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.