The unexpected guest: a poem in two parts

I.
Cat plays at my feet,
tickles my leg
once;
twice;
thrice.
I look down to tell him to stop,
and see he's too far away
to reach my shin.
How is he tickling me?
Mid-wonder,
something skitters inside my pants leg.
Palmetto bug?!
I shake my leg forcefully,
flinging it away.
It squeaks.
Mouse.
I try to rescue it before the cat can kill it, but
the mouse is small and fast and
takes refuge behind the fish tank.
Vigilant cat stands sentry, while my shin
replays the memory of where
the silken paws
climbed.

II.
Vigilant cat!
You waited patiently,
ears cocked,
pupils wide,
hours long.
The mouse waited too,
then, tricked by your silence,
emerged from behind the fish tank.
You pounced.
Mouse pounced.
I pounced.
We danced together erratically
on tip-toes until at last
darkness fell
in the concave form of black polypropylene,
no longer single-use plastic.

Bewildered rodent rests now
under a giant oak tree,
blinking in the sunlight,
panting,
a fang hole in its side.
A mortal wound?

The poet ponders:
Will mouse live or will mouse die or
will mouse find its way back up my leg?

Fang

Fang (formerly FindusBabyCatBiteyBeauDrJekyllandMrHyde) is turning into a schmusiger Kater.

Updates: politics, penguins, pets, and personae

Were he still living, "Aged Reader" would be sending me the occasional nudge to blog. Alas, he is not and does not, so I have been negligent about keeping things current. Some updates are in order, and I believe Aged Reader would be appalled by some and proud of others.

Generally, I try to keep this space apolitical, because I have three different professional personas to project/protect (musician, potter, writing teacher), and sometimes people actually read what I write here. Today I throw caution to the wind. As I type, I am listening the News & Observer's live-stream video of protesters at the NCGA, where state Republicans are showing the world that they believe in neither democracy nor due process. Shame on these power-hungry connivers for their years of self-interested sneak attacks and subterfuge, and for this particularly egregious disregard for the people of this state. The ends do not justify the means; appearances and process matter. Shame. Shame. Shame. We'll see you in court.

How does one shift topics from appalling political transformations to more mundane things like pottery and pets? Well. You can see why it has been hard to blog this year. Stepping up to the plate to aid in the switch: a community-building environmental-activism local-to-international art project.

Much of what could have been blogging energy this year was redirected to The Potters' Penguin Project, with updates posted semi-regularly at www.facebook.com/potterspenguinproject. I've inventoried 1,627 of 1,700+ birds to date--each one different, each one with its own personality (penguinality?), each one made by hand by one (or sometimes two or three) of 250+ makers. Most of our penguins originated in the NC Triangle area, but we've received birds from as far west as Arizona and as far east as Spain and Germany. The generosity of the makers--kids and adults, amateurs and professionals, friends and strangers, teachers and students--has been stunning and heart-warming, and it's been pretty spectacular seeing each penguin up close.

This would be a logical point to insert an image of the Far Side cartoon with the sea of black-and-white penguins, where one penguin in the distance is exuberantly singing "I gotta be me, oh I just gotta be me!!"--except that Gary Larson posted an online letter in 2008 asking people not to re-post his cartoons. That letter is reproduced here; the original source is no longer available, which is evidence either of an expired site or that the request was for an obviously losing battle. The penguin strip is all over the interwebs, of course, as a Google search demonstrates. In any case, my point is that while Gary Larson mocked that singing penguin's sense of special snowflakeness, every penguin in the Potters' Penguin Project colony truly is unique. (Note the placement of the adverb: "truly is unique," not "is truly unique." As I tell students in my writing workshops, unique means "one of a kind," and it doesn't make sense to say something is truly one of a kind, as opposed to only sort of one of a kind. Thus is every penguin, truly, unique.)

Yesterday was the official deadline for penguins to join the colony, so counting incoming birds will be high on my to-do list as 2016 winds to a close. The project will exhibit at Claymakers between January 10 and February 11, 2017, and in April/May, a contingent of penguins will represent the colony at the Greensboro Science Center (where one can see real live endangered African penguins up close).

