's probably not going to happen.

You know, if my friend and I were not good moral people, we could get a little scheme going at the post office. I could insure this thing that I could easily duplicate, and we're pretty sure that if it was damaged the first time around that it would probably get damaged again, and we could just keep sending the thing over and over again until he got a whole one, and then we'd have all this insurance money to collect.

But my friend and I are both good moral people and wouldn't really do that on purpose.

I have just finished making a scarf

Okay, so I haven't finished making a scarf. But I am finished except for adding the fringe.

Sorry I have not been around. I am still very busy. Took most of the day off, except for finishing a scarf.

To my friend in the great white north: after you get my email you will have to reply at an alternate email address as my mailbox is full and bouncing stuff and I just don't have the time to fix it right now.

Off to get some sleep before it's back to work tomorrow.

What the hell was I thinking?

Today is the first day of a very busy week at school. Somehow, I had thought that it was next week, but it isn't, it's this week. This week is the last week to work in clay that is at the green stage or the wet stage.

Not that the clay is green. I don't know of any green clay, though sometimes unfired terra cotta has sort of a greenish look compared to other clays. Unfired clay that has been slip-cast is called greenware, and sometimes any unfired clay work is called greenware. After is has been fired once it is called bisque.

Anyway, even the smallest pieces need at least a week to dry properly, so this is the last week to make anything. And really, this is only the last week to make anything if the stuff you are making is terra cotta that isn't going to be glazed, or something that is going to end up being a mixed media piece and painted instead of glazed. Anything that needs to be glazed fired should have been completed last week. But I think that he'll let me glaze some stuff that last week and pick it up during the summer or fall semester.

I hardly have anything finished. The 18 inch pylon-vase is completely finished, though it did end up with a bit of a crack at the top, but I'm hoping that a bit of black ink will make that less noticeable. The other vase is finally in the kiln, so I should see it today or tomorrow. The relief sculptures are nearly dry, and I'm not worried about when they get fired. The plates and bowls have been bisque fired and glazed, and some of them are in the kiln and will be taken out today. Despite my original plan to dip and pour glaze on the plates and bowls, I had to brush glaze most of them, which took about six hours. So using that time to glaze was a mistake, since I could have done glazing during the last week, but I wasn't thinking clearly at the time and was just wanted so much to get something completely finished.

Which leaves just an enormous amount of work to do this week, even if I go to all seven classes and the extra lab time on Friday afternoon. I am nearly finish this stage of the Triffid, but now there are cracks appearing all over it. I'm afraid that's going to happen with most of my projects, since I have been working on them too long and they are getting too dry to work the clay properly. I should make a fork and a spoon and a ladle to go with it, but I haven't started them yet.

I have the bodies of two Martian crickets, but no heads or arms or legs. Not only are they too dry, but I now think that they are too big and should be made in three or even four parts, with the heads being separate from the bodies, and the arms and legs being attached to a third piece. The pieces that were meant to become the heads did not dry properly, and I may have to start over with them.

The Alien egg is mostly going well, though it still needs some work, and I didn't even start the face-hugger dish that I meant to go with it.

And while all of that is going on, at home I've been trying to work on a couple of sleestak, and the teacher still wants a dragon instead. The dragon I have started, but only just. I've started the jaw, but I haven't even put any teeth on it yet. Since he really wants to see that dragon, I suspect that he will allow me to work on it that last week and have it fired later.

It's all quite silly anyway. I don't need the credit for anything, and as much as I hate to get a bad grade, the odds are that I will never really need to worry about my GPA in the future. But I hate to get a bad grade, just in case. But regardless of the grade, I did want to have some nice pieces finished. I hate to get this far and then have to give up on something or have an incomplete set or whatever might end up happening.

This is too much to get done. What was I thinking?

Drama over the student art show

I believe that today is the opening reception for this year's student art show. Early this evening, the school will be handing out awards for best student art and this year's art scholarship winners, and a few honorable mentions will get gift certificates to various restaurants and art supply places. And people will walk around and talk about which pieces that they like best while eating fruit and cheese and such.

