Taking a break now

My week of having the house to myself is just about over. I didn't quite get done with all the work that I'd hoped, but I got just a tiny bit of gardening done and I did lots of other useful stuff. Like laundry. I did tons and tons of laundry. At this point I'm thinking that I should maybe even get out some of the winter stuff I put away and wash that too, and then I'll have washed just about every article of clothing I own, except maybe for the costumes.

And now I'm debating should I put clean sheets on the bed now or wait til tomorrow. And I am wondering if my husband is coming home or not. He was nice enough to call me last night and tell me that there was a slight problem and that he might not be coming home til tomorrow. But then he doesn't follow up with a phone call today telling me if the problem is resolved. I'm currently going with the assumption that he is coming home later tonight. I should officially call it quits for a while on the cleaning and the sorting and just change the sheets and have a bath and call it a day.

Again, it is much like a few weeks ago. I took bags of trash to put on the curb, so why don't I see more empty space in the house? I did make a little progress. Before he left, my husband bagged up some clothes that he didn't want anymore, and this morning I donated the unwanted clothing to a garage sale. And then I threw out a bag of my own clothes that I decided wasn't worth donating.

So I made some slight progress, and then I started to over think things again. Like should I keep these candy tins from Christmas? I know that some really beautiful things can be made with polymer clay and other odd things such as little candy tins. But I'm not especially good with the polymer clay yet, and while I'm into ceramics I probably won't take time out to learn about polymer. So do I want to hang on to the tins until such time as I want to work with polymer? On the one hand, the tins are small and not really taking up that much space. On the other hand, it will start to add up, and some of this stuff needs to go.

I did a lot of work Wednesday and Thursday, and I even managed to get some work done yesterday after the mammogram. I was the first one there, and they let me go in a little bit early. Today, I felt a little bit sick, and spent most of my time watch DVDs. I was not really sick enough to excuse the inactivity, but I guess I've again gotten to the point that I just don't push myself to do something when I don't expect to see much for my efforts.

It's early, but the clean sheets and a bath really sound like a good idea.

Why am I a hoarder?

You might remember that I am supposed to be cleaning house this week. I would rather be in Oklahoma with my husband and doing a bit of knitting in between the occasional tourist thing. But I didn't go because Friday I have a mammogram scheduled, and I figured that with a few days of having the house all to myself I might get some cleaning and sorting done.

Yesterday I threw out a couple of things that I just never ever part with. One thing was part of a costume, and I never throw away costumes, especially those that I spent many hours making myself. The second thing I threw away was a pair of jeans. I never part with jeans that actually fit me, and I tend to hang on to the old ones that don't fit anymore, just in case.

The costume thing I threw out was a sort of bat-wing thing that attached to a dress I wore three years ago. It was uncomfortable to get into, it doesn't store well, and I don't think that it is my best work. But I've kept it for all these years, just in case. Yesterday I decided it was just too much in the way for something that I only wore once three years ago.

The jeans had to go too. They were my most comfortable jeans, and I've worn them so much this year that they were starting to get holes in the knees. They make patches for such problems, and I would have just patched them and kept them for ceramic class and such, but I think that if the knees were unraveling like that that perhaps other areas would soon follow, and those areas are not so easily patched. It would be quite embarrassing to be out in public and suddenly find that the seat of one's pants has split.

So while I'm putting things in the trash, in go the wings and the jeans. Of course I haven't put the trash out to be picked up yet, so there's still a chance that I'll change my mind and retrieve them. But for right now I'm still thinking that I should just part with the items and be done with it.

Other things that seem just as obvious are not yet going in the trash. There are books that have been damaged that I will probably never read again, but due to the damage I can't sell them either, so I resist just throwing them away.

What I'm really having trouble with is my record collection. I am pretty sure that they should go, but not today. I haven't listened to any of the records since I've been here. Not that I don't like them still, but listening to records is something that I do when I'm alone, and when we first moved here I didn't have that much alone time that wasn't being spent on some school thing, so I didn't listen to them much then. So the record player wasn't put in a convenient location, but I just figured that I would move things around after I'd been here a year or so and finished with school and such. I didn't move stuff around that much, and then a bunch of other stuff happened, and my record collection wasn't much of a priority. And then there were floods, and during one of them the entire collection got wet. Not much, just a bit damp at the bottom, but I didn't notice it. So when I finally got it into my head that I should maybe move the record collection and maybe even get out the record player, the record sleeves were all stuck together at the bottom. I suppose that the records themselves are still playable, but the sleeves are ruined. With some of my records, I was just as attached to the album cover as I was the album.

So I must decide if I should throw out the whole record collection and the record player, or if I should just throw out the album covers and put the records in new paper sleeves and then maybe make a minor repair to the record player. If you've noticed that your record player looks to be in working order, but whenever you play a record it sort of groans a bit during each rotation, you probably need to replace a rubber O-ring. Rubber degrades over time, especially things that got a lot of use, such as the record player you used as a teenager. So if you take apart the casing you'll probably see that one of the moving parts has this one inch diameter rubber ring around it, and the rubber ring looks like something took a little bite out of it. Unfortunately, there probably aren't a lot of people still selling rubber rings for fixing record players, so you'll just have to buy some that were made for other things until you find one that fits.

It seems a shame to just throw out the record player now that I know how to fix it, but I'm just not sure that I want to keep that and the records that I haven't played in over three years, especially now that looking at the damaged album covers just makes me ill. But the records are still where I moved them last year, and the record player is still in the back room, and I don't really have any plans to throw any of it away this week.

What I sometimes wonder is why I now have such trouble throwing things away? When I was younger this wasn't such a problem. Not that I ever was a neat freak, and not that I ever saw the necessity of cleaning things right away. I doubt that I will ever enjoy doing much of anything that requires the use of a vacuum cleaner, dish washing liquid, a mop, a broom, a scrub brush, furniture polish, etc.... But I do remember that when I was younger I enjoyed the sorting process that proceeded throwing away things that I no longer needed. I used to read old letters and cards, and look at magazines and pictures, and reorganize my clothes and my art supplies. Sometimes I found things that I thought I had lost. Once in a great while I even found money. Usually, it was not an unpleasant bit of business at all.

But now I put such things off until I just can't function until some sorting gets done, or until I've lost something that I just can't do without, or until there has been a flood or some other dreadful thing that happened. Last year we had a flood that was bad enough that I had to remove the carpet in the bedroom and the hallway, and so I had to sort and box up things in order to move them out of the room so that I could move the furniture and such before I started to rip up the carpet. I think that is the last time I got any real work done in this room.

