It was May when last we spoke. May: a good month. In fact, a very good month. Lucky thing, that: the other 8 1/2 months of this year have been, by and large, absolutely unbearable.

My beloved Zima cat (whom you may remember as my occasional glass-shop assistant) died on March 31, at eleven and a half years old; she'd been mine from a tiny kitten. She lost a short but ugly fight with cancer, which had first appeared in early March. She became ill the same week that my beloved Shadow dog (whom you may remember as the dog we adopted to keep Tashi from eating any more furniture) also got sick. His illness was harder to identify, and so we tried every treatment for every symptom. For weeks this went on: I gave him pills and shots and subcutaneous fluids and force-fed him and cooked special food for him and logged hundreds of road-miles back and forth between home and various vets. I dropped the classes I was taking; I cut back on work. In my grief at losing Zima, it was out of the question to give up on Shadow. Bless Don's sweet, kind heart: he understood.

In April, it finally began to seem as if all our work had not been in vain. The vets were throwing around words like "miracle." Slowly the daily course of medications and special foods slackened, until there were no more shots, no more fluids, and far less scrapple and lunchmeat in Shadow's food bowl.

In mid-May, Don and I took a week's vacation in West Virginia. We took the dogs with us. Shadow and Tashi climbed mountains and strained at deer and jumped in lakes like natural-born athletes; Don said Shadow was in better shape than we'd ever seen him. While we were in West Virginia, Shadow began to eat plain old dry food again, for the first time in two months.

In late May, I felt like the misery of trying to keep on top of work, school, and wifedom simultaneously with grieving for one pet and fighting for another's life was finally behind me. For the first time in months I could look into the future at a point farther out than a day or two, and be unafraid. It was during this time, for example, that I began to formulate plans for the dogwood windows project: it would be a big one, but hey, nothing compared to staring the grim reaper in the face and telling him he'd been a houseguest for long enough; his impositions upon my family had grown tiresome; don't let the door hit you in your ass on the way out.

On about June 7, Shadow developed a cough.

On June 11, Shadow died of congestive heart failure.

I lost my shit completely for a while. I had given everything I had to trying to save Shadow; I had nothing in reserve for taking care of myself in the event that I should lose that fight. Stained glass was not at the top of my to-do list.

Now, here we are. Four months later. I guess I'm about through the process of crawling out of the deep black hole I've been hiding in. In July, we adopted a new husky to keep poor lonely Tashi company; last week we adopted a new cat for no real better reason than that no one else wanted her and she'd spent months in a 2x2x2 cage at PetsMart. My sporadic fits of crying are much reduced, although the junk food/comfort food habits of the spring and summer seem to be sticking around for the long haul.

Last month I had a birthday (30, for which the most appropriate celebration seemed denial, so I dyed my hair neon punk-rock red). As my gift, I asked Don to build me a workbench for glass work. Et voila:

The only must-have functional feature of the workbench as I proposed it to Don was a couple of very, very shallow shelves, just tall enough to slide in a plywood workboard containing stained-glass-in-progress. You would think that cats would neither walk nor nap on top of little pieces of cut-up glass, but experience has taught me otherwise, so these cat-proof shelves are absolutely key. As Don built them, they are just perfect, and I am most tickled. Handy husband to the rescue, indeed.

In the last week, I've visited Weisser Glass twice. They moved into a new location while I was laid low with grief and self-pity; the new space is at least four times the size of the old one and I find it sort of intimidating somehow? Like, if I was going to peel my sad self off the couch long enough to come patronize your business establishment, the least you could've done was kept the old, familiar, cozy, safe store just long enough for me to get my bearings. Gosh, I sure hate it when the world doesn't revolve around me. But anyway, I have purchased a bunch of nifty things:

• Lead came, a bit wider than I've worked with before, in order to accomodate--
• Strongline steel reinforcement strips, to be slipped in between lead and glass for extra strength
• U-shaped zinc framing, a bit skinnier than I've worked with before, in order to accomodate--
• Pre-routed oak wood framing that you can slide a zinc-framed panel into, the purchase of which Don reacted to as if I'd told him I was seeing another man ("You're two-timing me! I could have built this! Why didn't you let me build this? How much did you pay for it?")
• 60/40 solder, because while I was able to find the 50/50 solder hidden deep in the bowels of Don's workbench, I couldn't find 60/40 (the full listing of the many glass tools he'd appropriated in the last 3 years would require an entry all its own)
• Flux brushes, because you can never have too many
• Horseshoe nails, because somehow mine rusted while sitting unused for three years

Still need to procure plywood workboards on which to build the windows, and a zinc saw, or a plain old hacksaw with a 32 TPI (teeth per inch) blade, because the rust that got my old nails also got my old zinc saw. And still need to finalize life-size production patterns; I keep procrastinating on that because I'm not actually sure whether the oak framing is appropriate for this project (might make installation harder). If I don't use it, that affects the width of the window, which affects the pattern, which makes my head swim with the effort at keeping straight the math, in sixteenths of an inch. I actually got really good at fast conversion and addition of eighths into decimal while Shadow was sick, because once he started eating again, I measured and logged everything he ate or drank. For some reason I chose to draw the line at recording in sixteenths of a cup. Because filling up the lower half of homemade Microsoft Word medication logs with tiny print recording the helpings of chicken, beef, rice, kibble, canned food, scrapple, lunchmeat, and cheese that my dog ate each day for two months in increments of a relatively fast and loose 0.125 cups is clearly on the safe side of the crazy line, right?