No Telling

I won't tell if you won't tell. I made these at three different times and tried to make the glazes all the same but didn't quite achieve it. Maybe the guys just got different suntans.

Moving along in the world, I now have an iPhone. Susan's breaking point was the $49 price tag. Don't call me because I don't know how to answer it yet. Or how to make a phone call. I don't even know my phone number. I don't like to talk on the phone because I had to talk on the phone a lot in my previous life, so after I did some heavy begging, Susan disabled the ring and message tones for me.  And I know Susan really loves me because she put Angry Birds on it for me.

More Pots

I've been working on these guys, I call them "Raven Heads".  They will be fired soon and then I'll think about what kind of glaze for them.  The heads lift off and each pot is about 9" high.

Last night I watched the movie "Thank You For Not Smoking" - I'll give it 3 stars (out of 5).  My latest Audible book is "The Likeness" by Tana French. So far it gets 5 stars, mainly for elegant writing and a story that is slowly pulling me in. Susan just finished "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey" by Walter Mosley and gave it 5 stars.

If you read the Wall Street Journal this Saturday you'll have seen a long article about Austin. Although I'd like to think it makes us seem really "hip", I give it a D+ for accuracy.

Christopher and Caitlin

We have a nephew. He has his Aunt's (and father's) wicked and warped sense of humor. These two managed to have an easy-going afternoon with us (and other family) without constantly looking at their phones.

He's smart and is studying Music Education. His girlfriend is smart, too. She's studying biology and wants to be a doctor.

There is hope for our future.

In a totally unrelated pivot, we've been catching up on our Netflix lately:

5 Stars to The Girl in the Cafe and to Welcome.
1 Star to Italian for Beginners , which we didn't even finish.
2 Starts to The Deep End. We got this one because of Tilda Swinton and her performance in Michael Clayton (5 Stars). Her performance in this was okay but the story was preposterous and homophobic.

We've also been reading:

Me - The Book Thief
5 Stars - I love it and don't want it to end.
Normally I listen to audio books (much easier to cope with for people with dyslexia) but Susan insisted this one had to be read because of the illustrations on a few pages. Perfect decision.

Susan - Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
3 Stars - Good story, stereotyped characters, easy-to-guess bad guy, iffy writing style and/or bad editing.

[Susan insists on speaking:

I don't care if the author is living in Mississippi, I've lived in the south and "y'all" is written with an apostrophe to indicate the omission of  the "ou"' in "you all" (or, if you are prissy, "all of you"), and thus the formation of the contraction.  

As everyone south of the Mason-Dixon Line knows, "y'all" can be both the singular and, most commonly, the plural of "you". As in "Y'all coming along, Billy Bob?" or "Y'all ready to eat now, folks?" To further confound y'all, there is a plural - "Y'alls coming to the movies with me?" and a possessive - "Is that y'all's dog there?" Moving along, there is the inclusion of everyone present with the "Are all y'alls ready to go?" And so on.

To write the word "yall" implies we Southerners don't know what we are saying. Get it, y'all? ]

More Baby Pots and Pancakes

Baby Pots because Baby, it's cold outside!

I am an oatmeal fan and a pancake fan so I really enjoy cold weather as an excuse to have those for breakfast. Not both at the same time until now because Susan has found a recipe for oatmeal pancakes that are even lighter and puffier than the Bisquick Melt-In-Your Mouth ones (recipe on the box) we've been making. Up until now she only tolerated oatmeal in cookies but these pancakes have won her over.

Oatmeal Pancakes
--------------------
Mix in a bowl:
1/4 c. flour
1 c. quick-cooking oats (the 1-minute kind)
1 T. sugar
1/2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
a dash of salt
optional: 1/4 t. cinnamon (we don't opt)

Mix in another bowl:
1 c. nonfat buttermilk
1 large egg
2 T. melted butter

Add the wet stuff to the dry and stir just until mixed.
Cook on your lightly oiled (or not, if teflon) pancake griddle or in a pan, turning when tops are covered with bubbles. These might looked browner when done than normal pancakes.

If you are of the decadent type you can do what we do: Fry up Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage. Crumble it into little pieces. Sprinkle them on the pancakes before you flip them over to finish cooking. When you serve them, serve them sausage-side up because then there are all the little spots to trap the syrup.

If you have extra pancakes left over they will reheat (about 10-20 seconds) in the microwave the next morning. If you are like us, there won't be any left over and after breakfast you'll just go lie on the floor for an hour or so.

