A catch up post

I don't think that I've blogged about what is going on much since Black Friday, except for that short trip that I took to the boring place.

I've now finished ceramics class. Unfortunately, I do not think that I will be taking the next class, unless I win the lottery or find a good job or something before the next class starts at the end of January. Probably just not going to happen. But I need to do other stuff, like clean and sort through the junk and get a job, and while I told myself that I wouldn't let the class become that important this time around, at the end of it I spent way too much time in the lab and started putting off things that were more important or time sensitive. So no ceramics for a bit, maybe for good.

At school there is that leaf vase that I really wasn't supposed to do and two bowls waiting to be glazed. Everything else that I did this semester came home with me a couple of days ago. Except for the two bowls, all the work I did for throwing class fit into this one box. On the one hand I don't think that it's not a bad looking lot for my first try at the wheel, and on the other hand everything is small and I didn't get a lot done. They look okay, but unfortunately my favorite piece was broken. It still looks pretty good, even with some of it broken off. I'm trying to think of something to add to it and make it a mixed media piece. Anyway, I think that I could figure out how to do some interesting stuff, if I had the time and money to take another course, which unfortunately I don't.

Maybe after I get a job I'll see about buying a used wheel.

About a week ago, we three girls went to the mall. Only because of the baby, we're now no longer three, and the baby isn't even a girl. So that was my first time to go shopping with the baby, and I was told that we probably wouldn't be out long because he would probably start fusing and they would have to go home. Only he didn't fuss. He likes shopping. And he likes having company over. And he likes going out to dinner.

People who are not even six months old should not care about going shopping or having company over, and they certainly should not care about going out to dinner when they can't even eat anything.

Maybe the kiddo is just weird. Anyway, he did not get all fussy, and so it was not a short day like I expected. Not that I didn't enjoy myself, but I got really tired. I wasn't expecting to stay out most of the day like that. If I'm not planning to be gone all day and into the evening, I don't like to be gone more than a few hours, and I'd really rather be home before six.

So I thought that we would go to the mall for a few hours, and then the baby would have had enough and he and his mom would go home. And then maybe just the two of us would go to lunch and talk, and then we would head home too. But, no. After a couple of hours, the baby had a bottle, and then he was good to go again. A couple of hours after that, I was ready to leave, but I hadn't taken my car, so I really couldn't. And then we had lunch and ended up staying until five. At five I was really ready to go home, and was relieved that we were leaving. Only we all weren't leaving, just the baby and his mom. My companion (and ride home) still had a few more things to get. I didn't get home til almost eight.

The day after that, some of us had dinner at the pilot's house. I've been to the pilot's house a couple of times before, and the last time I caught a cold or something. So when I started sneezing and such this time, they've decided that I'm allergic to their cat. They have a really big friendly cat. I love the cat. But I don't see how I could be allergic to their cat if I'm not allergic to my brother's cat and I've never noticed a problem with anyone else's cat. I've lived with cats for years, and there was never any problem. But, Saturday night I had the sniffles and such really bad, but it mostly went away by Sunday, so maybe they are right.

Sunday afternoon we left for the boring place, which I've already blogged about. So that just leaves the knitting and all that I'm trying to get caught up with before the party next Saturday.

Yesterday there is a dinner that I was invited to, but I didn't go. Someone else in the group apologized for not going either, because she had this party to go to. I know other people going to this same party, so I made some comment about that. Not cause I really wanted to go to this party, but just because it's been weeks or maybe months since I've made a smart-a** remark about anything on the list. Sometimes smart-a** remarks just don't translate on the computer, so now there are people sort of explaining why I didn't get an invite. I know perfectly well why I didn't get an invite, and I also knew who to go to if I had wanted one. I just didn't. I haven't the time or money to do the stuff I've already committed to, so adding another party to that is out of the question.

So I'm now debating should I just leave it alone or make another smart-a** remark?

Yesterday we got caught up with Stargate and Sanctuary, and we watched The Day The Earth Stood Still. Contrary to a local reviewer, this was not the worst sci-fi film ever made. It just isn't going to be everyone's favorite movie. And I think that it would have been more fun for me if I hadn't seen a lot more previews of it about a week ago. There were not a lot of surprises in the film after that.

Back to knitting and the rest of my life.

Sort of bad news

Sleepless near Seattle came back once after the previous post but did not leave a comment. I think I have scared my new reader away.

Okay, that's not the sort of bad news.

The sort of bad news is that I was hoping to make an art sale before Christmas, but yesterday I learned that the person I was hoping to sell the art to is declaring bankruptcy or something. So I guess that I won't be selling anything to her.

I have written about trying to sell my art before. It just doesn't seem to work out. Not that I really want to sell most of it. Most of it I made for me (or specifically as a gift for a friend) and if I like it I want to keep it. If something went wrong with it and I don't like it, then probably no one else would want it either.

Once in a while someone will ask about buying something, and if it is something that I wouldn't mind parting with or something that I think I can mostly duplicate, I tell them how much I want for it. (That is, if I've kept up with time and expense and such to even answer the question I tell them how much I want for it. Otherwise, I have to do some math and get back to them.) I have to figure how much I spent on supplies, and then I have to figure how many hours I actually spent working on the thing, etc.... So if I've spent twenty dollars on supplies on something that it took me twelve hours to make, then I'm going to say maybe a hundred and fifty dollars. And that's only if I'm sure that I can make another one, or if it is something I can live without. If it is something that I really like and I don't think I can make another one, I won't sell it. But at this point I probably won't sell it anyway, because the person wanting to buy was probably thinking less than fifty. Less than fifty is not going to happen unless I really don't like the piece, and I can't picture anyone offering to buy a piece that I really don't like.

The hundred and fifty dollar price tag tends to shock some people. So either that person has never bought from an artist before, or else the person bought from an art student who just had to sell stuff either to get back the money for the supplies to pay for the next semester's supplies, or else the student has accumulated so much artwork that he has to start selling stuff at a huge discount just to get rid of it to make room for the next semester's stuff.

Non-artists just have no concept of what goes into making art. Either they don't have a clue how much art supplies cost, or they think that you make the art really fast and won't charge that much more than the cost of the art supplies. Or they think that since you are an artist that you enjoy making the art and that you shouldn't charge that much for your time.

