Gardening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool. I'm rich

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

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

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

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

Okay, that's probably not going to happen.

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

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

Another word about mammograms

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

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

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

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

Monday Blues, weekend getaways, and mammograms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should I boycott Survivor?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The usual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently, life goes on, even without blogs.

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

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

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

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

Went up the road a bit to Oklahoma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One more week of insanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday sucked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have just finished making a scarf

Okay, so I haven't finished making a scarf. But I am finished except for adding the fringe.

Sorry I have not been around. I am still very busy. Took most of the day off, except for finishing a scarf.

To my friend in the great white north: after you get my email you will have to reply at an alternate email address as my mailbox is full and bouncing stuff and I just don't have the time to fix it right now.

Off to get some sleep before it's back to work tomorrow.

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?

Drama over the student art show

I believe that today is the opening reception for this year's student art show. Early this evening, the school will be handing out awards for best student art and this year's art scholarship winners, and a few honorable mentions will get gift certificates to various restaurants and art supply places. And people will walk around and talk about which pieces that they like best while eating fruit and cheese and such.

But I won't be going this year. Mainly, this is because I've been so busy that I need a night to myself, so I'm not going to drive to school on a night that I can't even get into the lab. But I'll admit that a bit of sour grapes also figured into the decision not to go.

I won't be getting any awards or honorable mentions or anything like that. Yesterday, I was told for sure that I wouldn't even be in the show, unless maybe I would like to complain to the head of the art department myself. No, I don't think that I would like to do that.

Last week we were deciding which pieces we would want in the art show. I hadn't really given it much thought. There's always an art show going on, but I'm not always in it. I was in the first one this semester, since my teacher was in charge of that one and got to pick whatever he wanted to go in it. I think that he picked three of last semesters projects. Anyway, I knew that there was another show coming up, but I hadn't really paid much attention to it. Most of my stuff was still in the sculpture lab, and he could pick any of that for the show, or if he wanted something that I'd already taken home he could ask for it.

So I happened to ask about it, and he said that he didn't want things that had already been shown and asked what I liked best of what was left. And I asked which semesters I could choose from, since we'd already shown most of the good stuff from last semester, and most of this semester's stuff hadn't been glaze fired yet. He said that wasn't supposed to use stuff from last spring, but I could use some of that since that stuff wasn't fired in time to be in last year's show. Then he gave me a form to fill out.

The deadline was yesterday.

But all your stuff was already here, and you're just turning them in to me anyway. Just decide which two pieces you like best.

Now, until I saw this piece of paper, I'd forgotten that this show was the one with the awards and the gift certificates and such. Maybe if I had remembered I would have given it more thought and asked more questions and such, but I didn't. Anyway, I picked the paper castings of sea life and the glass dragon, since despite what he'd said I didn't want to break the rules and enter something from last spring, and he didn't want the stuff he'd shown before.

Okay, so I signed the paper and thought that was that.

Last year, we put all of the sculpture and ceramics in the sculpture lab and someone came by and looked at everything and decided who was in the show and who got awards and such. And my stuff was already in that room, so I didn't think that I had to do anything else. But I asked when people where coming to look at the pieces, and he said that this year the teachers were picking what went in the show, but someone else would come and look at the show and decide the awards after the show was up. Probably, that would be Monday.

Okay.

He said that my stuff was all ready, but he was hoped to get someone else's stuff fired before he started taking things over.

Okay, whatever.

Anyway, that isn't what happened.

If you were trying to get a scholarship, you were supposed to take your artwork over to the main building to be judged, and then after that you were supposed to take your artwork to be judged by someone else on Saturday. There were only three of us who had ceramics and sculpture who hadn't tried to get a scholarship, so apparently our stuff didn't even get looked at.

And, our teacher was told that the student art show has already been organized and that there is no room left for the five pieces he was going to put in. After a lot of arguing, they allowed him to put in one piece, not one of mine.

It is all nonsense that they do not have room for the other four pieces in the show. Our pieces would go in cases, which we have several of, and right now only two or three are being used. But I don't want to argue about it. Getting my pieces in the show at this point just isn't important to me. I can't win anything. It's too late for me to get a gift certificate to Trinity Ceramics or anything like that. And when you put something on display there is always the chance that it might get damaged or even stolen. So I don't see why I should risk that happening.

