Yay.

Sorry it's been soooooo long catching up. I'll give you the low down:
- we're really into grapefruit right now. Texas is where they come from up here.
- I'm getting an application to Penland together. Maybe I'll be able to attend as a studio assistant!!
- The ClayFiber show was a huge success. We had 300 people at the opening. It was like being back in Macon for one of our shows; running to the back to grab more chips and hummus, opening wine bottles, taking out the trash after.
- I start teaching a kids wheel-throwing class next week - yay!
- I also start teaching an adult tea pot class - yay!
- Jamie is having fun in school.
- we found a weird new show to watch in the same brand as Brak, ATHF and Frisky Dingo. It's called Metalocalypse and it is really really violent and nihilistic plus silly and stoopid. (Mother and Daddy, if you're reading this, don't watch this show. It's not for you.) It's about a death metal band and has a lot of real death metal in the show. Steve, check it out.

I avoided talking about the snow for once! (spring is almost here; the birds are chirping, the squirrels have de-hibernated!)

I'm outie-5000

Even more snow. Do you see a theme developing?

Today we had huge snowflakes. We got 6 more inches total. I bought some tall boots with my birthday money. I can kick through huge drifts of snow with them. This weather is still really fun to us unless we have to walk long distances. At noon today the temperature was 0 degrees. During the night it's been as low as minus 4. This weather, I've learned, is strait from the arctic. I believe it.

Freezing stories: Yesterday the boiler went out in the building at work and everyone who didn't have a space heater went home; also a window in a bathroom fell open overnight and the toilet water froze. While Jamie carried a cup of water from his office to the house, about a 20 minute walk, little ice crystals had started forming. There is a constant freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw on the windshield while I run errands in the car - the snow melts on the warm windshield while I am driving with the defrost on but freezes into hard, bonded ice bits when I leave. I'm amazed at how quickly the conversion happens.

Jamie and I are getting excited about our Christmas trip next week. He is finishing a paper tonight and when that is done he will be done with school. I'm trying to finish up Christmas presents and get them in the mail. For each of you who are reading this, See you soon!!!

More Snow!

It started snowing yesterday at noon and it hasn't stopped yet. It's coming down so lightly. Last night it seemed like the whole state was covered in a giant slushy. I wanted to squirt cherry syrup all over the ground and slurp it up. Jamie and I went for a long midnight walk over to the ISU cross training course. It is one of our favorite places to walk. The course goes through a pastoral wooded space; it's hilly and there are bridges, and pleasant little alcoves with benches. There were no footprints at all except little bunny tracks crisscrossing the path. We had a snowball fight and we tried to build a snowman but we'd left our gloves at home so we didn't stick to it for very long. The sky was thick with snow and reflected light. There was almost no space for the snow to fall. It was like the snow cloud was a mile deep and resting right on the ground; resting right on us and on Ames. It was so bright that I felt like I was watching a night scene from one of those old westerns back when they shot during the day and just put a gray filter over the camera lens. We almost cast shadows. The bug repellent streetlights filled the sky and the ground with a yellow-pink glow. It felt dreamlike. The word I kept repeating to myself was "ethereal."

Today I got ready for work, was right on time, not a minute to lose, and walked out of the house to see our car under two inches of snow. Luckily it hadn't frozen yet so it was easy to sweep off with a broom but I was late to work anyway. (When I got to work I found out that I hadn't even been on the schedule today so it all turned out all right.) Jamie shoveled the snow off of our sidewalk. Tonight I went out to Lowe's and bought a larger snow shovel and an ice scraper. The roads were a mess. All of us drivers were going 25-30mph, skidding at every red light and spinning our wheels at every green one. There were no mishaps and everyone seems very patient and understanding. I see the salt trucks going around now.
-Heather
PS: I'm thinking of subtitling this blog; "It's really really cold up here."

SNOW!!!

Guess what everybody? The first real snowfall is here! It's so fluffy and crunchy and white! It snowed for the better part of the day today and accumulated to a full inch. It snowed once two weeks ago but the ground was too warm for the snow to stick. I sat in the house eating soup watching the snow fall in the wind at about a 45 degree angle. Today I had things to do! So Jamie and I got to drive around in the weather, slipping a little when we took each corner. Everyone went about 25 miles per hour so we were all very save despite the many opportunities of dings and fender benders. The wind was not harsh this time so it was fun to be outside surrounded by fluffy precipitation. Some of the snowflakes were as large as a nickle! One fell into my ear.



It's been a long time since I posted and a lot of great stuff has happened so I'll briefly try to fill you in. The last post was about installing a show in the Octagon Gallery. Since then I've been offered and have accepted an additional job as the Octagon's Ceramics Studio Manager. The studio is in the basement where the Octagon holds year round clay classes. It pays very little but the experience is invaluable and on top of that, I get my own huge studio space! I'm also teaching a teapot workshop in the Spring! CASA had its annual Fall open house last weekend (I have moved from a Shared Clay space to a semi-private studio space; I'm keeping my space there because it is such a resource of experience and talent), and this weekend I was hosted by a downtown business during ArtWalk (businesses let artists display work in their store for the afternoon). I unloaded a kiln for the event this morning:


and here is my table at ArtWalk:

(And I actually have sold a few pieces at these events! Yay!)

