1. If I had thought I'd left wildfire smoke behind when moving out of the west to the northeastern United States, I was gravely mistaken. As you may or may not be aware, numerous spots in Canada are currently ablaze, and the smoke from Quebec is reaching us here.

Yesterday morning on the river wasn't too terrible, although the sun was a small, ominous strawberry viewed through the haze.

You might recall that while I was living in California I discovered I was "Sensitive People," that category of people who experience side effects of poor air quality at lower particulate levels than the general population.

I actually felt fine yesterday morning, aside from a couple of sneezes. By yesterday afternoon, however, the cloud had descended further. I'd hoped the evening thunderstorm would wash the smoke away, but things still aren't looking great right now. At least this smoke doesn't smell as terrible as the conflagration that hit Santa Rosa and incinerated houses along with the vegetation.

Hard to photograph this stuff, but I think this picture helps to illustrate that this isn't the usual fall morning fog.



I am glad that I bought that Curve O2 mask early in the pandemic. I will be wearing it today.

2. Summer pottery class #2 was last night. In the grand scheme of things, the studio space at the Albany Art Room is pretty amazing. It is also incredibly convenient; I can walk over from home in less than 10 minutes. But it has its quirks, because the Albany Art Room started life as a house.

For instance, the throwing space is rather cozy, to use a real estate euphemism:


And different things are in different rooms: pieces and tools live in a handbuilding room, the cleanup sink is in its own room, the wedging table is in its own room, etc. Lots of back and forth up and down the hallway. And wood floors aren't really ideal for a ceramics studio.

Still. I'm so happy to be back throwing again. I do miss the big mirrors and glorious double studio at the Arts Center.

The instructor here was saying she's very much seeing the broader uptick in interest in ceramics. She is also well-connected with the people from Monroe Pottery and the Northeast Ceramic Supply, which closed in 2019, and said that the place that sprang up after the closure, Waterbrook Pottery, is very much full with a long waitlist for new members. So, probably for the best to not just wait around for an opening. It's like getting a spot to store a boat in almost every single boathouse in the USA. In any case, it's helpful to know more about the pottery community and landscape out here; a lot of this is why I'm in this particular beginners throwing class.

I may very well wind up setting up some form of home studio, especially if it's feasible to fire pieces at the Art Room.

But I should probably work on moving other projects along before starting too many other new things.

I am going to be pretty bummed when this class ends, but life will go on. And I do think I've at least demonstrated to myself that it's theoretically possible to shoehorn pottery into my ridiculous schedule. In the long term I will be more strategic about how I do this. Maybe just not during the spring semester.

I wish I had more process photos to share, but when I'm at the studio, my hands are usually covered in mud clay and I am really busy running around doing all kinds of things, trying to make the most of the time available. So you'll just have to use your imagination.

I really enjoy pottery/ceramics in part because it's generally a community endeavor. It's just too involved to assemble a home setup, and there are some major compromises to a home studio. For example, yesterday as part of our class we got an orientation to the glazing setup at this studio. I really should have taken a photo of the test tile board, but hopefully I'll remember to do so next Thursday. The glaze setup is a good example of what I mean about home setups: it would be really hard to get the same sort of setup going at home, because for dipped glazes, every glaze needs to be in its own 5-gallon bucket, at a minimum. At this studio, some of the more popular glazes are kept in trash cans, to give you a sense of scale. So it's possible to offer a wide and versatile range of glazes and underglazes and stains at this studio, and that would be way less feasible and way more expensive to try and do at home.

I also liked learning even more about this studio's recycling efforts. The studio offers two clay bodies, Bmix with sand, and a red clay. To keep clay out of the sewer system, they have trash cans set up to collect all of the slip and water that get produced over the course of a throwing session. They also have buckets set up to collect leatherhard/bone dry clay fragments, and so eventually all of the clay winds up getting recycled and used, and almost nothing goes down the drain or into the trash. I did like that, in Tempe, I could experiment with different types of clay and find my favorites (porcelain!!). But clearly, there are tradeoffs, and we produced much more waste in Tempe.

For glaze cleanup, we learned there's a glaze rinse bucket, to once again minimize how much glaze winds up in the sewer. Everything that winds up in the glaze rinse bucket winds up getting used to make a "compost" glaze, which is actually quite pretty. So that's fun.