For the record, I can cook and I can make these all by myself.

Late edit by Susan: Angie's Comment includes a similar recipe, but you have to plan ahead and soak the oats overnight. By using the quick 1-minute oats you can avoid that advance planning. We've tried them both ways (regular oats, soaked overnight and quick oats not soaked) and we can't tell that much of a difference. In our house the pancakes are usually a spontaneous decision so the quick method has become the Go-To recipe.

A Better Start

Last year during the break between semesters I was very unproductive (see here and here), which resulted in Susan's desperate attempts to motivate me (see here). This year I was very productive, as shown in my "30 Days of Creativity" door in my garage studio. The circled dates (a total of 4) were days when I didn't do anything creative.

I painted this door several years ago, it's to the right of my work area; in the spring and fall I leave the door open and sometimes get wrens coming in to visit.

One thing I worked on off and on was my collection of Pod People.  The tallest are about 6" high and all of these still need glazing of some sort of another. Or maybe they'll just stay like this.

A conclusion, sort of, to the Toto toilet problem (see here). Definitely we have a Gravitation Push/Force Flow issue which can only be resolved by tearing down our house, ripping out the concrete foundation, pouring a new one with reworked pipes and then rebuilding the entire house. Not going to happen. The only way to resolve a Gravitation Push issue with a government-mandated low-flow flush toilet is to flush at least 3 times.  No further discussion on this issue.

However, on a bright note (as if there would be one when discussing toilets), Susan, in a fit of anger about the whole mess, desperately called the Customer Service number she found for Toto. After fumbling through the options (Press 2 if you need a toilet, Press 3 if you want to unstick your Barbie from your toilet, Press 4 if you can't figure out how to flush your toilet, Press 5 if you want to know what fanny-ribbon is....) she got an option for Technical Assistance For Your Toto Toilet. 

I know you aren't going to believe this, but here it is:
A real, live person answered the phone.  Brian.
A real, live person, Brian, here in the United States, who was NOT reading off a script.
Not only was it a real person, Brian, he let her rant and rave and then calmly walked us through about 10 different checkpoints - the two of us peering into the tank and trying not to drop the phone in the toilet as he helped us confirm everything was working correctly.  In the end it it only cost us 1 penny to find out that the toilet was working correctly and I only had to make one trip to Lowes for a new part (for which he gave me the exact SKU number).  And.... he gave her his phone number to call back if she had more problems! Susan spotted a mechanical part that wasn't aligned correctly, it's been bent back into place, the flapper is happy and the Toto flushes with a gurgle. We'd prefer the old-fashion whoosh but sometimes you have to take what you can get.

We still hate the damned low-flush toilet, we hate that if you have a problem a plunger will not fit in the tank correctly, and we hate that we have a Gravitation Push/Force Flow issue (yeah, I know, Let the Force Be With You). We now know that changing to another brand of toilet won't solve anything and that Toto is about as good as we can get.

Thank you, Toto, for having a real person provide Customer Service, we are still in awe that you did. And how sad is it that we are shocked to find good Customer Service?

Susan speaks: He's back in school starting today. Or, as I call it, Adult Day Care.

A Dream

Today we celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. He gave his famous "I Have A Dream" speech about the struggle and quest for racial equality in 1963. Most people remember the "I have a dream" phrases but when I looked over the text of it today, these phrases seemed to jump out:

"This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."

We may be a little closer today to racial equality but we seem to be dragging ourselves down as a nation, regardless of race, with our "jangling discord", our political intolerance, and our collective incivility.

Baby Pots

These guys are real small, only about 4-6" high. You are seeing them in their unglazed, naked glory. I do have a habit of really messing up good pieces with bad glazing choices and sloppy technique but Susan keeps reminding me that those become "teaching moments".  I have a lot of moments....

I'm working on more of these pots. Stay tuned.

I'm Talking To YOU!

I just bet you think this is a test tile where I experimented with various glaze colors. Possibly. But more than likely it is a depiction of what I was saying (and is much calmer than what Susan was saying) to our elegant and expensive low-flow Toto toilet. Or, as they say in the plumbing business, our Commode. Whatever. It's 5 years old, the handle has broken twice and the flapper has been replaced once and needs replacing again. We won't talk about the fact that a standard plunger won't work on it but Toto doesn't care about that because it believes that its toilets will never have a problem. Never mind. It's finally working, barely, now.

