Pro-cras-tin-ay-ay-shun

Pro-cras-tin-ay-shun
Pro-cras-tin-ay-ay-shun
Is makin’ you wait
Keepin’ you way-ay-ay-ay-ay-a-tinnnnn….

So this is supposed to either be a recap of last year and a promise of the new or just a promise of the new or SOME such fresh look at this blog in 2015.

Except that I’m not much of a conformer. 😉

From a Myers-Briggs perspective (well, technically, from a Keirsey perspective, for those of you into such things), this is only to be expected; I am an ENTP.* As a friend (and cognitive behaviorist industrial psychologist shrinkperson) put it: “You’re about as much an off-the-charts ENTP as it gets, Cynthia.”

ENTPs have lots of very nice qualities. We are the Inventors, the unbearably curious, how-did-you-DO-that tinkerers. The epitome of the 2+2=7 school of collaboration, we like to gather cadres of talented folk to do interesting, interesting stuff.

If we’re smart (and most of us are), we deliberately look for execution-type folks to help us put our great ideas into action, because we are, well, flitters. Easily bored. Really good at starting, really bad at finishing. That’s because once the the ooh-shiny wears off a hot new idea we start thinking about…

I think I’ve figured out how to add venting control for thermal equilibrium on that Olympus kiln. The controller schematic shows an RS-232c port, right? So I should be able to convert the signal…if I set up the Raspberry Pi to monitor input from the controller, then take the inputs from the four thermocouples coming from the datalogger ….

Yeah. Like that. My more diplomatic friends term that “easily distracted.”

“Focus, Cynthia. Focus. Focus. Right HERE, Cynthia! Focus!”

My buddy the shrinkperson once described an ENTP’s morning like this: “You get up at 8am, start to make your bed but then pick up your water glass to take it down to the dishwasher. Then you set it down to straighten a picture. That reminds you that you were going to move that picture to the living room anyway, so you take down the picture, carry it to the living room and start to hang it up, but you need a hammer and nail.

So you go to the garage, where you finish fixing the broken lamp you’d started working on the night before. You take the lamp back to the living room, realize you’ve forgotten the hammer and nail and go back for them. While you’re back in the garage you bring in the carton of napkins you left out there after yesterday’s shopping trip, and set them in the kitchen by the dishwasher. Now you can’t find the glass you were supposed to take to the dishwasher, so you head back upstairs to the bedroom to find it. It’s already noon and you still haven’t made your bed.”

Yup. Pretty much. I prefer to think of it as having a mind that operates at warp speeds but a body that plugs along at 10MPH. The obvious solution is scaling the body through cloning or somesuch, so I can make ninety-‘leven copies of myself, zip an idea out to each clone and then let each one get back to me as it finishes.

Until then, well…

Double-sided fusible web interfacing is working well, but I don’t think the Silhouette is really going to support more than two layers of Thinfire at a time without screaming. When the 110J arrives Monday I’ll give that a shot. In the meantime, probably should mix up some plaster-silica and see how well it impresses over paper…

Anyway, the gist of this post is that I am, actually, working on a whole bunch of projects that I will be documenting for this blog in 2015. I wasn’t quite sure what I meant by “whole bunch,” just that lately I seem overwhelmed with projects, so I made a list of what I’m currently working on that should be showing up in this blog:

• Finding the detail/size limits of a sonic vibratory tumbler for soda-lime and lead glasses
• Determining whether the average palette can distinguish between 50 different varieties of milk chocolate (about to abandon this one–I don’t think it can and I’m getting sick of chocolate)
• Using a Silhouette Cameo to develop color inlays in glass part sheets for Mom’s transom window
• Using the Cameo as a fiber CNC for 3D portraits in box casting
• Developing a silicone/urethane moldmaking tutorial and accompanying videos
• Compression pattern bar mosaics
• Finish documenting the dragon and cat goblets I made for a wedding last summer
• Identifying an organic adhesive that can be used to construct a glass sculpture that’s encased in refractory and fired, vaporizing without identifiable residue in the final piece
• Developing a reproducible method for building mokume gane jewelry components in PMC and glass
• Set (finally) Oliver Wendell Kiln as a casting/fusing kiln in the garage (more complex than you think), and incorporating a venting/cooling system into his controller
• Kinetic glass jewelry project
• Finish the video documentation setup in the studio (so I can stop trying to shoot video with the left hand while doing glass stuff with the right)
• Making a series of 12×12 pate de verre wall panels, mostly for texture tests but also because I have a big blank wall in the living room that needs filling
• Diagram some crucible fill patterns for Nathan’s February murrini cane class
• Make “peacock eye” murrini inclusions for an opaline goblet casting

That’s the plan, anyway. Of course, this blog was never meant to inform anyone but me. It was supposed to be a journal of my thoughts and project notes, kept online because that was the most easily maintained, accessible location.

I’m thinking that for the peacock mold I need to do a different type of mothershell–I really don’t like the way the silicone is flexing on the other goblet molds. I have a fair amount of the Shore-A 40 silicone that’s getting a bit old; why wouldn’t that also work for a shell if it were thick enough? I mean, normally you wouldn’t do that for the expense, but if I don’t trust it for a library mold anyway, why not…?

About eight years ago other people started reading it, which still surprises–and delights–me (although I do wish you’d comment more). It’s morphed into something of a teaching blog because I use it as a shorthand method of responding to questions in other online forums. Instead of laboriously typing the same response, over and over, I just copy a link to a post.

Well, and I’m also working on compiling a lot of these posts into a book, the format of which is TBD. And I use it to keep my hand in as a writer, because I don’t write much professionally anymore, and that’s a set of muscles I don’t want to atrophy.

And besides, this blog seems to have taken on a life of its own. Despite a real falloff in posting frequency, several redesigns, a migration to an entirely new address and frivolous directory changes, plus disruptions my professional self warns clients to NEVER do, Morganica receives about 6,000 visitors per month. That’s astonishing for a personal blog that’s never promoted, so thank you very much.

Gary’s suggestion that I reduce time spent at coarse grits and greatly increase time at finer grits is paying off, but I’m still seeing some clouding on the flat surfaces. I wonder if I should just go ask a rockhound what I’m doing wrong…?

But it does make me feel guilty (as do the roughly 3X weekly reminders that there hasn’t been a post in awhile). So if I make a resolution at all for 2015, it will be to reduce the size of posts a bit, but make more of them.

Teaching posts (some of the casting tutorials, for example) can take a few weeks to put together, so it can be tough to keep up a 2X weekly frequency, especially with a dayjob. And I’ve discovered that I tend to add a couple of paragraphs to other locations (Facebook) for example, instead of posting here.

So…I’m thinking I’ll go back to my earliest posting method and simply note what I’m doing in shorter, more frequent posts. At some point, I may go back and consolidate them into complete tutorial pages. We’ll see how that works. Stay tuned.

But the real topic of this post is me, the ENTP, and procrastination. That’s because my goal for today was to get up bright and early and clean the garage.

It’s 2:08 pm. I guess I’d better get started.

*If you’re interested in this kind of thing, google it. The minute I start explaining Myers-Briggs, Keirsey temperaments, and all that, I will get it wrong.