Last year I went and watched my fellow classmates win awards and such, but I don't think that I'll go this year. My classmates and I won't be getting anything, and only one of us will even be in the show. I know that it is partially my own fault, that if it had been important to me I should have found out what was going on last week, and when something didn't sound quite right I should have gone to the main building and asked more about it, but I didn't.

It's just one more annoying thing to deal with.

Today I am unbelievably tired for no good reason

Today I went to class for three and a half hours. I had many things that I hoped to get done. I was going to do a bit of touch-up work on the Triffid and then glaze the bowls and plates before working on the Alien egg, and then if I had the time I'd roll out some slabs and get things ready for what I'd have to work on tomorrow.

Only that didn't happen. I got everything out and then saw a bit of a crack starting on the Triffid, so I put some slurry on it to try to fix it. Then I mostly forgot about it while I moved on to setting up for glazing the plates. I thought that since I'd decided there was only time to glaze everything solid black that I'd quickly get all of that done buy pouring and dipping. There were three pint sized jars of black glaze, so I was pretty sure that would be enough. But after looking at the glaze only one jar seemed to be pourable. Rather than risk mixing in water and making the glaze too thin, I decided to pour glaze inside of the bowls and brush glaze onto everything else.

The inside of one bowl had some little cracks, so I put that one off. The other three bowls have been glazed on the inside. Brushing on glaze requires three coats. So three coats each on the outside of the bowls, and three coats each on the outside of four plates, and three coats on the inside of four plates. And after the slightly cracked bowl is dealt with, three coats on both the outside and the inside.

So, after three and half hours, I am not even done with the stupid glazing. I still have to brush on another fourteen coats on various things. And I forgot about the touch-up work on the Triffid, which means I am still not finished with that and it might still have a bit of a crack. And I didn't work on the Alien egg at all. And I certainly didn't roll out slabs or anything else.

But I am so tired. I am exhausted. I am exhausted from just brushing on some silly glaze. And it wasn't even anything complicated, no little detail work, just endless medium brushstrokes of the same color glaze. I shouldn't be this tired. I didn't do heavy lifting or walk back and forth from the car with supplies. I didn't do anything that required either much physical work or mental concentration. Yet I am just about ready to call it a day and go to bed.

I suppose that I could do that. The teacher has offered to let us in the lab for two hours tonight while he does something, but that isn't enough time for me to waste time driving or gas money. I won't go in again til tomorrow, maybe not even til tomorrow night. I'd like to work on a few things around here, but I guess that's nothing that can't wait a bit longer.

I just can't believe that I'm this tired over nothing.

My computer sucks

For the most part, the computer is a toy. I know that there are all kinds of useful things to do with the computer. Like I can look at my bank account online and I can get maps online and email is a good thing to have and all that. And once upon a time I did some real writing on the computer. I used to spend several hours a day on the computer trying to get that novel published.

But let's be truthful. We don't spend that much time on the computer doing anything useful. Or, at least, we don't spend that much time on our home computers doing anything useful. We surf the net, we blog, and maybe we download episodes of TV shows that we missed. The useful stuff takes up maybe half an hour a day if we have a lot of emails. The rest of the time is spent having fun, or at least wasted doing things that are supposed to be fun.

So I suppose that I could do without the computer. I could tell my friends that I don't have one and if they really need to contact me that they'll have to use the telephone, and I could actually write down the amounts in the checkbook, and I could just buy a regular map. And on occasions when that just won't do I can borrow a computer or use the one at the library. If I gave up blogging and downloading TV stuff, I could probably do without a computer and in the long run this would probably save me time and money.

But I don't really want to do that, do I?

Even before I was having serious problems with my husband, there was always the computer to argue about. Not serious heated arguments, but he was always spending too much time on the damned thing, and he was always wanting to spend money on the damned thing when we had actual necessities that needed to be paid for first. And of course he is always wanting to buy a new computer, and he broke our agreement not to buy another one when he bought this one in 2002, after we had bought two used laptops the year before. And he wants to buy a new one now, but I won't have it, because he still owes my mother a lot of money and I will not discuss buying a new computer until he pays her back.

But he wants to buy something to replace part of this one, which isn't going to cost as much as a new computer, and I'm thinking about it. If it would actually fix whatever is wrong with the thing. Maybe fixing this one wouldn't cost too much.