So that's what's been happening. I'm starting to feel at home at the Octagon and at CASA, and we've been getting together with Jamie's co-workers every couple of weeks. I will always be an outsider in Iowa because I drawwwl and say things like "Ya'll," "fixin' to" and "it's a quarter-to" instead of "it's a quarter-till," but it's starting to feel like we can make it up here - for a few years, anyway.

-Heather

Something Old, Something New

Heather:
Well, after hanging four years of shows in Macon, I am back to it here in Iowa. This week I am helping the Octagon's esteemed Gallery Curator, Heather Johnson hang the next show and I feel right at home. Heather J's style is different from mine (she likes to hang the paintings symmetrically like butterfly wings; each wall section is anchored by one large painting and then paintings of similar size are placed on either side until the section is full) which I think works better for this gallery space than my installation philosophy. The way I like to hang a show is to detract attention from the whole wall, pair paintings that compliment each other and make niches of theme or color that pull a viewer in close. Octagon's gallery is a lot larger than Macon Arts and is a less attractive room with gray carpets and uneven sheet rock walls. So the show has to make more of a statement from farther away.

Something new for me is I have been signed up to teach two workshops in the Octagon studios! One is a teapot workshop, hopefully occurring in January. It will be four weeks long, one two hour session per week. I'm hoping that on the fourth week I will have fired everyone's teapots and we can have a round table critique! (this may be a little ambitious). The second is harder - a children's earthday class with the goal of making a hand made version of a chia pet. I'm going to research chia pets tonight. I have never heard of making your own chia pet but I can sort of work out how to in my imagination. I'll have to try it out myself before subjecting a bunch of kids to possible disapointment.

Our Open House at CASA is in November and I've got some works in the pipeline for that. It takes me a long time to get from actually forming a piece to having it glaze fired. I started working with earthenware which you don't have to fire twice which will save time. But I'm still working with good ole porcelain too - something old and something new!

Politics and Davi

This will be a bifurcated post. The first part will be about politics, and the second part will be about Heather helping me with a project for a class.



I am loving reading the news these days. I am disturbed by it too. I am loving seeing the reign of incompetence and idiocy that has been Republican rule come to an end, and I am loving watching the conservative movement implode. Certainly there are some good-guy smart conservatives out there (Andrew Sullivan is my first stop for political news every day), and I think that we NEED conservatives. But not populist social conservative ninnies. The bad guys are losing. It's sad to see John McCain's wagon hitched to a sinking ship, but he knew the risks.

If you are a Burkean conservative (a moderate-liberal pragmatist), or a thoughtful libertarian (meaning not an ideologue or a resentful old white man), then you have a reasonable point of view. Chances are, if you are one of those two types of conservatives, you want the GOP to blow itself up as much as I do. It's been a strangely satisfying sight.

Like watching any grotesque thing in its death spasms, this has not been pretty. The deregulated credit system is going haywire, sending the world into a recession. The planet is warming up. Racists and idiots are marching around accusing the next duly elected president of the United States of being a terrorist. Sarah Palin is...well...she keeps talking. But it looks like we might have legal abortions, social security, diplomacy, progressive income taxes, and freedom of speech for a while longer. Hell, we might get gay marriage and electric cars too. (I'm being hyperbolic. I'm not THAT optimistic...)

Anyway, its about time Americans got beyond prejudice and stupidity enough to quit electing Republicans. Too bad it took a major economic crisis, several hundred thousand deaths, and the erosion of civil liberties to get them there.

Anyway, I'm super happy that Obama looks like he's gonna win.



In more immediate news, Heather is helping me with a pain-in-the-ass project that involves manipulating a bunch of data on spreadsheets. I am smart enough to think of stuff to look for, but not good enough with the tools or experience enough with data manipulation to do very much of this for myself. The result of this is that she is being my little assistant. (Heather here: more like little savior. Give credit where credit is due. I saved your butt with my biology-major knowledge of Excel!)

I'm buying her lots of meals this week. (Heather: Yum Yum!)

Watching the debates.

Heather: We've been following the politics and the credit crisis news pretty closely. It is such a turbulent time!

This is my advice for the most painless way to get the news these days: do not watch political news on tv. Only watch the debates themselves. It is at times like these that I appreciate being too poor to have cable. Iowa public radio gets news from the BBC which I listen to often. I can't believe how huge this credit crisis is. it is effecting Japanese markets, British markets, markets all over the world; even sending the government of Iceland into a tailspin. The country of Iceland may actually go bankrupt because of the housing bubble! How crazy is that?

I've been listening to some great interviews on the radio - "Fresh Air" had a great interview with an Alaskan journalist on today. "Talk of the Nation" seems to have pertinent shows with real content every day - I remember them doing a silly show on ice cream a few years ago; the world is their oyster now that we have so much to talk about. "This American Life" has done some really great in depth shows on the credit crisis.

I am flabbergasted to learn that businesses routinely rely so heavily on credit. it has to be more expensive to borrow money for stock or operating costs every month than keeping a reserve. I couldn't sleep at night if my company ran that way.

Well, I'm off to search the web for today's presidential debate. Wish me luck!
-Heather