anybody still here?

Wednesdays are rugged for me because I get up at 5:30am, drive half an hour, do CNC machining for five hours, drive half an hour, do The Worst Art Class On Earth for three hours and then pick up my kid. Thus, I've been absent. However, that wraps up in a couple weeks as I'm LA-bound again (ugh). Still. You can't complain much when you're driving around in a Porsche all day switching between making cannon parts on a Haas VF-1 and soldering up cabochon rings. And you can't complain when you can get a year's worth of salary and benefits out of the way in four months.

I don't understand Instagram. There's a jeweler in New York with 20k followers and like Annette Bening in their advertisements following me and liking pictures of my daughter fishing. Granted, I appear to be in some thin-ass regimes. There are about a dozen working watchmakers. There are a couple dozen blacksmiths. There's only so many CNC guys. And when I post jewelry it gets shared around. It's weird.

What if I'm good at it?

We have an employee at the birth center now... and two students. We'll probably have another in September. We'll have still another in October and possibly yet another by December. From a staff of 1 to a staff of seven in eighteen months.

I'm paying a designer a thousand dollars to work up a mark. And I paid three thousand dollars for a skookum 4k Xeon Quadro laptop from hell because this summer, I'm bloody well teaching myself MasterCam. Because I didn't spend $15k on a rose engine lathe because I'm pretty well convinced I can do what I need with a Pocket NC if I pull the spindle and fix a graver.

I might just be serious about this.