This is a bit baffling. I don't think that they expect this of people doing other kinds of work. I'm sure that mechanics like cars, but most people don't expect mechanics to work all day to fix a car and then just charge ten or twenty dollars above the cost of the parts.

If someone is taking an art class and spending 150 hours a semester working on art projects, that's 150 hours that they didn't have to do other things, like getting a job. But, still, people wanting to by art don't get it that the art student would rather give all that hard work to his mother or donate it to charity rather than sell it at a price that would work out to a dollar an hour.

Anyway, it looks like I won't be selling that vase before Christmas. Which means that I've been working on the new leaf vase for no reason. And now the professor seems a bit unhappy that I am in the lab working on the thing anyway. The class I'm officially in ended a month ago, and all that we are supposed to be doing now is drying, firing, and glazing. Except for that, we're supposed to be done, and here I had started a new piece.

So, I wasted about fifteen hours on a piece that I really didn't need to make right now. And I didn't get it done in time for this semester's high fire anyway. And that and a few other things were distracting me when I maybe could have been out looking for a temp job or something.

It kind of sucks.

I think that I have had it with school for a while

I went to school twice this week. I went once on Tuesday, and after a break of more than a week my brain was fried, and I couldn't seem to get anything done. So I left early to run some errands, which turned out to be a really lucky thing since I needed to run those errands and I got a bit sick and didn't feel like doing them later.

So I went to school again on Friday, and except for having a bit of trouble actually getting into the building, that went a lot better. That is, everything went better with the clay. I'm almost done with the green work on the second leaf vase, and I'm thinking that I should go in on Monday and finish up. The main purpose of this project is just to see how long that it takes, so that I'll know how much I should charge for the other one. So far I've spent about nine hours on it.

The bowls and such that I threw still need some touch up work. But, some of them are too dry, and they will just have to do as they are. I'll try to finish the rest Monday or Tuesday.

I really should have done all of this before Tulsa. I don't even really remember what I was doing before Tulsa. I didn't have a cold yet, so that wasn't it. And it obviously did not have anything to do with making the house spotless. Anyway, if I had put in another nine hours or so two weeks ago, then I would have been done with it all by now, and the teacher would have enough stuff to high fire and everybody would be happier now.

I'm not happy. I was thinking at school how this stuff isn't making me happy anymore. I have felt like that before, when a project wasn't going well, but this one is just fine and it still isn't making me happy. I had thought that I would like taking a non-credit class better, that it would be less stressful without having to think about grades and such. And I has been less stressful for the most part. But I do sort of have to think about deadlines if I don't want this semester's work to have been a total waste of time. Right now this just feels like another chore that I have to get through.

My last throwing class

This past Saturday was the next to the last of our throwing classes. And I don't plan to go next week, because next Saturday is the Halloween party, and I just can't see spending any of my time that day getting messy or doing anything that might make me tired. The plan for next Saturday is to have my costume laid out and ready to go, made sure the map and directions to the place are printed up, make sure that I have toll money and such ready to go, get together anything else that I have decided to take, maybe put my hair up in curlers, and then spend most of the day watched DVDs until such time that I need to get dressed and put on makeup and such.

I just don't want to take the chance that I'll end up going to class and getting mud in my hair or maybe I would slip on some clay or water spilt on the floor. No thank you. I'm going to put my feet up and watch TV.

So Saturday should have been my last class, cause I have already gone in to make up those two hours that I will miss next Saturday. But he was talking to the rest of the class and saying how since this was his first six week non-credit class and since he had not really thought it all out and written a schedule of what needed to be done by when, he had decided that will we are not allowed to spend any additional time at the school throwing new pieces, we are allowed to come in and finish up the pieces that we've already started. So that was good, and I managed to do a couple more pieces that I sort of like. I can go and finish them up next week and the week after that.

It is sort of sad that the class is ending now that I am just starting to get the hang of it. It does still take me too long to center sometimes, and I do still have trouble with the lifting part, and I often start out trying to do one thing and then just have to go with the flow and make something else. But at least now that awful thing of getting something so lopsided that pieces of it come off of the wheel now only happens about every third time, and I just grab some more clay and start over. It isn't the end of the world if that happens once in a while, or if I end up with a shorter wider bowl than what I had pictured in my head when I started.

There's a guy in class who is really getting good at this. And it is his first time doing ceramics. He used to be a carpenter, so I'm wondering if he has done a lot of work on a lathe and that has helped him. He says it is from watching a lot of how-to videos. Anyway, he was already making little bottles and vases, while the rest of us were still having trouble with bowls. He missed last Saturday's class. I hope he is okay.

So now of course I want to take another class, which I said that I would not, at least until I get a job or maybe win some money in the lottery.

But I'm trying to not think about that. I'm trying to just enjoy what I have left to do. In a week or so I will go to the lab and try to learn to finish up the leather hard pieces and then set them out to dry. I'll start with the pieces I like the least, just in case I really screw up. Then if that goes okay the dried pieces will get bisque-fired and I can pick out some glazes. I'm not really in any hurry about that part. If they don't get done this semester, I can wait.

Just seems a shame to stop throwing right when I think I'm starting to figure it out.

Raiders of the Lost Art?

Yesterday I went to school for a bit. My husband was home yesterday, even though today he works in Oklahoma and he should have left yesterday. But the financial situation is pretty bad, and he decided that he couldn't afford the extra fifty bucks or so for yesterday's motel room, even if they are going to pay him back for it in a couple of weeks. We just don't have the money now. So he stayed home an extra day.

But since he didn't tell me he was going to stay, I had already made plans to go to school for a bit, so I decided that I should go ahead and go. I had recorded about ten hours of television for my husband while he was gone last week, so he could entertain himself with that while I was gone. And as it turns out he spent the entire time sitting at the computer, and probably wouldn't have said three words to me if I had stayed.

I have already recycled most of the school's clay and have enough for me for the rest of the next class period, and I don't think that I will need anymore for the one after that. Actually, I'm not planning to go to the last class, since it is the same day as the Halloween Party and I will probably be busy. So I worked an extra hour last week, and then I worked an extra hour yesterday, so that will make up for a missed class.