But I won't be going this year. Mainly, this is because I've been so busy that I need a night to myself, so I'm not going to drive to school on a night that I can't even get into the lab. But I'll admit that a bit of sour grapes also figured into the decision not to go.

I won't be getting any awards or honorable mentions or anything like that. Yesterday, I was told for sure that I wouldn't even be in the show, unless maybe I would like to complain to the head of the art department myself. No, I don't think that I would like to do that.

Last week we were deciding which pieces we would want in the art show. I hadn't really given it much thought. There's always an art show going on, but I'm not always in it. I was in the first one this semester, since my teacher was in charge of that one and got to pick whatever he wanted to go in it. I think that he picked three of last semesters projects. Anyway, I knew that there was another show coming up, but I hadn't really paid much attention to it. Most of my stuff was still in the sculpture lab, and he could pick any of that for the show, or if he wanted something that I'd already taken home he could ask for it.

So I happened to ask about it, and he said that he didn't want things that had already been shown and asked what I liked best of what was left. And I asked which semesters I could choose from, since we'd already shown most of the good stuff from last semester, and most of this semester's stuff hadn't been glaze fired yet. He said that wasn't supposed to use stuff from last spring, but I could use some of that since that stuff wasn't fired in time to be in last year's show. Then he gave me a form to fill out.

The deadline was yesterday.

But all your stuff was already here, and you're just turning them in to me anyway. Just decide which two pieces you like best.

Now, until I saw this piece of paper, I'd forgotten that this show was the one with the awards and the gift certificates and such. Maybe if I had remembered I would have given it more thought and asked more questions and such, but I didn't. Anyway, I picked the paper castings of sea life and the glass dragon, since despite what he'd said I didn't want to break the rules and enter something from last spring, and he didn't want the stuff he'd shown before.

Okay, so I signed the paper and thought that was that.

Last year, we put all of the sculpture and ceramics in the sculpture lab and someone came by and looked at everything and decided who was in the show and who got awards and such. And my stuff was already in that room, so I didn't think that I had to do anything else. But I asked when people where coming to look at the pieces, and he said that this year the teachers were picking what went in the show, but someone else would come and look at the show and decide the awards after the show was up. Probably, that would be Monday.

Okay.

He said that my stuff was all ready, but he was hoped to get someone else's stuff fired before he started taking things over.

Okay, whatever.

Anyway, that isn't what happened.

If you were trying to get a scholarship, you were supposed to take your artwork over to the main building to be judged, and then after that you were supposed to take your artwork to be judged by someone else on Saturday. There were only three of us who had ceramics and sculpture who hadn't tried to get a scholarship, so apparently our stuff didn't even get looked at.

And, our teacher was told that the student art show has already been organized and that there is no room left for the five pieces he was going to put in. After a lot of arguing, they allowed him to put in one piece, not one of mine.

It is all nonsense that they do not have room for the other four pieces in the show. Our pieces would go in cases, which we have several of, and right now only two or three are being used. But I don't want to argue about it. Getting my pieces in the show at this point just isn't important to me. I can't win anything. It's too late for me to get a gift certificate to Trinity Ceramics or anything like that. And when you put something on display there is always the chance that it might get damaged or even stolen. So I don't see why I should risk that happening.

Last year I went and watched my fellow classmates win awards and such, but I don't think that I'll go this year. My classmates and I won't be getting anything, and only one of us will even be in the show. I know that it is partially my own fault, that if it had been important to me I should have found out what was going on last week, and when something didn't sound quite right I should have gone to the main building and asked more about it, but I didn't.

It's just one more annoying thing to deal with.

Today I am unbelievably tired for no good reason

Today I went to class for three and a half hours. I had many things that I hoped to get done. I was going to do a bit of touch-up work on the Triffid and then glaze the bowls and plates before working on the Alien egg, and then if I had the time I'd roll out some slabs and get things ready for what I'd have to work on tomorrow.

