The next day I hunted around for a glass cutter (which are also kinda hard to find). Once I found one I tried to make some pendants on my own and failed utterly, due to the fact that I had the wrong kind of flux (but it wasn't my fault; I stole the flux from Carrie to begin with). It was very, very frustrating, as I had a very firm deadline of having to be finished with everything by Saturday (you'll learn why a bit further down).
So the next day I went back and talked to Michelle, and she sent me down to Mandarin Glass in Lakewood to buy flux. This is where I had already been to buy the copper foil tape (and where I had gone in search of microscope slides). They did not have the same type of flux that Michelle used, but I bought some anyway because it was only five bucks down the tube if it didn't work.
It did. If anything, it worked better than what I'd been trained on. And I created a really good pendant.
That same day (we're on Friday now if you've lost track) in the evening my whole family came over along with Jason and Alexis, and all nine of us went to Sakura for din-dins. Sakura is one of them Benihana-style restaurants where you sit around a big grill plate and they cook the food in front of you and toss the knives around a little bit. It's a good show, and the whole family could sit around one grill, so it was a good choice. Also it's pretty durned tasty, especially the pink fish/wine sauce stuff. If they bottled and sold that, Carrie would eat it all of the time. Since it was my birthday I got surf & turf -- steak & lobster. Durned tasty, I tells ya.
After dinner we came back to the house where I opened presents. Mostly money (which is good), some movie gift certificates from Susan, my brother gave me a tonne of Earthbound/Mother music (which is really cool), and me mum gave me a pretty big gift:
He's fully 12" tall, and is probably more complicated to transform than my 12" Unicron action figure. But he looks durned cool, and he comes with a little Matrix that lights up when you put it in his chest. After that there were cupcakes that my lovely wife made, and roots beer floats. Now that's a birthday meal!
After my family all left I got back to work and made two more pendants and a pair of earrings. I'll put up some pictures when I get a chance (I have to take some pictures that actually look good. Y'know).
On Saturday morning we drove up to Gig Harbor to submit our stuff for TideFest jurying. I submitted (shocking) the pendants that I'd made!
I'm getting sleepy now. I'll write more later.
Labels: Life
