Obsessive Sea Glass Sorting

It is wintertime, and even though our climate here in the Pacific Northwest is generally pretty mild, going beach combing this time of the year is generally not such a pleasant experience. Driving rain, strong winds and 40-degrees is not such a good time, especially when the journey to the good "beach combing bits" on our beach involves climbing across fallen trees, mudslides and basketball sized rocks covered with slimy slippery sea weed that might offer up a twisted ankle if you're not paying attention. Besides, the days are short, and the good low tides tend to be in the middle of the night when you can't see anything, anyway.

Sea glass marble sections

I have been using part of this winter to "get organized." Which basically means I have been sorting "old pickings" from years gone by. I am slowly getting to a point, now, where I no longer have "random stashes" of unsorted sea glass from days gone by.

Maybe I have gotten a bit obsessive about getting everything sorted... but I have felt the need to get organized because-- as a seller of sea glass for jewelry and art-- I get more than a few "special requests" for particular colors of sea glass, and in specific sizes... and half the time I "don't know what I have."

Of course, I never really set out to "have a business" here, and being able to find enough glass to sell some is really more of a hobby... but still, I decided that since I do some "business like" things, maybe it would be appropriate to have a better sense of what I have available.

I am pretty close to having it all done, now. On one level, it makes me happy to know what I have... on the other, it makes me a bit sad that I have no more "secret stashes" I can pull glass from, when I get a special request. But that's just how life works out, it seems... there are always two sides to every story.

Always Organizing Sea Glass

I am home in the Pacific Northwest, after 3+ weeks in Europe.

Before we went on vacation, I'd been working on organizing my stock/accumulation/collection of sea glass. It has been a major project, since I have been keeping 40-odd years' worth of glass in about six separate locations, according to six previous ideas of what the "best way" to organize would be.

The result?

Chaos.

Since I don't just collect sea glass for myself, but also sell glass to artists and collectors, at least a minimal degree of organization has become important.

This recent organizational effort arose because I grew increasingly impatient with myself when people would send me email and ask me things like: "since you sell sea glass, do you have any such-and-such glass?" and my only real answer would be "I am really not sure, I'll have to check my stock."

Maybe that's a fair enough response, but "checking my stock" had become a major project.

Many moons ago, I had a gift shop. Whenever we got a request and were not sure if we had the item in stock-- and had to spend time searching-- we used to joke that we'd "started the black hole clock." Time counted off on the black hole clock was the wasted time we spent, looking for something we should have been able to find, right away. Sometimes the "clock" would run for just a few minutes... at other times, it would run for days, as several people wasted their time looking for something "we all remembered" to be somewhere in the stock room.

My black hole clock has been running far too often.

Hence the need to reorganize.

Maybe I will never be perfectly organized, and maybe such a thing is not even possible. But at least I would like to be able to respond to inquiries with some degree of confidence and promptness.