Playing with Clay Again

After a 6 week hiatus, (really has it been that long?) I went back into the studio this week spurred on partly by some frustrations at work. Pottery as therapy. I threw a couple pitchers, or maybe they are jugs, on Thursday. One was OK the other not great both in shape and proportion. Frankly after several weeks of not doing anything, I expected to get nothing at all so 50% is not so bad. With the fugly one I experimented with pulling a handle with the clay already attached. I have never done this before, but as I am never happy with the shape and attachments of my handles I figured it couldn't hurt to try something new, especially on a piece that was already doomed. I am not any more happy with the result as with my usual method. I can never seem to get the shape symmetrical on both sides, or straight on the piece or the attachments as artless as other potters seem to be.
On Saturday we went to Halifax to see the summer craft show of the Nova Scotia Designer Craft Council. It is a smaller show than the Christmas one, but it was still fun to see. It was a recon mission to scope how others sent up their booths and to steal ideas for making things. Everyone has a different way to deal with displaying their wares, my favourite was using drum stands as tiny tables for a jewelry display. Too small for pots, but I did see some modular shelves that were infinitely adaptable to different sized wares depending on what kind of show.
It was also good because I came back jazzed up to make some new things. I began almost right away with some slump molding. I tried this once in Newfoundland, and it was good but the piece cracked before it finished drying so I didn't try it again. It is good to get away from the cult of round and just make fun things for the joy of it. I'm trying a looser approach, at least this week.

My Morning Routine

This morning, as usual, after my 30 minute sleep in and my first cup of coffee, I wandered out to the berry patch to gather some fresh gooseberries for my yogurt and muslix breakfast.

Then after dawdling around some more, I finally realized (as usual) that I had about 10 minutes before I needed to go to work and proceeded to rush around (as usual) getting dressed, making lunch, finding keys and shoes and sun screen and remembering that I should water the greenhouse and turn on the drip line in the berry patch.

Yup. That's pretty much my morning routine.

Except this morning was anything but routine. When I finally went to hook up the drip line (now 5 minutes late leaving for work, as usual) I noticed there was something wrong with the pool. It was only an inch deep.

It had collapsed sometime between 9'0clock last night and 7:35 this morning. The weird thing is, I can't tell you if it was like that at 6:30 when I went to pick gooseberries or if it happened this morning in that 65 minutes. At any rate I had just enough time to tell the pool boy the news before I had to rush off to work, unhappy in the knowledge that for the first time in weeks, I would not be swimming tonight after a long hot stinky day in the sun.
We suspected this might happen but we were hoping it wouldn't. Once we set up the pool and had it filled we realized what we thought was a level piece of ground was only sort of level. It was in fact about 4 inches out which translated over an 18 foot diameter, 4 feet deep is quite a bit of water pushing on one side of the pool just waiting for an excuse to tip. Of course, once the pool is full of 20,000 litres of water there isn't much you can do about that. Now that the pool is no longer full of 20,000 L of water we decided that this was an opportunity to fix the underlying problem.
Pool Boy went to work and ordered a load of top soil to level out the pad. We were hoping it would be delivered today but it hasn't arrived. He did prepare for it by using small stakes you see in the picture to find out what level is. Hopefully, we can get the topsoil tomorrow and begin refilling the pool by tomorrow night.
Unfortunately, we invited friends for a Brunch/Pool party on Sunday morning. I don't think there will be much chance of it being filled by then.

Pools and Pots

If there has ever been a good summer to get a pool, this is it. Hot, Hot, Hot. Which I'm not complaining about because I love it when it is hot, especially if I know I can just cool off in a pool at 4 o'clock quitting time. Which I do, every day. The pool boy and I both notice that we wake up stiff like we have been exercising a lot, and it took us while to figure out that an hour of paddling and splashing is actually a lot more exercise that we would normally get. The pool boy now wants to gear the pool up to be an indoor heated winter pool by erecting a heated poly tunnel around it and putting a wood stove in it. I put my foot down at that one, but as I was standing in the pool at the time I worry that he didn't notice. He did eventually get a timer for the solar heater operation so I lost that battle too.
Recently it has also been muggy, which I'm not so fond of. We had massive rain on the weekend but it didn't help with the humidity and everything was soggy including the washing I tried to dry by hanging up in the house on a retractable clothes line strung diagonally from the living room to the kitchen. It took all day Sunday to dry, 12 hours from 10am to 10pm. And the stuff closest to the kitchen smelled faintly of bacon and eggs after Sunday morning brunch.
Between pool and gardening and getting the bike on the road (yikes! in July, that is just pathetic yes?) I haven't had anything really interesting to blog about.
Sunday, during the monsoon, I fired a glaze kiln for my friend and neighbour Colleen who is also an aspiring potter. I used the medium sized kiln, which had a problem with the top coils the last time I used it. They didn't heat up. It took hours to get up to temperature, but I figured that as Colleen didn't have a full kiln load, I could just put ware below the top shelf and everything would be fine. But disaster! This time the top two elements didn't come on, and all but the very bottom shelf were under fired. Not really a huge disaster, but I did spend all day Sunday watching it and now I have to re-fire the majority of what was inside. I guess I also have to solve the problem of why the elements are not coming on. I am hoping it is a flaky switch and not bad elements. When I bought the kiln I was told it had recently been refurbished so I figured the elements would be OK. Just another thing to put on the ever growing list.

