Eleanor’s phone alarm went off at 3:30 that Thursday morning. She grumbled and hit “snooze,” intending to just lay there for a few more minutes. It would give Yasha a little extra sleep, considering he was the one driving. So at 3:45 she got up and quietly crept to his room, closing his door before turning on his light. No reaction at first, then a bleary groan and a glare. She smiled sheepishly, nervously, sleepily. Those two and a half hours had not been nearly enough.
She put her belt back on and grabbed her backpack, going down to the kitchen to forage for breakfast. She found bagels in the fridge and set about toasting one while munching a Nutrigrain bar. Yasha sat at the counter, eating pita chips and drinking juice. She quickly buttered her bagel and wrapped it in a paper towel for easy transport. They put shoes on and headed out to the car.
“We’re never doing this early-morning bus ride thing again,” she told him moodily in the car. He agreed.
He dropped her off at the Baltimore station just after 4:30. A quick hug and he left, as she shuffled inside to sit and wait. She zoned out, glancing at her watch occasionally. Had this been any other Greyhound trip she would have her iPod out, but her ears were still feeling stuffed up and she didn’t feel like dealing with the volume level necessary to actually hear it.
Just before 4:50 she stood and waited by her gate, printed tickets in hand. The ride to DC was short, the traffic nonexistent, and she dozed in her seat. There was an hour layover in DC, and she thought sleepily how ridiculous their planning was, considering they had just been there not 6 hours earlier. She nodded in and out of sleep, checking her watch when she snapped her eyes open, not wanting to miss her bus. 6:40 came and she stood again, ignoring her achy back. The second leg was much the same as the first, though she thought she may have actually slept a bit there because suddenly they were at exit 79 and it was just about time to get off. They were almost a full hour early, meaning she would have no trouble making her ten o’clock – though she would be vaguely smelly for it.
Rather than wait the half hour for the number 24 bus, she ended up walking back down the street to Broad. Her shoulders were starting to hurt, the combined stress of the pit and having made that trek twice in as many days. She caught the first bus that came down Broad to campus. In the ten minutes between getting back and having to leave, she put on her pajamas (which didn’t smell of beer and sweat and smoke and who knew what else) in the hope they would somewhat disguise her unwashed state. She checked Facebook briefly and was back out the door.
On her way to class she stopped by the campus convenience store and got some pills for her just-starting to hurt muscles.
--
Sitting in bio lab Eleanor examined her arms for any obvious bruising, anything that might give her away. Her left triceps were especially tender, which was strange because that was the side Yasha sheltered for as much of the show as he could. She reasoned it was because she ended up bracing that arm on the back of the guy in front of her, pushing against him hard. Her throat was a little raw and her ears still felt a little stuffed, but she seemed hardly the worse for wear. Compared to Yasha’s kidney damage and concussion, Eleanor was fine – though she was slightly annoyed at having lost an earring.
Nate finished the introductory lecture on the respiratory system in large animals. They were supposed to be dissecting fetal pigs that day, but for some reason the department either didn’t order them at all or didn’t order enough, because their class instead was supposed to dissect rats. Eleanor, for some reason, didn’t have much of a problem with the rats as much as the pigs, probably because they were fetal pigs and her strange hippie ways were very much against that. However, due to the general gross-out factor of all dissections, Nate instead made it entirely optional.
“If you feel like your life won’t be complete without cutting into something in bio 101, then go ahead and cut open a rat. Otherwise, it’s not required.”
In her mind, Eleanor sort of wanted to do the rat. But she had a feeling her unnamed classmates wouldn’t want to – especially since Nate’s previous class had already done one and the rat was sitting on the counter for students to look at if they chose – so she didn’t mention it. Instead they played with healthy and smoker’s pig lungs, looked at slides of lung tissue, and found their vital air capacity. Without the dissection, the class let out a little after 11. She made her way back to the house, stopping by the dining hall to get a sandwich for lunch.