From penguins to pets....Patient readers might recall that we adopted a new cat in April following the death of Homer Wells. FindusBabyCatBiteyBeauDrJekyllandMrHyde has become a little less bitey than he was in April, but he remains edgy and vigilant--vigilant not in the protective way of Miss Maggie B., nor the professional on-duty way of Schroeder, but rather in a psychotic way that suggests he knows the world cannot be trusted, no matter how much kibble you feed him or how many times you let him in or out or in or out or in or out the back door onto the porch. He doesn't like being touched unless he initiates the contact, but he's an expert at sucking up to strangers--the talent that suckered us into adopting him. Last week, he destroyed three handmade mugs and tried climbing inside the piano twice. Here is a video of him in jail, followed by some photos of him at his finest.

Schroeder, meanwhile, has given up playing fetch. We lost Preferred Carrot shortly after Homer died. Schroeder will gift us with other finger puppets, but he has no interest in retrieving them if we throw them down the stairs. Instead, he has turned his attention to a life-sized stuffed kitty toy that he carries by its neck up and down the stairs. When we go to bed at night, he brings it into bed with us and humps it. When we wake up in the morning, he humps it again, and when we go downstairs, he brings it downstairs. Occasionally, he tries feeding it by dropping it next to--or in--his food dish. In the evening, when we sit on the sofa in front of the fireplace, he retrieves his plush toy, jumps onto the sofa with it, and humps it. His obsession is all the more remarkable because the plush toy is big enough to obscure his line of sight: Schroeder jumps from floor to bed/sofa without seeing where he's going, and he has yet to miss his mark (although sometimes he'll land on FindusBabyCatBiteyBeauDrJekyllandMrHyde). He purrs a lot, seems happy, is a genius, and is neutered, so we set aside our prudishness and let him have at it.

In other news, alter ego Robo Revenger has returned. Robo Revenger responds to spam callers so they have less time to call you, dear readers. This fall, Robo Revenger spent a good ten minutes talking with pseudo-Mikrosofft scammers phishing from the Indian subcontinent. I managed to capture most of the conversation in a video recording (see below). The first 1.5 minutes are excellent; my high school classmates might enjoy the reference to Four Square just past 1:00. I'm also partial to the two minutes starting ~3:10. The first "f*&% you" is ~5:22. The stuff about how to count desktop icons ~5:35-7:03 is fabulous, yielding a nice stream of "f*&%-yous" ~7:04. The part from 7:00 to the end demonstrates how to remain chipper and polite in the face of adversity. Really, the whole thing is a Robo Revenger tour-de-force.

A week later, the Mikrosofft phishers phoned back. Robo Revenger had barely gotten out the video camera and started misleading the callers when a real live human knocked on the door. Robo Revenger asked the spammers to please call back in ten minutes--and they did! Add that to your toolbox, people, and remember to always use your superpowers for good. (And if you really care about preventing spam calls, add your voice to the chorus at the Consumers Union.)

Findus gets a hip name

We have friends who gave their son a distinguished first name and a hip middle name. Their son went by Hipname until middle school, when he decided to create a new middle-school identity by going by Distinguished (Dist for short). Those of us who have known him since he was a wee babe have trouble remembering this, and we have to work at not calling him Hipname, but most of his current peers have only known him as Dist.

Based on this model, I have suggested to E that we gave Findus an official hip middle name. The cat can continue to use his distinguished name (Findus) when he goes to the vet or applies to college, but at least while he's still a kittenish cat, I think we should call him by his hip name. Hipname is not to be confused with assorted nicknames: E will probably still call Findus "Baby Cat," and I will probably still call him "Bitey Beau." But Findus seems to be communicating to us, through his behavior, that he wants to go by his Hipname now, and we should try to honor that. So for the next while, we'll be calling him "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

Here's a film in which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde chases Schroeder up the stairs.

Cats as time sinks

A tiny piece broke off the potentiometer in the pedal for my pottery wheel. Neither super glue nor epoxy have fixed it, so I'm wheel-less for the next few days, until I can get a new part. In the meantime, here is a video of Findus trying to decide whether he'd rather destroy a paper bag or wrestle with Schroeder.

Introducing Findus "Baby Cat" Bitey Beau

Meet Findus, a.k.a. Baby Cat, a.k.a. Bitey Beau, formerly Fargo, adopted April 25 from APS of Durham. After three days quarantined in the upstairs bathroom, he emerged to help Schroeder begin a new exercise program. He spends his waking hours snarfing food and harassing Schroeder ("c'mon, hit me, hit me, I dare you!," he says, gnawing on Schroeder's head; to which Schroeder replies "happy to oblige." Two pots broken so far, one per cat). He spends a huge amount of time sleeping every day, which makes E jealous. We thought Schroeder was a bitey cat, but Findus bites much more. He'll occasionally open his fanged jaws wide even when he doesn't immediately need to bite, because a bitey cat can never be too prepared--though on such occasions, he's usually happy to receive a tooth massage. He managed to get us to adopt him by kissing all of us repeatedly, nose to nose--his preferred form of human contact other than biting. Below are photos of the two cats sharing some tender moments of not beating each other up.

