Wednesday, March 18, 2009

off on spring break...

Lots of work to do, but some fun family visiting too over spring break next week!

In the mean time, two fun things to put on the blog:

1) Perhaps not strictly "fun" but I enjoyed the point it makes.

All credit to the Cartoonist Stuart Carlson



2) And another fun thing to put on the blog: the coloring book for lawyers!

Uncle Bob actually gave us a copy of this. One of his patients is a lawyer and when he mentioned a niece in law school they insisted he give us a copy and brought one in to their next appointment.

Here's a link to the fun coloring book:

http://officespam.chattablogs.com/archives/Coloring-Book-for-Lawyers.pdf

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Lincoln City Trip

Our family has a favorite little motel at the beach, and mom, dad, Genaro and I escaped there for the weekend. Genaro and I brought along a lot of law text books, but we enjoyed some walks on the beach and the amazing view too!


Lincoln City, the beach city, has an awesome tradition of placing glass floats out on the beach for people to find and keep. My dad is an avid beach comber and has been trying to find a float since they began placing them out. He wakes up early and spends hours walking the tide pools and combing the dunes. I sleep in and stroll on the beach leisurely. Dad has found zero floats. I have found one, and Genaro and I found a second one last year. Now certainly my dad deserves a float, right? Well Genaro and I got him an early birthday gift and gave him a gift certificate to make his own glass float. Here are some pictures (and video) from the glass float making!


After getting molten glass onto the blowing tube, you roll the molten glass over chips of colored glass that will melt into your project as you warm it up in the super hot ovens.


The different colored glasses melt at different temperatures and you need even heating so you have to slowly spin the molten glass mix in the furnace, it gets so hot it is almost dripping off the end of the pole.



Here is video of dad twisting the glass to make swirled patterns of the colors. You can see how hot it is by the glowing color and how it droops from side to side when it is turned. Oh, and you can see the pug who hangs out by the warm furnaces hanging out on a chair in the background.



The pole the glass was on is hollow. A tube is attached to the end of that and you slowly blow air into the mass of molten glass to make a small bubble and then work all the way to the full float size. Here is the float after my dad blew enough air into it to make it the right size. The worker actually detached the float pretty easily, and then put one last chunk of molten glass on the bottom to make a foot for the float to rest on. (They also stamp the year and the name of the studio on the bottom of the stand, which is kind of cool!)


The final, amazing product. Craig Chapman glass works? Sounds good to me!