Anyway, I have recycled most of the school's clay, except that there is a bit left to do that is on the floor, and a bit that got too dry so I put it back in the recycling bin. So I think that someone else can do that last little bit. If it is still there in a couple of weeks I'll come back and do it myself, and just keep it for later.

But I had found some more of this same clay that I had at home, and while I had worked on it last spring and it should have been all ready to go, I instead found that there was a hole in the bag and the clay had all dried out. Maybe a mouse put a hole in that bag while looking for food, or maybe it was just some accident that happened over the summer, but either way I had to soak the clay in water again, and it was all ready to go into the mill.

So I did that first thing Monday morning. Well, not quite first thing Monday, as I did not quite get there early enough to get a parking spot next to the building. So I parked in the next lot over, which isn't very far away at all, except when you have to carry something heavy, like a bucket of clay. So I got a bit tired, and my arms got a bit sore, but I managed to get it all to the building okay. And after an hour or so all of the clay that I brought with me was recycled, so I put it back in the bucket and covered it with a plastic bag.

Now, sometimes when I have to load or unload something in the car, and I can't find a good parking space, I will borrow a teachers' spot for just five or ten minutes. And I think that most of the teachers can figure out that I'm not really planning to leave my car in the teachers' spot all day, just for ten minutes or so, and they don't have a cow, especially if they are art teachers. But most of the teachers' spots were taken too, and I didn't want to use a handicapped spot, even for five or ten minutes. And that left the maintenance parking, and I'm not on the best of terms with maintenance, so in the end I decided that I could just carry the stuff back to the car. It hadn't killed me to carry it that far earlier, though it had been more difficult than I had imagined it would be.

So of course halfway to the car I dropped the bucket of clay. I'm not totally that clumsy, but the handle on the thing broke. It's a cheap bucket and can easily be replaced, and the clay was still covered by the plastic bag so nothing really bad happened. It was just so annoying, and my arms hurt a bit more, but I got everything back into the car.

Now in between getting the clay back into the car and working on the wheel for about an hour, I was looking for this piece that I did last year. Technically, it is a vase, but I doubt that anyone will ever put flowers in it. One of the other teachers actually said that she would be offended if anyone ever put flowers in one of her vases. I think that extreme is a bit silly, but really if you just want something to hold flowers then you'd probably just get something from Walmart. If you have a piece of art pottery, then you probably want to look at the pottery and not flowers.

So I was going to look at this vase, because the teacher had mentioned that someone might want to buy it, and I said that I would probably sell it if I could make another one. I wasn't entirely happy with the way the glaze turned out on this one, so if I could make another one I could have one that I liked better and still have the first one to sell to someone who likes it just the way it is. The vase is put together of a lot of cut out little pieces, which takes a long time, but I was thinking that it would be possible to cut out the pieces at home and then take the pieces to the lab to assemble, and that way it wouldn't take up so much of my lab time. Only I did need to have a look at the original vase first, and I couldn't seem to find it.

So I thought that it must be in the professor's office, only he said that it wasn't. He thought that I had taken it home. No, I'm pretty sure that I didn't. And I know that we had stored a lot of stuff in the tool room, but I had already looked in there for something else last week, so I knew that it wasn't there. The last time I saw the vase it was in a certain storage room, but the professor didn't think it was there, but I looked anyway. Not there. And then he thought that it was in a different storage room, because he had moved a lot of things there. So I found four of my dragons, but not the vase I was looking for.

Are you sure that you didn't take it home with you?

I'm pretty sure that I did not, because I didn't want to risk something happening to it while I was doing the major cleaning and moving bookshelves and all of that. But I said that I would look again before I went and complained about the vase being missing. I have heard a lot of people say that they liked the vase, so maybe someone just took it. Stolen stuff is not unheard of, but it is usually tools that turn up missing rather than art.

Accidents more often happen with the art. Maybe someone broke it and just put the evidence in the trash before anyone else noticed. That has also happened in the past. And if I was that worried about it I should have taken it home right away instead of leaving it there over the summer.

We give up looking and I work on the wheel. And then the professor remembers that it is in a display case. I didn't know that we were having a student show, and I was pretty sure that I had looked at the display cases Saturday, so unless someone put up a new show on Sunday, I didn't think that it was in a display case. But the professor remembers that someone borrowed a few things for the library. Okay.

So after I got done with the wheel, I walked over to the library, and there it was.

And I like that glaze even less than I remembered. So I'm really hoping that I can do another one and sell that one.

I've having a moral dilemma about the clay

I have spent about seven hours this week recycling clay. Monday I went to school and started trying to get the clay out of the recycle bin and soon found out that most of what was left was stuck to the bottom of the bin and probably wasn't going to come loose just from me trying to remove it with my hands. Rather than stand there and cry about it, I went home and collected some gardening tools and went back on Tuesday. Tuesday was a lot of work, but I did get a lot of the clay out of the bin, and I put about half of it through the mill and got a lot of usable clay out of it.

I was tired, and my arms and back hurt, but I felt like I actually got something done. Money-wise, this was probably not the best use of my time, since if I'd had eight or nine dollars to spare I could have just gone to the bookstore to buy new clay. But I didn't have the eight or nine dollars, and I imagined myself recycling all of the clay in the bin and having enough clay to use myself for the rest of the class, and maybe enough for the other nine or ten people to use next Saturday.

Thursday I went back to finish the project. I got the remaining clay out of the recycle bin, but there wasn't as much left as I had imagined. I started putting the clay through the mill, and I put away enough for myself to use this next class, and hopefully enough for the class after that. I would have also put away some for that last class, but for some reason the last of the clay I put through the mill doesn't look right and needs to done over again.

Then I got tired of recycling clay and decided to try to work on the wheel for a little while. I was at the wheel for less than an hour, tried to make four or five bowls, tried to keep two of them, but damaged one when I tried to take it off of the wheel.

Okay, so there is still a bit of clay waiting to go into the mill, and there's a little bit of clay that was starting to dry out that I put back into the recycle bin. There's a little bit of clay that I put through the mill that doesn't look right and needs to be redone. There's some clay that I put aside for myself that will be enough for one class, possibly two, but not three. And then there's a bunch of clay that I was going to leave for the other nine or ten people in the class who had also planned to use recycled clay.

So now I have a bit of a dilemma. If I don't take more of the clay for myself, I probably won't have any clay for my last class. I did all of the work, and I should be able to do what I want with it. In theory, I could just say that I did all of the work, so all of the clay is mine.

