you say it best when you say nothin at all

So, as a reincarnated blogger, and for the sake of my new readers, I should establish my personality as the writer and let the readers get to know me by introducing them to the things I love.

Let me introduce you to the current love of my life:
My job.
I figured since we've been spending so much time together, we should just move in together. It disagreed, so I still sleep at my place.. but I spend most of my waking hours over there.

Some things I love about my job..
This is my "desk."

While most peoples tools are a keyboard and moniter, here are mine:

 

I spend a lot of my time lately making things that look like the one on the left, look like the one on the right:

And my other main project is working with these babies:

     They started out completely bare, white wood. Think, a human with no skin. I have been applying a few coats of an oil varnish per week (one at a time), choosing the colors out of gold, red, and brown options, layering colors for different effects, trying to come up with four completely different violins, to see what works.

     These violins have, interestingly, turned out like birth order stereotypes. I started them each a few days apart from each other. The first one has about 14 coats of varnish on it currently, while the 4th only has about 7. The first one headed in a definite gold-brown direction. (My straight-A, Harvard-bound child) The second headed in a very different, but still deliberate, red-brown, direction. (is in a band and got a tattoo without me knowing, but still has a good head on her shoulders) The third we had a little more fun with, choosing colors at random to see how it turned out. The third was a little of a wild child, went in a quite pretty strawberry blonde direction, but came back around and turned down a similar direction to the first one. (we're still not sure how he turned out ok) And the fourth is completely different from the other three, dark brown-red, and we're going to experiment with antiquing. (well this is interesting, but still cool) And with each one, I corrected mistakes I made with earlier ones, and sometimes made new mistakes.

     My favorite part is the place I work while I varnish. The varnishing room has large windows facing north and east, because varnish works and dries best and properly in good light. The lovely part is when it snowed last weekend, it was like sitting and varnishing violins in a snowglobe.

There are other things I love about my job. The people I work with. The music we listen to. The banter, and the drama, and the joys, and the heartaches, and the support, and the advice, and the family type relationships we have. But I can't take pictures of those things.