I am going to be really busy with trying to get all of my pieces glazed next week - to the extent that I already know I'll need to sign up for an extra Open Studio session. All that I got done last night was some trimming of some mugs and a bowl, and handle application to the mugs.

I did also manage to squeeze in a small surface decoration experiment. After my previous post about the "potters pads," I brought in some rubber stamps, and a piece of some foamy/spongy material. I then had some success with using the rubber stamps to apply stamp designs to a couple of pieces using a black underglaze that I'd applied to the foam/sponge. So maybe I don't need to shell out extra $$ for this specialized supply. There's no telling how everything will look in the end, until after it all comes out of the kiln from the glaze firing, but I'm very pleased to at least have managed this experiment, because it's in line with my longer-term interests. And if it doesn't work, I'll know that the Potters Pads might be worth trying.

That's another thing about a pottery studio. Ceramics are a highly versatile medium, so it's entirely possible for two different people to head off in completely different directions in what they do. We only get to appreciate that if there are occasions to observe other peoples' work, both the finished work and the process. Our instructor here, for example, likes to apply underglazes and then do carved surface work to create patterns and color contrasts. That's in contrast to what I just did, where I'm treating the clay more like a surface to paint on. Bridget, my ceramics instructor in Arizona, worked with porcelain and used China painting to add exquisite surface decorations to her sculptural forms. At this studio, I've also enjoyed seeing the types of work that people have contributed to the Art's Center's kiln fundraiser; there's a diversity of shapes, sizes, textures, and colors on display.

And maybe next week I'll even remember to take a photo of some of these things. Next week.

1. In December I signed up for a 6-week Beginning Wheel throwing class at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, in downtown Troy. The first class was Thursday, January 12, so I didn't go because I was in the middle of having Covid. That meant my first class was last night. I'll spare you the horrors of the bike route the G-machine sent me on to get there from work*, and will fast-forward to:

Ahh, I can't even tell you how amazing it felt to be back in a pottery studio.



I quickly realized I had exactly zero clear plans for what I wanted to make**, but given that it is a beginner class and the current topic is "throwing a cylinder and then varying/altering its form," I went with that.

Giant tea mugs and planters, ahoy!



(only the front 5 are mine)

It's always interesting to learn how new clay bodies handle.

Actually, more than anything, I am grateful to now be in a space again where I can finally let myself think and dream about what I want to make. It turns out it kind of doesn't really matter so much what I actually make, so long as I can have at least that feeling of creative potential. This does a certain something for my spirit.

It takes about an hour to bike home from Troy. There's a smaller pottery studio at the Albany Art Room just a couple blocks from home, but I still can't quite figure out the best way to infiltrate it yet. I suspect they may just basically be full, from my standpoint. They do offer both beginner and intermediate classes, but I don't yet know how quickly they tend to fill up, and their classes are shorter and seem like they may have fewer associated Open Studio options. I might still wind up switching over to that for simple geographic reasons. It might also be that I can buy clay from them, make studio space at home, and just use them to fire stuff. But let's be honest - if I don't have the social structure of going somewhere to practice the art, will I still actually follow through?

In the short term, I am so grateful to finally just have my hands in clay again.

2. I finished my first LaTeX project! I got myself set up in Overleaf, plugged away at things, and managed to convert one whole set of handouts for Animal Phys into a booklet.



Achievements unlocked:
-A document that doesn't look like crap, thanks to someone's book template
-Lists: itemized, enumerated, and of the to-do checkbox variety
-Image embedded
-A Table of Contents, automagically generated from sections, subsections, and subsubsections
-A simple table
-Hyperlinks
-Flashy cover design that I totally didn't come up with.
-Section with text in two columns

I punted on trying to incorporate my R Reference Card, and on trying to figure out how to include sections with landscape-oriented pages.

I also now have a better overall sense of the scope of what's involved in converting my types of Word documents into .tex that are useful for my purposes.

That means I can more realistically consider future projects, like converting my hodgepodge of lab handouts into much more attractive and systematically-organized lab handouts that can then eventually get turned into a full lab manual.

Indeed, I am pleased.


*I already knew of other ways to bike to downtown Troy from work, I was just curious about G's thoughts on the matter. The suggested route was TERRIBLE for a person on a bicycle, especially given that it was dark and the road conditions were sketchy due to sleet.
**Well, one very loose plan, to make plant pots, heh.