But that wouldn't be a very nice thing to do. If I came to school on Saturday and found out that there wasn't any clay for me to use, I'd be seriously upset about it, and expect that the rest of the class would feel the same way. And the bookstore is closed on Saturday, so there isn't the option of buying some more, at least not in time to use in the next class period.

I could go back to school today and finish recycling the clay and keep that, but I really don't want to. For one thing, I've been there three days already this week and spent time and gas driving. For another thing, I'm just tired of recycling clay and would like to stay home today and get a few things done around here.

Another thing is that if I went to school and did the rest of the work and kept that clay, I would still have the moral dilemma of whether or not it is fair to keep that much of the clay when they don't have the option of buying more on Saturday. At least this way I'm just leaving them some clay that they will have to work to recycle.

I am thinking that right now there is just enough for me to keep what I have already put aside for myself and for the rest of the class to do half of their work Saturday with the other clay that I finished and the other half they can do with what is left that needs to be recycled. And I think that will be the last of the clay, and that they will have to buy clay after that. And I will either be short some clay for that last class, or maybe if all the clay doesn't get recycled Saturday I can come back Monday and finish what is left, or maybe I'll find some more that needs to be recycled here.

The week so far

We went to see Blindness on Sunday. It was mostly what I expected. It was Day of the Triffids, only without the triffids. It's mostly about what horrible things people will do to other people, and when things are bad and people need other people the most, some of them will try to be helpful at first, but as the problem gets worse more and more of them do more and more ugly things to each other.

There is no explanation of why everyone goes blind. It is an illness, and it seems to spread either through the air or by touch. The first victim we see suddenly goes blind while driving. He is then taken to an eye doctor, and the next day most of other people who were waiting to see the eye doctor go blind, and the eye doctor goes blind.

At first it is thought that isolating the people going blind will stop the disease from spreading. So the eye doctor and his patients are taken away. The eye doctor's wife is not infected, but as her husband is being taken away, she decides that she can't stand to be separated from him, and so she pretends to be infected and they take her away too.

The infected people are taken to an empty sanitarium. There are probably still a few of those left. At some point it became illegal to lock people up just for being crazy, and you either had to get them to volunteer to be locked up, or you had to hear them threaten to hurt themselves or others, or you had to wait til they actually did hurt themselves or others. Most of the crazy people did not volunteer to be locked up, so the places were mostly empty for a while, and then some of them hurt themselves or other people, or threatened to hurt themselves and other people, and they were locked up again, but enough of them remained free to have lots of empty buildings here and there. And presumably they keep using the newer and nicer looking buildings, so the empty building where the infected blind people are sent isn't very nice at all.

It's an okay movie. Most of the time it is not a really scary movie, but there is violence. Not a date movie.

On Monday, my husband was unexpectedly called to work out of town for the rest of the week. On the one hand, I had been looking forward to having the house all to myself next week, so having this week too is a good thing. On the other hand, it wasn't a planned thing and there was no time to really think about where he was going and did he need to pack anything that he hadn't already packed and such. So he left a few things that might have been useful. And however much I might want to have the house to myself for a while and plan to do all sorts of useful things while he is away, it does seem to take me a few days to get used to it, and I have trouble getting to sleep, etc.... So at this rate, I'll maybe get around to doing something useful around here by about Friday.

The first useful thing I decided to do was go to the school Monday morning and deal with the whole recycling clay thing. So the first thing is to take out the clay that has been soaking in water in the recycle bin and spread it out on canvas for to dry out just a little bit. And then there is a machine that we put the old clay into, and if we mix a bit of clay that is starting to get too dry with a bit of clay that is still too wet, the machine will make it all into usable clay. But you can't put in actual dry clay, and you don't add actual water either.

So there was a bit of clay that had been on the canvas since Saturday, and I had to get out more clay from the bin. Only we'd already gotten out the stuff that was easy to get to, and now much of it was really stuck to the bin, and I soon had trouble getting any of it out with just my fingers and small things like forks. So after only an hour or so I left, saying that if I was going to get any real work done I would need to come back some other time with some gardening tools.

I have already complained of how I looked after class on Saturday. How I looked Monday was maybe two or three times worse. I didn't actually fall into the bin, but I was leaning over it at such an angle that I got my hair into the water and clay. So that wasn't pretty.

Tuesday I went to the school with the gardening tools. I mostly brought the little hand tools, but just in case I also put a garden hoe in the car. I spent three hours getting clay out of the bin and through the machine. It was a lot of work and my back hurts now. But the stuff stuck at the bottom of the bin is now half removed, and now that I've reached the bottom of the bin the rest should be easier to get at.


It doesn't look too bad outside, and today would probably be a good day to go out and work in the yard and start to get a few things ready for next spring's garden. But I feel so awful from the clay recycling that I'm probably just going to stay in and wash dishes and watch DVDs. The thing about recycling the clay is that I started doing it because I didn't have the eight or nine dollars here and there to buy bags of new clay. I've now put in almost four hours work. If I get eight dollars worth of clay out of it then I've earned like two dollars an hour. Only I haven't even quite earned that, since I had to use gas to get to school and back twice now. By the time this is over I'll have probably spent eight dollars on gas. But I suppose that someone had to clean out the recycling bin eventually, so it might as well be now and it might as well be me. It does get hard on the back though. And I've often decided against trying to get such and such job because I don't want to do stuff like this, cause no job is worth getting hurt and worrying about a possible permanent injury, and here I am doing all of this work over a couple of bags of clay worth eight or nine dollars each.


This morning I learned that there is more ongoing drama about the upcoming party. I'm just sort of sitting here waiting for more people to talk about it. I don't think that I'll post it here, because it is so far a long bit of business and I think that it will have to be a post all by itself.


So now I will got back to washing dishes and watching animated Flash Gordon, and seeing if I can get through the day without going to McDonald's and trying to win a million dollars. It would really be nice to win a million dollars, and just eating some fries and having a soda would be nice if I had the cash.

Making a mess

Yesterday I went to throwing class. I wish I had some comfortable coveralls, but I don't, and I don't think buying them just for this six week class is a good idea, especially with the money situation being what it is. Nor did I attempt to find a suitable apron, and I have quit trying to be less messy by wearing things made from trash bags. I've just accepted that I am going to make a mess in throwing class, and that afterwards I need to go home and change, or at least bring extra clothes to change into at school.