Kitten of Kansas, cat of NC

My first teaching gig after grad school was as an assistant professor of music theory at the University of Kansas. Lawrence was a blue-tinged college town situated on the eastern end of Bob Dole country. I arrived two years after Bob Dole lost the presidential election to Bill Clinton (Dole won most of Kansas, but Clinton won Douglas County).

One of the first things I did in Lawrence was adopt a cat. I had grown up with female cats--Cuddles, Grimalkin, and Charcoal--and I fully intended to adopt a female cat and to name her Fafner.

I took it as a sign that the humane society had a cat named Madison--the same name as the town of my doctoral alma mater. But there, next to her, was a big schmusig orange tabby named Larry--the chummy name of the town of my current professorial gig. Larry was so very schmoozy that he ended up coming home with me and becoming Larry Fafner. He made it his habit to sleep at night curled around my head, purring. He was a lovely cat.

Larry Fafner came with free tape worms that required, in quick succession, a bad vet, a change of vets, a good vet, and several hundred dollars to resolve. Two short months later, when I decided to adopt a second cat to keep Larry Fafner company, the good vet gave me some financial advice: look more thoroughly for signs of health in the adoptee, and bring him/her straight from the pound to the vet before bringing him/her home to Larry.

So, three days in a row, in mid-November 1998, I visited the Lawrence humane society. On Wednesday and Thursday, I played with multiple adorable kittens, leaning toward a sweet little tabby I thought I would call my own--until, on Friday, I decided he was perhaps more wild than Larry would tolerate, and I settled on a jet black kitten named Luke instead.

"We usually require cats to be here for eight days before adopting them out," the pound administrator told me cheerfully, "and Luke has only been here for seven; but that's OK, we'll let you take him." Thus it was that Luke and I headed to the vet that very afternoon. The vet said the cat needed a flea dip, so I left him there and went home to think about a new name while they de-pested him.

When I returned late that afternoon to pick up Not-Going-to-Be-Named-Luke Kitten, he looked content and clean in his carrier. The staff at the clinic had fallen in love with him and, oohing and ahhing about his adorableness, confirmed I had made an excellent choice.

On the way out to the car, sweet wee Kitten started foaming at the mouth. I did an about face and returned to the clinic.

"How odd," said the vet. "He must be allergic to the tinsel toy we gave him. Let's just take that away..." He removed the silvery tinsel ball from the carrier and sent us on our way.

Later that evening, Kitten was still hyper-salivating, and he refused to eat or drink. I phoned the vet, who agreed to meet me at the now closed clinic to re-evaluate the cat. He decided that perhaps Kitten was younger than originally thought and was having a reaction to the flea medication. Together, we gave Kitten a warm bath using Dawn dish detergent--apparently the mildest vet-recommended soap available for washing cats. As we finished, Kitten leaped out of the sink and hung from my sweater, warm and soaking wet.

Thus Kitten learned how to stare water in the face and never blink.

That night, to keep an eye on him while keeping him away from Larry Fafner, I nestled Kitten into a cushioned shoe box and pulled him under the covers with me.

Thus Kitten learned that sleeping under the covers is the bees knees.

On Saturday, Kitten continued hyper-salivating and still refused to eat. Back to the vet we went. The vet taught me how to force feed the cat using a syringe and extra moist prescription canned food. It worked alright at the clinic, but at home, it was another matter. At feeding time, I sat on the edge of the bathtub with the shower curtain drawn, held Kitten in my lap, pried his mouth open, and forced the food in--whereupon he shook his head to keep the food from going down, spraying food all over me and the shower. For a very sick kitten, he achieved remarkably thorough coverage.

I know all of this happened in mid-November, because it followed closely on the heels of another November event. On November 3, I had worked late and then gotten drawn into watching state election returns online. My office was across the hall from some practice rooms, and one of my students dropped in to chat after he finished practicing. When he saw that I was watching election returns, the conversation turned to politics. A little voice in my head said "don't talk to students about this." Another little voice responded "it's OK, your students are adults. They're in college. You can have respectful conversations."