--
She took a nice, long shower when she got back, doing a more thorough examination for other injuries her clothes had hidden. Her knees were slightly bruised from being pressed and banged against the rail, and her upper back and shoulders were starting to ache. She knew it would only get worse before it got better and was not looking forward to the next few days.
She prepared a lie as to why her copper container wasn’t quite finished and headed to the critique. I took it home because my locker has been giving me trouble and won’t open. But when I took it out when I got back one of the feet had broken off and I wasn’t sure how to fix it. It seemed plausible enough. But when she got to the crit she ended up telling the half-truth anyway.
“When I was bending that foot so it would sit flat, the solder broke and it came off. I wasn’t sure how to fix it. And then I noticed the other feet weren’t really in the right places to so I have to fix them all.”
Luckily, only nine out of sixteen students had finished boxes, so everyone had until the next class to finish and fix them. Eleanor planned to go back to the lab on Sunday when Sheal was there, though she had a feeling she wouldn’t.
The crit went well for everyone else, though Eleanor said nothing. She periodically flexed her hands and arms, testing her muscles, but was otherwise silent. During the break and for a few minutes after class she worked on the crochet project in the hall. It had grown a lot since she had last seen it Tuesday, with some chaining reaching above and across the rail and around the steel pillars. It was soothing to work on it, even if standing there to reach the higher parts made her left shoulder ache more. When she got back home she took some Aleve.
--
Later on Ces texted her.
C: Shafer at 730 with Anna and Nicole?
Thursdays were one of the nights Eleanor went to Angela’s and watched TV on the large flatscreen in her dorm’s common room. That night was Supernatural night, starting at 9. She figured she had time, and anyway, getting out was always a good thing for such a shut in. She readily agreed.
Ces and Eleanor left together. They were meeting the others outside Bo Dillaz since it was a fairly central location. Of course, since Nicole was involved, they were waiting in the cold for a good twenty minutes before she showed up – Anna had gotten there fairly quickly. They headed over to the dining hall.
Around 8:45 Eleanor left to walk to Angela’s for their TV night. She rode the campus security escort back to her house afterwards.
[1331]
[9609/50000]
God, this took forever to get out... I forgot what I did on Thursday, and now it's Monday, so I've got a lot of catching up to do...
Showing posts with label jewelry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jewelry. Show all posts
Monday, November 9
Tuesday, November 3
november 3
Tuesdays were lazy mornings, at least compared to other weekday mornings. Eleanor’s first class wasn’t until 12:30, so she slept in a bit. Her phone alarm woke her at 9, and every five minutes for the next half hour. Nothing new there. But what was different about this morning was all the motion coming from the kitchen. The faint sound of music told her at least Ces was up there making breakfast. For some unknown reason Eleanor didn’t want to go up when someone else was there. But at 9:36 she was hungry, and the need to eat overwhelmed her need to be by herself while doing it.
Coming up the stairs the smell of omelets hit her. Ces has been cooking. Liz was there as well, just putting bread into the toaster for her own breakfast and turning on the coffee maker – a pink affair decked out in Hello Kitty as well, another addition from Ces. Disappointed that she would have to wait for her bagel, Eleanor decided to get something else to eat. She got down her Pampered Chef microwave pot and began gathering ingredients for Coco Wheats. She added some of the chocolate almond milk in addition to regular milk for that extra chocolate kick.
--
After a quick shower she set to work writing her paper for English. The intro paragraph had been written the night before, so it was all downhill from there. She knocked the whole paper out in less than an hour.
--
She left for class just after noon, even though it had been moved to a building closer to her house. The regular lecture class had been replaced with an artist lecture in the Art Foundation building, which was, in essence, down the street. Realizing her timing error, she slowed down and walked all the way around the building to waste as much time as possible. Finally coming around to the front, the automatic doors opened, and she stopped dead, staring at the floor.
There, as if waiting for her, was a large duct tape arrow pointing to the stairs.
