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Making Ceramic Ornaments with Cookie Cutters
For several years now, we have made Christmas ornaments from clay. Last weekend I brought my supplies into the kitchen to finish up a couple requests from friends, and my kids descended on the makeshift workspace and demanded clay and all my tools. After a morning of wresting on the living room floor and failed attempts at controlling the noise level in the house, the silence that their focus on the clay brought was amusing, even if it took me five times longer than…
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Frosty Garden
It was a frosty morning in the garden! I guess it is time to start popping the D3 supplements because it is way too chilly to sit outside with my sleeves rolled up. Pictured below are oregano, some type of choi (bok? pak? I dont’ know), and triple curled kale. Last week, the basil, beans, peppers and cherry tomatoes (the last bit of summer still holding on) permanently bit the dust, so now there’s a good bit of open space on the…
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Big Wheels Peace Accord
This morning I’m sitting on the couch, drinking coffee, and listening to the boys upstairs playing with some new action figures. The tension between the two of them has been through the roof the past couple weeks, so hearing them playing together does my heart good. Sometimes the struggle of parenthood is managing to equip children with conflict resolution tools while the bullets are flying… at each other and at you as the parent. Sometimes I succumb to the chaos…
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Royalty
Royalty visited our garden this afternoon. After our caterpillar died, I figured our butterfly season was over, until this lovely monarch lighted down on the zinnias. And we waited near the red carpet to get a picture. The youngest confessed to having ill intent towards it (as he does with most bugs), so we sent him to the deck after he’d had a good look.
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Pumping Soap and Counting Mississippis
She walked into the locker room holding her bags and mumbling to herself. People mumble to themselves, especially when they’ve just walked across a rainy parking lot to the gym, but as she started unloading her bags to open the corner locker, she kept on speaking under her breath, not making eye contact with any of the other women changing around her, seeming to be conversing as her voice quietly undulated with indecipherable words. I’d seen her in the gym…
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Pottery and Pinguecula
About two months ago I tried my hand at the pottery wheel after not working with clay for nearly eight months. The next week my eye flared up. After a busy summer and fall at the wheel in 2013, my eye had given me trouble but had cleared up when I quit working with clay. Steroid eye drops helped during that season, but the flare-ups only went away after extended time away from the wheel. After having it flare up again at the end…
