Yeah yeah, color inside the lines. Play by the rules. Follow the herd. Blah, blah, blah.

I'm dyslexic. I get things turned around or transposed in my  mind. It's okay, I've learned how to deal with it, how to make it work for me. Somethings I avoid until I absolutely cannot put them off anymore, then I do my best and have someone else check them for me.

Like anything having to do with numbers. *shudder* I went to 4 schools by the time I got to 6th grade. Each of them taught a different kind of math. Old math, New math, Logical math, and Gestalt math. Every time we moved I had to learn a new way of doing math. Numbers are not my friends!

Needless to say, some of that confusion was because I'm dyslexic. Not all of it though. Once I was diagnosed, a very good counselor told me that there would be times that I would just have to figure things out for myself. I took it to heart!

Sometimes, not knowing that you can't do something means that you find a way to do it that nobody else figured out. Take my jewelry for example.

I watched the video and sort of read the instructions - well, I skimmed the instructions. I missed the part where it says that you can't apply silver over glass because they have different coefficients of expansion - when heat is applied they expand at different rates and amounts. When you stop to think about it, that's a duh.

I experimented and failed a couple of times, then asked some experts and was told that it couldn't be done, then I got stubborn. I knew there had to be some way of making it work. I had one of those AHA!! moments and thought that if I could just pad the bottle out to the amount that would let the silver shrink to the size of the bottle when it was heated, then they'd shrink to a fairly close fit when they cooled.

Whatever I used had to be thin, millimeters count! It had to be burnable with no residue. It had to be pliable. It had to burn at a lower temp than the silver melts at. It had to be petroleum and mineral free to maintain the quality of the silver, and it had to be cheap. I ruminated on it for several hours.

I was fixing a hole in a cigarette paper with a small patch of toilet paper when it hit me. I could use toilet paper as a kind of papier mache to make the bottle temporarily thicker. I didn't even need to use glue - water would work!

Voila! I tried it and figured that since the silver clay I used shrank 10%, I should make the bottle 10% bigger. Okay, about 5 layers of TP. I did it, covered the bottle in TP then in the silver clay lace work, and fired it up. It worked like a charm! The silver didn't crack and break, the bottle came through just fine, everything fit the way it was supposed to, and I had a viable piece of jewelry that was way different from anything else I'd seen. When I cleaned it and polished it and did all the stuff that you have to do to make it bright and shiny, it was just beautiful!

I've done the same thing with other things in my life, sometimes figuring out something that someone else has already done, sometimes coming up with something totally new and different. My point is, we'd still be stuck in the stone ages if someone else hadn't done the same thing.

Sometimes it's a case of building a better mousetrap, others it's a case of being too stubborn to admit that something can't be done. I've always thought that the phrase, "It can't be done." is wrong. It should be, "We don't know how it can be done, yet."

I've got to admit, sometimes being stubborn has created a lot of tension and disharmony in my life. On the other hand, it's responsible for me being able to do something that even the "experts" said couldn't be done. So, all things being equal, I think I'll keep that bone deep mule factor and just deal with the things I can figure out how to do. I'll leave the numbers stuff to the accountants. That's why they get the big bucks.