Once I put aside some time for the task, I have no trouble doing things like throwing away actual trash. I can throw out the expired coupons and the junk mail and the notes reminding me of a doctors appointment and last week's sales ads. And then after I deal with the trash I can collect the towels and the socks and do the laundry. But then I can't seem to deal with the rest of it. The t-shirts that I don't wear anymore except on the day that I'm doing laundry usually can't be thrown out, even if they just seem to take up space, because most of them have sentimental value. I might want to wear them again, and even if I don't I'd like to make something else out of them. I might make them into pillows or book bags, or if I get enough of a certain theme I could make a quilt of them. But I definitely do not want to throw most of them away.

I am tripping over art supplies, yarn, and other craft stuff that I can never seem to get organized. There are always just a few more books that don't seem to fit anywhere on the shelves. I keep finding a few holiday things here and there that somehow did not get boxed up the last time I put stuff away, but either I don't know which box the items are supposed to go in, or I know exactly which box they are supposed to go in and it is either the box at the bottom of the stack or it is really difficult to get to in some other way and it hardly seems worth the effort. And there are just all of these little things that either don't have a permanent storage place or I don't remember where they go or what I meant to do with them.

I have maybe two or three hats, but they don't have a place for them. If I had a lot of hats, depending on what kind of hats I had I would have a box to keep them in or a hat rack, or maybe if I had a collection of baseball caps I'd have a shelf to display them. But I just have a couple of baseball caps and visors that I can't actually find when I need to keep the sun off my face, and I have a knit cap or two someplace that I can't seem to locate when it gets cold. So I have a few hats that I toss here or there and trip over them most of the time, except when I might actually want a hat. Oh, but I do have a few more hats, but those hats have places since they are costume hats and are either on a shelf in the back room or stored with the costumes.

And then there are boxes and bottles and jars, and they are scattered everywhere, but I have trouble getting rid of them because I'm quite certain that I will need them at some point for something. As an artist I am always needing boxes and jars for something, but it is hard to figure out ahead of time which of them might be useful for what and when, and then I don't know where to store them until I figure that out. I have about ten twelve ounce empty Coke bottles, which I am quite certain I put aside for some purpose, but I can't remember what, and that must have been six months ago. I have decided now to throw them away, since if I remember what they are for I can always go and buy some more Cokes and save those bottles instead. But other things are not as easily and as quickly replaced as empty Coke bottles, so they do not seem to get thrown away, even after six months.

And I am not sure how I ended up with a colander in my bedroom. But the really puzzling thing was finding it contained a tube of sunblock, a few packets of seeds, aspirin, and a few items from a store Condom Sense.

I do not know why all of that is such a problem for me. Is some of it like a mental illness, and did I inherit it from my grandfather? Is it just a bunch of bad habits I picked up after marrying my husband? Is it just a result of no longer living under my mother's roof and not having to live by her rules anymore, and this was all going to be a problem for me after I moved away from home no matter where I moved or who I married?

Back to work now. I must get the laundry done today so this evening I can relax and enjoy watching LOST.

I think that I have finally decided to stay home this week

I keep changing my mind. I wanted to go to Oklahoma with my husband, and I wanted to leave a couple of days early so that we could go to a ren fest there. Last week when I found out his schedule, it all seemed like a good idea, but then I remembered that I have a mammogram scheduled for that Friday and my husband will not be coming home til the following Sunday. I decided that I can't just skip the mammogram, but I was considering going on part of the trip and then taking a bus home on Thursday. My husband seems to have thought that I'd already decided not to go and had made plans around me not going. Not that I'm upset about that, but I guess that means he wasn't that into the idea of us going to the ren fest. Not that we couldn't go to another ren fest right here that same day if we wanted to, and we haven't made plans to do so, it just seemed like a good idea to go to the one in Oklahoma. I don't think that we have enough money to spend on making special trips to go to them when they're out of town, and this is the first time that he's been scheduled to work in that part of Oklahoma at the right time of the year to go to this one.

Anyway, we're probably not going to the Oklahoma ren fest because I have this damned mammogram scheduled, and we're probably not going to the one here either. Just not that excited about the idea of it at the moment. Now that I'm not going out of town I have no special plans for Memorial Day weekend. Not that I ever have special plans for that weekend. Memorial Day is one of those weird Monday holidays that I forget about until I try to get into the library or something like that. We don't do anything. Often it isn't even a holiday for us. Neither of us works in a bank or anything. When I have a job it is usually retail, or maybe a movie theater or food service. Not a holiday for those jobs. The only reason my husband has the day off is that it's assumed that all of his potential customers have plans for the day.

In any case, he's had the whole week off already, and we haven't done anything that special. We went to see the Indiana Jones movie, and we went to see some other movie, and basically we've run some errands and gone to lunch and such and haven't really gotten much of anything done. We helped my brother out with something Wednesday, but other than that, not much. Made a dent in the work last week, so I imagined that since he was home we'd be doing a lot of work this week, but no. Thursday we went to Fort Worth to run some errands, but other than that it seems like he's spent a lot of his time in here blogging and such. So for the most part it has been a pretty boring week.

Sorry. I have been corrected. While I have done nothing, the husband has washed some of the dishes. And of course I didn't notice because I haven't gone anywhere near the kitchen this week.

Anyway, I'm imagining that I will get all kinds of work done next week after he leaves, but now I realize that probably won't be the case either. For one thing, he isn't working a full week, which was one of the reasons I wanted to go on this particular trip. He won't be leaving til Tuesday. I rarely get much done that first day, so I don't picture getting a whole lot done on Tuesday. I will try to work on Wednesday and Thursday, but it usually takes me a while to really get into it. I won't get anything done on Friday, cause that is when I have that damned mammogram. While I don't expect for it to take up that much of my actual time, I just don't picture myself being that useful for the rest of the day. And then it will be Saturday, and I probably won't get that much done then either. I'll probably get some work done, and then I'll wait around for him to call and tell me if he's coming home that night or if he's too tired and will be staying over and coming home Sunday. He rarely says that, but if he even when he does I've already planned the day as if he was coming home Saturday night, and at that point it's very unlikely that I will start getting out things to work on after I've probably spent a couple of hours putting everything away.

So while I've been consoling myself that while I don't get to go out of town at least I'll be home all week and probably get a lot of work done, I've just now realized that except for Thursday and possibly Wednesday I probably won't get any work done that I wouldn't get done on any other normal day.

Nothing keeping me from doing laundry or getting work done in the garden and such this weekend. Just tradition to be lazy I suppose.

We go to lunch and run a few errands and such, and then we don't do much. I should think of something that needs to be done that I'd really need his help for, but nothing comes to mind. No two person jobs that I can think of. Most of it is the other way, with the idea of two of us trying to clean something or even work in the same room never quite working out as we'd just get in each other's way. There are exceptions to that, mainly in the garden, but it is to hot to do much serious gardening.

