lee_future | Reading

Creakily snoring cat is the best cat.

Got my crown done today, for a mere $250 thanks to the NDP's championing of dental insurance for indigents. My left jaw aches; this is a state of affairs that will likely persist until morning. It's nice to not have a bit of a hole where a tooth should be, though. (I had a temporary crown. It came off a month ago and the dentist said "eh, probably not worth putting it back on again.")

Things in boxes, empty shelves. There's more of the last lousy ten percent of stuff I can pack but it's running into the problem of deciding -what- to pack. That in turn would be easier if I had a better sense of what the apartment will look like without bookcases, which I won't get until after the movers come. Oh well. I can always take later boxes over to the storage unit myself.

Soon I'll get to see what life is like with Less Stuff, at least for a little while.

My great-great-great- (+/- one great) -grandfather or uncle Joseph G. Taylor had a violin that was discovered among my grandmother's things when she died in 2014. Turns out to be a fairly decent instrument: not amazing quality but certainly a few steps above my cello. ("Wilhelm Duerer fecit anno 1900.") Her kids got it refurbished and then had no idea what to do with it, so my dad gave it to me as the only person in the family who plays a stringed instrument at all. It's mostly sat in its case for years; for awhile I loaned it to someone who wanted to learn to play violin, and I'm not sure whether it got any use there or not.

I took it out yesterday just to see what it was like. It's tiny. Tuning is obnoxious; I'd forgotten how much I hate wooden pegs. (I'm spoiled by the amazing mechanical pegs on my viola.) Notes aren't where my fingers think they ought to be, and everything is cramped. I'd expected all that. What I hadn't expected was for it to feel like cheating. I'm accustomed to a certain amount of resistance in bowing, I expect from the thicker/larger strings on the viola (and more so on the cello, though that's a whole different thing). On the violin the bow just ... glides. Faster notes and slurs come so much easier and more clearly, string crossings are trivial. Hmpf.

Other than that... I'm still here. Mr Tuppert has stopped creaking but is still sprawled on his heating pad with his chin on his front paws, and that's pretty cute. Life goes on.

greenstorm

Yesterday I got a ride into the studio with Mary and glazed for just over three hours. I also had an online workshop with Shikha Joshi, one of my favourite potters, which I watched 40 minutes of -- it's a two hour workshop and I have access to rewatch for a month.

I got a tremendous amount of fun stuff done to be ready to run a kiln next weekend, when some more studio members have had time to glaze. We also tested specific gravity of the glazes I knew were too thick from the previous glaze-making bee, and fixed them.

A couple times during glazing I got the shakes but was more or less feeling ok by the end of it. This is the point where I always question myself: am I really unwell? I just did much more in a day than I think I can. I've learned to interpret it as my body running on adrenaline, because--

--when I got home I fed the animals and then collapsed into bed. I couldn't keep warm, even with extra wood on the wood stove, and pressed myself hard into the heated blanket and shivered for an hour or two. The heat felt like an IV of blood or water to a thirsty person: like something my body drank up every kilojoule of. My throat swelled up, and my digestive muscles went on strike so I had to prop myself up on pillows because otherwise the food just oozed back up. I slept and listened to Murder on the Orient Express briefly and slept again.

Ok, not all in my head. Still very shaky, waking up in the middle of the night to just have this weird internal experience like I'm being jackhammered but my body doesn't really move is nearly a new one, but. Still unwell, symptoms still kinda amorphous. Rest indicated for the next few days. Sometimes I can head off the worst if I immediately go into dark and quiet and lying down not thinking much.

We got a bunch of snow last night and overnight -- the snowplough went by last night and then just woke me up now, so we must have had more -- and I'll need to snowblow the driveway to get ready for the truck returning.

