For the Illumination of the Masses

It's 16 hours until Trent Monk plays live in my living room.

I am understandably a-twitter. And in this case, I'm not talking about the web application.

However, since my older son recently left the nest, flew the coop, or, in a bit of high-tech humor, RTSed, we have been cleaning furiously for a couple of weeks. Nothing like eleven years of clutter to motivate you, especially when Son the Younger decides to switch rooms. They are now almost Zen-like in their simplicity and lack of clutter.

No, you may not see pictures. Chiefly because why would I take pictures of that? (Here I am referring to the "before" state.)

But this evening, I was telling Robin that I needed to clean up my bead room. She apparently did not realize why one would need an entire room just for beads.

Apparently she has not been introduced to my obsession hobby. So, for anyone who is unfamiliar, here is where I put things on string. Yes, it is a mess. That's why I needed to clean it up.


This is a closer shot of the bead boxes you can see in the above photo. You can tell here that each type of bead has its own little place to be. Ah, order!

And here is a shot of a single box. In this one there are gemstones (moukite on the top left, lapis at top right, plus a few others), and a lot of glass, including some millefiori (glass beads with flowers in them; the word is Italian for "thousand flowers") next to the moukite.

Now just imagine this box multiplied by... [leaves room to count]... let's just say more than 20.

Then imagine that I now own a torch and prefer to make my own beads from molten glass (any of the lampworking posts will show you more), as opposed to beading, i.e., stringing other people's beads.

Sad, how many beads there are. I should string some of them or something.

But first, I think I'll sleep. And then clean some more. So that that cool musician fella has a clean house to play in.