So. When you look at my Livejournal for last year, there's this big gap in my jewelry-talk for several months. There's a lot of talking about other things, but very little about jewelry. And that's because, as I mentioned before, there was this storm. (Ike, I mean.) The somewhat-shortened version is this: we decided at the very last minute to evacuate. We spent a few days at my aunt's house and then figured out that we weren't going to be able to get home or go back to work for at least a week or so, and we took off on a big road-trip to visit my husband's parents in Ohio. (We hauled nearly all my beads all the way there, too, jumbled up with a lot of other stuff in the back of Rob's Toyota.) The only other bead-related thing, while we were being displaced persons, was that while we were in Ohio, my friend Karen and I decided to meet up, and since she lives in the Detroit area, we decided on Toledo as a good sort-of-halfway meeting point. And since I had mentioned bead stores, she found one for us to visit - it turned out to be Meant To Bead, which is an awesome shop. If you're ever in Toledo, I highly recommend it. I know I bought a number of things there, but the one that I have photographic evidence of is this string of Czech glass rondelles (which, as you can see, got made into a bracelet later):
I love those colors and I never would have thought of putting the purple in there, but it really works.
Well, so anyway - back to the story - we got home, eventually, and we found a wet apartment and a landlord telling us that everybody who lived on the first floor had to move out so they could gut the whole floor (I think they had to go right down to the beams) and start from scratch. I don't really think it was liveable, anyway, but obviously we had a bad scramble for a while trying to get a new place and get moved and clean up the old place. And of course we also had to figure out how much of our stuff was salvageable, which luckily was quite a lot. There wasn't nearly as much water in our area as there was in other parts of town - the FEMA guy who looked at it said he thought it was about a foot, although there wasn't a really clear waterline.
So we found an apartment on the mainland and we got moved; my husband said he didn't want to live in Galveston and risk having to go through that again someday, although he has relented a bit on that recently. Meanwhile, we also had to go back to work. We both worked for the university medical center, which had been heavily damaged - Rob went back to work more or less as normal, but my office was in a building that wasn't habitable, and so we went into temporary quarters for a while, and then we worked at home for a while, and then in November the shoe dropped, and half my office was laid off, including me. Rob's job was ok, although his job duties were shuffled around a bit in this same process. I decided, after some flailing around about it, that I wasn't going to look for another job as a secretary, and I have been a student all this year, studying medical coding, and I should be done in a couple of months. Luckily our financial situation was such that I could do this. So while I have not done a huge amount of jewelry-making over the past year (I always feel like I ought to be studying!), my jewelry-making story does pick up again at the end of last year. And I'll cover that part later!
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