Dichroic Reflections

So yeah anyway whatever

Well, one of the "grr" situations from yesterday may be resolving itself amusingly (as in, the people who were supposed to pave the way for me to do other things apparently did they just didn't bother telling me about it. This involves possible travel for me a mere week and a half away, so it's the sort of thing I sort of need to know). Another frustrating situation, once expressed (er, maybe a bit forcefully) to my new manager resulted in a bit too much flattery about my value to his team and all the exciting directions he wants us to go in. Actually it did make me feel better, not so much for the flattery (well, maybe except one bit that was passed on from above) but because most of what he was saying and planning were the things I'd be saying and planning in his shoes. It does make me feel better that the new manager and I are generally in agreement as to where we should be heading. So my morale today is less "Grrr" and more "So yeah anyway whatever".

Also the Cubemate and I went to the bead warehouse store at lunchtime and bought headpins and jumprings and a strand of jade beads and one of rose quartz and two of iolite (that last is for me to make a rowing necklace for her) so now I have beads to fondle. Because apparently the chunk of cash I just spent on BotMo wasn't enough. (Well of course it wasn't, says the impatient acquisitive magpie side of me; only some of that money was for May beads; the June pearls and the November meteorites won't be arriving for months!) I keep being reluctant to sign up too far in advance because of the actual possibility we might just chuck it all up and go adventuring, and would thus be hard to mail things to. But I couldn't let that Astronomy package go without signing up - me with aerospace all over my resume, and a space science degree. I'll figure some way to get it to me, wherever I am. I'm not really even doing all that much beadwork these days, to justify all this acquisitveness. But beads are so satisfying just to have around, to run through your hands and lay out in various combinations. No wonder dragons and magpies hoard shiny bits.

One major difference between knitting and beading, is that beaded jewelry doesn't really take all that long to make (though individual pieces may take a while to conceive) and that I can generally make it for cheaper than I can buy jewelry someone else has made. (Those strings of semi-precious stones I mentioned earlier? $3 each.) On the other hand, in knitting the yarn alone general costs more than a machine-made sweater or socks would. At least in theory, I can made something better-fitting and better-made than a storebought item, depending on my own skill, but the real benefit is more in the process, as a hobby, and in the satisfaction of being able to wear or give something I've made. It's kind of nice to be able to be able to switch between the hobbies, between short-term projects where the fun is in the designing and the wearing, and the longer-term ones where the satisfaction is in completing a big project (and also in the wearing, of course).