So after class I was going to go to a friend's new house. As I usually don't feel so good after class, I thought that I would just drop off a few things and play with the dogs for a bit and then leave. Other people were supposed to stop by later that day and do craft stuff, and I figured that if I felt better I could always come back later. But I at least wanted to drop off a few things for them to work with if I didn't feel like it later. And also, I wanted to make my first trip to the house during the day, since I was sure that I wouldn't be able to find the place at night.

So I didn't have time to clean up much after class, and I certainly didn't have time to change clothes. But since I wasn't planning to stay or see anyone except for my friend who know I was coming straight from throwing class, I didn't think that it was that important. And then I got lost for a bit, and then I ended up being at the place a little later than I thought, and then when I was invited in there were already six other people there.

Since they had already seen how I looked, it seemed silly to leave for an hour or two, change clothes, and then try to find my way back. So I stayed for a bit, and then I stayed a bit longer, and then we had dinner. So no one got to the craft stuff til maybe seven or so. And by that time it had been a long day for me, and I still didn't want to drive around in a strange place after dark, so I ended up leaving at about seven thirty or eight without doing any craft stuff at all.

But I did get rid of a box of junk, which some other people were happily making into Halloween crap when I left.

I did get two lopsided bowls done in class, which were really bad and not even very tall. If it hadn't already been the third class I probably wouldn't have kept these either. I think that all I'm going to get out of this class is that I tried it and found it that it just wasn't my thing.

Throwing class

After all this time I am finally trying to learn how to make stuff on the pottery wheel. I am not having much luck with it, but at least I am finally trying to learn it.

The first class I took at the university did not allow beginners to use the wheel at all, which was strange since the next semester you had to commit the entire four months to either hand building vessels, or hand building sculptures, or throwing on the wheel. And how are you supposed to decide if you want a whole semester of throwing on the wheel if you've never been allowed to try it? But that is the way it is set up there.

The second class I took at a community college, and they require everyone to at least observe a demonstration and sit at the wheel once. You don't have to make anything to turn in for a grade, you just have to try. I tried for about half an hour and gave up on it. If you watch someone who is good at it, like my teacher, then it looks easy and they have nice pieces done in about ten minutes. I can't seem to get the hang of even centering the clay.

So I didn't spend much time trying out the wheel, cause I knew that I wouldn't get anything done on it that was good enough to turn in for a grade, and there was always something else that needed to be done and I didn't have time to waste on the wheel doing extra stuff. So this semester I had skipped the regular classes and I am just taking this non-credit thing.

So I have been all summer without doing any ceramics, except for attempting to make some of my own clay, and that didn't go as planned either. So when class was about to start, I noticed the low enrollment and thought that the class would probably be cancelled. I decided not to get upset about it, and on the bright side if the class was cancelled I would be getting my $75 back, and we needed the money. So the week before the class started I was not really organized, and I hadn't even bought any clay, cause I didn't really think that there was going to be a class. At the last minute some students who wanted to take a different art class joined ours after they learned that their class was definitely going to be cancelled, so then we had a dozen or so people in our class and ours didn't get cancelled.

Still, I didn't learn that the class wasn't cancelled until after 5pm on Friday, which meant that it was too late to buy any clay. And then I was a bit late for class. Traditionally, the first day of a college course is a waste anyway, cause people don't have their books and such yet. The first day is just that day when you go and make sure you're in the right place and such. So I wasn't sure we would be doing anything that day or not, but that would be unfortunate, since the class is only on Saturdays and only for six weeks. Can't waste an entire class period like that.

But it turned out alright, since we wouldn't be doing much to start with he had enough clay for us to get started. Then there was about an hour of stuff that I didn't care about, like a tour of the building and talking about ceramics in general and such that I already knew. And then we watched a bit of a video that I'd already seen, but it had been a while and I needed to see it again. And then he did a demo himself. And then we got a few pieces of clay to work with, and two people already knew what they were doing, and the rest of us looked pretty bad at it.

So the first thing that you do is get the clay centered, and that just takes me too long. I do get around to it eventually, but it just seems to take me longer than everyone else. And then the next two things you do is to make a hole in the clay without getting the clay off-center, which I usually seem to do okay. And then the next bit is to make the hole larger, again without getting the clay off-center, which usually goes okay, but it doesn't always look as smooth at the bottom like it is supposed to, so sometimes I have to go back over it and smooth things out. And then comes the part where you lift the clay up and make a cylinder, and I never get that part right, and either it quickly goes off-center and looks more like an egg, or large pieces of clay actually come off. And then you have to start over again.

A couple of the new students have gotten to the part where they don't have a nice cylinder, but maybe they have a short bowl or a lopsided bowl or a bowl with a few curves in it that are not supposed to be there. And they like them well enough to keep them. But I've now been to my second class and do not even have a lopsided bowl to show for it.

The teacher says that this is normal and I shouldn't get upset about it. And I'm not upset about it, but two days of a six day class and nothing to show for it isn't my idea of a good time either.
The other thing that bothers me is that most of us have decided to use recycled clay. New clay is only eight dollars or nine dollars, but we are making quite a mess and spending the eight or nine dollars on stuff that we mostly end up putting back in the recycle bin seems silly, especially since there is now a machine all set up to recycle the clay. The problem is that since we all decided to use recycled clay, I spent half a hour of the two hour class getting the clay out of the machine. And then it takes me a while to get used to the wheel and the centering and such, and then we have to stop and clean up the area before class is over. So my first class I only got to work at the wheel for about half an hour, and my second class I only got to work at the wheel for about an hour and fifteen minutes. So I'm not happy about that, and I'm hoping that he'll at least let me use the recycling machine some other day of the week, so that on Saturday I am all ready to go when class starts.

I'm afraid that the money situation is so bad at the moment I can't even afford the eight or nine dollars for clay, and the store isn't open on Saturdays anyway.

I feel really bad physically. I don't know if it is the throwing class, or if maybe it was doing a lot of work the day before class. I am very tired and feel like staying in bed all day. Not the best idea at the moment. I'm am making progress on cleaning the backroom and I think that if I stop now it will just end up being a cluttered mess again soon.

