I woke up on Friday morning and logged into work. I noticed that I was having a hard time reading my emails. The words just weren’t making sense. I figured I needed a few more minutes to let my Diet Coke kick in when I started to get the tell tale shimmery light in my peripheral vision.
Anyone who gets ocular migraines knows exactly what I am about to describe. It isn’t a migraine in the commonly understood sense (vicious headache, nausea) instead it’s like you are going blind in the weirdest fashion. It’s like looking through a kaleidescope of broken glass. It starts with the feeling you can’t quite focus then out of the corner of your eye the light starts shimmering in a jagged way and it slowly moves until it’s affecting your entire vision. Then you get bone tired and have a slightly bruised feeling in your brain. The only thing you can do, or at least I can do, is go sleep for an hour. When I wake up it’s entirely gone.
Keeping with the glass theme, thankfully unbroken here, I wanted to photograph my collection of etched glasses. The tall martini glass is part of a set of six a friend of mine gave me years ago. They are exquisitely pretty. When I am having a particularly rough day the only thing that will help is to have a drink in a really pretty glass. This is the glass I reach for.
The smaller ones are actually part of a new collection. I wanted to have smaller glasses on hand for dessert wines and when people wanted to have a shot of something. I thought etched, stemmed glasses would be more civilized than regular old shot glasses.
The thing is they are tricky to find. I don’t want a matched set. Part of the charm, I think, is that fact they don’t match. You would think it would be easy to find the odd aperitif glass in antique stores but I rarely do. At least in my neck of the woods. If I find them at all they are always in sets.
I’m going to have to reapply myself to this effort. I just discovered a new antique mall in Sacramento that is thousand and thousands of square feet. Certainly I can find one or two there.

I had a beautiful set of 4 etched glasses from my grandmother – now the set is down to one. The glass is very thin – they broke far too easily to be living in this house!
I just found an etched candy dish at the Goodwill yesterday. It was so beautiful. As I was standing in line to pay for it, I realized it had a big crack in it so I put it back on the shelf. Have you looked on Ebay?
I’m reading along here thinking we have an awful lot in common…then I see your etched glasses!!! I’m about to pounce on a nice old set at a nearby antique mall. Yours are great!