June 22 Greetings from Russell Manitoba, think we are about 4 hours from our destination here, so I've entertained myself for about 3500 km.....  Did a cross stitch of a black cat, it's really hard hitting the right tiny little hole on some of the lovely roads we drove on, I think Maine gets the award though for a section from Sugar Loaf to the Canadian Border, actually one of my maps doesn't even have a road marked there, they are just about right!  I also hand sawed 7 coils of silver wire to make silver chain bracelets, then assembled 5 Byzantine bracelets 1 20 gauge, 2 18 gauge and 2 16 gauge, will add some beads when I get back to NB!  Actually worked quite well, I wore a denim skirt and it made an excellent work bench!  Once again the 20 gauge wire was abit of a challenge holding onto those tiny links while the truck was bouncing along on wash board.....  I have socks to knit on the trip home!  The trip....  SW corner of NB to Calais, past Bangor up past Sugar Loaf, no snow left, into Canada, painless trip through Montreal on a Sunday afternoon, different highway than usual, almost screwed up there as the highway exit number we went off on was for the wrong highway, it was the number of the highway we wanted not the one we were on so exited 6 km to early, but the surface street was running right beside the freeway and the cars were moving on it, they were sitting breathing fumes on the freeway...  then cut through the corner of Ottawa, then North to Deep River ON where we stayed.  Then onto Sudbury where we headed north towards Timmins, then cross country on gravel to Sultan, my husband claims that detour cuts off a couple of hundred km.  (My son came that way when he drove home in April, the software streets and trips  routes you that way, problem is there is only one gas station on the corner between pavement and gravel... and that is afer 79 km of gravel, (WM says it's quite good gravel, Whoopee!!!) Stuart was really whining about the price of the gas when he finally got there  (probably driving on fumes?) and  it was only 3 cents/ litre more than Sudbury, Marathon where we got gas the town closest to the Hemlo Gold Mines was 10 cents more than Sudbury and it's on a MAJOR highway!)  Stayed in Nippigon night two, then continued on through Thunder Bay and Dryden on Ontario's two lane highway that is the only way in our out of the Province in Canada!  Yes there was a lot of road construction but it looked more like bridge rebuilding than highway widening!  Stopped to visit Gord's cousin at Rushing River campground near Kenora for an hour if we stayed more than an hour we had to pay $7.00!!  Last night we made it to Russell, sitting here typing waiting for the thunderstorm to pass, we have a major stream going past the door of our motel "The Jolly Lodger" (where do people come up with names!?)  may have to paddle to breakfast.  Hopefully the next stop will be groceries in Watrous then the Cabin.... sun sand windsurfing, would you believe scraping, painting, filling, roofing, repairing.....

 

June 18 Another gloomy day, did see a bit of blue sky once though!  Discovered something about the US and Canadian Postal systems yesterday, a parcel was sent to me from Washington state that was addresses entirely correctly except the second last line had NB  E5V 1J2,  then the next line said Canada!  Some bright light presumably in the US postal system crossed out Canada and wrote in UK because they  added the NB to the Canadian Postal code making it into possibly a British Code
.... So the parcel went to Britain, nobody there wanted it , so three months later it is now back in Washington State!  See where it ends up this time... Actually parcel number two was already sent the end of May, it appears to be on a round the world journey as well!  See whether third time lucky really is true!

We leave tomorrow to go to SK,  I should be able to access my lynne@fireball.com email address  while I'm gone,  but no real phone for three weeks, no telephone solicitors, trying to clean my rugs, sell me life insurance......etc!  I am entrusting my cat and my plants including my Orchids to my son, he usually only kills one plant each trip!  When I get home I will be opening the gallery, keeping regular hours, still trying to decide what they will be, something like Friday to Tuesday 10:30 am to ?????  Haven't got a clue if there will be any evening traffic.  Wednesday and Thursday I get to make beads, weed gardens etc!

 

June 16  Windy, rainy, overcast and ucky here today,  are you noticing a pattern?  I was assured by someone a couple of days ago that this is the coldest spring she can remember, that is reassuring !  I was trying to blame hurricane Angela or  whatever her name was last night as the table on the deck was turning summersalts, but the WM assures me that she fizzled in the Carribean!  Our sundial got toppled last night too, guess I won't know what time it is anymore, however since it takes sun to work, wasn't much use anyways!