To anyone else, the arrow simply pointed out the alternative method of ascending the building. But to her and several of her friends it was a memento of one spectacular day last November. Yasha had come down for a visit, wanting to try out something that a friend of his had tried at her college: duct taping a person to a wall. The other group had been unsuccessful, but Eleanor weighed barely 100 pounds, and with Yasha’s ‘skills’ they were sure to succeed!
And so, four hours and three and a half rolls of duct tape later, she was suspended a foot above the ground in a sticky silver blanket. She then proceeded to peel herself off the wall, hanging precariously for a moment by one arm before dropping the last few inches. She walked almost a mile back to the dorm still wearing the tape, random bits of trash stuck to the sticky side by her friends.
Back to the present. Taking a few steps forward and around the other people gathered in front of the elevators she marveled at the arrow’s continued existence. I wonder if anyone will ever bother to pull the tape up? Wouldn’t it be awesome if it stayed there till I graduated? The elevator doors opened and she stepped inside.
The lecturing artist was a young Chinese-American woman, Helen Lee. She described herself as a glassblower and graphic designer, using blown glass vessels to make letters. She was interested in language and the body and how they intersect and interact. It was one of the more unique and engaging artist lectures Eleanor had been to, and was definitely glad the usual class had been replaced with this.
While walking to the Fine Arts Building and her next class she sent a picture of the tape arrow to Yasha and to Facebook as proof of its continued existence. She stopped in front of the giant yarn contraption spreading along the railing. There was still almost half an hour until class, so she pulled out her hook and set to work adding more to her octopus of the day before.
Time for class. Pulling out her keys she attempted to unlock her locker and get her tool box out. But the key wouldn’t turn. I just opened it last night! What happened? Ten minutes of trying and still nothing. She was frustrated. Another girl in the class noticed and tried her hand at it, before calling over the only male in the class for a try. Finally the tumbler turned and the lock popped open. Grumbling she pulled her box out and started unloading tools, setting to work.
She finished the tension lip and sanded the main container with successively finer grits of paper. But all the soldering stations were filled, so she spent a while wasting time. Finally, an opening. She soldered the bits of the lip together. She soldered pieces of wire to the bottom of the container which would become the rivets for the plastic pearl feet. Class ended, they all cleaned up. She kept working.
She had finished the rivets and was adjusting the angles of the feet when one of them broke off. It had been soldered with easy solder, the lowest heat one. There was nothing she knew of that could be done, and with the deadline just two days away (though one of them didn’t count) there was no time to start over. She was going to wait for Sheal to get back from her class and ask for help, but she was getting restless. She finished the rest of the box. The lid was assembled, the clay sand dollar was attached, the body was polished. She decided to just leave it and make up something about the foot coming off ‘in transit,’ rather than hot gluing it on and risking her grade.
As it was the other three feet didn’t quite match up. The box, even if it had all four, didn’t sit quite upright, listing to one side. When she held it up in the correct orientation two of the feet appeared to be almost centered along the bottom while the lone foot was sticking out the side. It was too late to fix it. The rest of the box was finished and clean; it would just have to sit crooked. She was not looking forward to the critique on Thursday.
It was 8 before she walked back home. She had gone to a sandwich shop earlier for dinner, ordering a salad because her hands were brown with copper dust and no doubt covered in other unpleasant substances. Such things had never really bothered her in high school. She would frequently forego the rubber tongs in the photo darkroom, preferring her own fingers, and consequently she imbibed small amounts of toxic chemicals over those four years. But this was a new kind of horribleness, one that she could actually see. So she ate her salad with a fork.
Arriving home a voice greeted her from the bowels of the house. It was Nicole. Setting her bag down – but not before fishing out her copper container – and grabbing a pint of ice cream from the freezer she ventured upstairs to Liz’s room to be social for once. Ces had gone to JMU for an event with a friend and would be back later that night. Eleanor sat on Liz’s nice carpet – hers was the only carpeted room in the house – eating her ice cream and lamenting the shortcomings of her project.
