Here's the California Tower in Balboa Park. Everyday from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., we hear the bells ring on the quarter hour. In fact, just this minute, I can hear them as I sit in my office at home. It's a quiet evening and when the wind is right, I can hear the tower bells. But, really, that's a fiction. There isn't anyone in the tower ringing the bells. It's a recording piped in over a loud speaker. The bells play the familiar Westminster chimes. I've forgotten what the words are, but they represent a four line poem, a grace before a meal. Each quarter hour another line is added until on the hour all four lines are played and then followed by one bell for each hour. I just heard five chimes, to represent 5:00 p.m. There is one more set scheduled for this year.
These bells will not chime at midnight. I suppose people who live in the neighborhood have complaimed about them making too much noise. That's too bad. When I was a child, we had a clock at home that played the same lines. If I woke up in the night, I could tell what time it was by listening. Nowadays, all I have to do is glance at my digital clock or open my cellphone. People complain and so adjustments are made. I think if you move to this part of town, you should expect to live with the chimes and the train whistles which people have also complained about. I like hearing the trains, but I haven't heard them now for quite awhile. The clock bells, the train whistle, the ships horns, the fog horn, they all represent life in the city. It's part of the fun of living near downtown.
Here I am at home on New Years Eve again, this year because I'm sick. I've got the "bug" that's going around. It seems to be a sort of cold although now I wonder if I have the stomach flu as well. My special friend has that. Lots of people have been sick. It's that time of year. But I've survived pretty well, and now I'm ready to go on to a new year and business growth.
My plans for this coming year are to find additional markets for my work, to stretch myself as an artist in printmaking, jewelry design, and move into enameling. The jewelry will mostly entail getting my website up and running. And that will involve writing some text to support what I do, my methods, and my artistic and technical beliefs. It will also involve starting to photograph my jewelry and other work. I now have pieces of jewelry that I wish I had photographed before I sold them. I also would like to work on the display in my studio and on my worktable outside my studio. And I need to work on some packaging and business cards. I had created a second design for my card and those are all gone. Almost all of the first design is gone as well. I'm down to just a few cards.
I hsve learned some things about copper and gotten some new tools that will help me work with it more easily than I have in the past. And I suppose that's another goal that I have: to expand my skill with copper, to use it in new ways, learn new skills for using it. Weaving strips of it into baskets has helped me feel more comfortable with it. Knowing that I can cut it with scissors makes it easier to shape than it would be if I were using a jewelers saw. I've learned to etch it and I'll go on with that process. I'll etch it and cut it and enamel it and shape it and weave it and create all kinds of things. I've already cut a piece into the shape of a fish which I can etch and then print on paper as well as use for a piece that stands on its own.
So I suppose that at least a portion of my new year will be spent exploring use of copper. I guess that makes me a coppersmith. A coppersmith. Eventually, I'd like to develop my skillls to the point where I can do the same things in silver, become a silversmith, using cold joins and other techniques to create works of art. And I suppose another goal for this year or in the future is to really learn to solder so that I can do even more. However, for now, I like the idea of restricting myself to cold joins. That forces me to think more creatively, I feel.
This year, I feel I'm now at the end of the first stage of my journey, one on which I have undertaken to begin a fledgling business that someday may become a means of support or it may become another CocaCola. I've come to the end of the beginning of the business. Now it's on to the middle part. In writing the novel, they say you need to make sure you can hold your audience during the middle part of the novel. That's the point at which things can begin to drag or come to such a slow down that it's hard to get up and running again. Hopefully that won't happen to me or to you Dear Reader.
When I sat here in front of my computer this time last year, I had no idea where I was going with my blog. Now I have two of them. I've tried to write in them everyday, but I have, of course, missed some days, mostly because I was sick or out of town or sick and tired of wrestling with the wireless network which is down now as I write. I'd like to say I wrote everyday, but I know I'm not a machine, so I think I've done rather well, keeping it up. There were lots of times when I was so sleepy that I didn't know if I could write, and times when I didn't know if I had anything to say. However, that's one of the things that amazes me about the human mind. If you give it a chance to speak, it will tell you something everytime you ask. And I suppose that's the ultimate goal: record what the mind has to tell you. If you don't, you run the risk of not remembering.
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