But we do go out to lunch. In theory this is because we have nothing to eat, but it is more because we haven't done enough about cleaning the kitchen. Over the last few days we have been to several stores to buy food, but much of this was not regular food, but more stuff that goes with food. We have bought sodas and chips and mustard and olives and that sort of thing. So while we have gone out and come back with bags from the grocery store and even made a special trip to a couple of stores that aren't near home and we don't normally go to, somehow when it is time for lunch we still can't come up with anything to eat. So we have been to at least one restaurant everyday this last week.

Most of Saturday I felt sick. I haven't felt especially good most of the week, but most of Saturday I felt pretty bad. And I think this is because I'm getting old, and it is hot outside. I feel bad for no other reason that it is hot outside. Not that I'm spending that much time outside, other than the daily stuff that I do in the garden such as watering, which is mostly in the morning. And it isn't really hot yet. Technically, this isn't even summer yet. I don't think that it was even 95 yet, and I'm complaining about the heat. I must be just getting old. The heat has only really bothered me these last few years. It is usually the cold that I cannot stand. I'm still really sensitive to the cold. I take a sweater with me nearly everywhere even now, as I get uncomfortable in an air conditioned room of 70 degrees. So it isn't that my preferences switched to liking cold weather, just that I no longer enjoy the warm weather either. Unfortunately there isn't much of a cure for this. Unless I win the lottery and become a snowbird I'm just stuck with it.

My brother bought something for cooking outdoors, and Wednesday he bought another one. They both look very similar to me, but apparently one is for smoking while the other is better for grilling. So we are all going over Monday for lunch to have hotdogs and hamburgers and such. And that is the end of the big holiday plans, and I expect to spend the rest of the day in bed watching DVDs.

A word about knitting (or, at least, a word I found while knitting)

Faggot.

I don't know, but it rather leaped off the page at me. Faggot. Just wasn't expecting to see this word in the knitting books.

The original meaning of the word (or, at least, the oldest meaning of the word that I am aware of) just meant a bundle of sticks. You would gather a bunch of little sticks and tie them together and keep them around the house for when you needed to start a fire. And perhaps there were other uses for bundles of little sticks, like maybe you need them for basket weaving or something.

And then later it became slang for homosexuals, and I think maybe in some places they still call cigarettes faggots. But in either case I don't think that I've ever heard the word used in casual conversation, and the few times I've heard someone yelling the word it did not mean anything as harmless as a bundle of sticks, and I don't think it was meant to refer to cigarettes either.

So I'm looking through this book on knitting, and there are pictures of faggoted ribs and faggoted ladders. The panel called "tuck-stitch variation of faggoted ladders" is just wonderful and would be good for a costume, but I don't think I'll be able to duplicate it, at least not anytime soon. And if the definition of the word faggot just means bundle of sticks, then I suppose that is a good description of the design. But it still seems very odd to me, and you'd think that all these years later that someone would have come up with another word.

Can you picture a group of old ladies discussing their knitting? That's a lovely faggoted ladder you've made there. If I had the time I'd put some faggots here on the side of this sweater. If I hadn't have decided to put in faggoted ribs I'd be finished with this by now.

I'm sure that I'll have more to say about knitting later, but for now I just had to share that little bit.

Gardening

I like the idea of gardening. I like the idea of having a bunch of vegetables growing in my backyard and just wandering around picking whatever looks good for dinner. I like the way the big green healthy plants look.

Anyway, I do like the idea of gardening. The actual fact of doing the gardening is different. I do not so much like the sneezing and the bugs and the digging and the weeding and the other work. My attempts at gardening are not as impressive as some other people's. And I rarely seem to get the timing of it right. So while other gardeners in the area are now eating plenty of stuff from their gardens, I have few big healthy plants and a lot if little seedlings.

From my garden I have collected two spears of asparagus, one very small bell pepper, and a lot of cilantro. I can't really make much from that. I could also have a bit of mint or thyme, but there's not much I could do with that either. I love cilantro, but I can't do much with it until I have tomatoes and peppers and onions. By the time I have tomatoes, the cilantro will mostly be gone.

We used to be fond of watching a British comedy called The Good Neighbors (or The Good Life) and there was an episode that was harvest week, and they had to harvest every single thing that they had grown or it would all spoil. But that was a comedy, and in real life there's no such thing as harvest week, unless you are only growing one type of crop. In real life there are constantly things to do, stuff to pick, stuff to plant. But somehow I don't have the hang of it and don't have enough different things ready at the same time to even make much of a salad.

With worrying about the ceramics and everything, I didn't plant things and such when I should have this year. A few of the pepper plants are getting big enough, but most are still not even yet a foot tall. Same with the tomato plants, and eggplants, and squash. I didn't bother planting much of the stuff that is direct from seed. But two years ago I planted a cilantro, and I've gotten a lot of volunteer plants since then. I am overrun with sunchokes, which are only at an edible stage during the winter and I didn't dig any this year, so I'll have a lot next year. The asparagus isn't really old enough to produce much, and most of what it did produce this year came while I was out of town for the week of spring break, so I didn't eat any of that. We have a fig tree, which we planted in the middle of a drought and hasn't grown enough to produce anything. We have no other fruit trees, but we have a medium size pecan tree which produced a lot last fall, but we were lazy and left them for the squirrels.

Our first garden must have been eighteen years ago. We didn't have a clue. The husband went out and dug up several garden beds and bought a lot of seeds and planted them just like it said on the package. And a month later almost everything was growing except the tomatoes and peppers, which we later learned to buy transplants because at the smaller stage they get a disease that makes them difficult. So we had a lot of stuff growing, but it takes a while before you can eat anything. After the first month, the only thing that you can eat is radishes. We didn't want to eat radishes by themselves, so we waited another month till we had lettuce and such to make a salad. Two and three month old radishes are usually not edible. We didn't know.

Sadly, that first garden sprouted nearly everything that we put in the ground except tomatoes and peppers, but at right about the time we were supposed to get a lot of stuff to eat, our lawn mower broke and we didn't have the money to fix it. We soon had really tall grass and stickers and such, and we couldn't even walk to the back of the yard to get to the garden. Most of it died, and a lot of the rest of it was eaten by rodents.

We never again did anything quite so big. And we planted closer to the house. And we bought tomato and pepper transplants. And we still never seemed to have much stuff at the same time for a proper salad.

