Name That Colour

Got bored with being a blonde today so I asked my hairdresser to make me Orange. Actually I asked for Tangerine. I wanted that plastic pumpkin colour that kids used to put their Halloween candy in. I figure if your going to colour your hair make sure everybody knows it.
The first thing she did was put a filler on my hair so that a colour would stick to it. Like primer on a wall I guess. It was the perfect shade of Tangerine. I was excited. Then she put the colour on and it looked like someone had bled all over my head but she assured me it would lighten up.
This is the colour I got, which I think is too dark, and frankly, looks like I'm trying to be a redhead. Which was not my intention at all, because I can be a redhead for free thanks. But I am at a loss for what to call this colour.
Not sumac.
Not autumn oak.
Close to blood orange but not really.
Peter says there is no colour in nature which is this shade. So I started thinking about lighting gel colours, and I think the closest is a Roscoe 22.
At any rate, I'm off to wash it, several times if needed, to see if I can lighten it up a bit.

Green Tip for the Day: Each year I try to change one thing I do on a regular basis that makes my life more environmentally friendly. This year, I'm recycling my 20's.

New pots

Last weekend I took a break from re-firing tiles to bisque fire some coil jugs I made ages ago. This a speckled red stoneware clay, when I put a glaze on it, the speckles should come out. I think this weekend I may try to mix up various glazes for testing. And then I can see what colour I want to glaze these. At the moment I'm thinking either a clear or a white would be interesting with the red. I've been lurking around a number of slipware pottery blogs and I'm really starting to love the red earthenware with white over top style. Ironically when I started pottery 10 years ago, I was in a low-fire earthen ware studio and hated the limitations of the glaze colours. Now that I'm making stoneware, the brighter glazes are not as important.

You can see some of the bathroom tiles stacked up on the shelf above the jugs. We are up to 21 usable ones. This is a better picture of them laid out.

First Pay Cheque

Today was a first paycheque day. I celebrated by buying seeds, potting soil and mushroom compost. We have had several nice sunny days but with cool winds, which is not so bad for working. This weekend though is supposed to get into the teens, so I'm going to start up the greenhouse and see if I can get seedlings for a veggie patch started.
My municipal career may be short lived. The Town of Wolfville has a projected budget shortfall this year, and while directors and councillors have apparently been batting budget proposals back and forth since January they are running out of time to reconcile how to deal with the shortfall. The entire staff of the town was called to a meeting on Tuesday to hear the bad news. So far everyone is hoping that various budgets can be cut enough to make up the difference without losing either services or staff, but the message we were given was that some of us may not be here in three weeks time. Yikes!
On Wednesday the new senority list was posted and everyone was mighty interested to make sure it was correct. On the theory that the last one hired is the first to go, I have no delusions that I'm out of a job if it comes to that. Particularly since things like water, sewer fire department and policing always trump parks and recreation.
Safe drinking water vs pretty gardens is kind of a no brainer. We are deemed non essential services, and then Study boy pointed out that when it comes to the bottom line, schools always cut music and art first.
So if I'm laid off in three weeks, that would make my municipal career a whopping 6 weeks long. Which, when you consider that a long term contract in the perfoming arts is about 5 weeks, is not so bad. At least I'm used to looking for work. But I did get into horticulture with the idea that I wouldn't have to look for a new job every month. And now of course all the good gardening jobs are taken and what is left are the very hard labour, very low paying crappy jobs. Maybe potting will become full time earlier than I planned.

Wierd Easter

Happy Easter a little late. My Easter had more to do with watching curling and live entertainment than chocolate this year. Forget about the guyonastick, my Easter never has anything to do with that.

I started work last week, and put in a hard four days before my first holiday. Actually, not all that hard as it turned out. Day 1 and 2 were mostly orientation and pfaffing around. Day 3 and 4 were a lot of raking, but curling seemed to have my arms in shape enough that on Good Friday I spent most of the day doing the same thing again at home. I uncovered snowdrops and crocuses at home, and discovered other promises of spring too.
Definition of a bus man's holiday. Only in this case I'm a gardener (obviously.)