Soon the already ridiculous conversation going on around her divulged into reminiscing about Destiny’s Child and the Spice Girls and all those other good girl bands of the 90s. Eleanor sat there with her laptop – having traded her ice cream tub for the device after a while – listening and laughing at the antics of the other two. Her own childhood had been filled with different music, having never really had the opportunity to pick the radio station: talk radio or classic rock or the rotating mix. She wasn’t a very musically-minded child, though she had certainly grown to be a musically-independent young adult. She wasn’t really sure when the shift had occurred but the change had been for the better, she reasoned. It had gotten to the point where she could not stand silence. Silence was something to be beaten viciously with a blunt object. She thrived on sounds and music, even if she wasn’t really listening to it; it was more for the noise, the not-silence.
Around 10 she left them to their own devices and set up in the newly-furnished living room. She played her own music and wondered when exactly Ces would get in.
She anticipated the coming day, for it promised to be an amazing one – even though it started with a test.
[1487]
[5045/50000]
Coming up the stairs the smell of omelets hit her. Ces has been cooking. Liz was there as well, just putting bread into the toaster for her own breakfast and turning on the coffee maker – a pink affair decked out in Hello Kitty as well, another addition from Ces. Disappointed that she would have to wait for her bagel, Eleanor decided to get something else to eat. She got down her Pampered Chef microwave pot and began gathering ingredients for Coco Wheats. She added some of the chocolate almond milk in addition to regular milk for that extra chocolate kick.
--
After a quick shower she set to work writing her paper for English. The intro paragraph had been written the night before, so it was all downhill from there. She knocked the whole paper out in less than an hour.
--
She left for class just after noon, even though it had been moved to a building closer to her house. The regular lecture class had been replaced with an artist lecture in the Art Foundation building, which was, in essence, down the street. Realizing her timing error, she slowed down and walked all the way around the building to waste as much time as possible. Finally coming around to the front, the automatic doors opened, and she stopped dead, staring at the floor.
There, as if waiting for her, was a large duct tape arrow pointing to the stairs.
To anyone else, the arrow simply pointed out the alternative method of ascending the building. But to her and several of her friends it was a memento of one spectacular day last November. Yasha had come down for a visit, wanting to try out something that a friend of his had tried at her college: duct taping a person to a wall. The other group had been unsuccessful, but Eleanor weighed barely 100 pounds, and with Yasha’s ‘skills’ they were sure to succeed!
And so, four hours and three and a half rolls of duct tape later, she was suspended a foot above the ground in a sticky silver blanket. She then proceeded to peel herself off the wall, hanging precariously for a moment by one arm before dropping the last few inches. She walked almost a mile back to the dorm still wearing the tape, random bits of trash stuck to the sticky side by her friends.
Back to the present. Taking a few steps forward and around the other people gathered in front of the elevators she marveled at the arrow’s continued existence. I wonder if anyone will ever bother to pull the tape up? Wouldn’t it be awesome if it stayed there till I graduated? The elevator doors opened and she stepped inside.
The lecturing artist was a young Chinese-American woman, Helen Lee. She described herself as a glassblower and graphic designer, using blown glass vessels to make letters. She was interested in language and the body and how they intersect and interact. It was one of the more unique and engaging artist lectures Eleanor had been to, and was definitely glad the usual class had been replaced with this.
While walking to the Fine Arts Building and her next class she sent a picture of the tape arrow to Yasha and to Facebook as proof of its continued existence. She stopped in front of the giant yarn contraption spreading along the railing. There was still almost half an hour until class, so she pulled out her hook and set to work adding more to her octopus of the day before.
Time for class. Pulling out her keys she attempted to unlock her locker and get her tool box out. But the key wouldn’t turn. I just opened it last night! What happened? Ten minutes of trying and still nothing. She was frustrated. Another girl in the class noticed and tried her hand at it, before calling over the only male in the class for a try. Finally the tumbler turned and the lock popped open. Grumbling she pulled her box out and started unloading tools, setting to work.