We read a lot of books on the subject. Or, at least, we got a lot of books from the library and looked at a lot of pictures. We got a bit better at it. We decided that the main thing that we liked to grow and eat was peppers, and we got pretty good at that. We planted a few fruit trees. After nearly thirty years of not liking asparagus I decided that it wasn't so bad if I cooked it myself and tried to grow some. We stopped planting a lot of stuff like turnips, cause we don't really eat turnips anyway. And while it was easy enough to start growing corn and potatoes, in the end it just wasn't worth fighting the ants over it.

We lived at a house with excellent sandy soil and didn't have to worry about drainage. We bought soaker hoses and built sturdy structures for caging tomatoes and growing vining plants. We finally seemed to get the hang of it all. One year we had pepper and tomato plants that were nearly as tall as me.

And then my husband became a traveling photographer, and we didn't have a garden for a couple of years. And then we had to move to an apartment, which had a very small bit of space for a garden, but the soil was a heavy clay that I didn't like. I learned to garden in containers a bit while I dug up the clay and worked in sand and peat moss.

Right about the time I got the hang of having a tiny garden and had the clay soil replaced at the apartment, my husband decided we should move. I loved my apartment and didn't want to move for a few more years. I didn't even want to fill out the forms to move for another six months. But my husband didn't listen and three months later we were moving to this house.

I originally didn't want to move, but it was an extra two rooms, and it did have a pecan tree, even if not as nice a one as at the old house. And we could have room for a washer and dryer (though the house wasn't properly wired and such to have them both in the same room), and I imagined having a big garden like at the old house. So I agreed, and we moved.

And a year later everything happened, and I wished I had kept the apartment.

But now I have the house, and I don't really want to give up my two extra rooms and my washer and dryer and everything. And I want a big garden. But I don't have the nice sandy soil of the old house and it all takes work.

And it's more than ten years since we had the really wonderful garden at the old house, and my husband has mostly lost interest in it. He certainly doesn't mind having a garden, but it used to be something we did together, and now it isn't. To be fair, I think that at the old house he originally did most of the work, and I mostly provided moral support. But now it is totally the other way round, and I'm not a big strong man, and there's more work to be done here because of the awful clay soil, and I'm just very slow at it. And this year I was really distracted by the ceramics class and didn't get much of anything in the garden done on time.

I'm still working on stuff, but that will mainly be getting stuff ready for next year. It's just too late to be worth the effort of doing anything now. Still, I worry about the little bit that I have done. I worry that my plants will dry up and die if I go out of town for more than a few days.

Cool. I'm rich

Okay, not really. But I got a check in the mail yesterday. And the check was about nine dollars more than it was supposed to be. I sold a scarf and something else to a friend, and then I went to the post office to send the package, and at the last minute I had a feeling that I should have the package insured for a hundred dollars.

The scarf arrived okay, but the other thing was chipped. But my friend decided to keep the chipped item rather than claim the insurance. Then he sent me the agreed amount for the scarf, and the agreed amount for the postage. And he also sent me the two dollars for the insurance, which he did not need to do since it was just my last minute idea and he did not ask for insurance.

And then he decided to add seven more dollars for my time of driving to the post office, which I wouldn't have asked for, and it isn't even December or April when it is a bit of a hassle to go to the post office. And it's not like I had to drive to Dallas or something to do it. This took all of maybe fifteen minutes to do.

Seven dollars for fifteen minutes work is cool, don't you think? At that rate it would be twenty-eight dollars an hour. What I could do if I had a regular paying job at twenty-eight dollars an hour.

Okay, that's probably not going to happen.

You know, if my friend and I were not good moral people, we could get a little scheme going at the post office. I could insure this thing that I could easily duplicate, and we're pretty sure that if it was damaged the first time around that it would probably get damaged again, and we could just keep sending the thing over and over again until he got a whole one, and then we'd have all this insurance money to collect.

But my friend and I are both good moral people and wouldn't really do that on purpose.

Another word about mammograms

I just got an email asking me to direct my readers to this place. Unfortunately, at the moment I have very few readers, and I think that most of them are men and wouldn't be interested anyway. But I'll take a moment and mention it anyway.

If you buy gift cards from this place, they are supposed to make a donation to someplace that gives free mammograms. I love free stuff. I don't so much love mammograms, but they do seem to be necessary once in a while, so it's nice if sometimes a girl in poor financial shape can still get one if she doesn't have any money.

And if you'll notice, they do have gift cards for my favorite place, Bath & Body Works. And if you don't like that place, they have cards for a lot of restaurants, including Marie Callender's, which I know many people like because I get a lot of people Googling Marie Callender semi-annual pie sale. There looks like a gift card for just about everything, and there's even gift cards for grocery stores, and I know everyone here needs groceries. Great. So you can give somebody a gift card and make a charitable donation to a mammogram place at the same time.

Okay, thank you for reading. Back to the regular nonsense of blogging. End of plug.

Monday Blues, weekend getaways, and mammograms

Sorry, I haven't written a Monday Morons post in a long time, and I'm not going to write one today either.

Just now I have noticed that someone found my blog by Googling the words--number one person googled, and another person found my blog by Googling the words--truth about time traveling lottery. I'm sure that by itself is worth a whole post of its own, but I haven't the time for it.

The husband is home this week, and in fact is not scheduled to work at all so should in fact really be at home for the whole week. This sort of situation usually results in a.) little or no work actually getting done, and b.) too much money being spent on lunch and such. With two days off, he did manage to cut the grass for the first time this season, about two or three weeks later than most everyone else, and we have gone out to eat twice and gone shopping for this and that. Not that we bought anything really silly that we didn't need, but at this rate we probably will soon enough.

Earlier he had mentioned that since he had the week off he wanted to go someplace. And I didn't want to spend a lot of money, but there were a few things that he could easily have talked me into. Like Arkansas. It isn't terribly far away and we usually come home with some nice crystals.

I decided to see where he was scheduled to work the next week. Turned out to be Oklahoma, and while going to Oklahoma isn't a really big deal anymore, I started to think about what we might do there next week instead of spending a lot of money to go someplace else this week. And I soon figured out that if we were to leave on Sunday rather than Tuesday we could go to a ren faire in Muskogee on Memorial Day. Wonderful. We both like ren faires, and we've never been to this one. The last one we went to in Tyler wasn't that great, but it wasn't a terribly expensive trip and I did very much enjoy the time we spent in Tyler.

So I start adding up the money we'd have to spend. We'd need to stay two extra nights at a motel, but to go anywhere else we'd need at least three or four nights just for a short trip not too far away. And we'd have to buy gas, but he's going to have to buy gas to go to Oklahoma anyway, so we might as well buy a little more. Going anywhere else this week would also mean buying gas, but we won't be getting any of that money back. We'll have to buy tickets to the ren faire, and we'll have to spend money on food, but we usually end up spending too much money on food anyway. And unlike most of these little trips I go on with my husband, he'll only be working for three days, so I wouldn't be stuck in the motel room knitting or something for five days straight.

