Everything is new

Today, I started work at CMOG. Got the walk-through of helping customers in the morning, and spent most of the afternoon blowing ornaments with another new-ish girl. As I was blowing ornaments, this Venetian glass master named Gianni Toso wandered out of the flameworking class he was teaching to mess with William Gudenrath and heckle me. After watching us go back and forth a bit, he kicked us off the bench to demonstrate a goblet for us.

It was the best first day at work ever. I got messed with by the guy who made this:





Over the spring, I saw a picture of Gianni both in Glass magazine (featured in a photo essay documenting the beginnings to middle of the Studio Glass movement in the United States) and in the CMOG catalog (next to the description of the flameworking class he is currently teaching). In both images, he had the most fantastic old school bushy beard, in real life, he kind of looks like the Kris Kringle of glassworking with a soft Italian accent. I think you have to be a great glassworker to rock a beard like that and not be afraid of setting your face on fire.

I had the last week or so off between jobs, and I landed in Corning a few days early. I spent it jogging, doing yoga videos, stealing wireless signals, catching up on all the TV shows I missed last year online, studying javascript and borrowing books on PHP, hanging with computer nerds, recalling the ability to cook an awesome dinner out of a microwave from a far distant, impoverished and somewhat transient early-twenty-something era, and generally having a good time. Life is really, really good today.