She finished the tension lip and sanded the main container with successively finer grits of paper. But all the soldering stations were filled, so she spent a while wasting time. Finally, an opening. She soldered the bits of the lip together. She soldered pieces of wire to the bottom of the container which would become the rivets for the plastic pearl feet. Class ended, they all cleaned up. She kept working.
She had finished the rivets and was adjusting the angles of the feet when one of them broke off. It had been soldered with easy solder, the lowest heat one. There was nothing she knew of that could be done, and with the deadline just two days away (though one of them didn’t count) there was no time to start over. She was going to wait for Sheal to get back from her class and ask for help, but she was getting restless. She finished the rest of the box. The lid was assembled, the clay sand dollar was attached, the body was polished. She decided to just leave it and make up something about the foot coming off ‘in transit,’ rather than hot gluing it on and risking her grade.
As it was the other three feet didn’t quite match up. The box, even if it had all four, didn’t sit quite upright, listing to one side. When she held it up in the correct orientation two of the feet appeared to be almost centered along the bottom while the lone foot was sticking out the side. It was too late to fix it. The rest of the box was finished and clean; it would just have to sit crooked. She was not looking forward to the critique on Thursday.
It was 8 before she walked back home. She had gone to a sandwich shop earlier for dinner, ordering a salad because her hands were brown with copper dust and no doubt covered in other unpleasant substances. Such things had never really bothered her in high school. She would frequently forego the rubber tongs in the photo darkroom, preferring her own fingers, and consequently she imbibed small amounts of toxic chemicals over those four years. But this was a new kind of horribleness, one that she could actually see. So she ate her salad with a fork.
Arriving home a voice greeted her from the bowels of the house. It was Nicole. Setting her bag down – but not before fishing out her copper container – and grabbing a pint of ice cream from the freezer she ventured upstairs to Liz’s room to be social for once. Ces had gone to JMU for an event with a friend and would be back later that night. Eleanor sat on Liz’s nice carpet – hers was the only carpeted room in the house – eating her ice cream and lamenting the shortcomings of her project.
Soon the already ridiculous conversation going on around her divulged into reminiscing about Destiny’s Child and the Spice Girls and all those other good girl bands of the 90s. Eleanor sat there with her laptop – having traded her ice cream tub for the device after a while – listening and laughing at the antics of the other two. Her own childhood had been filled with different music, having never really had the opportunity to pick the radio station: talk radio or classic rock or the rotating mix. She wasn’t a very musically-minded child, though she had certainly grown to be a musically-independent young adult. She wasn’t really sure when the shift had occurred but the change had been for the better, she reasoned. It had gotten to the point where she could not stand silence. Silence was something to be beaten viciously with a blunt object. She thrived on sounds and music, even if she wasn’t really listening to it; it was more for the noise, the not-silence.
Around 10 she left them to their own devices and set up in the newly-furnished living room. She played her own music and wondered when exactly Ces would get in.
She anticipated the coming day, for it promised to be an amazing one – even though it started with a test.
[1487]
[5045/50000]
november 2
Mondays: the bane of every student’s life. Eleanor’s first alarm, on her phone, went off at 7:30. Snooze. 7:35. Snooze. 7:40. Snooze. 7:45. Snooze. The old-style alarm across the room goes off at 7:50, and she throws back the covers to sprint across and turn it off before it can wake anyone else in the house. Her phone goes off again and she dismisses the alarm.
Her eye inflammation is bothering her this morning, for once involving both eyes instead of just the left one. Eye drops. The small bottle is running low and there’s little hope of getting a new prescription anytime soon. She is not looking forward to relying on regular eye drops, but knows she won’t have much of a choice while at school.
She checks her phone. From Yasha: “Imm so chill right now like the beatles rockband i am the walrus chill.” Received: 1:30AM. The coherency of the text is amazing, considering just how much he smoked. She goes upstairs for her morning bagel, cinnamon raisin this morning. She forgot her plate again, and went back down to get it while the bagel toasted.