I have had work in a little Gallery in SK for the last 17 years, the owner always has two group shows every summer, I finally got around to checking the themes for them two days ago  (did look a month ago and they weren't posted yet!)  Handwave Gallery

The first show is Saskatchewan Symbol, this is the 100th anniversary of SK and Alberta joining confederation, the second show is  To Be There Is To Be Square , the second one is easy I have a bunch of  Zoozi Pillow beads looking for a home, they're square, therefore they're off to SK!  Now for  a Saskatchewan Symbol, dust.... Doesn't translate well into beads...  So I made a bunch of black lentils with combed yellow 'heads of wheat' and little blue  dots, the finished title will be 'once in a blue moon' .  (People can translate the title to mean anything they want!)  Now at breakfast this am WM looked at the 'wheat lentils' and said "those don't look much like wheat, the heads are too open, they look more like Oats...!"  You'll have to wait to see  pictures of the peices  until June posts them during the shows, then you can email me and let me know if they are oats, wheat, or some other unknown cereal crop.....

 

June 14   Rainy cold and ucky here today!  My son phoned from the mainland last night at 10:10 and told me his car wouldn't start so  he couldn't come home, I said what about work... Oh the whole plant is shut down for the funeral!  No I don't believe for one second that his car wouldn't start, although it doesn't always start when it is raining... however  it does seem to start if he actually wants to go somewhere!  The funeral is for Stuart's supervisor who was killed in a motorcycle accident half a mile from the plant parking lot last Thursday night, Two motor bikes hit head on, both drivers were killed.  The other person was a 20 year old with a brand new trail bike....

OK my theory about Steel mandrel rests is WRONG!  Will have to start testing colours that go ucky in a kiln without other colours, the aqua, sky blue or whatever seems to be the guilty party.  In fusing that colour doesn't  get the silver scum if the kiln is vented and has a fan.... My Dark lavender bead in the kiln with chopped up brick almost looks like a mirror, really pretty!

 

June 13  Hot and muggy on the mainland  30 C or 85 F  only 17 C or 62 F and foggy here, what a difference a couple of miles of open water makes! 

I've been making lots of beads the last couple of days,  running annealing/striking experiments with my two kilns,  will report  on anything that I discover after I get the beads out tomorrow! My problem is trying to remember what beads I made in the morning to duplicate them for the afternoon....  My theory is that steel mandrel rest in my  one kiln is causing some of the beads to get  a scummy/metallic  surface, the other kiln has chopped up kiln brick inside it, the other possible theory  is that it's a specific colour of glass that is giving off  EVIL molecules causing the beads to go scummy!  Maybe it's neither and the only solution is to put a fan vent into the kilns!

Money-pit is now on my home page,  it was starting to get dark when I took the picture so it's a bit fuzzy, the orange buoy is her home.

 

June 11  Cooler today, but not raining, which is lucky as the Deer Island Salmon Auction was today, I stayed home and  worked and let my husband loose at the auction....  All he bought was two boxes of tractor feed computer paper, my gallery computer uses a typewriter ribbon and tractor feed paper,  practically no cost receipts!  Tractor feed paper is getting hard to find, but the two boxes we got today should last me for a  couple of years!  He didn't even buy me the cute little fishing boat, it was only $2600.00 with 100 hp engine,  how does he expect to be rescued  next time Money-pit gets becalmed if I don't have a boat?

No beads today, made a bunch yesterday that were suppose to match, but they all  had striking red in them and the red varies from pale yellow through to dark red all in one bead!  Kind of interesting but not what I wanted!  

 

June 9  Mid afternoon, this update is coming to you courtesy of the flying vermin, aka BLACK FLIES, was outside weeding, but that lasted 5 minutes then I was swarmed, so had to retreat.  Warm and muggy here.

Yesterday afternoon Gord aka WM 'sailed' Money-pit, not the boats real name, back to St Andrews, in order to trim the rigging , the former owner was going to show him how... since it was a nice calm sunny day....  The water pump on the engine broke half way there so he actually had to sail (row?)  the boat most of the way,  (He does admit to running the engine coming through the narrow passages into the wind, against the tide, and other whiney landlubber excuses, for using an engine on a sail boat!)   The main point of this storey is instead of getting back at 3 or 4 he got back at 8:30 and was starving!  My question was what kind of an idiot goes out in a sailboat with no snacks/junk food, etc, etc... ?  And he wonders why I didn't want to go with him?

Still managing to make beads without resorting to presses and new glass colours, I did get an email from someone asking what it was like to make round beads?