And lately it is even worse. Whatever it is that prevents those stupid pop-ups doesn't seem to be working this week. Sometimes, when I type in an address, I get that message that the address cannot be found and I should check my Internet connection, etc.... Except that it appears in a pop-up screen over the very thing that I was looking for, so why the message? And there are other pop-ups. Some of the pop-ups seem attached to particular web addresses. Whenever I go to read the blog of a certain British lady, I get a pop-up for Horny Singles. Not what I was looking for at all. I'm not typing in the wrong address, and the British lady's blog is still there, but I have to close a page about naughty twenty-one year-olds before I can read it.

So I have about had it with this thing, and I guess that I will be going to the electronic store in the near future and watching some of our money get spent on a replacement part for this toy.

Either that or just give up on the thing for a while.

Forgive my absense

I feel like I am very busy, even when I am not really doing anything. I am up to my eyeballs in...uh...clay.

The projects that I have been working on for a while are probably too dry and not going to work at this point. The Triffid isn't what I'd hoped for, and the Martian Crickets are just bodies with no heads or arms and legs. The newer stuff is just sitting there while I wait for it to get dry enough to work with. My relief sculptures are going to warp a bit, and I think that it is too late to do anything about it. For my sculpture in the round, I want a sleestak, while the professor wants a dragon. I haven't started either one yet.

My first vase is finally fired. It has a tiny crack in it, but I'm still pretty happy with it. The other vase is still waiting to be fired, since there aren't enough other pieces to fire the kiln at that temperature.

I had to pick two things to enter in the student show, and since I haven't finished anything except one vase this semester I had to pick stuff from last semester. Professor didn't want it to be anything I'd already shown, so it's going to be my glass dragon and the sea life paper castings. I'm not too crazy about the paper castings. At the time it seemed like a good idea, but after they were done I thought why did I do that? I'm sure every tourist place near a beach sells something just like it. For the amount of time I put into them I could have made more dragons instead.

From last year's show my friend K won a $25 gift certificate from Trinity Ceramics. He gave it to me so that I could buy a screen. I have been so busy that I haven't used it yet.

It's very sad, but things are not going well, and this is probably going to be my last class. I can't picture much changing over the summer, so I probably won't be going back to school in the fall. Maybe not going back in the fall wouldn't bother me so much, if I thought I would be going back in the spring, but I doubt that I'll have money for that sort of thing then either.

Anyway, I don't think that I'll be posting much for a while. My sleep is disrupted so that I don't often wake up early enough to blog in the mornings, and I can't see wasting much time with it in the afternoons and evenings when I might better use the time on artwork and gardening and such.

And of course now that I've said that I'll wake up really early tomorrow morning and have to think of something to write about.

Monday Morons--You're a teacher?

Okay, so I was at the ceramic supply place, and I had ordered some clay and some casting slip and paid for it, and I was just sort of looking around the store to see if I should get something else before I had the supplies loaded into my car. And this woman comes in and talks to the cashier, and the store part of the place is small and I heard what they were saying without really trying.

It started out normal enough. The woman came in and said that she was a teacher and that she had spoken to someone on the phone. So I'm thinking that she's already ordered stuff and that the cashier will ask if she has a tax number and then ring up whatever the woman ordered and send her around to the back. But that isn't what happened at all.

The woman says that she needs to buy some stuff for her students. And she says that they are using some red clay that I'd never heard of. But the cashier knew what she was talking about, and I've only used maybe six clays so far and I'm sure there are a lot of clays that I've never heard of. But I was thinking red stoneware, which is a cone 6 clay and uses high fire glazes. But the woman wasn't using red stoneware, and the cashier took the woman over to the low fire glazes. And the woman says that she needs a few colors and probably some clear. And the cashier says that the low-fire glazes are all on this wall.

And the woman says, "What's low fire? What does that mean?"

Okay.

So the cashier says something like the red clay that the woman is using is fired at the lower temperature ranges and that these are the glazes used with that kind of clay. And then the cashier shows her where the low-fire underglazes are and tells her that the underglazes also come in pint sizes, but those are kept in the back and she would go and get them if the woman needed that size instead.

So then the woman says that she'll probably need to see the pint sizes and wants to know how much they cost. The woman hasn't picked out any colors, and the cashier can't just be expected to go and get all of them in the pint size. The cashier tells the woman that the price depends on the color, but the average is about twelve dollars.
The woman seems to know nothing about ceramics. She doesn't know what low fire means. She doesn't know that colors all have different prices depending on what minerals are used to make the glazes and underglazes.