I'm terrible at math but I think that a low-flow of 1.6 gallons (the Government-mandated requirement, stand back as Susan curses) multiplied by a minimum of 3 flushes means our low-flow toilet uses 4.8 gallons of water each time time a human being makes a visit.

Enough said.  I tried to appease Susan by going to Home Depot and buying 20 regular 100-watt incandescent light bulbs that she can stash away. In case you weren't keeping up, our Government is requiring manufacturers to phase out production of incandescent bulbs so that eventually only CF bulbs will be are available. You know, those CF bulbs that contain mercury and no one has figured out what to do with them when they burn out and you want to throw them away.

Let's see, what else is the Government thinking about sticking their fingers into? How about requiring military veterans and their families to pay higher health insurance premiums, when they had been promised, as a condition of enlistment, they would get it at a fixed low rate. Yep, they're poking around at that as a possible money-saver. Picture this: You enlist in the Army and are promised health care for life. You are trained to defuse IEDs (improvised explosive devices). You leave your family and go, more than once, to Afghanistan. You survive, come home, leave the Army and go to look, unsuccessfully, for a civilian job. "What are your job skills, son?" And now your grateful Government wants to take back a benefit you were promised? I don't THINK so.

As Roseanne Roseannadanna (here and here) used to say, "It's always something!"

And so on and so on. This is about the extent of the ranting and raving we do. At least we listen to what others have to say, without interrupting and without screaming, as opposed to those raving talking-head idiots on TV.  Civil discourse seems to have disappeared from our nation, along with sanity, as shown by the events in Tucson. A 9-year old girl? We have lost our way if we think this can be explained away.

Gifting and Giving

This is Mr. Scrubby, made of some kind of ecologically wise material. I usually do the dishes so Susan gave him to me and we decided he was too cool to use so he just watches me from the window. We had a fairly quiet holiday. I am listening to an audio book, Unbroken, a terrific book that makes me realize I am a total wimp. Susan is reading a library book, The Passage, and insisting we leave the lights on all night long. Here are more books that we gave each other:

We aren't big gift givers - if we really want something expensive we decide together, if it's not expensive and something we really want, we just get it. Or rather, we wait a week or so and then get it. Which means often times the urge has passed ("If it's meant to be, it will happen"). Unless, of course, it's books and as far as that goes, Amazon should have sent us a Christmas card. Susan has over 130 books on her Amazon Wish List, but just to balance that out, there are three Reserved books waiting for her at our library.

We made Portuguese Soup for our Christmas Eve dinner and finished off with some Pumpkin Cake Roulade we'd held back from the one we took to her sister's that afternoon. We also held back some of the Black Russian cake from the same gathering. Susan usually only makes those cakes once a year so I insist on cutting some quality control samples before they leave the house. Wouldn't want anyone to get some bad cake.

Finally, here is the last of my batch of Nichos, for now anyway.

Here's hoping you had a happy holiday break.

Charlie Ferguson: Wasted Expressions

Wow!
I love this guy's photography (Charlie Ferguson, here). We caught this show near the very end; if you live in Austin you have a chance to run over and see it at the L. Nowlin Gallery (here) before they take it down.

These are all pictures of dumpsters. The same damned dumpsters I see every time I ride my bike in Austin. The same damned dumpsters I totally ignore. But not anymore.

I like to think that "art" is anything that makes you look at your environment with a little more focus.  Charlie's photos are beautiful art. You can't tell me the first image doesn't look like a magical night sky.

The Best Doctor You Could Ever Hope For

Q: Doctor, I've heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life. Is this true?
A: Your heart is only good for so many beats, and that's it... Don't waste it on exercise. Everything wears out eventually. Speeding up your heart will not make you live longer; it's like saying you extend the life of car by driving faster. Want to live longer? Take a nap.

Q: Should I reduce my alcohol intake?
A: No, not at all. Wine is made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine, that means they take the water out of fruity bits so you get even more of the goodness that way. Beer is also made of grain. Bottoms up!

Q: How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?
A: Well, if you have a body and you have fat, your ratio is one to one. If you have two bodies, your ratio is two to one, etc.

Q: What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise program?
A:  Can't think of a single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No pain...good!

Q: Aren't fried foods bad for you?
A: YOU ARE NOT LISTENING! Foods are fried these days in vegetable oil. In fact, they are permeated by it. How could getting more vegetables be bad for you?!?

Q: Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?
A: Definitely not! When you exercise a muscle, it gets bigger. You should only be doing sit-ups if you want a bigger stomach.