I started in on some kitchen items yesterday. Tonight I think I'll work on more of the fiddly small ceramics and such.

While in Arizona, scrottie really wanted to obtain a bulk order of organic black beans from Crooked Sky Farms. Several months and eleventy-billion text messages later and we're finally beaned. Emma approves.



For randomdreams: here's the kind of salsa that S loves, which I suspect has to be recreated fresh to attain the same flavor. I'm thinking maybe I could just try making up my own recipe, with oodles and oodles of peppers. S was semi-maniacally talking about buying a huge amount of it and then canning it.



We had our last ceramics class last night. Once again I'm sad to be leaving that behind again, but grateful to have had the chance to stick my hands in clay for a while. I've made notes about a couple of potential ceramics places in Albany; we shall see.

They'd done another glaze firing, so I got to bring home several pieces. However, the majority of my pieces from this session were still sitting on the glaze cart, waiting to be glaze-fired. Thankfully the good people who are running the studio were willing to expedite my remaining 7 or 8 pieces so I don't have to lean on other people to pick them up, pack them, and ship them to me.

This bowl came out fabulously:




Mom: don't look at what's under the cut if you want gifts to remain a surprise.

( Read more... )

So I managed to get this first bowl finished during the first ceramics session, as you might recall:



But I have several more bowls to go. Painting the dragonfly with black iron oxide took a while. Here's how that bowl looked before the glazing and firing:



At the moment I have a bunch of other projects in the works, too, so I didn't want to spend Saturday's studio time entirely on painting. I do, however, want to continue making these kinds of pieces. So I worked on two more bowls at home on Saturday morning. I'm hesitant to show the outcome of the painting effort for the new bowls before things get fired again, because as you can see from the work above, glaze firing is a dynamic process and things almost never turn out exactly as you expect them to. So we shall see. Then I managed to spend the entire afternoon in the studio making headway on the other projects. A full day of ceramics - not bad. I strategically sat at the wheel that was furthest away from the noisiest classmates, and that made things much more tolerable for the afternoon.

When I first arrived at the studio, another new student had appeared. We took one look at each other and went, "I know you." It was J, someone else who was a regular back when I did ceramics during grad school. It was comforting to see him there. He's kind of funny in that his specialty is cylindrical vases with textural decorations - that's basically the only thing he makes, as far as I can tell. He made two of them during Saturday's class. How many vases does a person need? He says he gives away pretty much all of them. His approach reflects the personal tactile comfort/engagement aspect of ceramics. Clay speaks to different people in different ways.

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Grad student N and I have been keeping a close eye on the weather over the past week, ever since we'd heard that there would probably be an unusually early monsoon storm coming up. Ant-hunting season has begun. And storm it did, although as with most monsoon rain the amount of rain a given location receives can vary tremendously. We only got a few light sprinkles in Dogtown, but the neighborhoods north of the Phoenix Mountains were more thoroughly drenched. The bulk of the rain fell from Friday night through Saturday morning, which meant that we wouldn't need to go down to Tucson until Sunday morning. This was a small relief, given the ambitious ceramics agenda you can see outlined above.

There was just one slight hitch, in that scrottie and I had made plans to have dinner with friends who live in Paradise Valley on Saturday night. I enjoy bicycling up there because then I get the combination of decent exercise AND quality time with good friends. But all told, it takes about 1.5 hours to ride up there, and another 1.5 hours to ride home. So we didn't get home and into bed until 1:30 am.

I don't think I really slept, because I then had to get up by 3:30 am so N and I could drive down to Tucson in time to catch the leafcutter mating swarms, shortly after sunrise.

We made good time on the drive, arriving by 5:45 am. The total rainfall accumulation in our key collecting area was just borderline for what we think it takes to trigger mating swarms, but if we didn't go down there we would never know whether we'd wind up missing our only opportunity to get queens.

Typically, during a good swarming event, we will drive past multiple mating aggregations on our way out to our main collecting area. Yesterday morning, we saw next to no signs of activity as we drove along. It occurred to me that we could roll down the car windows, and when we did so we discovered that it was unusually cool out (almost chilly!), so I figured the cooler temperatures could be postponing any ant activity.

