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.

First Barbecue

We had the first barbecue of 2009 on Monday a la Jamaica. Not exactly a 100 mile diet. The pork may be local, but the rum, plantains and hot house peppers were definitely imported. Maybe someone should introduce a carbon tax fund for those of us who cannot stand the idea of another brussel sprout come March.

Ribbons O Clay

Back to making tiles today. We had a problem on Wednesday when the extruder Mark I kind of blew up. The ready rod bent and the rotating motion of the plunger on the drill introduced a gyrating motion that eventually got so bad it jammed up and torqued the whole machine into a curve. Amazing how much pressure can be put on a device like that. The 5/8th plywood base was actually bent about 1/2" up from the table where it was clamped. We only got about 6 feet of extruded clay out before we had to give it up.
So Engineer Boy went back to the drawing board and changed the plunger motion to straight down with a lever. He totally stole the idea from a commercially made extruder. We attached it to the wall so the ribbon of clay comes out and is held straight by gravity until I can catch it. I have to stand on a chair to raise the lever high enough, but that gives me several feet of space below for a long ribbon. You can see the grey stripe below the tube in the picture. If you want to see a similar version in motion, there is an expert village video here which is where EB got the new design concept.

Today I extruded these ribbons. Once they set up a little I will cut them to length and smooth them out a bit. We only need about 30 tiles in total so this should be enough in addition to what we made on Wednesday. The Mark II works well but it is difficult to get the plunger back up out of the tube. There is extreme suction working to keep it in there, and I have to lever it out again. Engineer Boy thinks if he makes the disc out of plastic and a little smaller diameter, that it will get easier.
You might wonder why, now that we have what we need for tiles, we continue to refine the design. Extruders are great fun, and besides tiles they can make handles, coils, hollow tubes for wind chimes and sides for baking wear.

Kiln Snafu

I had a disappointing bisque fire yesterday. I was firing butter dishes, which are rather large for my teensy kiln. They are tall enough that the top shelf needed to be above the peep hole that lets me look into the kiln during firing. I had an awkward angle to try to see if the witness cone had started to bend. I thought I could see that it had started to bend, but apparently I was looking at something else completely because when I opened it up this morning I realised it was under fired.

What to do? I'm not sure how my glazes will react on under fired bisque ware. They could develop cracks or bubbles or holes. I could re-fired the bisque but that is annoying as it takes all day, and requires me to hang around. I also fired some pattern stamps I made. I was not going to bother glazing these, but now I may glaze their handles for testing how the glaze reacts to the bisque ware. If it is a disaster, then I will re fire the bisque, but if the glaze works out I won't bother.
Leaf, turtle, sun and ladybug stamps.

Today however we are back to making tiles.

How Much Wood Could A Woodchuck Chuck?

We ordered fire wood the other day. This is a new experience for us. We installed the wood stove only 6 months before we left for NL, and we had lots of carpentry scraps of softwood to burn in the few fires we made. When we got home, there were some softwood ends left by our tenants that we burned, but that ran out about 2 weeks ago. As winter is not really over yet, we thought it prudent to order some in case the power went off. It arrived last Friday. The power went off Monday.
This is about four cords. We have no idea how much we will actually burn, but we hope this will be a 2 year supply, so that we can always have a year in reserve drying out.
I'm not sure about woodchucks, but I know that this pile took us about an hour to chuck. Friday was a sunny day and the afternoon temps were above freezing. The ground wasn't frozen at all beneath the snow we cleared for the pile, and the higher temperatures made it softer still. The delivery truck got stuck in the mud backing up with the second load. He had to dump the load too close to the driveway and get our truck to haul him out. It was a comedy of errors, his truck was almost axle deep in mud, ours had no traction on the still hard packed ice of the driveway. Finally though, with much revving and swearing, it lurched free.
While the driver was off getting the third load, we had to chuck the second closer to the first to make room for the rest. Then we did it again with the third load so that the fourth wouldn't be on the driveway. We will wait until spring to pile it up properly.

Carnage

I find that most weather reporting is overblown, and I've started to disregard much of it. Like the boy who cried wolf. Last week they were forecasting that the weekend would be nasty; feet of snow followed by rain and freezing rain. Well, they got a third right, the weekend was grey and a bit drizzly, but Monday we did get about 6-8 hours of rain alternating with freeing rain. The two large trees outside our sun porch (aka the studio) lost a lot of branches in a very short time. Three large branches came down right where we park the truck usually, but we did have the forethought to move the truck to a safer location when it started to look bad. The first branch came down four minutes later. Another branch took out the clothes line. There are still three or four 'widow makers' in the crown just hanging there waiting to fall in the next wind storm. I got out the step ladder and my pruning saw to cut them out but couldn't reach up high enough. I only managed to cut of the the bits trailing down that would hit the truck as it passed under.
This is a species of tree that is known for being messy with falling twigs. It is called a Chinese Elm in these parts, but the bark description doesn't fit the two species of tree with that common name. I think it's really an upright habit of a Siberian Elm, Ulmus pumila, but I've never been completely certain. At any rate, I like the shade these provide my south windows in the summer, but they will need replacing sooner rather than later, especially if we get another ice storm. So sad.
I will have to call my arborist friend Tony to come back and clean up the broken jagged branches left way up in the canopy.