Capricious Me

This, ladies and gentlemen, is probably the ugliest paperweight you’ll ever see. I made it last Thursday when the interns at Microsoft Research got to go try glass blowing. It was an experience filled with much danger, fear, and heat. Fiery furnaces holding clear, molten glass are kept burning constantly for a year or two until the furnace is rebuilt. The intermediate steps require smaller furnaces on either side so the clear glass isn’t contaminated. And at the end, there is an oven to temper the glass. The glass, even with it’s “cool” enough to be solid, is at least 600 degrees F.

We learned to “gather” the glass, which meant sticking a metal pole into the bucket of clear glass and rotating it so the glass would be balanced. Then we had an option of making an ornament (required blowing) or paperweights. I chose the latter because we could pick more colors.

You dip the gathered molten glass in glass chips of different colors, making sure that the colors touch only clear glass, because color mixing doesn’t work as you might imagine. Then you heat it up again so the colored glass melts. Next comes the fun part, where you take scissors and tweezers and pull and stretch and distort and fold the colored parts. I didn’t get enough color on mine, which is why it looks so… awkward. Anyway. After you do that, you have to shape it and make it smooth. Then you take ginormous looking tweezers and pull the glass off the tube. Not all the glass gets pulled off, of course, just the parts that you pull, which hopefully contained most of the color. By then, the glass is fairly solid though it’s still moving pretty fast. The colors are still indistinguishable, because it’s so really hot. You let it cool a little more, and then to detach the pole from the paperweight part, you just give it a little tap. Of course, to minimize the danger to use, we didn’t do that bit and we had one of the glass blower people helping us hold and rotate while we cut and tweezed and pulled.

And, in other news, I posted more food pictures. Weekends, I’ve decided, are going to be my food testing days.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the office I’m in doesn’t quite respect my presence. The lights are on this motion detecting system, so they go off if there’s no movement detected over a period of time. When I enter in the mornings, I stomp around to get lights lit. And then I sit… and everyone who knows me knows that I fidget non-stop even when I’m silent or typing. And yet… the lights will go off after a while and I’ll roll around in my chair stomping about like a madwoman to turn them back on. The people in offices near me must think I’m throwing a fit. This doesn’t happen when my officemate (today a new one joined us) is there and he’s just as quiet as I am. And thus, I’ve come to the conclusion that the room refuses to acknowledge my presence unless I force it to.

And for you nagging boogers, here are the pictures of cheesecake. I threw in some pics of crepes and star fruit, so never let it be said that I don’t post my food photos!