So going to Muskogee was starting to really sound like a good idea. But then I was looking at the calendar, and I remembered that I have a mammogram scheduled for that Friday. Damn. So either I have to cancel the whole thing, or I have to get home by bus or something on Thursday. So now I'm not sure what to do, and my husband is starting to go off the idea. Bummer.

Friday

No, I'm not going to do a Freaky Friday post today. I haven't in a very long time. I've had more important things to do, and in fact I've been so busy that for several weeks I didn't even look at the tracking stuff. But this week I started looking at it again, and yesterday I saw the oddest search. Someone found me by Googling pelvic exam Christian. So I had to have a look at that.

Mostly, that search would lead one to stuff about pelvic exams being done to or by someone named Christian. About sixth on that search is my blog for the month of March, during which time I had to get a pelvic exam and was complaining about them in general, and at some point in another post that month there was some mention of Christian which I don't really remember.

But then there was one other post from a girl who had just used the abortion pill and something went wrong with it. So then the search quit being funny and I stopped reading.

I stayed home this week. Five days here at the house, by myself. The idea was to get some work done and not spend money trying to have a nice lunch in the middle of nowhere. To get some work done, one has to do some...uh...work. Yuck.

The first day I did not get much done, and the second day I tried to get some gardening done but didn't really feel up to much of that. So with half of my week to myself now gone, it's time to do some actual cleaning and sorting and such.

So it's really sad that when I actually put some serious effort into it, four large garbage bags later I don't seem to have done anything that was worth all of that work. I know that I spent hours cleaning. I know that I threw a lot of junk away. With four bags of trash outside, shouldn't there be visible evidence of that inside? With four bags less stuff, shouldn't there be four empty places, or four clean and almost empty places, or at least four places that look neat and orderly?

But it doesn't look that way. At least, not much. Before I had way too much stuff in the bedroom, and now I have a lot of stuff in the bedroom that's been rearranged a bit.

The only real progress that I have to report is that there is no longer Halloween stuff stacked in the hallway. Remember that the goal was to have the Halloween stuff put away before Christmas. So that's like five months behind schedule. The Halloween stuff that was stacked in the hallway is now...stacked somewhere else. But at least it isn't in the hallway.

Not doing as much work today as yesterday. It is always a bit disappointing to know that after one has done a lot of work to say get done with the laundry, or the weeding, or cutting the grass or something like that, that after all of the work is done that it is just going to be needed to be done all over again in a week or two. But that's life, and you get used to the idea, but this is a bit more depressing to do all of that work and not really being able to see anything for the effort. So I'm less than encouraged to do even more work now. But there's plenty of hours left in the day, so I might change my mind and have another go at it later. This is my last night by myself, so I should try to do something with the time.

So far my husband isn't scheduled to work any next week. He wants to go somewhere. Unfortunately, business has been bad, gas is expensive, and we probably shouldn't spend enough money to go anywhere interesting. He wants to go to Colorado, since we have never been there. Two years ago we went to someplace in Mississippi, and that turned out to be a nice trip, but I really don't want to go there again. Another time we went to Hot Springs and dug up some crystals, and he's mentioned doing that again. Arkansas is not that far away, and I like crystals, so I think that it would not take too much to convince me to do that.

Maybe if we got some work done. Maybe if we got three or four rooms clean all at the same time we should reward ourselves with a trip to Hot Springs. Maybe.

Should I boycott Survivor?

I was a big fan of Survivor during the first season. It somehow wasn't what I expected, but after the first episode, I was hooked. A few weeks later, I was pretty sure that Richard was going to win, but I was pulling for Sue. Sue was not quite my hometown girl, but she was from Oklahoma or someplace that I could identify with.

I was so into this show that before the first season was over I was planning to audition for the second season. I was mentally writing a script for the tape I would send in. I was thinking up things that would get me noticed if I could audition in person.

Not that I did any of that. I was on the road all of the time. I wasn't home long enough to even make that audition tape.

I watched the second season with almost as much interest as the first. After about three episodes I guessed who would win. She did.

The third or fourth season there was someone on the show who went to school with one of my English professors. It is good luck to know my English professor if you're going to be on one of these shows. The woman on survivor got to the final four that season. And my English professor was a big fan of our college's wheelchair basketball team, so she also knew that one-legged guy who won the first season of Big Brother.

And then I started to lose interest. I had about given up watching the show when they found Rupert. On the first episode that season he started the game off by stealing all the shoes from the other team. Cool. He didn't win that season, and he didn't win the next season which was the All Stars, but he did win a million dollars anyway. Right after the All Stars, the audience voted for the person they thought should get a million dollars, and Rupert won that.

Okay, Rupert winning a million dollars was great, but I was still losing interest with the rest of the show. And then I was noticing a lot of things that I didn't like. There's been a couple of incidents that I would call sexual harassment, and they both ended with nothing being done to the man and the woman leaving the show soon afterwards. I don't think that should be part of outwit, outplay, and outlast.

I've also noticed a lot of people having serious injuries. Sometimes, people will get hurt, and that's to be expected. But most of the time, these people are getting hurt during challenges, mostly group challenges, and there's no need for it. The group challenges should be stopped. Now that I think about it, the group challenges are dangerous. It's like if you were playing pro-football, without a proper field, without safety equipment, with people you had just recently met, and without being allowed to practice. So people get hurt.

There's no need for this. They don't really have to have the team challenges like that. They don't have to rig up this stuff made up on the spot from bamboo and coconuts. They could use better quality materials and then have it made up to look like bamboo and coconuts later. They don't really even need the team challenges to be stuff that the whole team has to do together either. They can have stuff more like the individual challenges, but keep team scores, and that would be a lot safer. An occasional relay race might be okay, but the stuff where the whole team has to push or pull a cart usually ends up with someone falling and getting run over by the cart.

And it wouldn't hurt to maybe have people wear a team t-shirt or other uniform during the challenges, and have everyone put on some safety gear.

Anyway, I won't be auditioning to be on the next Survivor. I'm wondering if maybe I should even stop watching the show til they deal with some of these problems.

The usual

Well, I decided not to go to Paris. We spent too much damn money last week and didn't get much work done. Maybe I will get some work done this week. Maybe not. At least I won't be out of town spending money in an attempt to make a trip to the middle of nowhere into a vacation.

It is somewhat dark and wet outside. Not much, just barely enough to be annoying and keep me from trying to go outside and work in the garden. I keep thinking that it has stopped, but as soon as I get my tools and such together it starts again.

