Here's to taking Fridays off!

I've taken today off from work as a vacation day. I could really get used to working a 4-day week... damn that need for a regular pay check!

I started my 3-day weekend off last night by spending some quality time with my nephew, Michael. I learned a while ago that Mike has never been to a Mexican restaurant (and Taco Bell does NOT count), so we went to dinner together to a great little place nearby that serves authentic Americanized Mexican food. Just me and Mike. The food was wonderful, but it paled in comparison to the company. Michael is exceptionally smart, and he's interesting... and he is a good conversationalist. Mike listens well and speaks well; we both managed to eat our full at dinner, but I'm not sure how, coz we talked so much. That was the first time since I don't know when... ever? maybe... that I got to spend time with my nephew when it was just he and I, and I loved it.

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The original plan for today was that Joycie and I and her friends were going to go on our annual (last annual... *sniff, sniff*) prom dressing shopping trip. But now that has been moved to either tomorrow or Sunday; I'm not quite sure how the plans have finally panned out. I would feel like I am wasting 8 hours of vacation time, but I love a 3-day weekend (did I mention that I love a 3-day weekend?). Also, I was able to schedule a session for this afternoon for my pottery class, in lieu of my usual time (Saturday mornings). Hey! I just realized that if our shopping trip is Sunday, I can go to pottery class tomorrow, too. Yay!

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I started a new pot last Saturday, the inspiration for which is a crazy quilt. If you’re not familiar with what a crazy quilt is, here’s a quick & dirty explanation... in the olden days, people would make quilts out of old clothing pieces, cutting traditional blocks and other standard geometric exact shapes for their quilts. The leftover odd-shaped pieces were not thrown away, but instead pieced together however they could be for yet another quilt... in crazy patterns, thus the term crazy quilt. Usually the crazy quilts were made of the finer, richer fabrics since no one would want to waste a piece of those fabrics, like old Aunt Gertrude’s fancy Sunday church dress. So traditionally, the crazy quilts tended to be of richer, darker colors, or jewel tones. People would also embroider fancy stitches on the seams.

To make my crazy quilt pot, I drew a pattern for it at class. It's a slab pot, and instead of piecing it, I cut one large piece of clay and scored it to look like pieces of a crazy quilt. I then textured some of the pieces to look like fabrics, and left some smooth. I will wrap it around a base and work on it that way. I'm looking forward to working on it this afternoon. I’m a long way from glazing it, but I wanted to get an idea of a color pallet to use... so I took a photo of my pattern, then I drew it out and saved it as a .jpg file.

I took photos of the glaze samples, and then using the color match and fill tools in MS Paint, I have come up with colors to use for each piece of the “quilt”...

The colors won’t be exact, of course, but so far I’m liking it. Right now, I’m also planning to put handles on the pot, glazing them a glossy black, along with using glossy black to emulate, as much as I possibly can, embroidery on the “seams.” I’ve found, though, that plans change when I’m working with clay, which is all part of the fun.

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The opossum living under our porch lives there no more. And you can make that sentence more exact by removing the word “there.”

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This morning while I was brushing my teeth, I walked over to the window in the bathroom and looked out at our frozen, snow-covered pond and saw 3 deer walking across it. Kev put some hay out for the deer, and they were heading to it. Off in the woods I could see several more deer heading in the same direction. They eventually all showed up, so I snuck outside with my trusty Sony.


I was able to take several photos before one of them snorted at me. The snort was a warning for all of them, and with a couple more snorts and some stamps, most all of them suddenly took off running simultaneously, some of them crossing on the frozen ice of the pond.

I watched them dash through the snow with their tails up like white flags waving through the dark tree trunks of the woods. Very pretty.

The original 3 deer looked at the others running away, somewhat disdainfully I thought, stayed put and continued to eat while I snuck back into the house.