I go back and forth on the idea that people who know us well but aren't psychotic, like good friends or certain exes, should be allowed to write warning labels for us. Nothing scandalous, just friendly little operating instructions for the benefit of future significant others. Mine would probably start with "System shuts down for overnight maintenance most Friday nights."

I'm not very good at Friday nights. If you took stock of lifetime episodes of ennui, most would be on Friday nights. Weeknights tend to fill up with dinners with friends or classes or chores or ... something ... and a few late nights creep in, often in tandem with early mornings for unfathomable reasons. Weekends are all about the fun too. In between, however, there is Friday night.

I coasted into tonight on fumes. A week of night classes and early wake-ups had me shuddering through the day on a carefully titrated schedule of caffeine and Advil. Early in the day I announced my intention to spend the evening supine on the couch with a glass of wine and some take-out and a movie. This wasn't entirely true -- really I planned to be conked out asleep by 9. Claudia, who is often around on Friday nights, tried to gauge just how incoherent I planned to be. We agreed to meet for the commute back uptown and I gulped a late cup of coffee to try to be perky for the ride home. It lasted until about 168th St when she got a look at my sagging eyelids and suggested gently that maybe we ought to spend the night separately, the better to sleep and recharge. I felt guilty but agreed. We're still early enough into things that it's nice sometimes to protect the other person from our less savory aspects, and these include imploding into surliness from lack of sleep. I probably should have reached this conclusion earlier in the day so she would have time to make other plans with someone who wouldn't be looking quite so yearningly at a pillow.

At home I did a couple quick chores and sank happily into a glass of wine, a video game and brainlessness. I thought about my happiest Friday nights and realized that they took place right down the street. Chicken'n'Waffles and Sausage Boy share my desire for Friday night somnolence and I spent many, many Fridays in the cozy confines of their living room with take-out, wine and something utterly nonchallenging on TV until one by one we were reduced to snores. They're kindred spirits.

Tomorrow is Saturday and there will be a barbeque in Brooklyn, drinks on the roof of the Met, and plenty of energy to spare. But right now it's 9:24 on Friday night and I'm going to bed.

There are good days and bad days, and then there are apocalyptically bad days. At least in glassblowing. Guess which today was?

The upside is that I learned a new, fast, easy technique for making bottles. That was excellent. The downside was watching them, one after another, leap to their demise in a variety of interesting ways. Nothing would even last long enough for me to make a lumpy, uneven version of a bottle. They all imploded or exploded or sometimes both at once. I did get one thing into the annealer, something that had at one time been bottle-shaped but ended up looking like a 4-year-old's idea of a goose that is checking itself for ticks. So very ugly. On top of the parade of disasters, or perhaps compunding them, it was freakishly hot in the shop tonight -- 104 in the relatively cool parts, which means the area near the furnaces was probably in the 115ish range if you weren't too close. Up close you were probably better off measuring with a meat thermometer.

Eventually class ended and I hopped on the 2 to change to the A at Fulton. After 20 minutes on the platform someone finally mentioned that the A and C were not running, so from there I dragged back to the 2, sat down and started writing notes on the new technique. I looked up to find myself somehow back in Brooklyn, so I had to get out, switch to a Manhattan-bound train, and then change to the 1 later on. I got home too tired and dragged out to be annoyed, which is probably just as well.

Only two classes left, and one is in the cold shop, where we work with saws and grinding wheels and jumbo belt sanders. Oh, and sandblasting. What could possibly go wrong?

 

Recent stuff from last week's class and the weekend. I had a really nice bottle going in class last night but the bottom was thin and shattered. That's glass for you.

So rollerderby. Girls in spandex and helmets and elbow pads battling it out on rollerskates. Gotham Girls Roller Derby has a regular season of matches and it's a lot of fun. We went Saturday night and watched the Bronx Gridlock pummel the Brooklyn Bombshells in 60 minutes of flat-track action.

I'm trying to catch up on blogging. Blowing glass 2-3 times a week doesn't leave a lot of spare time, particularly as it necessitates doing laundry and shopping for Gatorade on the free nights. Here are some recent tumblers and, for comparison, the very first structurally intact tumbler I made -- note the difference in thickness.

