Working the Glass in the Flame

Bead in Progress

Flameworking. Wow! I’m so hooked.

I took a two-day class at Asheville Glass Center in the very cool Phil Mechanics Building in the River Arts District. Totally fun.

Flameworking glass is to painting what stained glass is sewing. Flameworking is free form: you can create on the fly, add bits of color, change your mind, stretch, bend, shape, as you go. Design as you go.  Stained glass has 100% of the design on the front end, followed by all the technique.

From a creative standpoint, taking the jump from making 2-dimensional glass panels to 3-dimensional objects is like changing your mushroom preference from shiitake to psilocybin.

I’ll definitely be investing in a torch and getting gas lines hooked up in my glass studio in the coming days.

Adjacent land values have not appreciated 600%; there’s something about our land that has the appraiser excited about us in particular. Well, Bob has done a lot of tractor work. But, we didn’t grow or stretch the land, just terraced and cleared a bunch of it. And I’ll bet the appraiser was impressed with Bob’s drainage system.

Above ground drainage ditch.

We live at 1600′ elevation with slopes going to about 2400′ above us. Water runs downhill. We border on a county road, with two culverts emptying onto our property from the ditch on the other side of the road. We get A LOT of water when it rains. We also happen to have a lovely “seep”, a very wet area that delights us with wild orchids in the spring. So between our “wet weather streams”, aka drainage ditches, and natural springs, controlling the water is essential to keep the driveway useable, to keep the clay-mud to a minimum, and to keep the ground from getting saturated and sliding all of Bennhenge downhill onto the neighbors place below us.

Bob has buried hundreds of feet of culvert and done extensive tractor work to control the drainage on our 2+ acre property. Our predecessors on this property who lived here for most of the last century dealt with the water, too. They had buried 55 gallon drums along the ditch and covered them over with old shingles. We exposed the ditch and added a bunch of rock work, including steps and flower beds. (When I say “we”, I mean “Bob”.)

I filed an appeal with the tax assessor’s office, so I’ll wait to see what happens to the value after we get a chance to discuss things with official-dom. In the meantime, I’m enjoying living in the most valuable place I’ve ever owned — even though I’m afraid the neighbors dog might have just had puppies in our crawlspace.

Our investment property.

I started this blog with the idea of answering the question: What do you DO in Tapoco? Now, I’m really getting serious about answering that question for myself. The rubber has met the road here. With our interest in the Pub exchanged for full interest in the “house” across the street and a little undeveloped land near town, we are scrambling to figure out how to make it work up here.

Graham County, beautiful as it is, ranks 99th out of 100 NC counties for economic activity.  Tourism is the main industry, and we’ve had two horrible years for tourism (gas prices in ’08 and recession in ’09). The county commissioners just disbanded the Tourism Board.   This is not a progressive community.

I don’t know what we’re going to do with this house/sow’s ear. Originally, the house was purchased to be a vacation rental. The renovation is too expensive, the market too saturated with rentals, the income potential is too small to make that a viable option. We’re plodding ahead, not really sure of the direction we’re going right now.  If nothing else, this might make an interesting blog as we make our way through 2010! Wish us luck.

This Christmas I’m fixated somewhat on Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I watched the movie with Jackson and Jamie in Florida, then found my copy of the book here. Bob is constantly grieving about not being able to eat, and taking all the food for the feast seems like the meanest thing the Grinch did.  The song  lyrics remind me of someone who, unfortunately, didn’t live long enough to sing and rejoice with us this Christmas; he was a Grinch who didn’t get his heart-growing roast-beast-carving moment.

Bob and I have had our moment of discovering that all the trimmings and trappings had been taken. I like to think that we are handling it as well as the Whos in Whoville handled things on Christmas morning. We realize nothing of real importance was taken. We’re in a position to sing and rejoice, especially this Christmas.

We just got back from a two month unplanned Florida “vacation” where we resolved my husband’s ownership in The Market Street Pub. His business associate was killed on a motorcycle on 9/20, and we spent a couple months untangling a mess.

There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.
-Ghandi

I learned a lot about ignorance and greed while down at the Market Street Pub.  We uncovered crimes, fraud and forgeries, where there had been trust and friendship. The President of Sunshine Brewing, Inc. laid waste his fiduciary responsibility to the company, and took the company’s only assets for his personal use so that when he died, the shareholders were left out in the cold. Rather than dissolving the corporation, discussing his unhappiness with my husband (a 47.5% shareholder), he hid the fact that he didn’t want a corporate business. He  managed to keep my husband working like a dog doing all the plumbing, electrical, refrigeration, a/c, maintenance, etc. for years and years as if he actually was an owner.

Sunshine Brewing, Inc. d/b/a The Market Street Pub had a parasite inside. The parasite was the President of the company who registered the corporation’s liquor license to himself as a sole proprietor, conveniently also d/b/a The Market Street Pub.

The corporation continued to exist, all banking was done through the corporate accounts. The corporation paid the renewal fees for the liquor license on an annual basis. Who would believe there was a sole proprietorship operating with the company’s bank account? It happened. The company paid payroll, utilities, taxes, and rent. The company bought all of the liquor sold through the business. Then, its president died, and it was revealed that the corporation had no liquor license. It’s president was operating as a sole proprietor, the corporation was a shell. He had completely comingled all of his personal and business expenses, even paying his alimony from a secondary corporate account where he had diverted some of the credit card revenue stream from the business.

In the end, the whole experience just shows that we really do get what we ask for in life. Although Bob was taken advantage of and deceived for many years, we aren’t suffering. The empty, joyless life belonged to the man who perpetrated the crime.  We have everything we need, we are provided for, it is unfathomable to take something that isn’t ours when our lives are so full of riches. It is a sad cold heart that didn’t recognize ’tis better to give than to receive.

Northern Water Snake sunning on a log.

True, there is no bowling alley . . . no Wal Mart . . . no movie theater. So, I created this blog to answer this most frequently asked question.