The last day of class is the same day as the Halloween party, and I do not want to be tired and such then, so I am thinking that I might just have to skip the last day. Which means that if I don't at least get a lopsided bowl done during the next class I won't have a completed piece done this semester. Because the piece needs some drying time, and then you are supposed to put it back on the wheel for some finishing touches, and then it needs to be fired between classes, and then if it is going to be glazed that needs to be done before it can be fired again. So that's all hard to do in six classes anyway, so if I only go to five of the classes it's near impossible.

This particular class isn't supposed to be about finishing pieces, it's supposed to be about learning the technique. But I just can't quite look at it that way if don't have even one thing I'm happy with to take home with me.

Some odd comments from some people who mean well

I am living in my house and trying to figure out what to do about my situation. I know the general bit of what eventually must be done, but I haven't a clue about the specifics. Sometimes I think that I should get on with it anyway, and maybe I will figure out the rest as I go along.

So I try to get on with it, and then something happens. I maybe have a bad job interview. It's maybe a bit silly to get one's hopes up to that degree over one interview, but at the time I was really looking forward to getting a job, and getting a job at this place in particular.

Two things went really wrong at this interview. Actually, the first happened a bit before the interview. While I was not quite walking around the house singing, I did feel a bit better having come to a decision and having a job interview scheduled and a few other such things. And then my husband tells me that he really wants to work on our marriage and that he agrees to do some things that he should have agreed to long before. The point of all that being that if we were going to do what we'd agreed to do, I'd need Mondays off, or maybe I'd just need Monday afternoons off. So instead of going into the interview with the idea that I should say anything reasonable to get the job cause I really need a job, I end up going into the interview thinking the I don't need a job but I should probably feel better if I got one anyway, but it would be best if I could get one that did not involve working on Mondays or at least having Monday afternoons off. I'm not sure that getting Mondays off was really a problem, since the whole thing is rescheduled so that people get off Fridays during the summer I would think that a similar thing could be done so that certain people got off Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday during the rest of the year. And getting off Monday afternoons wouldn't have been any problem at all, as some people work in the morning only. In fact a whole lot of them work mornings only, since they have a strict policy of not having anyone in this particular job work over nineteen hours a week.

So it would not have been the perfect job in any case, even with Mondays off or afternoons off or whatever. But still, I would have liked it, and I would have tried harder to get it if I hadn't been asked to totally switch gears a couple of days before the interview. And that was all for nothing anyway, as my husband did not actually go through with any of the things he promised to do and I did not need this particular time off to schedule other things.

The other thing that went wrong during the interview was that while I was being asked the usual questions that one expects during a job interview, a question was asked that upset me just a little bit. One gets asks stuff like do you really want this job and can you handle this job and have you had a job like this before, etc.... And then maybe you get asked why you left your last job or why are you leaving your current position? And then you have to find something to say other than you quit because your boss was being an a**. I had this idea that this particular part of the process was going to go smoothly, because I did in fact have something to say other than my boss was an a**. I had in fact reasonable answers to why I left my last two jobs, even though technically I was let go from one of them. My last job was in fact, a temp job at the Halloween store. So there was nothing bad to say about anybody on that one, since it was just a temp job for a certain period of time and then the job just ended, and it wasn't a matter of anyone getting fired or anyone deciding to quit. The job before that was a sort of private daycare, and I was too much out of my element and was going to admit that and quit anyway when they decided to hire me some help. My help did such a good job that they decided she could probably do the job without me, and I was really rather relieved to be let go as I had planned to go back to school anyway. I really liked those people, and if they had anything for me to do other than watch the kiddos I would have asked to stay, but as it turned out getting fired right then was the best thing that could have happened to me since it lead to me getting a Pell Grant. The job before that one was a less pleasant story, more of the I was going to quit because the boss was an a** but they fired me first, but I had paperwork on the subject if anyone really needed to know the details. I was a traveling salesperson, and I rather got drafted into that job because my husband was a traveling photographer. I never wanted the job in the first place and had pretty much told them that I was quitting the job over arguments about the schedule in March, and I somehow got talked into continuing to work for them the rest of the year. And then after that I'm told that I don't have a job after November, because I'm such a terrible employee. Really, if I was that bad why did they keep me on seven months after I wanted to leave? It's hardly the same as really getting fired when it's seven months after you've already said "I quit."

But none of that really came up about why I left certain jobs, which is what you'd expect to be asked if you're asked about it at all. What did seem to get the interviewer's attention was that my last job had been at the Halloween store, and he didn't seem happy about that. He said something like, what made you take that job? He almost made it sound like, why did you waste your time there?

I don't think that I've ever been asked about a previous job in quite that way before. People need or want money, and other people need jobs filled, and the two come together and one person pays the other to do a job. Maybe the person gets paid a reasonable amount of money for the work done, or maybe the employee likes something about the job that he's willing to take a little bit less money than he would normally want, or maybe he's just so desperate to get any money that he ends up taking a job that he doesn't really want and he'll leave as soon as he can get something better. But I don't think that the employee should be expected to explain any of that to anyone else. I wanted a job, and there was one available, and I took it.

What really upset me was that in previous interviews for other jobs, the main thing that seemed to get people's attention was the years I had not been employed at all. Like they didn't notice that I'd quit working for almost three years to go back to school. I had thought that going back to school would be a positive thing to potential employers, and instead I was finding out that no one cared that I now had a B.A. in English, and everyone cared that I spent a lot of time being unemployed.

So while I wanted to make a little money at the Halloween store, and I hoped that the job might be fun, my main reason for taking it was that I'd have a job to write down in that wasn't as far back as 2002. And it seemed a whole lot better to work at a temp job that had an end in sight, rather than say take a job at McDonald's or something and then quit after a couple of months. So it really upset me to hear this guy asking me why I took the job.

I did not get that job, and I didn't get called back for the five other jobs that were available at that same place. And that and some other stuff rather upset me, and I haven't been on any other interviews since then. But at the time I didn't care that much, since we were supposed to be working on our marriage and that was the priority, not getting a job.

People who mean well say other upsetting things too.

I've had people tell me that it is obvious that I'm only still with my husband because I need the money and that I should just get rid of him.