I adopted Kitten about a week after that--the same week that I returned essays to my undergrad theory class. The student with whom I had the conversation on election night got a B-. The B was for the paper itself, and was generous because I was new at being a hardass; the minus was for the peer-review he was supposed to have provided for a classmate, in writing, but didn't. The week I adopted Kitten, the student angrily informed me that he was going to sue me because I had graded him down for being a Republican.

My department chair was extremely supportive. He advised me to listen to voice #1 next time, but stood by me during the craziness with Righteous Student. It was a rough way to end the semester.

Enter Kitten, to cheer me up and keep Larry Fafner company. But Kitten was still quite ill on Sunday. By then, my choices seemed to be either to return him to the pound--where surely they'd euthanize him--or to hospitalize him. I linked Kitten's survival to my own, not knowing whether Righteous Student would succeed in destroying my fledgling career. So back to the vet Kitten went, to be force-fed and re-hydrated by the experts.

Kitten survived, and so did I. The vet phoned on Monday to tell me Kitten was finally drinking on his own. By the time I picked Kitten up on Tuesday, his name had become Homer Wells--an orphan cat named after an orphan named after a cat. Those familiar with John Irving's The Cider House Rules recognize "Homer Wells" as a profoundly pro-choice choice. Righteous Student was transferred to a TA's class, where, alas, he shifted his harassing energy onto his new teacher. I imagine he has wreaked a life of righteous havoc ever since.

Homer Wells, the cat, went on to achieve great things in his life and most certainly learned to "be of use." A vociferous and territorial defender of unmatched socks, he became the namesake for my avatar (mom2homer) when I wanted to assimilate with other moms on a parenting listserv. In midlife, Homer learned how to use the toilet, sorta, and before age and arthritis caught up with him, he was an expert catcher of mice and bats. In his old age, he figured out how to do unexpected things with computers.

Good night, you kitten of Kansas, you cat of NC.

Homer Wells

September (?), 1998 - April 5, 2016

New knobs

We had new, dark brown countertops installed in our kitchen last year, but we kept our old yellow pine cabinets. The color contrast turned out to be a little rough on the eyes, and the white porcelain knobs didn't help (although they had gone well with the previous dark green formica). We looked into replacing the knobs, but the ones we liked were beyond what we were willing to spend. Then it occurred to me that I'm a potter and I could probably figure out how to make whatever kind of knobs we wanted. So I did.

Here's what we had until last night:

The color combo reminded me a bit of the day in 1986 when I went to a physics class wearing an Oxford blue shirt and magenta corduroys and found the color combination so unnerving that I had to go home between classes to change.

Ugh

This was still during my post-back-brace limited-wardrobe-competence decade, when I was just so glad to find a pair of pants that fit, that my entire pants collection consisted of five pairs of the same style in five different colors (dark blue, gray, tan, olive green, and magenta). I figured any one pair was just as functional as any other, and all five corduroys were interchangeable; add a flannel shirt, and I was dressed in the official team uniform of the physics majors at Illinois. Then came that fateful Oxford blue/magenta day when I suddenly discovered I hate magenta. Anyway, the dark brown/yellow/white kitchen countertop/cabinet/knob combo reminded me a little of that.

Here's the new combo:

The cabinets are still yellow, of course, but now the knobs match the countertops pretty well. We have a grand Once-the-Cat-Is-Dead plan to lightly sand the cabinets, which should soften the color, but it will probably be a few years before we can implement the plan because we have very durable cats.

Every knob is decorated differently, so as a group they look intentionally mismatched.

The one below is on a drawer next to where we feed the cats, so that Homer and Schroeder can see that we love them dearly, despite the Once-the-Cat-Is-Dead plan (of which we have spoken nary a word to either cat).

In retrospect, I'm wishing I had made one with a gnu on it, so I could title this post "New gnu knob." All's 20/20 in hindsight.

Homer the computer geek cat

I have blogged more in the past few years about Schroeder than about Homer, but Homer is no slouch himself. Nearing 17, he is not as spry as Schroeder and is afflicted with an ever lengthening list of maladies. He has kidney disease, heart disease, chronic constipation, arthritis, and probably feline herpes and a little dementia. These are more or less controlled with daily amlodipine, lysine, and miralax; he recently finished an extended round of steroids. He refuses to drink out of anything that remotely looks like a water dish, and he will knock over any cup his head won't fit in if he thinks it might have water in the bottom. He has taken to scratching the kitchen cabinet doors, bedroom closet doors, glass shower doors, front door, and back door, while meowing and meowing and meowing, because he knows he needs to get through a door, but he isn't sure which one. He claws my nose or the bedroom furniture at 4am every morning so that I'll let him under the bedcovers with me. He sneezes on my computer and has been leaving dry pooplets on the floor for years.