In all, as morning temperatures started to rise we wound up getting to watch a small swarm form at one of the better collecting spots, and managed to collect 59 queens in the end. We didn't see signs of any other swarming activity elsewhere, so I think this rain wasn't quite sufficient to really get things going. This past winter was extremely dry, so I'm hoping that overall this rainfall event will encourage plant growth and facilitate future flights, so long as future storms roll through. Monsoon rains are always a gamble.

Two photos:

The dark spots on the upper left are the leafcutter ant queens and males in midair. The ants fly towards an aggregation, where the males grab onto the queens while in flight, and then they fall to the ground and mate.


Ants mating beneath the swarm:


In this species, the queens mate multiple times, so after they've finished with one male, they pause for a millisecond and then take off again, back into the swarm. Quite a frenzy. We wanted to wait until we were sure the queens had mated as many times as they desire, so that meant waiting until it looked like the queens could no longer fly and were starting to shed/tear off their wings. Altogether we used those 59 queens to set up 20 nests of 3 queens per nest:



That isn't enough nests for everything we'd like to get done this year, so we'll continue to keep an eye on the weather. Ideally we'll manage to start up around 85 nests total, so that's 255 queens, at least. A fraction of the nests will inevitably die; over 95% of the queens in the wild die during the colony initiation phase. We tend to have better success in the lab, but some extra collecting never hurts. We shall see.

That overzealous data entry project, coupled with continued long days at the computer, is making my arms feel less than entirely happy. So I'm trying to be more conscientious about staying off the computer. It's challenging, but a side-effect is that I'm getting lots of other things done.

Currently in the pipeline:

1. A shawl made from yarns that my sister-in-law gave me. I think I might be about 1/3 of the way through? This one is going to take a while, and I'm not particularly motivated to work on it in the Arizona summer heat, heh.





2. A bike seat cover, to help reduce the wear-and-tear of leaving a bicycle outside in the Arizona summer sun:



Better finished sooner rather than later.

3. (not pictured): I am staining and finishing a board to fit over the hole in the sewing machine table. The wood stain is so smelly, but on the other hand it's drying much faster here than the sewing machine table did in California, where I had to work in cool, very damp conditions.

4. (also not pictured): Re-potting succulents in freshly fired ceramic plant pots and trying to make sure they're happy. Ceramics starts up again on Thursday. The glaze pick-up date from the previous ceramics session happened while I was out of town, so my officemate kindly picked up a few pieces for me. But I think there should have been around twice as many pieces as she found, so we shall see.

Five of my pieces had finally emerged from glaze firing by last night, with a mixture of outcomes. This one came out beautifully, though not quite as I'd expected:



It's a large plant pot, glazed with Ohata and then Snow White. I was hoping more of the Ohata would show through, and that the Snow White would pool more in the indentations. This is a harbinger of the less-successful outcomes. All of the glazes that I used, other than the Ohata, were too thick, which is part of why I'd been hoping these first pieces would show up sooner so I would know and could adjust when glazing subsequent pieces. Argh to that, because I wound up deciding to glaze a bunch more last Saturday, and now I'm worried that they'll also all run and stick to the kiln shelves. Just as these pieces did:


(Worst Cranberry glaze I've had in a long time, and I was being really careful with it on the outside!)



I'm most bummed about the greenish-purple mug because the glaze job came out beautifully other than where it stuck to the kiln shelf, and given the way in which it was removed from the shelf I don't know if I'll be able to salvage it. Chunks got chipped out of the foot ring in order to free it. Sigh.

At least this mug came out fine, if kind of nondescript:


This firing also showed me that the porcelain clay I'm using (Dave's porcelain) is not as pretty as the porcelain clay I've used in the past (Coleman). So, new plans for the remaining porcelain pieces because I no longer wish to show off the clay body.

I'm hoping the next set of pieces will be finished by Saturday so I can make some final decisions for the three remaining pieces of bisqueware where I want to paint on designs with iron oxide.

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In cooking news, we wound up with an accumulation of root vegetables from our small CSA subscription (3 vegetable items per week). They made for some nice but lumpy-looking pastys:


We've also been getting one head of cabbage per week, which adds up quickly to a LOT of cabbage. I used some to make Ethiopian food, but that's a labor-intensive project. Then I got the idea to use some more of the cabbage to make coleslaw, and I think coleslaw is going to be my default for as long as the cabbages last right now, because it's summer here and coleslaw is a cold and refreshing food.