The husband left just after breakfast, and if he is being thoughtful he will call soon to tell me that he has arrived safely. He should do that anyway, and he should especially do it today because it is wet outside and there is the increased chance that he might get into an accident. But he might not call because a.) he is a man and doesn't always think of such things, and b.) we had a bit of a fight before we left and in his mind it's okay to let me worry because he didn't feel like picking up the phone. We should have had the fight yesterday, but I tried so hard to avoid it since we were about to spend the week apart and I just wanted to spend one nice day together before that. But, he had to bring up the same nonsense again this morning, before I was even out of bed. Great way to start the day.

The phone rang, and I thought it was him with the usual call letting me know he was there safe and where he could be reached, etc.... But no. It was a call for him, and I could swear it was from S of the company he currently works for. People from the company he works for frequently call for him here when he is out of town, because they someone get the idea that this is his cell phone, and no one ever corrects the mistake. So there's always this brief moment of worry, that they are calling me to tell me he's been in an accident. But this is almost always replaced by my being annoyed at the thousandth time someone has called me looking for him when they should know damned well that he isn't here.

The the phone rang and I thought it was S from the company, and there was just a moment of panic immediately replaced by being annoyed that someone from the company was calling me to talk to him, probably even calling from the same building he was already working in or the same motel he was staying at. So I just said that he'd already left and was about to hang up the phone. But then S was saying something about a job he'd applied for, and then it didn't quite make sense. Why was S from the company he already works for calling to ask if he was still interested in the job he'd applied for?

Okay, not S from the company he already works for. S was calling from B company, and she'd said something about the other company, and my brain just fused the whole thing together and came up with S from the company he already works for, since I knew that there was in fact S at the company he already works for and he works with her frequently and maybe he works with her this week too.

Okay, if the husband is reading this he needs to call home now to get the message to call S from B company. S from B company probably thinks that your wife is a nut, but you probably need to call her anyway, to be nice if nothing else.

So I've got a week to myself, which I had planned to start of with a bit of gardening, which I can't do right at the moment because it is dark and wet outside. I should also clean house, which I hate doing. To put off doing that a bit longer, I'm writing this blog post. I was busy, busy, busy for several weeks and didn't blog much and found to my surprise that I didn't miss writing it that much. Though I did miss reading other people's blogs a bit, and I am not too happy that some of the bloggers are sick and such and are not currently writing much, and KillerRants seems to be broken at the moment. And my favorite soap opera blog, which went private several months ago was actually deleted a month or two ago, which I still can't seem to accept and I keep typing in the address just in case the first few dozen times I read the delete message were in error.

Apparently, life goes on, even without blogs.

I seem to have an A in ceramics class. Not quite sure that I deserve it since some of the projects were not finished. I'll have to go in a few weeks from now and see if things dried properly, and maybe patch a few cracks and such. And the car is still full of stuff, and I still have a lot more stuff to drag home.

I'm thinking of whether or not to take another class, whether I should take the regular credit class later in the summer or the non-credit classes in the fall. Unfortunately, the non-credit courses are scheduled for October, and I am usually very busy with club stuff and such in October. The actual class time for non-credit is just a few hours on Saturdays. On the one hand a few hours on Saturdays wouldn't take that much time away from the rest of my life. But on the other hand, a few hours on Saturdays wouldn't be enough time to get many projects done. It is hard to decide which would be better.

While I've been thinking of which class to take, I've been thinking that it would be good to concentrate on making outdoor stuff for a while. I could use some planters and such outside, and I'm running out of shelf space for indoor stuff. And while I'm thinking about that I get this great idea about what I'd like to make, only I can't really do anything about it now. There's no class going on now. But I've got this idea in my head, and I can't shut it off. The ideas just keep bouncing back and forth. I will have no peace til I make the things. I go to clean something or cook something or whatever I want to do, and my brain says "But, what about the planters? Don't you want to go work on the planters now? Don't you at least want to get out some paper and draw what they might look like? Don't you want to take some measurements or something like that?" But no amount of drawing and such seems to make it stop. The brain just will not shut up.

At this rate I will not get any more done this week than I did last week. But hopefully I can get very little done this week without spending as much money as I did last week.

Went up the road a bit to Oklahoma

My husband read the schedule wrong. It was Wednesday he was supposed to be in Oklahoma, not Tuesday like he thought. Lucky I caught that. Monday he had this meeting to go to, and I went to class twice, and neither of us got anything useful done.

The business meeting is a total waste of time and money. I don't know why they bother with it. Supposedly, some people from the main office are supposed to be explaining some new thing to all of the employees. And then they are supposed to answer any questions anyone might have.

Not that there are any good answers to anyone's questions. Basically, the new people mostly aren't making as much money as they were led to believe they would make, and the old people mostly aren't making as much as they used to make "back in the good old days" or maybe not even as much as last year. And on top of that, the expense checks aren't really covering the expenses anymore. So the main question that the employees had was-- what's going to be done about the fact that the money paid for mileage no longer covers even the price of gas?

And the answer to that question was--not a damn thing.

And then they have the nerve to say how that if there were even an increase of say two cents per mile, that would cost the company millions of dollars. Not that two cents would cover the current problem, but they weren't even willing to do that much. So the company would have to pay millions of dollars to cover the cost. It is a cost that the company is supposed to pay, but they don't want to, so the employees get stuck with it.

Then the guys from the main office went on to say that no one gave them a dime for the gas they used to go to work everyday. No one gave them a dime to drive to the other side of town to their mostly 9 to 5 Monday through Friday jobs. Big deal. No one ever agreed to pay them extra for that expense. They aren't expected to drive all over the place, and they already make more money than anyone else.

Though probably what they said wasn't even true. I doubt that they drove all the way from North Carolina or bought plane tickets and such out of their own pockets.

The traveling photographers and sales people have to drive all over the place, have no choice on where they are sent, and were promised extra money for that expense. The checks no longer cover the expense, so there should be an increase. This happens once in while. But this time the price of gas went up a lot faster than anyone had planned for. The company will just have to increase the amount paid for mileage if they expect people to keep driving all over the place. But all these guys did was complain about how much it would cost the company.

We know how much it would cost the company. It costs us that much. Only we're not supposed to be paying.

They weren't listening to anybody, though they said if anyone had any useful suggestions they would consider it. I've got a useful suggestion. Cancel the stupid meetings and cash in the plane tickets and such and spend the money on the employees' mileage problem. And maybe even quit having middle management drive around checking up on people who haven't complained of a problem. That would save a lot of money on gas right there.