Fortunately, he still purrs, and despite all of his afflictions, he finds new ways to keep himself occupied. Understandably, he has turned his attention away from hunting mice and crickets to less physical activities. In particular, he enjoys typing on my laptop keyboard. He has downloaded files, conducted internet searches (mostly for long strings of repeated letters), opened music notation software, attempted to post to Facebook, read and tagged emails, and changed web browser settings. He has forced me to learn new things--most significantly, how to turn off Windows Narrator.

Yesterday, he turned on the closed captioning for the video of Schroeder playing fetch. Thanks to Homer, I can now recapture some of the former entertainment value of Google Translate (which, for better or worse, has improved significantly over the past few years) through YouTube's closed caption interpreter. (For those more in-the-YouTube-know than I, such poor translations are apparently old hat.) Among the more impressive phrases:

CC: Could kill her yes cat yes.
[Good job! Here, let's try that again.]

CC: My time.
[Bring me the carrot. C'mon. C'mon.]

The complete CC transcript follows, along with my own transcription. Given how often I repeat the same phrases, I'd think CC might have gotten more than just one "Bring it to me" right. On the other hand, I completely understand that CC had difficulty with "Chickabooj" (international Catspeak for "watch that carrot fly!").

CC: We are going to play Karaoke. Since the carrot this is the cast here we go yes. Re back. Before way yes employ. Goal what's me. Carrots me Trish come. Bonnie good kidding. Recap yes yes. Could kill her yes cat yes. Crash could. Kiddie yes good job picture year. Flying my only time. Okay here we go you ready Hebraic night. Communicator. My time. Me. Go can which I gotta. Kathy ready Trish. Bring it to me. Good shahar chahte in like 20. Like I let you down you can you create an issue. Job could she that's awfully nice. Yes job row hearing. Yes done. 

[We are going to play carrot games. This is the carrot; this is the cat. Here we go. You ready? Yes! Mreow. Bring it back. Good boy! Yes, good boy! Mreow! Yeah, whoops. You ready? Got the carrot. You ready? Chickabooj. Good boy. Good kitty! Where are you gonna put that? Yes. Yes, good job. Here, let's try that again. You ready? Yes! Chickabooj! Good job! Good kitty! Yes, good job, good job, good job. Yeah. Mreow. Mreow. One more time? OK, here we go. You ready? You ready? Mreow? Chickabooj. Bring me the carrot. C'mon. C'mon. There you go. There you go. Good job! Good job! I got it! I got it! You ready? Chickabooj! Bring it to me. Good job. Good job. You gonna let go of it? You gonna let go of it? You're done. You're done. You gonna put it in a shoe? Good job, you put it in a shoe. That's awfully nice. Yes. Good job. Mreow. Yes, good job. Good job. Got it, I got it. You ready? Chickabooj. Yes. Are you done? OK. Good job.]

Nightly routine

We live with a very talented cat.

Fauna update

I went out to the garden the other day to feed the mosquitoes, and ran into this beautiful guy:

Here's hoping he sticks around to reduce the population of blood-suckers.

When I came back in, Schroeder was working his kitty magic out on the porch. Observe his well-honed moves--how, with minimal exertion, he entices humans to pet his adorable schnoz.

Green Dinosaur Taquito

When Schroeder first moved in with us in 2012, it didn't take him long to fall in love with Hand-Knit Green Dinosaur Finger Puppet. His affair is documented here, here, and here.

That summer, Schroeder lost Green Dinosaur. After an appropriate period of consternation, his affections turned to Hand-Knit Carrot--tentatively at first, and then with growing devotion.

When Carrot subsequently disappeared, Schroeder was again agitated. We learned that you can't just replace one carrot with another; cats have standards. My mom knitted us two new carrots, and after holding out for the return of First Carrot for a few weeks, Schroeder finally gave up and latched onto one of the new ones.

Having suffered through two lost kitty cozies, we now know to search the house when Preferred Carrot disappears; we've successfully kept track of it for over a year. We thank my mom for knitting a supply of spares to keep on hand, and we always keep at least two carrots in the kitty-toy cycle--Preferred Carrot and Carrot-In-Training. We've tried other finger puppets, but Schroeder will not play fetch with them (although we'll sometimes wake up to a collection of puppet rejects--Blue Dolphin, Green Frog, and Unfavored Carrot--scattered around S's shoes in our bedroom).