What is this woman a teacher of anyway?

The woman says that whoever she talked to on the phone had said that something was eight dollars. She wanted to see the eight dollar stuff. Some of the low fire glazes are eight dollars.

The woman then goes on that she has about six students and that they have been using this red clay because they were studying Greek pottery with the black figures on red clay. So the woman ends up buying only black glaze. She didn't even buy any clear glaze to go over the parts of the clay that are to be left red. You'd think that she'd at least have bought the black underglaze and then the clear glaze to go over it.

Anyway, it all sounded very odd to me. So I'm wondering what this woman is teaching that she has to go and buy supplies for an art that she seems to know nothing about. And I'm just imagining all sorts of problems that her students are going to have with their artwork if they don't know more about ceramics than she does. And who is going to fire the ceramics? If they are studying Greek pottery, do they intend to go out and have an open pit firing too? I can picture this woman just starting a fire out in the middle of a field somewhere, or worse, next to a school or someone's house. And does she know not to glaze the bottom of the pots or they will stick to the kiln? And if she's having someone else fire this stuff for her students, will the know that they are using a lowfire red clay, or will it look like red stoneware and get melted in a cone 6 firing? The woman didn't even know what lowfire meant, so I doubt that she will think to mention it.

The best that I can hope for is that this woman teaches an art history class and that she got this idea to have some of her students make pots for extra credit. Hopefully someone else at the school who actually knows about ceramics told her to use this low fire red clay and will know exactly what to do with it once the student finish their projects.

And today sucks too

Yesterday I did almost half of the stuff that I wanted to get done. I cleaned just a little bit, washed a few dishes, got started on an art project, and half watched some TV while I was doing laundry and cooking and such. My husband has to eat out all of the damned time, which is a waste of money, so I was going to cook something with lots of leftovers so we would eat the leftovers instead of going out the rest of the week.

After deciding to make something that he really might like and spending about fifteen dollars at the grocery store I started cooking. And after I finished cooking I tried to keep stuff warm until it was time for him to come home. And then I thought that he was going to be late, so I'd be better off putting the whole thing in the fridge for later. I moved some stuff around in the fridge and made sure that there was room for the stuff without moving everything into different dishes, and then I went in the other room to watch TV while I waited for the thing to cool. And then I most have nodded off for a bit. Then my husband came home, and I told him that I'd already put the food away, which I thought I had, cause I remembered moving things around in the fridge to make a space for it.

And this morning before I went to school I found all the food still on the stove. So I had to throw everything away. So of course I was late for class because I was throwing away food and trying to clean up a bit in the kitchen, and we had to waste more money going to Burger King for lunch, and I've been in a really bad mood all day. And the computer didn't work this morning either, so before I found the ruined food I woke up at the usual time and spent two hours in bed wishing that I could go back to sleep.

Yesterday, before I knew that I was going to have a bad day, I agreed to do grocery shopping for my grandmother so that my mom wouldn't have to do it. So I thought that I could at least get that over with, or find out that she didn't need anything or whatever. And I call my mother, right when I said that I would, and she's like, where are you? I'm at home, where else would I be if I'm calling to find out what you need? She's like, I haven't had time to ask what she needs yet. I'll call you later.

Later, when all the idiots pick up milk on their way home from work, right when I said that I did not want to go out. This is why I don't do stuff like this very often. One silly errand that should take about an hour ends up taking the whole afternoon, or maybe the whole day. I should have just said no when she asked yesterday, but it just seemed like a simple enough request. Really, I am going to go to the store, if you need something, after lunch. Not before lunch, and not after dinner. So maybe you could write the list before lunch so you can tell me what you need.

Sometimes class is such a disaster that I feel like just going back to bed and watching TV or something. And that is what I feel like now, but instead I'm waiting for my mother and her mother to decide if something is needed at the grocery store. And I can't really try to do anything useful now either. Like I can't get out the clay, or right then my mom will call and I'll either have to tell her to wait while I put everything away, or I leave everything out and hope that stuff doesn't dry too much while I'm gone.

My professor really, Really, REALLY wants me to do a sculpture in the round dragon. I don't want another dragon. Not that I wouldn't like another dragon, but this one is going to be too much work. I don't think that I have enough time left, and I'm not sure that I'm up to that skill level yet anyway. I should just turn in a sleestak instead and get a bad grade and be done with it. I'm too tired for this stuff right now.

