catsittingstill

The Atlanta filkers had another housefilk, this time at Myra's house (thanks for having us over, Myra!) and Alice kindly offered me crash space for the weekend. I brought my canoes so Alice and I could go canoeing, too.

You would think that would be enough fun for one weekend, but it turned out Beth and Jennifer were going to a bead show Saturday morning and invited me along.

This totally brought out my inner dragon. There were pannikins and firkins and heaps and strings of treasure everywhere I looked. Hand blown glass beads, beads put together out of tiny blobs of molten glass, beads made from precious stones, beads of wood and bone and butterfly wings (or at least beetle wings; they're iridescent green and very light.) And among the others were strings and strings of various sized beads in a bin marked "touch me."

So, I did. And I was thinking about their pretty color(s) (mostly teal and sapphire blue, if I remember) and their pleasant weighty solid feel... and they started changing color in my hands. They were "mood beads." Like mood rings, with a material inside that changes color at different temperatures. But unlike the muddy, slow, unprepossessing mood rings I remember from my childhood, their colors were vibrant, and if the change was stately, it was still fast enough to change visibly while I watched. I kept closing my hands around them and then looking to see what color they had turned. Like a jawbreaker, but less unsanitary.

After I went around the whole show, I went back and dickered with the stall holder over a couple of small strings of the mood beads. I thought I could put them together to make a bracelet but one small string wouldn't be enough to go around my wrist. I got some wheel shaped beads and some barrel shaped beads, which I thought would be more interesting, alternated, than a bracelet of beads all the same size. This turned out to be a happy idea, because the wheel shaped beads and the barrel shaped beads change colors at different rates. Beth gave me some twine when I got home to string the beads on. I gave the mimmoths each a bead (a glass bead I had found at a stall run by a beadmaker Beth and Jennifer knew.) And I put together the bracelet to just roll over my hand when I make it skinny, which means it hangs down from my wrist, so the beads on the top get their temperature somewhat more from me, and the beads on the bottom get their temperature somewhat more from the room.

Right now the beads on the top are a beautiful royal blue, with the barrel shaped beads being slightly lighter blue (I'm not sure if this is because of their slightly less firm contact with my skin, since the wheel shaped beads kind of prop them away from me, or if this is because the barrel shaped beads have a slightly smaller mass and thus can be expected to react faster to changes in temperature.) The beads on sides shade through green and yellow to rose and the ones on the bottom are purplish, with the wheel shaped beads being almost magenta and the barrel shaped ones being halfway between lavender and purple. I keep turning them around to put different colors on top and they keep changing. They are mesmerizing.

Does anybody know why these mood beads are so much more colorful than the old mood rings? Was there some sort of change in the chemistry or the production process used? Because I remember those mood rings and they were *nothing* like this. They barely changed colors at all--usually they were meh gray or bleagh brown.

At the housefilk I pulled out some of my new songs, specifically Douglas and One Salt Sea and In Providence Skies, and was very pleased when people joined in. Michael was there, with his guitar, and courageously undertook to play some requests and backup for other requests. Myra plays the ukelele and this time I really got to hear it so I can testify to this. We were having so much fun singing and telling stories that we didn't leave until nearly eleven, which is considerably later than I had planned on, but it was well worth it.

On Sunday Alice and I drove up to Lake Allatoona, which is very pretty country, and went canoeing in, um Red Top State Park. We put in at the first ramp we came to, which turned out to be quite busy and next to a part of the lake that gets a lot of big fast motorboats. We still had fun, but it make takeout pretty tricky. And it was a good thing both Moxie and Constance (and Alice) handle waves well. The mimmoths rode in the dry bag and were well behaved when we let them out at our lunch stop.

When we finished up we took a half hour or so and drove around the park (very pretty) and found two places farther in that would make better put-ins provided the water level doesn't drop too far. We'll probably go again some time in October, and we'll try those places and see if they work better.