They've also given us a whole bunch of kale, some sunflower sprouts, a few collard greens, and some unidentified flowering green. I'm running low on motivation for figuring out what to do with all these greens, most especially the sunflower sprouts and unidentified green. I mean, I like hearty greens, but I also have limits.

Ceramics classes are a reminder that grief isn't a thing that subsides with time. It follows its own course. I am nonetheless grateful to be there among the ghosts and memories. Yesterday L gave us a brief tour/reminder about how glazing is managed in the studio. Discussion about the Purple Haze glaze (mostly phased out) brought back so many twinges of memories from what pieces I used it on. One of my goals at some point is to learn the glaze recipes because of connections between the glazes and pieces I've used them on, and their association with Bridget's work.*

Ceramics classes are also a place where my hopes and ambitions are quickly and regularly tempered by concrete reality. I have ideas for a couple more projects I want to work on, and I had hoped to get underway with them last night. Instead, I spent the entire time trimming pieces and attaching handles to mugs.

I have been watching this artist's YouTube videos lately, and now I'm envious of his trimming tools. Mine felt barely adequate after all that. But I'm also grateful for his demonstration of how to pull handles because it helped me pull some nice handles, for once. Usually I just completely hate the process of pulling and attaching handles.

The hard part with once-a-week ceramics classes, and with throwing and trimming in particular, is that clay doesn't always follow a predictable drying schedule. The three large bowls that I threw 2 weeks ago were still slightly too wet to trim, but by next week they'd probably be too dry. So then it was extra fussy to trim them.

Meanwhile, the porcelain pieces that I threw last week were at just about the right stage for trimming. On the other hand, they weren't easy to trim due to their irregular shapes. Porcelain, ahem. So then by the time I wrapped that up, it was getting late and my pulled handles were a bit too dry to attach properly, argh.

So who knows how much will come from all that effort. Never count your ceramics pieces until after they've come out of the (glaze) kiln. Even then, ceramics is a temporary reshaping of earth and glass, easily shattered. Eventually one must let go.


*Bridget's main work involved china painting, but she also developed some of her own glazes, including one of my favorites, Cherie Jade, still in use at the studio. I am sure the remaining glazes in use at the studio have other equally interesting stories and histories attached to them. Glazes can have as much personality and legacy as different clay bodies.

The early stages of getting an undergraduate set up on a project require a lot of hands-on time. I am trying to get one working on quantifying enzyme activities, starting from the square one of "Prepare a solution with this molarity." The initial time investment is challenging when I have so many other things competing for time and attention, and when I need to revisit the list of enzymes to figure out which one will be the cheapest starting point.

Aside from enzyme activities:

-Leafcutter manuscript revisions (it's working! It's going to get shipped off somewhere, although of course I'll need to sink a whole bunch more time into it first).
-Gearing up for the start of the circadian experiments
-Final pieces of the cricket video project setup (it's getting so close!)
-Last-instar feeding project heating up
-Revising and polishing job application materials + website (Have I mentioned recently how much I appreciate my current boss? She's being a tremendous help on this front!)
-Data analysis for Nebraska feeding experiments and the first round here
+ I will be leading article discussion at lab meeting next Tuesday

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At home, P has been gently nudging me to participate in the backyard ceramics venture. I gave in last night and tried throwing with some of the recycled clay. Centering the clay on a kick wheel is more challenging than on a motorized wheel, but then the actual throwing is easier at its slower, more controlled speeds. The recycled clay was starting to get too sticky, and had a couple of bad air bubbles because I didn't wedge it quite enough. I also didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to throw, so in the end I just put everything back on the plaster table again.

When I have so many things going on at work, I'm not that motivated to do much at home. Throwing also made me miss Bridget. I really need to quilt first, before getting back into ceramics.

We visited Caffe Trieste this morning. I suspect that something about their coffee caused immediate gastrointestinal distress, which makes me sad because the cafe itself was a welcome break from recent weeks of boutique-feeling establishments.

