Surprise Visit!

Wow. Guess who came to visit today? Nancy Miller (www.nancymillerjewelry.com) and her brother (all the way from San Diego!) Dave Robbins. Who is Nancy Miller? Well, she is a PMC artist and I'd say one of my mentors. A really generous, giving teacher and all around great person. I learned to enamel on PMC from Nancy, and was then invited to assist in teaching PMC at the Double H Ranch (www.doublehranch.org) in Lake Luzerne. From Nancy's website, "She developed and continues to coordinate a summer time jewelry program for seriously ill children at the Double H Hole in the Woods Ranch, a camp founded by Paul Newman and Charles R. Wood. This entirely volunteer effort has been well received by the teen campers and has the full support of the PMC Guild and Rio Grande". It was so amazing for me to get to participate this summer. In the session I was a part of, two of the campers were native French speakers. I did my best to assist these two campers in French, but my French is rusty to say the least, and I've definitely never learned all the vocabulary necessary for PMC. I knew "l'argent" was silver, "couper" was cut, but I was at a loss for most everything else! There was a lot of gesturing and hand movements, but we got through it and the kids turned out some really great jewelry!

Nancy agreed to teach Keum-Boo at DFB! A guest teacher all the way from Saratoga Springs. Pretty cool. Probably won't happen until after December, but it will be worth the wait.

Today was a slow, but great day. I also got a surprise visit from Jenny Ryan Albicelli who is a good friend of mine from high school. I'm so thrilled to have reconnected with her since returning to NY. She is a big fan of my jewelry, which is great advertising. She's like Cocoa in the shameless promotion of erin. Yay ladies! You rock, rock. Jenny brought a friend in too, Rachel? And 2/4 of a family of jewelry-makers came in today for supplies: mother and daughter. And grandmother was in the car, and grandaughter is also a beader! Kind of neat to have 4 generations of women crafting together! My mom was also here for most of the day, and she was super helpful in getting the back room cleared and purged of stuff I don't use, and she even vacuumed. The rugs haven't gotten a good clean since I've been here, because the vacuum at the store really sucked, and not in a good way. That is to say, it didn't suck as it should. It blew. Literally. I attempted to vacuum the rugs in the front of the store this am. First I swept, then I vacc-ed, and when I was done, the vacuum had just blown the dirt off the rugs, so I had to re-sweep. The red rug still has cat fur on it. Mingled with Gonzo fur. Bleah.

I'm nursing some indigestion right now. Had delicious but very spicy Indian food for lunch and I'm hurting now. Need to have some alka-seltzer before going to a picnic with Casey. Ugh, more food?