T.

If the small business at which I toil daily is any indication of an awakening economy, then this country's bottom line is looking up. Damn. The past two weeks have brought on a steady stream of re-orders from current clients and inquiries followed by orders from new galleries with how-soon-can-you-ship as the refrain.

Most want their double-our-last-order-please shipped yesterday. I spend my days in a flurry of multi-tasking. When something breaks (and glass breaks) or a flaw shows up late in production, it's necessary to re-prioritize, shift, re-schedule. Sometimes (but thankfully not often) a piece is created 3X before an acceptable specimen appears before my magnified eyes.

I have a favorite tool — a diamond-tipped rod, pencil-sized, which works miracles on those hard-to-reach spots in a pattern when the electric dremel just makes the flaw more flawed. I think that in another life I could be a dentist rather than the current starving artist. In fact, if the multi-verse indeed exists, I'm certain that I've got my gloved hands deep into someone's incisors.

But in this incarnation, even the antiseptic smell of a dentist's office sends my anxieties buzzing and beyond control. What I need, in the multi-verse life I envision, is to do the work I do in this universe but collect the paycheck that I earn in an alternate 'verse.

Where is Einstein when I need him?

Meanwhile, every day upon walking out my door to work, I pluck a handful of carrots from my parking-strip garden,  toss them soil-and-all into a plastic bag, then scrub and slice them at lunch. How is it possible that a single carrot seed — about the size of a pinhead — grows to what we know as a carrot? Maybe this seems simple-minded, but I'm constantly in awe of Things That Grow. May it ever be so.