Q: Is chocolate bad for me?
A: Are you crazy?!? HEL-LO-O!! Cocoa bean! Another vegetable! It's the best feel-good food around!

Q: Is swimming good for your figure?
A: If swimming is good for your figure, explain a whale to me.

Q: Is getting in shape important for my lifestyle?
A: Hey! 'Round' is a shape!

Did you have a Happy New Year? Did you plan to start a diet? A new exercise program? You can thank me anytime for this thoughtful advice that, if followed, may save you a lot of time and ease your pain at the feeding trough.

The Tooth

Susan calls this piece "The Tooth." The old faded silk artichoke from Michaels' was the perfect finish for it. It's about 7" high.  The base is a piece of cement. When Celeste put this piece in the kiln she thought the glaze might run off so she put it on a chunk of cement so it wouldn't mess up the kiln shelf. The glaze did run and stuck the "Tooth" to the cement - and I really like it. 

Celeste is the Lab Technician, aka "Kiln Goddess", where my classes are held (Julie is my Other Kiln Goddess at the other location). She is very helpful and supportive, as is Julie, and if it wasn't for my Kiln Goddesses I wouldn't have been half as successful in achieving the looks I want for my pieces.  When they come out wrong, it's the Kiln God's fault, not the Goddess.  (Susan's response to this piece of information: So, what else is new?)

Color. Colour. Significant Eye Candy, However You Spell It.

Eye Candy, to start off your New Year.



No, I don't have a Canon printer, no affiliation, etc.



Go here for more about these videos. Go here to be totally blown away by more of these incredible images.

Happy New Year!

Make your New Year's resolution something you can actually achieve without starving or sweating -- recycle creatively!  Go here to get inspired. And definitely here. Eventually I'll figure out Tumblr.

Celebrate safely and have a Happy New Year!

Susan, The Blog Wrangler, speaks:
Here's a Resolution for you -- This year try not to mess up the environment with your acrylic paints.
Here's how to make that easy for yourself -- get yourself a teflon oven liner (sample here). Cut it in half. Or maybe not. (It all depends on how much table room you have.) Use it as a paint palette, as spot to squeeze out your glue/medium/goop, as a backdrop for your adhesive spray. It will work much better than the knee of your jeans or even the back of your hand. I know this and don't ask me how. When you are finished, let the pain/glue dry. When it's dry, use the edge of an old credit card or stiff piece of cardboard to scrape the dry stuff off and dump it in the trash. Ta-dah! A clean surface to use all over again and you didn't have to wash it.  Even Scotch brand Super 77 spray adhesive will come off this (use masking tape to sticky it off). And, if you are a really creative person, this is the best way to make acrylic "skins" to reapply to stuff.

P.S. No, Don won't figure out Tumblr. He's still struggling to figure out just where the clouds are that are doing computing for him.

Peace on Earth

"There are 48 women presently working along the volatile front lines of the war in Afghanistan deployed as the second Female Engagement team participating in a more active role, gaining access where men can't. The women, many who volunteer for the 6.5 month deployment take a 10 week course at Camp Pendleton in California where they are trained for any possible situation, including learning Afghan customs and basic Pashtun language."

Wishing you and all the men and women
 in our Armed Forces
 a Happy Holiday Season and hoping for Peace.

Now.

Everywhere.

photos: Life/Paula Bronstein/Getty Images. More here.

Tuba Christmas 2010

Please don't tell me you missed it again! Mark this website now, check it next December, find your location and go.



Tuba Christmas players come in all shapes and sizes and often by the school bus load. They rehearse very hard every year - for the one hour before the show.

They play on the front steps of our Capitol Building. Go here and here to see previous tuba festivities. The big buttons they wear/carry indicate each year they participated. The kilted player in the first picture has probably played in every one they've had. Just for the record, if you wear a kilt in the true Scotsman style, it is probably not a good idea to settle for a TSA pat-down at the airport.

We neglected to gather up Janis and Mike this year but they went anyway and looked for us. With a good-sized crowd of course we didn't find each other. Janis emailed me the picture below just in case we hadn't shown up.

We had sunny skies, temperature in the 70's and happy tuba players. A perfect Tuba Christmas concert.

Yes, We Did Have Thanksgiving Dinner

But first, some more of my work, specifically a very small (4") cup. Many artists make test tiles to see what a glaze looks like. I prefer to make something that might be useful, like a cup. I wanted the Celadon glaze to be a little darker to accentate the Limestone White glaze areas so next time I need to apply it thicker.