At 8:30 she put her laptop to sleep and finished packing her bag for class that day: Biology and English notebooks, planner, wallet, clicker, laptop, external drive. She headed out on her usual route to Biology, bundled against the cold and iPod playing. As usual, she makes it almost 10 minutes before class starts.
The professor continues the lecture about protein synthesis. Eleanor is only paying marginal attention, given that she already learned this in Biology lab several weeks before. She takes notes anyway, knowing that her poor test scores will mean she had to take the cumulative final and needing to make sure she would actually do well on it. She had set her sights on taking Anatomy back in freshman year, but Biology was a prerequisite that needed to be passed with at least a C. At midterm she had an F, due to being still mostly asleep for the first month and a half of the class. She had started taking caffeine pills three weeks ago and was improving, though it was be an uphill battle to make that C happen. She had recently resigned herself to taking math the next semester instead, hoping she wouldn’t have to repeat Biology over the summer ju
Her eye inflammation is bothering her this morning, for once involving both eyes instead of just the left one. Eye drops. The small bottle is running low and there’s little hope of getting a new prescription anytime soon. She is not looking forward to relying on regular eye drops, but knows she won’t have much of a choice while at school.
She checks her phone. From Yasha: “Imm so chill right now like the beatles rockband i am the walrus chill.” Received: 1:30AM. The coherency of the text is amazing, considering just how much he smoked. She goes upstairs for her morning bagel, cinnamon raisin this morning. She forgot her plate again, and went back down to get it while the bagel toasted.
At 8:30 she put her laptop to sleep and finished packing her bag for class that day: Biology and English notebooks, planner, wallet, clicker, laptop, external drive. She headed out on her usual route to Biology, bundled against the cold and iPod playing. As usual, she makes it almost 10 minutes before class starts.
The professor continues the lecture about protein synthesis. Eleanor is only paying marginal attention, given that she already learned this in Biology lab several weeks before. She takes notes anyway, knowing that her poor test scores will mean she had to take the cumulative final and needing to make sure she would actually do well on it. She had set her sights on taking Anatomy back in freshman year, but Biology was a prerequisite that needed to be passed with at least a C. At midterm she had an F, due to being still mostly asleep for the first month and a half of the class. She had started taking caffeine pills three weeks ago and was improving, though it was be an uphill battle to make that C happen. She had recently resigned herself to taking math the next semester instead, hoping she wouldn’t have to repeat Biology over the summer ju
A quick quiz and the class is over. She makes her way over to the library to wait out the hour between classes. At the beginning of the year she used that hour to nap, because getting up at 7:30 (though not really) was ungodly. She continued to nap even when she noticed her Biology grades slipping, not wanting to sacrifice being awake for one class for her naps. But in the end it became necessary to change her habits. So she started taking caffeine pills to wake up for Biology and bringing her laptop with her and using the library internet, wasting away the hour.
10:46 rolled around and she packed up and left for English. It was a review day. Wednesday was the Realism/Naturalism test, though the professor had yet to reveal if it was a take-home or in-class essay. She was secretly hoping it would be an in-class exam because she wouldn’t be in class to do it – though that would mean she’d have to take the final. In her two academic classes there were five exams, including the finals, but only four would count. If the first four were As or Bs, the student didn’t have to take the final. Otherwise the lowest of the five would be dropped. She already knew she had to take the cumulative Biology final, considering her first two were 75 and 65 respectively.
The review managed to take up nearly the entire class for once. And at the very end the professor posted the exam question online: take-home exam. Eleanor groaned. She would have to read the stories and write the paper that night, having skipped on the readings when they were actually due. She would have to give her paper to someone in the class to turn in for her since she would be missing the class. Jessica, a girl she tended to sit next to and who was also in her jewelry class, would be the lucky recipient of her finished paper. She walked home.
--
It was 1:30 before she decided it was time to get dressed. Morning classes were boring lectures and not worth the effort of getting dressed, so she had been going to any class before noon in her pajamas. Quickly, she pulled on clothes of dubious cleanliness and loaded her sewing bag for beginning textiles. It was perhaps her favorite class, especially now that they had moved past felting.
