Yes, really, I should have stayed in bed.

I woke up very late, in part 'cause the little guy woke up at 4-in-the-aw-hell-naw-AM and we both suffered the consequences. I saw the immediate aftermath of a car wreck down our street when I was taking the little guy to camp and had to yank him out of his need to rubberneck and into the car seat. The sky overhead looks almost as bad as I feel. Ugh.

Glad to see Lee Zurik is keeping on with the NOAH mess. The one thing about the kind of throwdown Hizzoner the Walking Id made at last week's press conference is that, when taken up, it challenges good reporters to become better. "Inaccurate, biased and reckless", my tuchus. Read through everything in the above link. A whole bunch of things about this are still mighty fishy.

Yesterday, I embarked on something I haven't done in a little over half a decade...I dug through the hell that is our downstairs closet (and made it more manageable in the process - it's simply a box purgatory now, and one can actually walk in there) in order to find my old glass casting notes and information, most of which is still mighty relevant. I found the casting handouts that were my bible long ago when I thought moldmaking was da bomb. Hey, if done wrong, it is entirely possible to blow out a mold box and have wet plaster mix all over the floor, and I had my share of looking back on mold pours that went bad, on demonstrations that had me on the floor laughing hysterically, and other happy memories when I saw those few highly informative pages...oh, dear God, they go back to 1994...I AM getting frickin' OLD...but I had to get back to work.

Got some plasticine for the positive. Picked up the little guy from camp. Took him to Lowe's and plopped him in a shopping cart that looked like a racecar. Piled in some buckets, a few more tools, chicken wire, some pieces of melamine-coated shelving that will make good mold boxes and won't suck the water out of the mold, and some wood that I had to cut down to help make the sides. Got challenged to a race by one kid traveling with his sisters in another racecar shopping cart pushed by his dad - we took one look at a potential aisle raceway and decided the risk of having a forklift suddenly appear in mid-race was too great. The woodcutter refused to cut the melamine shelving on his table saw, saying it would ruin it. I was gonna need to cut it down anyway - so I now own a handsaw. Please, Lord, let me keep all of my fingers - at least it isn't a table saw, right?

Adding to the hassles of lost wax fusecasting and its slight derision within the glassworking world as a "warm" glass process that isn't as superkewl as hot glassblowing is the fact that I can't find a source for silica sand in this city anywhere. Seems any ceramic supply company that was once here has either gone outta business, or - insult of insults - has moved to Baton Rouge, or has moved completely out of state. I'm looking at either a road trip or mail order just to get frickin' silica sand. Seriously, if anybody knows where I can get any here in New Orleans, lemme know. Otherwise, I will be going to get plastered in a really really bad way. This is the prime town for that. But silica sand? Noooooo...

I shoulda stood in bed yesterday, too.