Earl Just a Big Blowhard

Last Thursday I finished the butter dishes I started the week before. I threw the knobs on Sunday, and promptly knocked them all over so they all had a flat side. Instead of trying to fix them, or throwing new ones, the sweetie suggested I accentuate the flat side. So this group all have knobs with at least one side shaved flat. I liked the idea so much I thought I might try it on other bits of other pots in the future.
I'm also in a chattering phase. I like that I can add some interesting detail to the pot without making it too fussy or ruining it in the glazing stage by trying to be clever. Chattering is something I can reproduce so my pots are actually starting to look like I have a 'style.' I think in the next week I should have enough for a kiln load. Gotta keep pushing along.

Hurricane Earl was forecast to make landfall in Nova Scotia on Saturday morning, and then blow up the Bay of Fundy, directly over us, and on into Moncton in New Brunswick. As is often the case, when a hurricane hits Nova Scotia, it veered east, and ran up the south shore instead, making landfall in Lunenburg county and doing most of it's damage in Halifax instead of in the Annapolis Valley before winds quickly dropped to tropical storm strength. Halifax did lose power for 24 hours because it is a very old city with lots of mature trees overhanging power lines. I don't mean to belittle this storm or the damage it caused, but while it was happening I was listening to a TV news reporter in Halifax tell me how strong the winds were, and in the background of the shot, I was watching a guy go by on a unicycle. Nuff said.
We went to Parrsboro on Friday night, and my dad has a weather station which clocks the wind speed. (Because that's the kind of guy he is.) I think the fastest gusts of wind were around 60km/h.
We battened down everything we could before we left on Friday and hoped it would all be OK. We had just one casualty, the dead American elm at the north west corner of the lot had blown down. This is all that is left standing. It has been dead since we moved in 7 years ago. It isn't ours, it was just on the neighbour's side of the line, and it has been towering over our roof like the Sword of Damocles the whole time.
Our neighbour hasn't wanted to take it down, which would require an arborist and be very costly I suppose, but every year it got a little smaller as the top branches would break off and land in our yard. The sweetie secretly hoped it would fall on the house so the neighbour would have to pay for repairs, but I am not that silly. The wind on Saturday was from the south east, so happily it blew away from the house and didn't even land on our property for clean up.
We went to Moncton on Sunday and came back to the valley through the Cobequid Pass, a very high road through the centre of northern Nova Scotia. I was driving the truck and I thought the wind gusts felt about the same as the day before, so Earl turned out to be a pretty dull event.

Sunday was not a dull event though. We went to Moncton specifically to buy this. A shiny red 850 R series BMW. Typical of us, instead of waiting until we sell our current motorcycles to buy a new one, we now have three. I haven't decided on a name yet, it has to be something German obviously, and I have a tendency to think of bikes as a 'he' so that should narrow it down. I'll take suggestions.
We spent the afternoon riding it around the local school yard to get a feel for the brakes and clutch and throttle. The sweetie has always wanted a BMW bike, and I'll admit that I've wanted one since I realized they sound more like a sewing machine than a machine gun. Sadly, it is supposed to rain all week, so I can't take it to work and show off.