I actually wanted to come here and describe my current favourite cup I made that came kind of out of nowhere, but my energy is done. I'll do so another time. It's neat how a single object can have so many possible future ideas radiating out of it as its used. Enough to say I'm feeling very interested in the intersection of glaze and clay body/form/colour right now.

greenstorm

This bisque kiln has a bunch of experiments in it. I've been playing around some, mostly in defiance of disability paperwork supposed to be using all my energy. Whether that's a good idea or not, when this kiln comes out of the glaze it'll be super exciting. Another list about it:

1) pendants from the pendant class I taught in there, some with alphabet pasta, to be glazed and distributed to the folks who made them

2) most of a pound of green body stain added to a bucket of white reclaim and mixed in, then some of that marbled with M370. It's very pale in greenware, but one expects it to be much darker after the glaze fire

3) some thrown mugs with a roller applied, and then ballooned out, most then brushed with the stained slip mentioned above

4) several mugs with the wiggle wire used to carve shallow facets into the surface and then ballooned out, some of which ridges are brushed with the green slip above. Either way the ridges tend to channel glaze down them in a very neat way.

5) Some bowls with lids, originally to microwave food without spattering but I think the lids fit too tightly and don't have a pinhole for steam, so maybe just for storing in the fridge?

6) Several lidded bottles thrown in the one-piece style with lids of varying degrees of fit, I need to keep practicing this.

7) The two teapots I made in memory of my aunt, which started my "I'm gonna do it anyway" clay rebellion. They're in dundee red, which is awful to work with but makes a stunning effect under bailey's red glaze. I have not yet made matching cups for them, and now can't until I get them home (I have no ability to see/remember shape in my head so the shapes won't match unless I'm looking at them)

8) Two scoop prototypes, of the kind to be left in oatmeal, sugar, etc cannisters.

9) eight or nine (?) spontaneously thrown bowls in marbled white, red, and coffee with some faceting on the sides, made to hold the pendants, which reminded me how nice and easy it is to throw bowls and not need to fiddle around with handles, spouts, lids, etc.

10) Some of the stuff was made in IMCO Night clay, which I remember how much I love to throw with, though honestly it all felt amazing after the dundee red. Throwing with very difficult clay and then easy clay makes me feel like a pottery god honestly. I can do things so effortlessly. Also I forgot what item was supposed to be number 10.

11) Oh yeah, two handbuilt mugs with douglas fir texture outsides and branchy handles. They look really nice, nice enough to make me handbuild since the texture mat is way too soft to work on the wheel :(

The Canadian Potters group has a mug swap periodically, and one of the above mugs will be for my partner. She says she likes white, black, and blue, a fair size, and doesn't mind raw clay texture so I'm thinking one of the IMCO night ones with the wiggle wire faceting and a blue floating glaze flowing down the grooves.

12) Oh yeah again, I discovered some fun curly handles because I was trying to do something nice for my mug swap partner.

Anyhow, the bisque opening won't be much of a reveal except "something broke" but it'll lead me to glazing and then the finished pieces, which will indeed be a reveal. How does the night clay take my blue glaze? How heavy are the teapots when they're done? How does the green stain look in various uses? How do the new handles actually feel to use? How well do the bottles fit together when they''re done? Is the thin edge on the scoops right or will it chip? Is it worth handbuilding more mugs? How does the red look swirled in those bowls, and do they fire to an ok size, and should I have let them dry before faceting them? Etc.

That's enough thinking for one day. I've been in bed all day except for chores, and same most of yesterday, and I'm doing the thing where after trying to concentrate on a youtube video or podcast for about twenty minutes I get exhausted and fall asleep. Letting myself do this rhythm for several days is very healing; I can feel my brain getting heavy now, so I'll let myself drift back asleep and be grateful for freezer pizza, instant oatmeal, and plenty of firewood brought in.

Something about doing a show at the art studio with the pieces I have lying around, maybe in summer or next fall? "100 pieces of mud" or "100 things I've touched with my hands?" or whatever the number is?

greenstorm

My truck brakes failed the other day: when I went to push the brake pedal my foot went right through the spot it usually stops at, and the truck did not slow down. At the very bottom of the pedal there was a little stopping power, and I slow down way before corners normally because it's slippery here, so I managed to get myself through the couple corners home, and the truck did stop in park when I turned it off.

Luckily the neighbour, who is a mechanic, came over after work and we got it into the shop (a caliper had failed and leaked the brake fluid out, so he clamped it off and added a bit more fluid for long enough for me to drive into town, and he gave me a ride home). The supplier sent the wrong caliper replacement, so I'm without a truck from Thursday through this weekend till probably Monday night.

