Time management skillz: learned.

“Patience: A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.” ~Ambrose Bierce

I have found that over the course of ,oh, the last five months, that I have been completely loosing track of time. It occurs to me in revealing moments here and there that a normal calendar abiding person wouldn’t find as fascinating. I was reading my friends blog the other day, who’s busy in Israel doing some schooling of her own, and the first couple sentences of her blog went like this “We’ve sneaked into a new month and I barely noticed its passing. Israel has the wonderful ability to wave a magic wand of blissful ignorance to the changing of seasons. I’m beginning to find it…well… ignorantly blissful.” and as I read that I kind of felt like I just had an ah-HA! moment… the one where ,thanks to her blog, I was reminded that I have no seasons changes to guide my internal calendar like we do back home. Here, every day is pretty much predictable, and while nice, can really mess with you. Anyone with me? No real spring (okok, things go from green to green and flowery here) no real winter, no fall (okok, it goes from green and flowery to green) . Summer, well, summers here most days. Anyway, long story short, its way too easy to lose track of my days. not that i'm complaining.

This week was interesting. And by interesting I mean I’m having to sit here and sort through the blur and try and get everything in the right order so I can properly write about it. So I’ll break it down by day.

Monday: We were graciously given the day to finish up Lars, the enormous pearl necklace enhancer. I do have to say here that the stone for this thing was so large I could have probably set using my toes and a tree branch to hammer the prongs down. Speaking of prongs, they were the size of support beams in a warehouse. So cutting them and setting the stone was like, easy, and i didnt even need my optivisor! So grateful me finished up the double-wide pendant and tossed it in the job box. Also: We also got our class pictures which we spent most of the day laughing at it. We all look so professional, which, made us laugh more. Looks: deceiving. We sure do clean up well.

Tuesday: we launched right into Mrs. Whatsherface’s ring. This one was a 7 stone channel-set in yellow gold. All that was required of us was to hi-grade all 7 stones, clean the casting up and set the stones. I have to say that this one went exceptionally well for me and I nailed this ring before I left the building at 3 p.m. *throws up victory sign* total job time: 3 hours, 10 minutes and every single table on every stone lined up like a military formation. WHOOT!Wednesdaythursdayfriday: Some folks were still working on Mrs. Whatsherface’s ring in the morning so I got to fiddle around a bit and spent the morning sharpening my gravers, slapping new sanding paper on my sanding sticks and touring the room chatting with classmates. Which I’m good at. Which makes me wonder if I shouldn’t be in the hospitality industry sometimes. What a nice break. The calm before the storm I like to call it. After break we were greeted with a dry erase board full of jewelry illustrations for our next project “Mrs. French’s Gifts”. PLURAL gifts. I thought this was a mistake and double checked the book. Sure enough. Gifts. Three. Here’s what I saw:This was a time management exercise for us. Three pieces of jewelry all requiring different things to complete them, three days to complete. The first piece was a simple heart shaped pendant, clean up the casting, set the stone, polish. Which an first sounded easy until I tried to cut seats for a heart shaped stone with awkward facets and an uneven girdle. So my first attempt at this was frustrating because my stone kept spinning to the left every time I pushed the prongs down. Which turned into a game of tweaking the prongs ever so subtly until I got it set straight. Which took forEVER. And it was so tiny I had to hold it with my fingers to do all of this which was a challenge unto itself. The second piece was an engagement style ring with a prong set marquise. At each end of the head was a v-shaped prong and two regular prongs on each side. The V-shapes don’t do much more then protect the points on the stone, so scooping out relief (deceptively easy sounding) for the points was easy. It was lining up the seats on the other four prongs and getting the stone level that was the challenge. And I thought I had this thing nailed until I went to do a final polish on it and realized that when I pushed the stone into the v-prongs I must have done it with more gusto then necessary and managed to crack the point on the stone. So I got to pull the broken stone and set a new one. And why did that happen? Well, too much gusto for sure, but also when I pulled the stone I looked at the broken point, and then at my relief hole through my loop to discover that I just hadn’t made that hole big enough, so the tiny hole plus the pressure shattered the point. So I re-drilled it deeper and reset a new stone. Glad it wasn’t real! And then we had to size it. Now the third piece was a hideous little number with a pear shaped stone, engulfed by 10 tiny channel set stones. Two of those stones were not only pink, but a hair smaller then the white stones. This was the pièce de résistance of the group. First, we had to clean it up, then size it up. Then we had to set all three thousand stones. Setting all of those tiny stones in the channel and doing it level and well was an event. I’m pretty sure some of my stones are sort of listing like a sinking ship, but since I decided that at that point that I was ok with that. Once we had all of the stones set, we got to size it down to a 6. Which, ok, not too big of a deal, but when sizing down a ring with this many stones in a channel, can prove to be a test of will and patience. So before I sized it down I made sure I tightened the stones really well. And that size down went beautifully. I only had three moderately loose stones. One of my classmates watched in horror as five of her ten stones clinked out after sizing. See, when you size a ring down, you change its structure, and it affects the seats of the stones. So too much too fast stretches it out and those stones fly like out of there like its on fire. By the end of the day on Friday I had two of the three pieces done, and was re-tightening the stones on the big-ugly. We’ll have half a day to complete these pieces on Monday!

All in all I’d say its going really well. I’ve said before that this guy grades really hard, and I welcome the criticism. I have gotten a couple projects back with C’s instead of CS’s because of little things wrong with them, but I’ve had great dialogue with Don about where I can improve some things and don’t particularly mind the grades, so long as I learn from it.

Its down to the wire here and while we’re all looking forward to moving on and getting out of here, we know that the next four weeks will be some of the hardest we’ll face. In the next four weeks we still have to complete two more JMA bench exams, 8 more projects and then tackle a final bench and written exam. Its a lot to think about and try not to stress out about. But that’s why I’m here!

Bring it on, I say.

Until next week, be well.