The Final Countdown

Hey guys! The end of the last day.  It has happened.  All there is left to do is wake up in the morning, hang around until my flight, fly in a sewing machine plane to Denver, hang around for a while, and THEN be HOME!  Woo!

Today was pretty cool.  I had very little to do that I could do in the amount of time left.  So, Books #1 and #2 are COMPLETELY FINISHED, but Book #3 is languishing in a twilight zone of the next thing that has to happen to him is hard and takes a while so I couldn't do it in an afternoon and then put it on hold for travel. So, he will continue on his eternal progression next week, when I am home and my package of tools and supplies gets there.  I decided to mail most of my gear home so that I could just carry on my bag and not worry about getting pulled over for carrying lots of sharp and/or pointy objects. 

Tonight we had the traditional pizza party that every class does on the last night of class, except this time it was ACTUALLY FUN.  I know, right?  Chris (who does conservation work for the Church) is apparently an avid ukulele player, and he brought one of his ukulales (apparently he has quite the collection, as well as a YouTube account full of videos of him playing songs on the ukulele...which is pretty spectacular when you think about it) and we all sat around and had a weirdly fun improptu ukulele sing along.  Also, it turns out that I just really like parties with classy artistic tipsy people.  Maybe it's just my perception that other people are half drunk when they drink at all, and I borrow some of their perceived uninhibited'ness for myself.  If that makes sense at all.  Anyway, it was fun! Woo!

So, Susan leaves tomorrow early so we said goodbye tonight.  Apparently Nashville is quite the hub of book arts, so I said I would try to visit sometime.  Which really would be great.  It kind of struck me tonight at the party where I was actually having fun that it is weird and cool the sorts of people who I get to know at these bookbinding classes.  I mean, obviously there are crazy and crazy annoying ones out there,  but a lot of them are interesting, fun-to-know kinds of people.  It's fun to imagine that I'm entering a field where maybe there are more cool eccentric interesting people than there are jerkface mean people.  Because if you're a mean jerkface, chances are you are looking for a higher paying job than a design binder or conservationist.  Not that there aren't notable exceptions...but none of them were in THIS class, so happy day.  Anyway, life is pretty great, is all.  I'm excited to go home, and excited to work, and excited to get my career going.  Which is more than I've been able to say for quite some time, so, Telluride--MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.