How to Heat a Pool

Not content with merely having a pool, almost as soon as it was obvious that it was going to fill up with water, the pool boy set about inventing a solar heater for it. He has wanted to play with passive solar for a while, but I won't let him do crazy things like this inside the house with the hot water heater. I know, I know, I'm such a kill joy.
His theory has always been, that a black hose filled with water will heat up in the sun, and if you could use a circulator pump to take cool water out of the pool and put the warm hose water into the pool, it would help heat up the pool. His first version was 200 feet of 1/2 inch poly pipe coiled onto a piece of plywood pointing at the sun. When the circulator pump was turned on, it added warm water to the pool for about 90 seconds and then the water coming out of the hose was pool temperature again. The pump pumped too fast. So about every 1/2 hour, you could add a few gallons of warm water for a few seconds. Promising but not perfect.
Then he remembered that we had lots of copper and aluminum finned base board radiators kicking around from when we renovated the house and replaced the baseboard with in-floor radiant. So he soldered them all together, spray painted them black and mounted them on another piece of plywood. The extra pipe added more water to the heating loop which adds extra heat. The aluminum fins collect more solar and transfer it to the copper pipe, and the copper pipe heats up more than the poly pipe. A lot more. The water coming out of the return hose is too hot to hold your hand under, and the water is warm for a lot longer, about ten minutes in fact. The cool water from the pool continues to steal heat from the hot copper pipe until it is the same temperature as the water, so it is not just the extra volume of pipe that adds heated water, but several minutes of heat transfer after the initial water has gone through the loop.
The next design stage saw the two pieces of plywood attached together and mounted on a pivoting bolt so the solar collector can be swivelled to always face the sun. It all works really well on sunny days. We have had the pool water up to 26 degrees Celsius on sunny warm days. On overcast days though the temperature is only 22 degrees Celsius, which is what is would probably be without a solar heater. On breezy days the aluminum fins actually act as a cooling device, and the wind will steal heat away from the pipe as the water goes through.
He has talked about enclosing the whole system under a clear sheet of plastic or glass to protect it from wind. I don't dare suggest that the pump operation could be put on a timer or that the swivel bolt be hooked up to a motorized cart. Perhaps that will be next year's pool adventure.
I'm told that some people use their pools to swim in.

How to Steal A Pool

Long before dumpster diving was fashionable, and consignment stores were chic, foraging was a way of life in Nova Scotia. We are an economically depressed people, and for generations we have traditionally relied on re-cycling and used items, DIY projects, and the barter system to get stuff which otherwise would be beyond our reach.
When big garbage day rolls around, you can pick up some pretty cool stuff, and it's not like stealing because those people were just going to throw it out anyway. In fact people deliberately put out stuff early to give other people a chance to pick through it. This spring we put out a broken gas whipper snipper and it didn't last a day before someone came along and decided they could use it or fix it or whatever and took it away. As long as it is obvious that the item is no longer wanted by the previous owner, it is fair game. This is how we came to steal a pool.
It was just sitting there.
No one was using it.
Honest.
Last Monday we decided to go get it. It is one of those easy set up** above ground vinyl ones from Cambodian Tire. It was mostly empty as it had been sitting there on the ground in the neighbour's yard since last summer. It sat there all winter too, empty and forlorn. The neighbour's moved out last February and no one lives in the house. The house, in real estate terms is a century old fixer upper with character (read filthy condemned dump.) The lot is now being used as a place to store materials for the water main construction coming through to Kingsport. Dump trucks and loaders trundle by endlessly. You can understand why we removed the pool from the overgrown back yard. It was a rescue mission.
It had about 4 inches of water in it from the rain storms the previous week so we knew it held water. With much effort, and without waiting to don some more appropriate clothing, we hauled on the sides grunting and slipping on the algae until it emptied, getting soaked and extremely dirty in the process. It's pretty big, so I squished home to get the pickup while the other one searched for the rest of the bits in the long grass. It was at this point that it occurred to me that this was the sort of story my parents used to tell about their pre-children days.
We hauled it into the truck, along with the plastic ground sheet beneath it. The ground sheet looked and smelled like it used to cover a pile of manure, so now we were really dirty. Once at home, we hosed down the plastic sheet (and ourselves) and set about seeing if the the slimy bits would come off the pool. They did.
I must tell you that I have never really wanted a pool. Last year when our friends Andrew and Christine got a pool the other one asked me if I wanted one, and my rely was "No, I want friends with a pool, the same way I want friends with a cottage by the ocean and friends with a sail boat, and friends with and apartment in Manhattan and a town house in London. That way you get the benefits without the hassles."
One Tuesday we set it in place and started filling it up to clean it. That was when I remembered what I thought about pools and hassles.
On Wednesday we filled it.
On Thursday we were still filling it and starting to wonder about the water volume in our well.
It was looking good so we decided to buy a filter pump at The Tire. That's when the math stopped making sense. A new pool just like ours cost $299 and includes a pump, and a ladder. After paying for a new pump and ladder (which we couldn't find in the neighbour's yard) and buying the necessary filters and chemicals, we ended up forking out about $200. So much for the free pool.
On Friday we were still cautiously filling it and we started to filter the water and scrub the pool. The pool boy invented a DIY pool vacuum from a Central VAC unit he scavenged from Big Garbage last fall. Here he is demonstrating the invention.
On Saturday we filtered and scrubbed.
On Sunday we filtered and scrubbed.
On Monday we filtered and scrubbed.
Today the water is clear and the pool is clean, and it was 15 degrees and rain so we had no inclination to go for a dip.