The previous class the graduate student teaching the class, Adrian, had given a demo on crocheting – something Eleanor’s mom had taught her to do when she was still in elementary school. A sudden revelation had showed her that a person can crochet onto anything with loops, and with that suggestion she had quickly ventured off into experimental territory. There was no worry about getting the actual coursework done, she was easily the fastest and most experienced crocheter in the class.
After a short slide presentation on tapestry in contemporary art, the students were released to work on the large group project that would progress over the remainder of the semester. Titled “Parasitic Growth” by the professor of the other textiles class, the two groups would be crocheting the banister and gridded railing over the first floor. Building off of another student’s chain stitches, Eleanor double-stitched a long section that would loop over one rail, around the top and attach to itself. When she started there wasn’t enough space to physically flip the yarn to go back and forth, so she improvised: she switched hands and slowly taught herself to crochet left-handed and upside-down. It was hard going and loose at first, and she had to switch hands after each row, but by the time it was long enough to flip she felt a bit better about the whole process – and more than a little proud of her improved skill set.
The long section finished, she began chain stitching loops that attached to each other and the grid and the already complete ‘scarf’. She changed colors at one point, accidentally taking the other end of a ball someone else had started – and that was still attached to where they had stopped. She worked rapidly, making loop upon loop and impressing Adrian, who was slowly crocheting bits of thread. At the end of class she clipped the yarn so her section wouldn’t interfere with someone working on the attached section. Stepping back, the bit she had done vaguely resembled an octopus.
Since she had failed to venture out the day before to the jewelry lab, she knew she had to spend some time that evening working instead. The crit on the containers was Thursday, and she still had a ways to go before she could be satisfied with what she made. Her container was copper and barrel-shaped with rounded ends. It would sit on its side and there was a square opening on the other side. The lid would have a small Sculpey Clay sand dollar fit in a prong setting and plastic pearls would be riveted to the bottom for feet. At that moment the main container was done – it just needed the feet and to be polished to a high sheen. The sand dollar was done, as was the base it would be fit to, but the tension lip that would hold the lid on wasn’t even started.
She set to work filing away the solder that still remained from when Sheal showed her how to do it, then going over the whole outside with 220- and 320-grit sandpaper. The second round of sanding was done with the flexible shaft drill and a bit of sandpaper taped into a dremel bit. It made the most obnoxious noise and coated her fingers in fine copper dust. But it was shinier and smoother, on its way to a high polish finish. She planned to solder one end of three pieces of copper wire to the bottom before finishing the polish, with the pearls being the last thing to go on.
Flattening the curves at the top so the lid would fit more flush, she measured the inside edges of the opening to fit the tension lid. She cut out strips for it and sanded the edges to be smooth and square. Deciding she had made sufficient progress for the night, and planning to go to Angela’s to watch House at 8, she packed her tools up and headed back to the house.
Dinner that night was two chicken patties with ketchup and ranch dressing for dipping, a mango, and a glass of chocolate almond milk. It wasn’t that she couldn’t have milk or soy, that wasn’t why she had the sweet drink. It just tasted good. Her mom had introduced it to her, a byproduct of working at an organic supermarket for almost two years. In the over breaks Eleanor worked there as well; it was her only experience in the work force, and it was a fun place to work. She missed it when she wasn’t there.
--
It’s 9 before she starts reading the stories for her paper. Going upstairs she puts the kettle on, dropping a bag of her favorite mango Ceylon tea into a mug with dancing hippos in tutus. She sits down and props her feet on the table while she waits, beginning to read. The kettle whistles before she gets very far. Must be because there isn’t very much water in there. She goes back to reading as the tea steeps. The timer goes off and she pours two full spoonfuls of honey in.
Coming back downstairs she sees a rather large cricket pressed into a corner, between the wall and a small spider’s web. She tries not to think about all the other bugs in the house and goes back to her bed to read and drink her tea.
[1713]
[3558/50000]
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