And then they all look hurt when the employees don't appreciate having what should have been their day off wasted to hear that the complaints about the mileage problem and such aren't going to be fixed, and that there's a new bonus program so that once in a great while one or two of them will make a little extra money (not enough to cover his or her mileage problem) and/or a free portrait. Great. Thanks a lot.

I didn't get much done in class Monday, but at least that was mostly my own fault. I wasn't having my time wasted at a useless meeting that I was forced to attend. I mostly finished a sleestak, started working on the other one, but then decided that it just had too many problems and it would probably be better just to start over at a later date. The rest of the time I was patching cracks and such. And then I just really needed to get away for a while and asked if I could get my review or whatever a couple of days early. Professor said that there really wasn't much of a review, just a form to fill out saying what projects were started and what was finished and so forth. So I did that on Tuesday and tried to pack most of my stuff. The triffid was still in the kiln, but it's probably okay. The kiln wasn't going to be cool enough until Wednesday, and I decided it could just wait. I packed a bag and some yarn and went to Oklahoma.

I shouldn't have gone. It was no big deal, and I went knowing that it was no big deal. But we don't go off like that much anymore, and my husband tries to make it nice when I go with him. It was one of those days when he only made fifty dollars. I'm pretty sure that we spent more than that. And then with the cost of gas and the mileage, he really didn't even make fifty dollars.

I got some rest, and I did some knitting, and I sat in a air-conditioned motel room and watched cable TV. Except for the cable TV, I could have done most of that at home. But I don't do that at home. At home I think that I should be doing something useful and I get up once in a while and try to do something.

Yesterday we drove around a lake and such. The place isn't that far away, but we hardly ever go there. So we went and looked around and took pictures and such. We went to an observation tower. Not the tallest tower, or even the tallest tower we've climbed, but I'm getting too old for this. That last bit of stairs was a little spiral thing that I don't like.

After that we tried to find a cookie place that I used to go to twenty years ago. The cookie store was usually the first stop of a geology field trip. The geology field trips had a lot of silly things like that. Anyway, they probably still make the cookies, but we were told that particular retail store closed several years ago. And then we went to have a sandwich at Robertson's Hams. It's one of those places that we've passed a hundred times and never stopped at. So we finally went there.

If I hadn't have gone with him, my husband probably would have spent five or ten dollars on food and whatever gas money that the company doesn't cover. But I went, and we were in a hurry and ate lunch at nearest place to motel, and that cost nearly thirty dollars with the tip and such. And then we bought sandwiches for dinner, and then we bought lunch the next day and some extra ham and mustard to take home. And it cost a dollar for the observation tower. We went shopping for hot sauce, but decided not to get anything. I think that we spent about fifty-five dollars. Not good. Can't do stuff like that too often.

So I'm wondering now about going to Paris. Not that Paris, just Paris in Texas. I know we used to go there a lot on business for another company, but that was a while back, and I don't remember doing anything special in that area. It sounds safe enough, but somehow we end up spending too much money on lunch and such. And there's still the extra money for the gas now, and we have no way of knowing ahead of time if he'll make money that week. I picture a whole week of him making only fifty dollars a day and us spending a lot of that, and me doing a lot of knitting when I should be here doing something more useful than that.

Not that I really do a lot of useful stuff around here. Right now I should be planting the tomatoes. I bought the plants a couple of weeks ago, and they still aren't in the ground. I've worked outside a bit today, but as you can see I took a break from that to write a blog post. Later, I'll probably find something else to do, and the tomatoes will still not be in the ground.

I guess I've still got a few days to decide if I'm going to waste the week at home or out of town.

One more week of insanity

It is Sunday, and I plan to make the most of it. Some gardening this morning, some rest, a nice lunch after that, not quite sure what this afternoon and then probably a visit to my brother's place to watch Battlestar and then maybe Dr. Who. Or maybe just more gardening. Or maybe just more rest if I'm not up for all of that. But any or all of the above would be nice.

I hardly know where to start. Seems like I haven't done much blogging for a long time.

Just six class periods left. And I don't think that I'm going to get much else done, so I suppose that I could just say the hell with it and stay home until Thursday. Thursday is my technically my "final" in this class. I probably won't get an A, even after he said that we could drop a project since he's letting the first semester students opt out of something and it's only fair that we're allowed the same. Let's see, the tall vase has been finished for a while and has a tiny crack that probably no one but me will ever notice, so I expect to get an okay grade for that. My dragon relief sculptures also have a few cracks, but fortunately the cracks follow where there are supposed to be lines anyway, so they aren't that noticeable, and I expect that grade will be okay too. The teacher and everyone else is quite pleased with the leaf vase, which I expect to get an excellent grade, even if I'm not really happy with the color the glaze turned out. I also expect good grades from the plates and bowls, even if I only made four each and didn't try any different glazes and such as I had originally planned. They are all solid black and look fine just the way they are. We were allowed to skip a project, probably the sculpture, so I did not finish my dragon. I barely started my dragon. I'll do it someday, but it really was too much to do in the time I had.

And that leaves the set. I never clearly defined what the set was going to be. I expected the set to be a bunch of strange dishes that I would make for the Halloween party, at least two or three things to start with, but hopefully after I finished my other projects I would have time to come back and do more. Right now it looks like the only thing I'll have done is the triffid. One triffid does not make a set. The first attempt at an alien egg dried out too quickly, and the second alien egg blew up in the kiln. The dip dish never even got started. And the Martian Crickets are not going well either. I had originally pictured them being two pieces each, the main part and a lid. But they were just two big and heavy, and by the time I got started on the heads the bodies were two dry to try to attach them, so they were going to be four pieces each, and then I thought as long as I was making the heads separate that they might as well have lids too, which made them five pieces each. But all the pieces needed to be fired together to ensure that they would all fit together properly, but that just isn't going to happen. I'll just have to fire the main body parts and lids together and worry about the rest later. That is, if they don't blow up in the kiln I'll worry about the rest later. After what happened to the egg I have some concerns. I've decided to totally take apart one cricket and try to fix any suspected problems and fire the other one as is and hope for the best.

Anyway, I guess that I'm getting a B for the official class work, unless I get some sympathy points for the blown up alien egg. And that totally shouldn't matter. I don't plan on getting another degree and having to worry about GPA ever again, but I still do, just in case. Still, at this point I would gladly take a B just to have it over and done with.

As for the extra stuff, I had planned to do four sleestaks. The sleestaks were the main thing that I wanted to do when I signed up for that first class a year and a half ago, and I'm only just now getting them done. I'd planned two skull relief wall hangings and two full heads, with one being a regular head and one being a skull. The reliefs have been fired, and one cracked all to pieces. The cracked one was patched back together and re-fired, but it didn't come out quite as I'd hoped. The other relief looks really good. The regular full head is nearly finished, but the skull still needs a lot of work and I don't know if I have time.

