With a moan of anguished anticipation

After building a little frame out of quarter-round, I put gobs of black caulking all around the perimeter, stuck the stained glass window in and stepped back to admire the look. It looked so great! Happy. Happy. Then it flopped forward and I could hear the glass breaking.

If you have ever read Nabokov's Pnin,** I felt Pnin's pain when he thought he had broken a cherished bowl while washing it. Only this really did break. After moping around a little bit, I decided to finish installing it anyway. You can't see the cracks in the glass but I think I'll cut some window glass to help support it.

Part of the lore.

**Pnin is washing up, after a party. Lovingly, he places an aquamarine bowl in the water. This bowl is a gift from his young son. It is Pnin's most precious object. It slips out of his hand and drops into the suds-filled sink.

He almost caught it--his fingertips actually came into contact with it in mid-air, but this only helped to propel it into the treasure-concealing foam of the sink, where an excruciating crack of broken glass followed upon the plunge.

Then something wonderful happens: "With a moan of anguished anticipation, he went back to the sink and, bracing himself, dipped his hand deep into the foam. A jagger of glass stung him. Gently he removed a broken goblet. The beautiful bowl was intact. He took a fresh dish towel and went on with his household work."

Lofty thoughts

I plan to install the sleeping loft floor this weekend.

How hard could it be? Just laying massive boards (2.5 inches thick by 12 inches wide by 14 feet) side by side, then screwing them down.

This will mean one less pile of lumber to trip over.

There's a reason why stained glass is a lost art

Tarr might have been the dog who did a little scent marking on the table at the sweatshop where I was working on this stained glass but I'm not sure. I thought the decent thing to do would be to wipe it up, no matter which dog did it, and when I was down at floor level, I found bloodstains all over the floor. Yikes.

I have bled for this project myself but not enough to leave large stains on the floor. But add to that getting burned by the soldering iron, possibly poisoned by flux, getting a sore neck and butt, spending many otherwise beautiful days indoors and many dollars, I declare I will never make stained glass again.

Even so, I am pleased with the way it turned out and hope it will fit in the place that it was created to fit. (See red oval).

Every backyard should have one.

Tiny Cabin is located across the old field from a large and, presumably, old cave, second or third largest in the state. Every year, on the first Saturday of June, I open the cave so that cavers and their groupies can crawl, scoot, walk, duck-walk, push their prone bodies along with their toes and otherwise locomotate themselves through miles of muddy passages.

If this sounds like fun to you, have at it. I kind of get off on their having to ask me for permission. I do wonder how they have gotten this kink of a hobby. I tried it once and was put off by stopping to think about the millions of tons of rocks that loomed overhead.

I have heard that there is a room that you could fit a 10 story building in. I have seen the waterfall room. I do know that kindergartners make good cavers.

This year may have a little extry special weirdness if we get a cave diver to come and dive into a looong wet passage at the entrance.

Progress on Tiny Cabin is happening in the stained glass window front. More on that later.

DIY Stained Glass

It is hard to imagine the colors here: ruby red in the upper center, emerald green leaves, brown twining stems, amber border and dried bloodsmears on the bottom of the sheet of paper from an inept glass cutter. I expect it will look better once it is all done. This will go in the upper gable of Tiny Cabin.

I designed it and the guy at the stained glass place printed it out on a piece of paper. Then I spent a fortune on tools, broke a lot of glass learning how to cut with a glass cutter. This kind of focussed work requires sweating with your tongue stuck out. Maybe some light grunting. For those of you DIYers who may want to try this, those complex curves are more difficult to cut than are straight or single curve cuts.

Today I finished cutting all the pieces of glass and then ground the edges smooth with a diamond wheel.

Tarr gets to come next time because every time I turned around there was a different beagle underfoot. We hope there is not a dog fight in the glass shop.

Poor Tarr had a scary epileptic seizure last Saturday. This is his second, so I guess we have that to look forward to. He was just sniffing some Rounduptm Weed Killer and then suddenly he couldn't control any of his legs. I scooped him up and took him to the nice lady vet - the one who was willing to treat him out in the Animal Hospital parking lot when I got him as a sick puppy from the dog pound.



Tarr as a pitiful sick puppy at the dog pound. Approximately 70 percent of the dogs there are euthanized.