It's the first time I've had no vehicle access out here. Before I could have walked or biked, but.

I've learned some things.

1) It makes me super nervous not to have transportation even when there's a defined period after which I'll be able to get in and out. It's not like I really had medical access before, it's not like I'm in any way short on food, but I'm still nervous about it.

2) I had over-planned stuff for this weekend: running a kiln, packing seeds with the garden group for seedy saturday, and hanging out at the studio helping folks glaze. It's way more stuff than I should have committed to in one weekend.

3) One of my two worst-case equipment failures in the truck, though scary, didn't kill me.

4) I had been letting "I need to do X" creep into my life, which when coupled with a defiant "I'm going to do X that I enjoy" meant I wasn't getting enough rest.

5) I probably should get a backup ebike type thing that can get me to town and back, and maybe that can load on the truck.

6) Keeping several days' supply of animal feed around is useful.

7) I do have friends out here who will help me with things. Mary at the studio picked me up, helped me load the kiln, and will give me a ride in Sunday to unload.

8) OMG what if this had happened the day before or on my shot and I had to miss it? Luckily it was the day after.

jazzfish

I made English muffins ("or, as they say in the UK, muffins") yesterday, so I can make more frozen breakfast sammiches. Today I decided to have a proper Eggs Halifax, which is like a Benedict but with smoked salmon instead of back bacon. In the event the hollandaise broke. This has been the usual fate of my attempts at hollandaise for the last N years. It's frustrating because it -used- to work. Still tasted okay but the texture was way off.

Since making tricky food was going so well I decided to turn the egg whites from the hollandaise into divinity. (If you're not from the South, divinity is the answer to the question "what if meringues were candy?" It is somewhat nougat-like and somewhat fluffy and usually involves pecans, though I haven't had much in the way of pecans since the death of my great-uncle who had a pecan orchard.) This involves cooking a bunch of sugar to hard-ball / 260F and then adding it into a running mixer with whipped egg whites. After an hour my sugar was stubbornly refusing to go over 245F. I turned up the heat a little more and the sugar boiled over. Thankfully I grabbed the pot so it did not boil over onto the burner, just onto the stove top, but while I was salvaging that the sugar crystallized. I swore and tried again: added more water and some additional sugar and stuck it back on the burner to re-dissolve and re-cook. This time careful additions of heat got it up to 250F and more threatened boiling over, so I called it good and poured it into the mixer. Adding injury to insult: while scraping the last quarter or so of the sugar into the mixer I managed to splash some of it onto my hand. Molten sugar is a nasty business: it glues itself to your skin and keeps burning. Thankfully my mixer is right next to the sink. No permanent damage done but I ended up with several blisters, some of which had the tops ripped off when I tried to remove the sugar.

I used to hate and avoid dealing with candy-making / molten sugar. Now I seem to have reached a point where it is my nemesis, and I will conquer it or get really annoyed and minorly scorched trying. Anyway, the divinity is in its pan and setting; should be edible sometime tomorrow.

Twenty-seven and a half boxes of books (down one and a half from last time), and what looks to be about twenty-five boxes of games (down three or so from last time). Plus one box of CDs and two-plus of DVDs. My obsession with the Arrowverse means that DVDs no longer fit neatly into two boxes. Oh well.

Now to pack up all the random miscellaneous stuff that doesn't need to be out while the place is on the market, which will take probably less than ten boxes and probably twice the time. At least I have plenty of time: my preferred movers aren't available until early-mid March.

greenstorm

Our cold snap is forecast, the coldest yet of the winter. It should happen Wednesday-ish, in a couple days. We've had a lot of warm, which is unusual, and a lot of up and down, which is much more usual. I still have snow, or at least an ice crust over a bit of snow in some areas and a solid two-foot-high platform of compacted snow in others, so I suspect my plants will be fine. In town there's not a lot of snow left, so the snap may be harder on things even though it's more like a zone 4b/5 type snap rather than our proper -40 forecast.

Though goodness knows the forecasts have been very off all winter, so we shall see. Either way I get my shot on Wednesday so I need to remember to plug in the truck. A dead battery will not improve that day.

