the scramble

Has anyone else noticed that summer is, like, over? I used to dread this time of year because it meant I had to go back to school. I hated school from kindergarten on, which made my childhood seem extremely long. I also hated being a kid, so you can't blame me for doing nothing the first fall I didn't have to go back to school but lay on the beach and smoke cigarettes. Man, talk about freedom! I didn't get over the fall dread until about 5 years ago.

Nowadays fall means getting ready for the Christmas slam. Smart people start doing this in August. I was goofing around and vacationing in August. My assistant, Sara, was also off for most of the month. Orders have been trickling in from stores, and I've been printing them out and filing them away. Last Monday was the first real day back to work in almost 4 weeks for both me and Sara, and we had a little meeting to schedule ship dates. I was not in the least panicked about it, I was anticipating a totally organized and mellow production schedule in our future.

That feeling disappeared after about 10 minutes as we both realized our production schedule is totally full, right up the very edge. We slammed the rest of our coffee, ran back to the studio, and took stock of what we had on the shelves. I chained myself to my wheel and started throwing, and Sara started glazing. It's not quite like going back to school; for starters, I'm getting paid. But it's pretty dang close!