Hello party people!

I am NOT at a Jonathan Coulton show right now.

James is.

Our sitter was unavailable.

Which was just as well, because Jocelyn barfed this morning, we sent her to school, and then she barfed there as well (yeah i know, PARENTS OF THE YEAR RIGHT HERE WOOOOO!), so if we HAD had a sitter, we probably would have had to cancel her what with the barfing and all.

Actually, she hasn’t barfed since she’s been home, but she hasn’t eaten much either. James was on sick kid duty today. Since I had to *sigh* go to work to attend my BIRTHDAY LUNCH.

That’s right, my birthday is on Sunday. And no, we’re not really doing anything, because WE ALREADY DID IT BABY. Back in November, I bought tickets to see Dianne Reeves, perhaps my favorite jazz artist behind Ella Fitzgerald, and so when we attended that concert, it was pretty much my birthday celebration in advance. We had a lovely dinner with a bottle of wine, saw Ms. Reeves perform (she was divine!) and have a great time. So it has been very EASY for me to totally forget that my actual birthday is still coming up. (Even though I’m totally conniving my way into getting more presents by saying blatently to the kids, “SO WHAT ARE YOU GETTING ME, GUYS???”)

Yes, I’ve already gotten presents. In the form of an awesome jump ring cutter, called the “koil kutter”, and a handheld Proxxon motor tool. Was all that greek to you? Well, it’s jewelry related. I’m a bit addicted to chain maille weaving, and that requires TONS of jump rings. I used to coil the wire around a wooden mandrel, and then just snip rings off the coil with my wire cutters, but those are not perfectly flush ends. So then I went and bought a jeweler’s saw, and tried my hand at hand-sawing some jump rings, which really was MUCH better tahn the snipping business, but the cuts were not really perpendicular to ring, and you could see the sawing marks as well. So I convinced James to let me buy a coil holding saw set up and WOW is it awesome. I cut like 20 rings by hand in 10 minutes. Now I can cut 100s of rings in 10 minutes. And the cuts are perfectly flush!

But enough with the blah blah blah – here are some actual pictures of what I made with my super awesome flush cut jump rings:

(**WHOOPS! Forgot to add the photos when posting, so adding them now- they are at the bottom, scroll, scroll!)

Sorry – these are just taken with my iphone, so not the best, but I’m going to take some good pictures this weekend and actually list them in my cobwebby etsy shop, and I’ll be sure to post the good pictures here too. Suffice it to say, I have created awesome beautiful jewelry! I can’t wait to buy some sterling silver wire to make more in SILVER! The copper is growing on me, and I love that it is so much cheaper than silver (I bought the wire for these at the hardware store for under $20, talk about AWESOME) but there is something about sterling silver that is just so elegant and beautiful! Next week I’m buying some wire, and lots of it!

Work is crazy busy. I mean CRAZY BUSY. I suspect there won’t be much jewelry making for the next month and a half, because they’re encouraging overtime to spend some of the money left on our contract before it ends, and I totally am going to take them up on it. The beauty of my job is, I get paid for overtime. It’s not like, time and a half, as I seem to recall what regular “overtime” used to be in previous hourly jobs, but hours over 40/week are paid out, and I can think of about a bajillion zillion things we could use extra money for (um… sterling silver wire anyone?!) so I plan on working a ton.

However, last time I worked a TON, I ended up with some back problems that landed me in the chiropractor’s office 3x a week for 3 months, and then back every week or so for 6 months… so I an going to work like crazy, but I am going to make sure I stay healthy.

Ethan has been doing awesome EXCEPT of course, for this last week. He even got a few PURPLES at school in February! (the school’s colors are purple and white, so “getting a purple” is like super duper awesome behavior). This week however, not so good. 2 behavior review write-ups. We are hoping it was a blip on the radar and not the norm.

We had an appt with a new psychiatric nurse practitioner, but they cancelled on us because of problems with our insurance carrier. We haven’t yet made any appts with anyone else, because things are going pretty well.

We enrolled Ethan in a 3-day a week taekwondo afterschool care program. It’s daycare, but with a taekwondo class thrown in. He LOVES IT. It’s only been 1 week, but already he wants to go FIVE days a week instead of three. I told him it’s not going to happen if he keeps getting behavior reviews.

This is getting long isn’t it? I like this Friday night blogging business. I’m home alone, with some wine, and the updates are spewing out. Maybe I’ll try it again next week. No promises though.

merry birthday to me,
amy