If at third you don't succeed, spontaneously combust

I have been having mask issues since before we left Oklahoma. Mask is the means by which I blast designs onto whatever it is I am carving and without it I can't do anything. {{Well, I could. It would just be a mess.}} Mask is also expensive and it takes a good two hours {{or more}} of work to get from an image on the computer to a blastable finished product. I'm sure that if you put the two things together {{expensive & time consuming}} you can come to a level of understanding about how badly my head wants to explode when there are issues with it.

Shortly before I stopped working in OK, I had had several packets of mask that had problems. One or two sheets of the pack of five or maybe all of them would come and just be bad. They wouldn't washout, the image wouldn't come out of them at all, some just blew to millions of little mask pieces during the washout process. Its INFURIATING. Having some general idea what I am doing, I have spent many hours on the phone with the mask company trying to decipher who's problem this really is. Of course, they say its mine, but they can't say why and of course because they can't say why, I say it's theirs. {{Really, I'd be ok with it being my fault if we could just figure out what *IT* is.}} I have emailed pictures, waited on next day shipping, asked a thousand questions and still, something seems to be wrong. One major question they cant answer is why I get a perfect washout & blast from, say half the packet of mask, and then the rest is shit? If I was indeed doing something incorrectly, wouldnt I just be dicking up all of the mask?

Yesterday, while trapped inside during Hurricane Irene, I decided to make some new designs and get them ready for blasting and painting. When I did the picture frame and piece of granite the other day I had no issues at all and was blissfully hopeful that the mask issue had some how solved itself. Wrong. Not one item from a FULL sheet of mask came out. Crap. All of it. All of it except one little 2"x2" piece. That one little piece was what was left over from a piece of mask from Thursday {{the day with the perfect washout}}. This gives me hope. Makes me think its not just me screwing something up. After all why did one piece {{one piece from a sheet of mask from whence they all came out perfectly}} come out when the pieces from the new sheet didn't? I'll be e-mailing the company today and trying again on a new sheet.

If it doesn't turn out I could always face reality and get a real job. Or maybe spontaneous combustion really is the answer.

I wonder how I'd look with my head of fire...