Only that didn't happen. I got everything out and then saw a bit of a crack starting on the Triffid, so I put some slurry on it to try to fix it. Then I mostly forgot about it while I moved on to setting up for glazing the plates. I thought that since I'd decided there was only time to glaze everything solid black that I'd quickly get all of that done buy pouring and dipping. There were three pint sized jars of black glaze, so I was pretty sure that would be enough. But after looking at the glaze only one jar seemed to be pourable. Rather than risk mixing in water and making the glaze too thin, I decided to pour glaze inside of the bowls and brush glaze onto everything else.

The inside of one bowl had some little cracks, so I put that one off. The other three bowls have been glazed on the inside. Brushing on glaze requires three coats. So three coats each on the outside of the bowls, and three coats each on the outside of four plates, and three coats on the inside of four plates. And after the slightly cracked bowl is dealt with, three coats on both the outside and the inside.

So, after three and half hours, I am not even done with the stupid glazing. I still have to brush on another fourteen coats on various things. And I forgot about the touch-up work on the Triffid, which means I am still not finished with that and it might still have a bit of a crack. And I didn't work on the Alien egg at all. And I certainly didn't roll out slabs or anything else.

But I am so tired. I am exhausted. I am exhausted from just brushing on some silly glaze. And it wasn't even anything complicated, no little detail work, just endless medium brushstrokes of the same color glaze. I shouldn't be this tired. I didn't do heavy lifting or walk back and forth from the car with supplies. I didn't do anything that required either much physical work or mental concentration. Yet I am just about ready to call it a day and go to bed.

I suppose that I could do that. The teacher has offered to let us in the lab for two hours tonight while he does something, but that isn't enough time for me to waste time driving or gas money. I won't go in again til tomorrow, maybe not even til tomorrow night. I'd like to work on a few things around here, but I guess that's nothing that can't wait a bit longer.

I just can't believe that I'm this tired over nothing.

Forgive my absense

I feel like I am very busy, even when I am not really doing anything. I am up to my eyeballs in...uh...clay.

The projects that I have been working on for a while are probably too dry and not going to work at this point. The Triffid isn't what I'd hoped for, and the Martian Crickets are just bodies with no heads or arms and legs. The newer stuff is just sitting there while I wait for it to get dry enough to work with. My relief sculptures are going to warp a bit, and I think that it is too late to do anything about it. For my sculpture in the round, I want a sleestak, while the professor wants a dragon. I haven't started either one yet.

My first vase is finally fired. It has a tiny crack in it, but I'm still pretty happy with it. The other vase is still waiting to be fired, since there aren't enough other pieces to fire the kiln at that temperature.

I had to pick two things to enter in the student show, and since I haven't finished anything except one vase this semester I had to pick stuff from last semester. Professor didn't want it to be anything I'd already shown, so it's going to be my glass dragon and the sea life paper castings. I'm not too crazy about the paper castings. At the time it seemed like a good idea, but after they were done I thought why did I do that? I'm sure every tourist place near a beach sells something just like it. For the amount of time I put into them I could have made more dragons instead.

From last year's show my friend K won a $25 gift certificate from Trinity Ceramics. He gave it to me so that I could buy a screen. I have been so busy that I haven't used it yet.

It's very sad, but things are not going well, and this is probably going to be my last class. I can't picture much changing over the summer, so I probably won't be going back to school in the fall. Maybe not going back in the fall wouldn't bother me so much, if I thought I would be going back in the spring, but I doubt that I'll have money for that sort of thing then either.

Anyway, I don't think that I'll be posting much for a while. My sleep is disrupted so that I don't often wake up early enough to blog in the mornings, and I can't see wasting much time with it in the afternoons and evenings when I might better use the time on artwork and gardening and such.

And of course now that I've said that I'll wake up really early tomorrow morning and have to think of something to write about.