How I hate just sitting here

I have nothing exciting to write about today. I overheard an odd conversation the day before yesterday, but that seemed like a Monday Morons kind of post. I've already written the draft for that, and now I'm just sitting here.

It's not like I don't have plenty of stuff to do. I recorded three hours of TV yesterday. I could watch that, except that the TV is in the room where my husband is asleep, so I can't do that. Over the past two days I have managed to make these armatures out of stuff like newspaper and balloons and Styrofoam cups, but I'm not working on the clay yet because I have to clean up a work area first, and that might make noise. And I should probably clean the kitchen so I can cook something later, but again that would make noise. And the sheets need to be washed, but someone is sleeping on them at the moment.

I haven't even had a bath yet. That makes noise. Not that I don't sometimes do that anyway when I have to go to school or something, but when I don't have anywhere that I have to be in the mornings, it seems rude to take a bath or a shower when it might wake him up for no reason.

This really sucks. I have so much to do today, and I won't get started on any of it for at least another hour while I wait for him to wake up. And I probably won't do much of the rest of it til after lunch while I wait for him to go to work. Which means that I will probably get about four hours of real work done before I have to make dinner and decide whether or not to go to a night class.

I brought this other bed in here so that if we had such different schedules that one of us could sleep in here and not disturb the other one. But we don't have different schedules. He has his schedule, and except for art classes half of the week, I just sort do things around his schedule. But I don't guess that would have helped me much today. Even if he were sleeping in here I couldn't do much. Well, if I kept the volume down I could maybe watch some TV, and I could go ahead and wash those sheets that he wouldn't be sleeping on, but the rest of it would still have to wait.

It's going to be a long day.

A bit of a puzzle

Yesterday I was told that I had especially good blood pressure. Like it was 120 over 80. It used to be like that all of the time. I paid no attention to it.

But yesterday I'm thinking, that can't be right. Maybe the thing is broken? Maybe 120 over 80 is the baseline reading and my actual blood pressure is something else entirely?

My blood pressure has been high for about two years, but I don't think that it's been high for the whole two years. I think that it goes up when I have an argument, or when I have to deal with something bad, or when I have to go to see a doctor. Going to the doctor and such used to be no big deal, but now it is very upsetting. So two years ago I was told that my blood pressure was high. And it had never been high before, so they waited a while and took it again. Still, they thought that it might just be some odd thing that would go away. I didn't think anything more about it.

The next year when I saw a doctor who made a big deal out of it and gave me some pills for it. Blood pressure was something I'd never paid attention to before. So I went and found one of those machines at the drug store and took my blood pressure, and it was a bit high, but not as high as she said. I hadn't felt good in a long time, but I just thought it was because of everything that was going on. Then I thought, well, maybe everything that is going on has made my blood pressure go up, and maybe that is what is making me feel bad. So I took the pills for a while, but that didn't make me feel any better.

I quit taking the pills. The blood pressure just seemed to go up whenever I had to go see a doctor. The pills didn't seem to be doing anything, so why take them? And for all I know the pills have side effects that would make me feel worse.

And I didn't go on a diet or do any of the other things that I was supposed to do. The fifteen pounds that I lost came back. A bit of the weight came back between the summer and the Halloween party, and now the rest of it is back. I am now back at pre-tragedy weight. I don't like it, and now that I'm a grown-up gaining weight does not make me feel good, but it didn't make me feel especially bad either. I have other things to worry about.

So I went into the clinic yesterday thinking that they were going to mention high blood pressure and then they would say something about the weight gain. But they didn't say anything about the weight gain. Maybe they thought that last year's number was written down wrong. And since my blood pressure always seems to go up a bit whenever I'm actually having to deal with medical stuff now, I thought that it would be high yesterday, but it wasn't.

120 over 80?

Okay, so what is up with that? You don't have better blood pressure when you gain weight, do you? And I know that chocolate is supposed to be good for your heart or something, and I had some chocolate before I went to the clinic. But the chocolate that is supposed to be good for you is the really dark almost inedible stuff, not the stuff that I usually eat. And certainly the leftover milk chocolate and carmel Easter candy that I was eating yesterday is not supposed to be good for you.

So I just don't get it.