Fighting Back With What Little I Have Left

As anyone who has read this blog even once since September knows, my life has had its share of ups and downs. In the past week I have been poked, prodded, sampled, tested, wired,... all in the name of figuring out why I suffer from extreme fatigue during the day, and why I can't stay asleep at night.

After seeing my cardiologist 5 times in May, he (and my GP) suggested emphatically, that I get a sleep study done. They both were concerned about sleep apnea. Guess what? Sleep apnea kills. It can kill you quick by allowing you to fall asleep at the wheel (which I do almost everytime I drive into Ithaca) or it can do it slowly by trashing your blood pressure, adrenal system and your immune system.

I did the sleep study on Wednesday night. I won't share with you all that I have learned since then only because I am still processing it. None of it was good news. Yesterday my GP called me at home on a Saturday to let me know that my last round of blood-sugar tests came back. Looks like diabetes wants to play too.







I have tried to stay upbeat through this recovery. I have tried to keep my head up, focus on the healing and I have kept myself optimistic by reassuring myself that soon everything would be fine. I guess "soon" means different things now than it used to. So, we fix the sleep apnea (I hope to be fitted for a CPAP as early as next Thursday), then we deal with the huge weight gain since January. See if that kicks the shit out of the diabetes. If so, sometime in September, we re-run some of these heart tests and see if we can keep this body of mine from stroking out. Wish me luck till then! Here's hoping there is a night of solid sleep on my horizon. It's been seven months without a single solid night of sleep. I think they call this torture.



I guess the final question must be: What's with all the freakin' flowers if life sucks so bad? Well... if I can't jump in my kayak (abs are too destroyed and the hernia is too fragile), and I can't make pots in any serious manner... well... the options get fewer. I can sit around the house and dose myself with food, pain killers and boredom.... or I can find beauty around my yard. If I can catch even a glimpse of that gorgeous light once or twice a day, then it feels like something positive has come from the doing.

This weekend I had a chance to take pictures of Aurora with alternating grandparents. First her maternal grandmother on Friday and then Nancy's folks came over on Saturday. (That will likely be tomorrow's post.) I love working with portraiture. I find it extraordinarily difficult, but if I can make just one great image, I feel like it was worth the work. Anyone feel like they want to sit for a portrait anytime soon? Seriously. I need subjects who are willing to sit for 45min to an hour. If you're willing, I would love to give it a whirl. Location of your choosing. We can do it in the coffee shop, the gardens, the woods, the lakeside... just about anywhere you desire.

With that said... perhaps that explains a little more about why I shoot flowers. They are available when everyone else is either at school or at work. They will hold still for an hour so I can bend the light to catch just the right sparkle. And maybe, once in a while, they capture something human.

Playing with light and shadow

Just a short posting tonight. Yesterday was spent relaxing and cleaning. Sounds simple enough, right? My hope was to go out and spend the morning shooting pictures in the amazing winter light. We were able to get a few good shots, but the ground was muddy instead of frozen and that made things more difficult. I also was ill prepared for how cold my fingers could get in just a few moments. In reading other photographer's blogs, they often comment on simple solutions for keeping one's fingers intact in cold weather. Today wasn't even close to fridgid... I think the high was nearly 37 degrees. Suffice to say that your fingers might not freeze to the metal legs of the tripod... but they SURE feel like they will. Ouch!

These few pictures were shot during our holiday festivities at Nancy's parent's home. Shot with ambient light (not much) and a single flash shot through a white umbrella. There is so much I am trying to learn about flash photography, and none of this is coming easy. Fun, sure. Easy, not so much.

Happy Holidays to All

Quiet winds, Quiet minds and the kiln is down

Last night I got ready to fire up our kiln, Ursa Arctos... and was, for the first time ever, greeted with the LCD saying FAIL. What? Fail? That's not very optimistic. So I pulled the owner's manual that hasn't seen the light of day in over four years. Guess what? Thermocouple had died. Okay, easy enough. Now we have some on order, but it means this bisque gets to wait till mid-week to be fired off.