I've been wading through disability paperwork and taxes. I think I've correctly hit one deadline, though it's a bit ambiguous. Now I'm working on the next, which is mid-March. The paperwork is going to eat my next doctor's appointment or two; I need to remember 1) to make more appointments if they have them (our town lost some doctors so they're booking pretty far out) and 2) to make a note to make an extra two doctor's appointments at this time every year, since it seems like this will be a yearly requirement.

I saw some stats on how many doctors' hours are used on filling out disability forms and have forgotten them. Good thing we don't have a shortage of doctors or anything. I'd hate to have a real issue like having the doctor read and summarize the last years' worth of treatments on a form when the treatment documents are gonna be sent in anyhow to the same person, who can then compare the medical docs, the doctor's description of them, and my description of them to try and find discrepancies... I'd hate to have that displaced by something like my sinus infection or someone's kid's asthma. Not that we test for asthma here, the waits are too long; if an inhaler helps it's assumed and that's where it ends.

Ok.

So you can see why I've been splitting wood and doing pottery. All the above, both doing this paperwork and feeling bitter about it, use up energy. Splitting wood and doing pottery use up energy too but they help my mind quiet down now that I'm out of books I can easily read for free. Between the stormclouds of whatever is going on with my hormonal experiments and the paperwork which reminds me that my support is entirely unsecure, it's not a good time. I've been triaging and doing this extra stuff, but my baseline is sliding back some. I'm weaker. I shake and fall unexpectedly occasionally. Bladder control is reducing again. To the best of my understanding this can be permanent, so I should stop, but.

Gotta live somehow, right?

Anyhow, I made two teapots thinking of my aunt. Teapots are complex, there are 2-3 pieces thrown on the wheel to assemble, one part pulled, lots of careful angling and cutting. I made these in dundee clay, which is horrific to work with. It took all my concentration and let me go inside the process. It's a break, a space without noise.

(I'd like to make a tree menorah but I don't yet have the skill)

I put green body stain in a bucket of white reclaim and marbled some of it into M370 and made a couple test mugs. I have very little idea how much body stain I was supposed to use so I need to fire these before going further.

I started making seed jars, thrown as one piece closed forms. These are exacting, and require precision and thought. Everything needs to fit, and it's harder to fix things afterwards.

Then today, after the seed jars from the last week, I went into the studio in town. I'm making an effort to be there on Sundays because then other people come and it can be social, and it's probably best if I exchange human voices with someone who isn't my doctor or disability police. No one else came and I marbled some tucker's red, coffee, and M370 together and made some craggy sliced bowls -- 7 of them -- and two cups, one of which is the slurpee-cup-sized cup I started all of this out with in the beginning, when I wanted to gain the skill to make something that big.

I have the skill now, though I never made a handleless cup for this purpose since I got distracted and didn't come back to it.

Making something without any shape requirements except "kinda cup-like" with no pieces that need to fit together was so straightforward and comfortable. I think the bowls will be pretty, too.

It's just not advisable for me to keep doing this until the other stuff is done. If my baseline slips too far I won't be able to do it at all, and then I'll still feel bad but without the option to overstep. And I need to rest up for spring. I need to start my tomatoes soon and that decision matrix is pretty demanding.

Spring is coming, though. It was glimmering light before 7 this morning. It'll be nice to go lie down on the ground next to a dog eventually.

I'm stealing the keyboard from my laptop for this. Again I shouldn't; it takes several days to accumulate about an hour's charge, and it doesn't run off the cord at all, so I should save it for disability and medical paperwork only. But here we are: rebellion by making pottery and writing. Story of my life.

I got home from the pottery studio and couldn't get warm or stop shaking. It's better now but I'd better go to bed for real - I do consider a difference between lying in bed in daytime and lying in bed for sleep, though I couldn't explain it.

Second injection soon, and on the wait list to get the ovaries and tubes out. That should take me 9-12 months (?) on the wait list, so we can test the chemical menopause thoroughly and pop me off the list if it's going to go bad. Hopefully I'll be telling you all about the garden soon. How nice would it be to hear a list of the peppers I'm planting instead of this nonsense?