The Tallest Tree

Here's a little working Christmas tree. It really is a pine tree, a star pine. This one is about six or seven feet tall. I think they grow to about 60 feet or more as adults. I've been familiar with them since I was a little girl growing up here in Southern California. There aren't as many of them as there are eucalyptus trees, but they are around in some of the older neighborhoods and in the Park.

Today was a quiet one in Spanish Village. I spent almost the whole day on paperwork and on my Small Image submission. On Mondays when there's nobody blowing glass, I can sit and dream up all kinds of ideas. I thought about all the things I've made that would fit in a 10 inch cube: necklaces, copper bracelets, sculptures, baskets, etchings. I'll have to decide what piece or pieces I want to submit for jurying.

When I'm working by myself, I sometimes like to listen to NPR or some music. I now have a telephone with an MP3 player in it. I can download songs and play them through its speaker. Inside the phone is a memory card that holds one gigabyte of information, approximately 700 or more songs. The card is half the size of my pinky fingernail and holds 50,000 times as much information as the first desktop computer I had when I worked for the Navy. That was about 16 years ago, when DOS ruled the computer world and a dot matrix printer was a fancy new item.

Currently the wi-fi network is down at Spanish Village. Philip says that he thinks the repeater isn't working. And the president wasn't able to get onto the DSL network either when he tried earlier today. So even though we're much more advanced than we were 16 years ago, we're still struggling with various computer problems. Really, I suppose we always will.

I'm so happy to have a telephone on which I can store all my most favorite music and listen to it whenever I choose. And when the battery gets low, I can plug it into an outlet in my studio or in my car and charge it up in no time. Now, if it had a radio, too, I'd really be happy. I still have to carry the other phone for the radio and the version of solitaire that I prefer. It proves that small is powerful. You don't have to be the tallest tree on the block.