Despite what might or might not be obvious to other people, my needing the money is not the only reason my husband is still here. The money issue is, on occasion, a major priority, and sometimes maybe it is the main reason for the current arrangement, but it has never really been the only reason.

Still, if people think that it is obvious I only keep him around because I need the money, it does seem odd that they think I should throw him out. I need his money, but I should say since I only need his money he has to get out? I don't recall these people saying similar things to other people, like since you only stay at that job because you need the money you should quit. Or that people who stay in a certain apartment they don't like because it is the only one that they can afford to live in should move someplace else.

On a completely different note, I've had some people say some particularly odd things about selling my art. I've posted before about the difficulties of selling art, and I posted about the problems of trying to figure out how much to charge for the art and other difficults of trying to sell stuff on eBay here. Basically, there's a huge gulf in between what I want to be paid for my art and what the people want to pay for the art. I want to be paid for the supplies I used to make the art plus a reasonable amount of money for the time I spent making the art. What a person is willing to spend on the art is partially determined by how much other things cost that they would be just as happy buying at the mall. So usually, people do not want to buy scarves that costs $80 or $175 or $330 or even more if they can go to Target and buy a scarf that they like for $15 or $20. True, they might like my scarves more, but not that much more. So I have only sold two scarves, and had an order for a third that was cancelled. If I try to sell ceramics I have a similar problem. Usually what a person wants to pay doesn't even cover the cost of the supplies, and they don't seem to realize that an artist should be paid for their time just as much as a person who does "real work." People expect that if you enjoy making the art that you shouldn't expect to make money from it, though those same people don't expect doctors and pilots who enjoy their work to do donate their time.

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that we do sometimes sell our art for smaller amounts of money that do not take into account the time it took to make whatever it is. Let's say that you know someone who enjoys hand-knitting things, and the person is always knitting either socks or little squares that can later be made into pillows or blankets or scarves or maybe even sweaters. And this person always has some knitting project with her, so that if she ever has to wait for anything that the waiting time is spent knitting instead of just being wasted. So five or ten minutes here and there while waiting for class to start and waiting for the phone to ring when someone is going to call right back and waiting for the pasta to boil while making dinner can all add up to an hour or two a day, and in a week or two you can make a scarf or pillow or maybe even a blanket or a sweater without having to really set aside much for knitting. So when this person is selling a scarf she only wants to be paid for her supplies plus something for her time for the hour or two that she spent putting the squares together, and she doesn't think about all the time that she spent actually knitting the little squares. She enjoys knitting and it keeps her from getting bored sometimes, so she doesn't think to charge much for her scarves, just enough to pay for the yarn and maybe a bit more. She has no problem selling scarves for $20 or so.

But if that same person were to quit her job or give up school or whatever she normally does to become a professional scarf maker, she can't keep selling the scarves for $2o and expect to earn a living that way. The people who have been buying the scarves for $20 probably will not keep buying them if they have to pay more for them, and they can probably find someone else who knits these little squares in between doing other things and charges $20 for a scarf.

So I don't sell much of my art. Most of my art is a labor of love to make something that either I want to keep or I want to give to a close friend or that I specifically made for a charity fundraiser. Yes, I can make you one almost just like it, but it will cost you. It will cost you whatever the materials cost, plus a very reasonable rate of ten dollars an hour for my time. I think that a lot of artists do eventually sell some of their stuff for a lot less than that, just to get rid of some of the stuff. This is especially true of art students who had to make a particular thing for a class, but didn't really like the piece. They just did it for the grade, and once the class is over they have no use for the piece. It is just taking up space, so eventually you either sell it or give it away, and sometimes you even throw some of it out. So, yes, sometimes an artist will sell you a vase for $25, even though it costs that much for just for the glaze and the clay, but you just got lucky. I like almost all of my art and don't feel the need to sell anything just free up some space.

So I get these comments from people. You should sell these. You could make some money. But the people rarely know what they are talking about. If I made something specifically to sell, I would have to make a certain amount of money for it, and probably no one wants to spend that much. Besides the two scarves, the only art I can remember selling was one tile and two decorated eggs (and one of those eggs was purchased only because the purchaser broke the egg and had to buy it).

What really puzzles me is that one of the people saying this stuff is someone who actually was an art major in college. She knows all this stuff. She is an artist, and she doesn't make art for a living. Maybe it was so long ago that she doesn't realize how much supplies cost now, or maybe she's forgotten how much time it all takes.

Another odd thing comment came from my ceramics teacher. I was making a Sleestak head. The teacher doesn't like Sleestak heads. He says that I can't make anymore of them for class credit, and he's not going to fire anymore of them. So I said that I would make more next year in the non-credit class, when we're allowed to make anything that we want. I said that I would like to try to sell some of them to fellow fans. He said that he didn't think that selling Sleestak heads counted towards the "personal enrichment" goals of the non-credit class and he was still unlikely to fire any of them for me.

So I thought that was an odd thing to say. If I can actually sell some of them at a profit, I can buy more supplies and have tuition money to keep taking classes. He would have no problem with me selling vases or something like that after we make them in class, but he has doesn't want me to make duplicates of things that I might actually be able to sell at a profit. I am very unlikely to sell many vases at a profit, since most people can find something that they like just as well for less money somewhere else. I don't know of many other people selling Sleestak heads, so I thought that maybe I was onto something.

Men!!!

Finally got up off my butt and went to the ceramics lab to pick up a few things. I didn't stay long and I didn't get much of my stuff. And I didn't get into it with anyone about my probably not coming back in the fall. I'd still like to take that Saturday only class, but so far no one has signed up for it. Doesn't look good.


Both of the Martian things cracked, but one of them might be repaired. The Sleestak head has a few minor cracks, but it looks pretty good. And the Triffid didn't turn out too bad. I couldn't find my relief dragons. Maybe I already took them home and forgot where I put them.


So I collected the broken Alien egg and three tile molds and put them in the car. And then I talked to one of my fellow students and the teacher for a bit. And then I noticed J wasn't around, so I asked about her.


Apparently I will not be seeing J again. Or, at least, it is unlikely that I will be seeing her again. She had to move. Not that she moved to another state or anything, but she's moved far enough away that she won't be going to that school anymore.