Trip pictures are mostly annotated, if  you want to know anything else email me, I might remember!

 

June 8  Had a thunderstorm last night, lots of thunder and lightening, the power was out for about 40 minutes, but there was no wind!  Prairie thunderstorms usually come accompanied by very strong winds and rip down lots of  branches etc....  The temperatures don't seem to drop here either during a thunder storm.  Today is warm and muggy.  I think that the black flies will be out in swarms so I'm hibernating.

Delivered my student beads into Saint John yesterday, had to dig a bunch of them out of my garden first as I didn't realize that one of the students had left hers soaking in the water when she went home... needless to say the beads got flung with the water. 

Since I put away all of the expensive Morretti colours before the class, I decided to see how long I can work with the old  cheap morretti colours before  I  break down and  get my stash back!  Today was the second day with my pre 2000 palete!  Not missing too many of the colours yet!  I'm also not using any bead presses!  Truly back to the basics!

 

 

June 6   June 5 draw....... A Surprise! TRUST ME.   AND the Winner Was Jill F from Portland OR,  next draw will be  August 2, I'm going to be away for a big chunk of time between now and then ... driving  2500 miles/ 4100 km to Saskatchewan and back... Hauling a Uhaul trailer there and back.  Four years ago when we moved here we bought a livestock trailer for $1000.00 and hauled it this way twice and back once, then sold it here.  The logic in buying was Uhaul in SK wanted $1200 for 7 days including the drop off charges,  if we rent here and return here the charge is $41 / day.....  I 'm not driving, I am the unwilling passenger, I usually try to come up with a reason why I should fly....

My class is over everyone survived,  the fog burned off just in time for the Kayakers but the dolphins  refused to show up yesterday!

Need to go collect all my stools from the  Bead shop and return them to their homes in the house and check the beads in the kiln, the students can sort out  who belongs to which bead, I can usually get about 90 % sorted but there are always a few beads that I don't recognize at all, but then there are a few of mine that I can't remember making the next day... usually they are really bad colour combinations, I like to think that the bead shop faerries struck over night and filled the kiln with fuglies.....

 

June 5 Foggy morning, updated the pictures on my home page, the anonymous tourist was whining, actually pointed out that it was lucky I lived 3000 miles away!  If you missed seeing the picture in question I can be bribed to email you your very own copy!  Actually tried to remove the picture yesterday but the computer wouldn't let my husband log into my site..... Obviously the computer liked the picture!

My draw will be later today will post the winner tomorrow! 

My students should be arriving any minute, so should go set up, hope it doesn't start raining as my husband is taking one of the husbands Kayaking  this afternoon, any excuse to escape house construction for a few hours!

 

June 3 Second try, different computer, first computer the Letter 'e' would not type, so after 5 or 6  jun's I gave up and moved...  Yes I am thinking about putting captions on my pictures, I apologize to anyone with a slow dial up connection that wants to look at the pictures,  but that's what we have, it took 3 plus hours to upload all those pictures... I watched a movie and listened to the WM swear!  (That is about 8% of the pictures that I took).

Spent this morning cleaning my studio... 2.5 hours, guess I should do it more than once every six months, actually spent awhile gluing little rod ends back together, the studio always looks so nice for the first couple of weeks after I teach then the little bits of glass build up the stringer ends get abandonned, rods less than 5 inches get buried ..... 

My son sspends at least two evenings a week cleaning his car, I commented a couple of days ago that that particular gene didn't come from me as my car is frequently refered to as a dumpster on wheels!  Unfortunately his car cleaning gene doesn't follow through into the house, he is currently residing in the living room, (the upstairs is under construction) his clean clothes are hidden behind the bathroom door  and his possessions, (every electronic gadget known to man) are any where he can find a hole.

 

June 2  Second day of sun in a row, scary!!!  Got the lawn  mowed, so the immediate need for goats has passed, the garden is beginning to dry out so I no longer come into the house leaving muddy little footprints accross the floor, however there are still black flies, my right cheek was so swollen yesterday I was having a hard time seeing!  Off to Saint John today to try and set up a business bank account for the gallery.  Tomorrow I have to clean up the bead shop as I'm teaching, don't want to clean until the final second as once it's neat I don't feel like I can do any  work!  Not to mention I hide all the hand pulled, ie expensive colours, don't know how I made beads before sage, copper green, evil purple, uranium yellow, and ink blue?  There are a few pictures of Japan  uploaded, the link is on the home page, but I haven't added any text yet... that to will come!