In the meantime, way too many flowers are in full bloom or just getting ready to pop!

So after trying to work my way around our kiln delay, I found myself lens-to-bug out in the budding peonies. Caught this ant doing his duty to his colony. Made me sympathize; working around all this beauty, but someone has to collect the sap.




Then I found this allium bloom with a silver maple winged-seed caught in it. Tossed by the almost constant breezes we get this time of year, this maple seed could have ended up just about anywhere.

Makin' plates and revisin' the layout of the gallery

Gallery revision #3. This time we got rid of the shelving supports which really brightened the wall up and also freed up a great deal more vertical space. This layout has also made each shelf independent and much more sturdy. No more wiggly shelves when customers put things down or pick them up.






Everyone was working on plates in the studio this week. What started out as the most frustrating day yet, ended with everyone making no less than four plates... in some cases LOTS more than four. Mind you, this is day one of plates. I would say these potters are on their way to some massive fun!

Making Plates

When I first started out making plates, it was the biggest struggle for me. I was always wrestling with the larger mass of clay (in the case of platters or chargers)... and keeping the lips from either curling UP too much in the drying process or flopping down because of being too wet. It was one thing after another until I started making plates 18-24 at a time. Then the kinks got worked out, a process was born and things just sailed right along.

This week we worked on plate making with our apprentices. Here are a few quick images during the throwing demo.

How We've Changed

That would be me, throwing plate demos, Justin looking on.

Dana cleaning glaze off her pots.

Nancy putting the finishing touches on a new summer dress. We do a lot more in our studio than just make pots!

In the past few months our studio has gone through some pretty wild major changes. We used to be a studio of one, sometime two, now and again three if Aurora was with us that week. Since January we have had Hannah in the studio making plates and mugs two to three days a week. Talk about increasing our energy level and helping us figure out what our capacity is! We have stacks of bisqueware that we had never seen previously.

In the past few months we have added Dana and Justin to our studio family. They're typically three days a week, 2-4 hours at a shot. In that short span of time they have gone from being complete novices on the wheel to being able to throw decent cylinders, bowls, and this week we began work on throwing plates.

I took a look around the studio yesterday and it was amazing. We had three wheels going full tilt, with Dana and Justin and Aurora all throwing plates. Fantastic. It also made me realize we need more room and more kiln space. More storage for pots wouldnt be a bad thing either!

We finally finished adding more shelves to the gallery. It took longer than expected because the shelving system that we're using (Fast-mount by John Sterling Co.) seems to no longer be carried by Lowes... so we had to do some hunting around to find a dealer who could order more for us. Ironically, we found our supplier just around the corner. For folks reading this who have no idea where we live... Trumansburg is a tiny town with a pop. of about 1500 souls. We have two hardware stores. Sort of. One is open banker's hours. The other is more of a lumber yard. Not at all a big box sort of shopping. Prices are considerably higher than say Ithaca, where we have Lowes, Home Depot etc. But Ithaca is a half hour drive away. In good weather.

So after calling every dealer within a 100 mile radius, I checked with our local lumber yard. Sure enough, they could get the shelf supports in a couple days. Wow. And just down the street to boot. Nice.

We rebuilt the gallery last night with help from Dana and Justin. They had missed out on the deconstruction of the gallery space last week when Hannah pulled her whirlwind routine and moved hundreds of pots out of the gallery in no-time flat!







As I was describing earlier, we had a full house yesterday. Hannah here in the morning till the early afternooon. Then Dana and Justin in the afternoon-evening. Aurora joined us between her chores and her french horn lessons. This image was shot of her working on a new dragon head she was making for Dana.

One of the things I love about working with our barn full of apprentices is that they all LOVE being here. We all have a great time and tons of work make their way through the kiln each week. We used to fire a lot. Now we basically never let the kiln cool down. Fire, unload, reload, fire. Rinse. Repeat.

Justin glazing up a storm.

Never after dark

The view from the car as we raced home trying to catch the sunset going down just behind us!