We didn't want Willow to feel left out, so we set her up a pool too.

** Easy, yeah right.

Please Don't Eat the Daisies

So last Tuesday while I was running around putting out fires (literally) I was meant to be planting a garden. Last year I had the great idea that it would be fun to plant a carpet bed at the Welcome to Wolfville signs. It turned out that my immediate boss liked the idea, and even had a design of the iconic Cape Blomidon already to use for a project from a few years back. So last fall we went on a workshop about making carpet bedding that I blogged about and we figured out what plants to use and how many we needed and we enquired at out local nursery if they could grow them.
This spring, when we were getting ready to buy some plants for the town signs I wondered why we weren't doing the carpet bedding design. My boss said that his boss had nixed the idea as too expensive for the maintenance so we just did the usual thing and bought a lot of annual flowers to make the signs look nice. Then last week our nursery called and asked when we were planning to pick up the plants we ordered. Oops. Apparently they considered our inquiry about whether they could grow them as an order. As we had already planted the signs, and part of the plant material was to be supplied by colleagues at the Halifax Public Gardens, we couldn't actually use them for their original intended purpose, but we did have to use them.
On Wednesday we found a spot in town and had a go at a spur of the moment design. I drew upon my years of watching my mother draw out lines to make patterns on the borders of her quilts. I think when it fills in, you will be able to see the double helix better, but I took a photo now because it may get vandalized before it fills in. There are some gaps that, had we planned this, would be planted, but as we really didn't want them anyway, we didn't want to spend any more money on this snafu. Plus they were a special order (sort of) from the nursery, so there were no more to be had in any case. If you look at it from the long side, it looks like 5 cats eyes staring back at you.

Only YOU Can Prevent Fires

Life is what happens when you aren't blogging. OK. Quicky post on how I became a volunteer firefighter.
Ummm, no not really. But I know some volunteer firefighters, does that count?
Last Tuesday it was hot and dry here and windy too. Even though the week before it was torrential rain, the mulch at the new town centre garden was completely dry. This spring the irrigation drip line was heaved up and visible so we put a lot more bark mulch on top trying to hide it, but this means that when it is hot and dry, even though the soil beneath is wet from the irrigation, the mulch stays dry. The town centre square is right next to a bus stop, where people smoke cigarettes until the last possible moment before they board the bus. Are you getting the picture yet? Last Tuesday we got called twice about the garden being on fire. The first time we just used a small bucket of water to put out the smoldering bits and had a laugh with the commissionaire who managed the parking at the centre.
The second time we came equipped with an actual fire hose and hooked up to the fire hydrant and hosed it down for an hour. Do I have a great job or what? How many people other than firefighters can say that they regularly open a fire hydrant for work? Anyhoo, I always think an episode like this is just another piece of street theatre. I treat such public displays like I'm on stage, because you know people are watching. People on the street at open air cafes, at the bus stop, getting in and out of their cars in the parking lot are the audience. I make a production everything from getting out the hose and finding the pipe wrench to carefully avoiding spraying people waiting for the bus and rolling the hose up and putting it all away. Just my little performance to educate the public on the hazards of smoking and not properly butting out their cancer sticks. Do you think they get it? Nope, we had another fire Wednesday night, which the actual Volunteer Fire Brigade had to answer. There were flames. Smokey the Gardener says, "Only You can Prevent Garden Fires."