 

 

These are some spheres we blew on the first night of this class -- bigger and thinner than the tennis ball-sized ones I did last fall. Look for them again in a few weeks after I do some cold shop work on them.

 

Lastly here's an urn sort of thing I made a couple weeks ago.

 

I have to go blow glass on Sunday, but you all should definitely go to the Cardboard Tube Fighting League competition.

The parent-meeting-visit went better than expected. They're smart, kind, well-intentioned people who plied me with barbeque and all manner of pig-based meats. They were so happy their daughter met someone that they bought champagne, although I think the real motive might have been to contribute to my total confusion when they tried to teach me to play Rook.

North Carolina itself was blissfully mild, a verdant mix of trees, aging tobacco plants, biotech campuses and strip malls. You forget, when you don't leave Manhattan for months at a time, that what we fit between 66th and 72nd streets along Broadway takes up several square miles of parking lots and box stores and sprawling apartment complexes. I'm a big fan of urban density and a big fan of farms and wilderness. It's the part in between that depresses the hell out of me.

It was a good trip but totally packed with visits and generally being introduced a lot. We started formulating plans to go back some time, with Claudia promising we could devote an entire trip to barbeque research. NC BBQ Crawl 2010 anyone?

I have to go to Europe for work the week after Labor Day, to the pedestrian-sounding although probably charming Dusseldorf. This equates to a free ticket to Europe and the license, nay the moral obligation, to leverage it into an extended Labor Day weekend somewhere on the continent. It's a decision I need to make in the next week or so for work planning purposes.

There is the delicious possibility that Claudia might join me. I picture us meandering the cobbled streets of some stately cultural capital, dining in sidewalk cafes and being hopelessly cute. We toyed with Amsterdam, and Paris and Madrid have popped up on the radar, along with Bruges. Any would be fine. On the heels of a two-week trip to Ecuador, though, it's a fair chunk of cash and we're still debating whether and where we would go together.

The other option, with her full endorsement, is that I'd take my ticket anyway and spend the weekend on my own at large in Europe. This has its appeal in a completely different way, and I will be happy no matter what the outcome is because, well, FREE TRIP. At Claudia's urging, I sat down today to research where I might go on my own. This, not surprisingly, precipitated a small crisis. It's simply not hard enough to get to most places in Europe. Where's the challenge? Left to my own devices, I HAVE to pick the most obscure, backwater, weird-language-having destination possible. Never mind that I've never been to Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin. They're not even on the list. I pulled up Travelocity and sampled prices for flights out of Frankfurt. The first five investigated? Bucharest, Llubljana, Riga, Tirana and Sarajevo. And also Pristina, Kosovo, for good measure in case it would be economical to see my friend the radiologist there.This went on for some time, and I can now report that it costs 1/3 as much to get to Istanbul as to the capital of Armenia. You can guess which is more appealing, though.

I stopped myself before I started pondering prices to Cape Verde or the Seychelles or any of the 'stans. I was starting to foam at the mouth a little.

One of the drawbacks of New York life is that very few co-ops will let you have your own in-unit washer and dryer. Something about the high incidence of Tide-scented suds overwhelming downstairs neighbors' drains. Most buildings, however, have laundry rooms that are an odd little nexus of neighborly life. Everyone uses them, but you hardly ever see anyone going in or out. We flit down, load our stuff, disappear for 37 minutes, return, rotate, and pop in again 45 minutes later just long enough to collect our clothes and empty the lint trap. The laundry room often becomes the building's library, with a shelf or two for unwanted paperbacks waiting to be passed along.

I was in Claudia's laundry room last night, admiring the two tall bookcases full of Willa Cather and Umberto Eco and various treatises on Middle East history. We snagged a couple of fairly new travel guides to Madrid and Andalucia. Her neighbors are an erudite bunch. This morning I lugged my own laundry downstairs and gave our shelf a browse. Apparently one of my neighbors likes lurid werewolf fiction. Sexy werewolves and she-cats, sexy vampires, sexy creatures of the night generally. So now I'm going to wonder who.