Winter journey

I hate the winter, and the holidays for that matter.  And now, if the cold weather isn’t bad enough I have a new reason to hate the winter months…..I can’t torch.  My setup is in the basement and I have to open the windows to torch.  Way too cold down there to do that.  My friend has a big heater blower, you know, the kind they use in car repair shops, anyway he is going to loan it to me to see if that will help.  My only problem now is finding enough power.  We haven’t finished our basement and I am using almost all of the available plugs now so I’m not sure I can even run the thing.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  It’s either this or I find some electric socks and a hot water bottle to sit on.  One would think that the torch would keep you warm but the radiant heat just isn’t that warm as most of it goes up. 

As for the other reasons I hate the winter, the obvious the cold but the holidays always make me blue.  Family is all spread out, they all want you to be where they are and you can’t, memories of wonderful childhood Christmas’ don’t help.  You can’t go back can you.  Usually when January 1^st gets here it’s spring for me.  There is still plenty of cold weather to deal with, even down here in the south, but for me it’s all sunny and bright and I’m ready to get on with it. 

Here’s hoping you all have a great Thanksgiving and a super holiday.  I’ll post beads if I’m able to torch.  If you don’t see the beads you will know that it was a no go……….

Blogger Sucks!

This thing rarely works like it should. I can't add any more things to my blog, haven't been able to for a long time. Guess I'll just add my Facebook link in here and see if it works.

Journey through the tornado

For all the different lampwork beads I do I have found one that I love and am driven by. It's a simple technique that I found a tutorial for some time ago online. It's called the tornado bead. I have put my little twist on them and each time that I torch I have to do at least two of them. No matter what else I do I have to do a few of them. At some point I have to get good at something and it might as well be these. Here are some examples of my take on the tornado bead......yes, these are all in the same color way. I do tend to like the blues\greens\purples. I have made six that were in the warm tones and only one of them hasn't cracked on me. Not sure if it's a compatability issue or I'm mashing them too flat. I'll keep trying. Just thought I would share. I'm starting to make beads to match them, making necklaces out of them and selling them on Etsy, if your interested, you can click on the Etsy Mini link at the left.

The journey back

I'm back, not such a journey. The second drive as bad, when they took it out the laptop booted right up. No data loss, they just had to replace the second drive and transfer all the photos, my business photos. I felt like my life was on hold for that week. I lost my momentum waiting for it to be fixed and now I'm finding it hard to get back to the pace I was keeping.
I really do want to back all the important stuff up and them reinstall the whole thing. It does need it. But, I think I'll wait for a cold winter weekend when I can't go down to the basement to torch. I don't want to waste a nice warm fall day sitting in here fighting with all of that. I know it will eat up a whole weekend messing with it. So, for now I pray that it behaves itself and I can just go on like nothing happened.
I did torch yesterday, those beads are in soaking now. When I get the holes cleaned out I'll take a few photos and share. For now, I'm just happy to have my laptop back.

Journey to now where

Well, it finally happened to me! My laptop quit on me and I lost everything and I mean everything. All of my business files. All the photos I use to post things to Etsy and Boundless Gallery. The file that keeps track of all of my beads, jewelry and sales. All my links, family photos and on and on and on. I was in denial about it for about a week and finally took it in to see if they could at least retrieve the files on it yesterday. In the end it will depend on how much they want to do that and if they even an. I have the original disks so if all else fails I will just reinstall it and it will be just like the day I bought it. If it weren't for the loss of the files I wouldn't feel so bad about just starting over. Computers get so full of junk and start getting slower and slower so it would be a good time to just start over, however, I really do need some of those files.

Just in case your interest, or if it ever happens to you, here is what happened.....My laptop has two drives the second of which I never really used. The main drive where all the programs are was getting full so I moved the whole "my pictures" folder over to the other drive. Within a week I started getting messages that there were problems with that drive and that I needed to do a "chkdsk" So, I scheduled it to do the chkdsk, you can do it on the fly as it needs to lock down some of the files, so you tell it to do it the next time the computer is rebooted. I got done with what I was doing and rebooted the laptop. That was it, when it got to the place where it was to do the chkdsk it errored out, turned itself off and started over, and over and over and over. Needless to say I tried everything but it didn't work. That was a week ago. I was so sick about it that I didn't do anything for a week. So, here we are, waiting to hear whether the data is salvageable or not. I have my fingers crossed that they can get the files off of there and it won't be too expensive to do that.

I'm using hubby's laptop for now, I have recreated our bill paying file and discovered that only a week before I had emailed my main business file to work to touch up so I had a slightly old copy of it that I could use. Soooooooo all is not a total loss. I do have email and Facebook (which is keeping me amused for now).

Until I'm back up and running. I offer you this bit of advice....it's not really "if" it will happen to you too but "when". Back up those files. NOW!