And Summer has arrived!!!!

You can't live on the East Coast of NC and not look forward to the summer, but you can if you are a Glassblower!! Especially one that has a retail shop in a tourist town!! Glassblowers generally shut down during the summer months and do maintainance on the equipment but when the tourist don't come till the middle of June through Sept. you have to do what you have to do.
I have an observation area in my store where you can watch (in the comfort of A/C) the activities of the studio(not in the comfort of A/C!!!)so people sometimes don't understand the heat we are dealing with. When you have a furnace that stays on 24 hours a day at 2100 degrees plus a glory hole spitting fire and heat out at around 2800 degrees plus an annealer that stays on at 1000 degrees Plus a pipewarmer that is on (which is equivalent to a gas grill being lit with 4 burners at high!) it gets a little warm.
As soon as school lets out my phone starts ringing for people wanting to take lessons and I try to explain to them about the heat but they never understand until they step foot in the studio. I tend to blow early in the day before the heat has built up too much and try to tell everyone that when they come in. Yesterday was a good example, I had a woman come in on Wed. with 5 kids in tow, wanting to know when i would be blowing. I wasn't on Wednesday because I had just had someone fix one of my fans and hadn't put everything back yet, but told her i would be on Thursday but she better get there before noon because of the heat. So yesterday at 10 minutes till 12 here she comes with all her kids. I had just finished working for 4 hours with NOTHING to show for it (which isn't alltogether unusual) and I saw her walk with an excited look on her face. Before she could even open her mouth I said, "I told you to get here before noon. I just finished for the day!" She was okay with it but I hate it when someone does that! I heard one of the kids apologizing for taking so long, so now I know what happened. I did have a student coming in for studio time at 2 and told her she was welcome to watch him, but they didn't.
I felt really sorry for my student, he was soaking wet after about 20 minutes!! i have to keep checking on them to make sure they don't faint!!
Its not an easy life!!

p.s. here's a few treasuries I am in from Etsy. Please check them out!
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http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=64175
http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list_west.php?room_id=57024
and my baby angel fish was shown on this page:
http://www.handmadenews.org/article/index.php?id=1492