Of the six class periods that we have left, the professor really only has to show up for three of them. But he says that he'll be at all six. Technically, the only thing we are supposed to be working on at this point is painting sculptures that do not have to be re-fired. But a few of us are still glazing and stuff like that. And there's a lot of packing and cleaning to do. So I might as well work on the sleestaks while that is going on.

My husband is going to Oklahoma on Tuesday. It would be nice to get out of the house for a day and spend the night at a motel, but I probably won't go. I would miss three of the remaining six class periods.

That is, my husband is scheduled to go to Oklahoma on Tuesday. He might get fired or quit on Monday. Monday is one of those meetings that people have to go to and listen to how bad they are doing everything, and this is the right way to do things according to some people who don't actually do the work anymore and sit in an office and make lots of money having a nice 9 to 5 Monday through Friday schedule. And the meeting is on a day that they probably will not pay anyone for, or they might pay fifty dollars for, and they make everyone skip lunch to do it and probably only give them coffee. He's already had to go to one of these meetings a couple of months ago, and he was wanting to quit even before then. But there's usually only one of these meetings a year, and if you can keep your mouth shut and sit through it everything usually goes back to normal after. Only someone higher up decided that they should all get together and have another meeting.

Anyway, if they can all just get through another five hours of this nonsense on Monday, everything will probably be okay after that. But my husband needs a sedative or something. He doesn't take criticism well, he especially doesn't take it well from someone who doesn't do the same job that he does, and he really doesn't take it well from someone who doesn't do the same job that he does and makes lots of money from his work while he's getting paid less this year because some of the better accounts were given to a new guy in Waco.

So, one more week of insanity, and then it will all be over one way or another. I will finish my projects or not, get a good grade or not, and my husband will either go back to his job as usual or not. Then it's back to gardening or house cleaning or job hunting or whatever. Or maybe a week away in Paris. No, not that Paris, but a week away anywhere might be good at this point.

Wednesday sucked

Before I get into how bad Wednesday sucked, I thought that I'd mention that the "demanded" picture of the scarf is over at Dmarks blog. I don't normally post pictures on my own blog, and with the way my computer has been acting lately, I didn't think this was a good time to try it.

The plan for the day was to go to school and glaze the triffid. Earlier I had decided that the triffid was never going to be quite what I wanted, and it was time to either give up and finish the thing or give up entirely and throw the thing out. I decided that I was probably the only one who would know it wasn't quite what I wanted and finished it. It didn't look too bad, but my original plans for it were a bit different, a bit taller, and it would require just hours and hours of delicate underglaze work. At this point I didn't have patience for delicate underglaze work, so I went to a couple of supply stores to pick out some glazes. After deciding that I would rather spend an extra ten dollars or so to get something a little more interesting that what the school supplied us with, I bought two little jars of glaze for that project, plus I spent about thirty dollars more on glazes for other projects.

The triffid started to have all these little cracks. Well, that happens. I spent too long on the project and kept trying to fix problems that no one but myself would ever even notice, and it wasn't drying properly. That's probably going to happen with a lot of my stuff this year. But I managed to fix most of the cracks before the bisque firing and was reasonably happy with the piece when it came out of the first firing. There were still a few cracks, but we've got something that's supposed to help with that, and I did a little touch up work on it Tuesday.

So the first thing that happened on Wednesday was that I went to school, and I ran out of glaze for my Triffid. So that rather sucked. I wasn't entirely sure that I had wanted to spend the extra ten dollars on the piece to begin with, but now that I had committed to using this kind of glaze I couldn't switch to something different. So I left class an hour early and headed to Fort Worth to buy another ten dollars worth of glaze. So now I've spent an extra twenty dollars on the triffid.

I would have called and asked if my husband wanted to go with me, but I'd forgot to charge my cell phone. We'd just had a nice day in Fort Worth on Monday, so we really didn't need to go there again so soon. So I just went and got the glaze and went home.

I had thought that if I got a lot done and finished glazing the triffid that I might stay home after that and just work in the garden and not go back to school. But I didn't finish glazing the triffid, and I was told that my alien egg would taken out of the kiln that evening, so I decided to put off the gardening so I wouldn't get too tired to go back to school. So we went to lunch and ran a couple of errands and went home to watch Dr. Who and the Tudors on the computer. That was the one good thing that happened Wednesday, no serious problems with the computer.

There was a sale at Baskin Robbins, so we were going to go have some ice cream before I went back to school. Only when we got there, about fifty people were in line ahead of us. We decided that we didn't like ice cream that much and went to have a hamburger instead.

By then I had gotten over having run out of glaze and not finishing my goal for the day and having to go to Fort Worth and spend another ten dollars on glaze. So I headed back to school, looking forward to getting done with glazing the triffid and possibly getting the alien egg glazed too.

Only when we took the alien egg out of the kiln, the bottom fell out, three of it's four legs came off, and there was a huge crack on the side.

I've had minor problems with pieces before. Little cracks, glazes that didn't come out like I expected, and pieces that warped a little bit or shrunk more than I expected. But I'd been lucky and never had anything really blow up like that before.

Okay, I'm upset, but I'm not crying about it or anything. Someday, I might try to make something like this again. I might even make a planter out of this piece. I don't think it would survive a glaze firing, but I'm thinking that if I can glue the legs back on I'll paint it and put it outside in the garden.

Anyway, I'll get over it. But I've pretty much lost interest in finishing the other class projects. I'll work on my sleestaks for a while and take home the other stuff and maybe finish something to be fired later, but I just don't have the drive to do the extra work at this point. Plus I wasted thirty bucks on glaze that I won't be using anytime soon. I've decided to wait till the other stuff is bisque fired before I buy glaze for anything else.

In this same firing another student's animal sculpture lost it's head. He wasn't in class that night and he doesn't know yet.

So I went home early. I finished glazing the triffid and couldn't decide what else to do, so just decided that I didn't really want to do anything and I went home.

In the grand scheme of things, I didn't have a really horrible day. Other people had worse. After I left, the professor's eighteen-month little girl got sick. He went home. I guess she didn't get better. He wasn't there the next morning at nine like usual. I decided to wait and see if he showed up at ten. A bit before that a substitute teacher let us into the lab. Professor had to take the little girl to the hospital.

So I don't know if the kiddo is okay or what. And I don't know if I should go to school or not. The professor might not be there. Someone said that we shouldn't expect to see him until Tuesday. I wonder how that is? I mean, if the kid isn't better I wouldn't expect to see him for a while, but how would anyone know she isn't getting better or if she would be better by Tuesday? I'm afraid that I wasn't paying attention at the time and didn't ask.