On Thanksgiving Day we went to the National Gallery of Art to see some of our old favorites (me looking at Philip Guston's Rug).

As a special treat, the featured exhibition was an Arcimboldo show, Nature and Fantasy, that was fantastic.

At the galleries where the works were displayed were ropes and posts marking off the areas where you had to wait in line to get it (the galleries were small so they had to limit the viewing). You know, sort of like those long lines at DisneyWorld, where you snake around forever until you get to the front. Ha! Because it was Thanksgiving there weren't any lines at all and the rooms weren't even crowded.

Outside the galleries was an enormous 15-foot high statue, Winter (After Arcimboldo) that had been created by Philp Haas. Susan waited about 5 mnutes for people to stop standing in front of it so she could get this photo. The atrium area in the East Wing of the National Gallery is about 5 stories high so the sculpture looked great in it.

We didn't miss our Turkey dinner, or actually, I didn't, thanks to the Cascade cafeteria in the National Gallery.  As you can see from the photo below, Susan opted for the vegetarian choices, topped off with chocolate.

Raku And More Artists

What should be in my Blog? My art or the art I see? Do you want to know about what art I'm making or do you want to know what pleases my eye and permeates my mind? How about both?

These two small pots (about 6" high) above are raku clay and raku glazed (go here for the unglazed view). They are not exactly what I wanted as they came out a little too muddy looking with not as much contrast as I'd like. I'll try again in the future

Still more Thanksgiving pictures, here at the Renwick, from their Permanent Collection:

Daniel Essig, Book of Nails II :

Michael Sherrill, Yellowstone Rhododendron (porcelain and steel):

After the Renwick we went on to the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

4 Seated Figures by Magdalena Abakanowicz is a favorite of mine. It probably could be renamed "Waiting at the Doctor's Office" or "Renewing Your Driver's License.

Chakaia Booker's sculpture fills an entire wall in one room.  "Her current work presents a level of acknowledgment to her African heritage and its influential artwork".  Go here for more information on her. I especially like the fact that she makes art that is big and guy-like, tearing down lots of stereotypes as she does.

Lee Bontecou's pieces are even more mysterious when you peer into them. We were lucky enough in the past to go to her retrospective show and she became one of our favorite artists. These are for you, Robyn.

Susan speaks, just to say that Anna pretty much got it right:

  "The chief obstacle to a woman's success is that
she can never have a wife.
Just reflect what a wife does for an artist."

Anna Massey Lea Merritt, 1844-1930

Gaman, Wood, Red and Blue, and Otto

Yes, it has to be about me sometimes. This is the face of Otto, raku clay, bisque fired. Otto is about 18 inches high and I'm still thinking about how he'll be glazed.

And now back to our Thanksgiving trip to Washington DC.
We always have a list of the museum shows we want to see but then there are the ones we think we'll just walk fast through. Of course those shows are the ones that catch us by surprise and make us linger and get behind schedule, the shows that make us wonder why we ever thought we could skip them.

At the Renwick we thought this show would be boring:
The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942-1946.

Gaman:  To bear the seemingly unbearable with dignity and patience. 

"After Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the infamous executive order 9066 in 1942, some 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned in concentration camps. The Renwick Gallery's Art of Gaman exhibition displays the arts and crafts of people who lost homes, businesses and professions during this dark chapter of World War II history. "

We couldn't have been more wrong about the exhibit. If there is one thing the Renwick does well, it is their signage. We read and looked, looked some more and read more and lingered longer. The small birds shown above are just one example of what the internees ( a polite word for prisoners?) made.

Also showing at the Renwick was:
A Revolution in Wood: The Bresler Collection

I don't do turned or carved wood but Michelle Hofzapfel's pieces (Table Bracelet: Promenade Suite), above and below looked like something I could try to "translate" into clay.

Other pieces interesting pieces were Todd Hoyer's Sphere

and Stoney Lamar's Self Portrait.

Finally, those utility boxes in this last photo are right across from the White House (you can see it in the background) and we've decided they are Red and Blue to represent our Red and Blue states. If you aren't from the US, here's the deal: Based on the majority of the votes received in the last major election, a state is designated either a Red or a Blue state. One means the state is majority Republican, the other means the state is majority Democrat, and I'll be damned if I can remember which is which.

I saw one of our Representatives at Whole Foods the other day and was thinking about shaking his hand and telling him "I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be mad at you or not, and not only that, I'm not sure if it makes a difference anymore." But I let him have his coffee in peace.