"And then, outside a greengrocer's, it happened - something that sooner or later always happens to me on a long trip away from home. It is a moment I dread.
"I started asking myself unanswerable questions.
"Prolonged solitary travel, you see, affects people in different ways. It is an unnatural business to find yourself in a strange place with an underutilized brain and no particular reason for being there, and eventually it makes you go a little crazy. I've seen it in others often. Some solitary travelers start talking to themselves: little silently murmured conversations that they think no one else notices. Some desperately seek the company of strangers, striking up small talk at shop counters and hotel reception desks and then lingering awkwardly after it has become clear that the conversation has finished. Some become ravenous, obsessive sightseers, tramping from sight to sight with a guidebook in a lonely quest to see everything. Me, I get a sort of interrogative diarrhea. I ask private questions for which I cannot supply an answer. And so as I stood by a greengrocer's in Thurso, looking at its darkened interior with pursed lips and a more or less empty head, from out of nowhere I thought, Why do they call it a grapefruit? and I knew that the process had started."

-Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island


Bill Bryson is an excellent traveling companion. Initially I had only carried along an intense book by Simone de Beauvoir for my trip to Europe, but on the extra day in Chicago I decided to track down a local bookstore to find slightly lighter fare. Bryson's book hit the spot, especially because it's about adventures around England and English culture.

I read the above passage on the train during a point in the trip where I could relate all to easily to it. In addition to traveling all the way to Europe for the sake of a one-of-a-kind bicycling experience, I wanted to see other cities and their sights and sounds, to get a feel for what this whole human experience is all about. To get perspective.

The first time we visited Paris, some of the immigrant neighborhoods caught me by surprise. Sure, we have Chinatowns in the US, but there's nothing quite like walking down a huge city block filled with narrow shops all specializing in African weaves, each with a guy standing out front to entice you inside. There were drifts of hair blowing along the sidewalk on that street. Then there are parks that consist of small patches of gravel, completely overrun by people (men, mostly) just lounging around, looking like they have nothing to do and nowhere to go (not necessarily homeless, just without purpose). Even the crowded US cities don't feel like this.

The human experience can be uplifting, inspiring, discouraging, depressing, the whole gamut. I know I wrote briefly about feeling like London was soul-crushing without elaborating much on the sensation. If I was traveling for a sense of perspective, London and Paris both gave me that, just not the sort of perspective I'd expected. I left London with a sense of my own unimportance. It's a city that doesn't care about you and your petty aspirations, especially if you lack social class. So, why even bother? How can I continue to churn out blog entry after blog entry, knowing that most of the subject matter is trivial and will gradually disappear into a dusty corner of the Internet? Wouldn't it be better to take a more refined approach, only putting out and sharing maybe one or two all-time incredible gems, cultivated and polished over a lifetime? Could I channel my energies in that fashion? It's not that I have any wish to be famous, whatsoever. I just want to feel purposeful.

On that train trip, reading Bryson's book, however, I remembered something else.

Practice.

Magnum opuses don't come out of thin air. They are born out of hundreds of small attempts and failures. I *do* need to keep at it, even when things seem utterly futile and I don't have any idea what the future holds (by the way, this is also related to gearing up for another round of job applications). The act of writing keeps me in touch with myself, and this is necessary for the sake of channeling my voice and using it for good. Besides, the demons compel me to write, and I have a hard time ignoring them, which means I probably shouldn't ignore them.

Shortly after I returned from Europe, my ceramics instructor from Tempe passed away. She had been diagnosed with an inoperable form of brain cancer a year or two prior. I haven't seen her since moving away, only heard the news indirectly. She lived such a public life, as a teacher, and yet I have also always had the sense that she was also a very private person, perhaps as a defense mechanism. Only every once and a while would this side of herself slip out. Just a few days after I learned that she had died, I received an alumni magazine with an article about her and her work, talking about the ceramic sculptures she's had exhibited around the world - the list of her accolades. What's most striking to me, however, is the photo showing her in her home studio space, putting on a bright face and smile even while the ravages of cancer are evident (but only to those who know). Despite the smile and warm, loving attitude, B did not have an easy life. Everything she has accomplished has been the result of tireless persistence and dedication. Porcelain clay is an unforgiving medium in an artform that is often overlooked because it's traditionally in the female "craft" arena. She was also one of the people who was a consistent champion of the things I did as a graduate student, and I know she will continue to be a source of inspiration through the low points.

And so, onward.