Seems that a few days after I last saw her, her boyfriend dumped her and told her to move out. There was no discussion, no fighting, nothing like that going on. She thought that everything was fine, and then he just announced that it wasn't working for him and she needed to leave.


Sounds familiar.


Different reasons though. Apparently, he needed his space. And since he got involved with an artist, the actual physical space might have been a problem. You would think that people would figure that out before they get involved with artists. But in his case it seemed to be more of the other kind of space. He didn't want to be around her all of the time. Again, you would think that people would figure this stuff out before they get involved like that. Just because you enjoy having dinner with someone doesn't mean that you should live with them.


That was one of the main reasons she was back in school. She had moved away from all of her other friends and family, and she needed to be out doing something by herself so that her boyfriend could have his space. Then after she's made ceramics such an important part of her life and signed up for classes and such, he dumps her. Great.


The three of us were supposed to have a show this year. I guess that's not going to happen.

Still not getting much done

The house cleaning and the sorting has declined somewhat. I had given up on trying to tackle anything big, cause that was taking too long and I just end up getting depressed and giving up. I then decided that the best thing was to do something small everyday and also to break up the day with other things like reading a chapter in a book or watching some old TV show that I haven't seen in twenty years.

Anyway, I thought that I was making some progress, and that was making me feel better. But yesterday I was looking for something, and I couldn't find it. This is not that unusual for me, except that the particular thing was among some stuff that I sorted through two or three weeks ago, so I should know right where it is. I don't. And I guess that I've even accumulated some new stuff since then and that didn't help the process. But I didn't get that much stuff, and most of it was stuff that had a place and a purpose, so it shouldn't have been a problem. But I suppose for me that all stuff is eventually a problem.

The sorted through things that are going to go are mostly out in the hallway. I guess that it will help to actually go ahead and send it wherever it is going to go instead of leaving it in the hallway. That probably isn't going to happen today. My husband announced last night that he hoped I did not have any major plans for the day, since he had to go to work an hour early and that wouldn't leave us much time to go where he wanted for lunch etc.... So that was odd. He doesn't usually announce where we're going to lunch the night before. Maybe he's got the days confused. The place he wants to go has a sale on Wednesdays. Anyway, it seemed a little weird.

Also weird is this problem I'm having with my skin. No, not the usual problems I have with my skin, but this is sort of an itch. No, not like that either. But it just feels like there is sand everywhere. There can't be sand everywhere. Look, no sand, or at least not enough that it should bother anyone. Still, I keep imagining that there's sand everywhere, getting in inconvenient places.

Okay, so I've decided that as long as I'm dealing with this imaginary sand that I might as well start making some mud. I should have started a long time ago. The summer is half over, and I'm just now getting started. I bought the over-priced screen like six months ago, and I've hardly used it at all. Anyway, I had thought that I would work with a little bit of it everyday over the summer, and then by the fall I would have a lot ready to make clay with, and I just didn't do it. It's July now. I should have started this in May.

So now I'm working on it, and I've traded the imaginary sand for real sand. Sometimes it's a matter of picking out a little bit of sand from the clay. This time around it feels more like washing the clay off of the sand. Well, it's not really that bad, and maybe I'm having a false memory of it being especially easy before. And the sand will just go into the garden, so it's not like it's a bad thing.

Okay, today I'm going to get lots of work done. Not really, but I am going to run a few errands and sift through some of this mud. And apparently I'm going to have a nice lunch.

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.

What the hell was I thinking?

Today is the first day of a very busy week at school. Somehow, I had thought that it was next week, but it isn't, it's this week. This week is the last week to work in clay that is at the green stage or the wet stage.

Not that the clay is green. I don't know of any green clay, though sometimes unfired terra cotta has sort of a greenish look compared to other clays. Unfired clay that has been slip-cast is called greenware, and sometimes any unfired clay work is called greenware. After is has been fired once it is called bisque.

Anyway, even the smallest pieces need at least a week to dry properly, so this is the last week to make anything. And really, this is only the last week to make anything if the stuff you are making is terra cotta that isn't going to be glazed, or something that is going to end up being a mixed media piece and painted instead of glazed. Anything that needs to be glazed fired should have been completed last week. But I think that he'll let me glaze some stuff that last week and pick it up during the summer or fall semester.

I hardly have anything finished. The 18 inch pylon-vase is completely finished, though it did end up with a bit of a crack at the top, but I'm hoping that a bit of black ink will make that less noticeable. The other vase is finally in the kiln, so I should see it today or tomorrow. The relief sculptures are nearly dry, and I'm not worried about when they get fired. The plates and bowls have been bisque fired and glazed, and some of them are in the kiln and will be taken out today. Despite my original plan to dip and pour glaze on the plates and bowls, I had to brush glaze most of them, which took about six hours. So using that time to glaze was a mistake, since I could have done glazing during the last week, but I wasn't thinking clearly at the time and was just wanted so much to get something completely finished.

Which leaves just an enormous amount of work to do this week, even if I go to all seven classes and the extra lab time on Friday afternoon. I am nearly finish this stage of the Triffid, but now there are cracks appearing all over it. I'm afraid that's going to happen with most of my projects, since I have been working on them too long and they are getting too dry to work the clay properly. I should make a fork and a spoon and a ladle to go with it, but I haven't started them yet.

I have the bodies of two Martian crickets, but no heads or arms or legs. Not only are they too dry, but I now think that they are too big and should be made in three or even four parts, with the heads being separate from the bodies, and the arms and legs being attached to a third piece. The pieces that were meant to become the heads did not dry properly, and I may have to start over with them.

The Alien egg is mostly going well, though it still needs some work, and I didn't even start the face-hugger dish that I meant to go with it.

And while all of that is going on, at home I've been trying to work on a couple of sleestak, and the teacher still wants a dragon instead. The dragon I have started, but only just. I've started the jaw, but I haven't even put any teeth on it yet. Since he really wants to see that dragon, I suspect that he will allow me to work on it that last week and have it fired later.

It's all quite silly anyway. I don't need the credit for anything, and as much as I hate to get a bad grade, the odds are that I will never really need to worry about my GPA in the future. But I hate to get a bad grade, just in case. But regardless of the grade, I did want to have some nice pieces finished. I hate to get this far and then have to give up on something or have an incomplete set or whatever might end up happening.

This is too much to get done. What was I thinking?