On Saturday we went to see our friend Sharon in a new play called Toxic Bus, a production for One Light Theatre in Halifax. Sharon was awesome! It was the first time we have seen her on stage so that was fun, although the play had possibilities that just didn't get realized. Peter felt it was a play about a lot of people he didn't like, and so didn't care about. I feel the same way about Wuthering Heights which is apparently a classic that everyone else loves, so it is possible that this will become a Canadian classic. Maybe you should go see it just in case. The admission is only $17, what have you got to lose? It runs until April 24 at Neptune's Studio Theatre. For tickets go to www.onelighttheatre.com

On Sunday we did a nod to some Home Improvement. Peter decided on Friday (whilst I was raking) that we wanted to put the snow blower away in the garden shed. When he walked into the garden shed however he put his foot through the floor where it had rotted. So in order to put away the snow blower he had to rebuild the floor, and while he was at it, he fixed the leaky roof which had caused the floor to rot in the first place. We finished that up on Sunday, racing to be ahead of the 15 cm snowfall warning for King's County. (So, we didn't put the snow blower away after all....)
Definition of irony. Only in this case no irons were involved, (obviously.)
Ironically, we didn't get the snowfall, but we still haven't put away the snow blower...

On Monday my dad, sister and I went to a show at the Metro Centre called Celtic Thunder. For those who don't know (and I was one of them) this is a
Sorry, I've seen the show and I still can't tell you what it is.
But it is on PBS and it is very popular.

My dad is a fan, and so we got tickets and went. Essentially it is the Naughts version of Lawrence Welk. Cheesy looking but musically tight (if a little insipid.) Imagine if you will Phantom of the Opera merged with Great Big Sea. Five men in kilts ages 17 to 41 singing and doing choreography seemingly inspired by The Full Monty. Add vari lites, rear projection, front projection, fog, dry ice and canned sync tracks to an over amplified mainly acoustic band and you are starting to get the picture.
The drummer was amazing. Truly, I'm sure all the performers were very talented but the packaging got in the way for me. The drummer was amazing enough to come through the packaging. And I'm not just saying that because he was cute and had drummer arms and I was sitting right where I could look up his kilt.
All in all it was not a complete waste of 2 1/2 hours.

Plus I think the last show my sister, dad and I went to was The Empire Strikes Back. So we were due.

Spring Cleaning and Tile Glazing

Today is the last day of being a bum. Tomorrow I start work again for the gardening season. Typically, I spent the last week rushing around doing all the things I meant to do while I was off. Cleaning out the basement, rediscovering treasures and freecycling bits of odd junk that accumulates in boxes over the years. Cleaning out the greenhouse, fixing the clothes line, cleaning out the deep freeze. Taxes never seem to make it onto the list before spring thaw.

I also fired several glaze kilns full of shower tiles. This is how the pottery shards fall:
I made 40 tiles.
1 broke while I was smoothing the finish in the leather hard stage.
1 I chipped the corner off in the greenware stage. (but I fired it anyway)
6 came out of the first firing (bisque) too warped to use.
1 got dropped (and chipped) going into the glaze kiln (but I fired it anyway)
12 came out of the glaze kiln ready to use.
7 came out streaky but looking like almost passable seconds.
15 came out suffering glaze defects and need to be re-glazed. Mostly they had small pin holes in the surface of the glaze or the glaze 'crawled' meaning it left large bare patches on the surface unglazed.
Pin holing happens because the kiln cools too fast, I fixed that by stepping the kiln back to medium and then low once it reached the final temperature.
I don't know why the crawling happened, but I think I over fired the last batch and that is when it happened.
If you are counting, that's 19 good, 21 bad. I'm not quite batting 50% yet. We need 28 in total for the shower.
The pin holing and the streaky colour can be re-glazed. I'm not sure about the crawling. But as my kiln only holds 9 tiles each time, I have at least 1 more glaze fire before we start constructing the shower.