In February, following the Great Purge, as we were prepping the study walls for painting, S found Green Dinosaur behind a radiator, covered with dust bunnies. Schroeder was in heaven. Preferred Carrot had been fine, but Green Dinosaur was his first love.

It did not take Schroeder long to love Green Dinosaur nearly to death, pulling stuffing out of a growing hole in its belly and unknotting the yellow stripe of yarn on its back.

I pushed the stuffing back in and sewed the hole closed with a piece of green thread. The surgery gave Green Dinosaur a curled up fetal look, but Schroeder didn't care.

The repair job held up through another month of loving, during which Schroeder ripped open two more large holes. Green Dinosaur was a few strands of yarn away from decapitation and needed more than my limited skills could offer. I called on my friend N, a knitter, for aid.

Two days later, N had worked her magic. She said she couldn't knit Green Dinosaur back together, so she made it a tiny tube of a sweater instead: Green Dinosaur Taquito. Schroeder sniffed Taquito's head and tail, puzzled but intrigued, as though recalling sweet memories of a distant dinosaur dream. We have high hopes that the love affair will continue.

Green Dinosaur died,

Came back as a taquito:

New life through knitting.

Herons and more tulip private parts

We had a friend in town yesterday with a bit of free time in the afternoon, so we took him to Duke Gardens. I was at the gardens about two weeks ago with some other friends, and we had the surprising privilege of watching a heron stab and devour a fish from the koi pond. We saw a heron yesterday too, and moments after I aimed my camera at it, in the blink of an eye, it flew into the water and snarfed down a fish. So to all you herons out there reading this, Duke Gardens is the place to be right now.

Catch it

Silence it

Swallow it

 

 

 

Because I'm in the habit, I couldn't resist taking more photos of tulip private parts. Seems like a pollinator would have to be pretty obtuse not to hone in on these things.

We have lots of pollen at home too, judging by the cat's head.

Cat lessons

Blazing amber 

kitty eyes-- 

behind them, 

sentiments so wise: 

"The sun has set, 

the crickets chirp, 

now is the time 

to get to work! 

You humans need 

to learn a lesson 

beyond this

legislative session. 

There are still 

bigger fish to fry, 

more important 

things to try!" 

If Schroeder could 

but English speak, 

he'd say to us, 

"Let go your pique! 

Stop surfing 

NC politics! 

Forget th' impending 

'pocalypse! 

The situation 

may seem dire, 

but focus, focus: 

aspire higher!" 

He drops a fuzzwad 

at our feet, 

meows forcefully, 

"get off your seat! 

Now learn a skill 

with real merit: 

I'll teach you how 

to fetch a carrot!"

Morning routine

Four exciting minutes of Schroeder playing fetch with the carrot my mom knitted for him.

Summer recaps finished: Penland and flutes

Warm November flew away, and barely-cold December is also on its way out, so here's my last summer catch-up blog. I'm sure I'll never catch up with autumn blogging, so I'll spill the highlights right away: (1) our determined angel fish laid new eggs every 2-3 weeks and the young fry got eaten by their carnivorous tank-mates and parents every darned time; and (2) Schroeder lost his carrot, causing distress and consternation, but my mom knitted him a new one and everyone is content once more. Ooh, and (3) I worked towards coming to terms with glazes fired in oxidation, attempting to mimic the variation of reduction-fired surfaces by spraying layers of different Claymakers' studio glazes à le Steven Hill, and it's going well enough that I recently bought a used compressor and spray gun, with hopes of building (and, by extension, finding room for) a spray booth for my home studio; but that's a story that lacks photos and will have to wait until 2013 for blog development.

So back to the summer. I spent the last two weeks of August at the Penland School of Crafts, taking a class entitled "Shape Shift: The Pot," taught by Jim Lawton. I had been meaning to take a Penland class for almost a decade, and the stars had finally aligned between a class I was very interested in, two unencumbered weeks, and manageable kidcare. At Penland, I learned a lot about darting, making holes, and assembling well-proportioned altered pots, worked intensely from morning to night, met a lot of interesting and talented people, ate super duper well, and happily jogged almost daily along beautiful mountain roads (only getting lost once, when what I thought was a 180^o-sum turn on curvy roads turned out to be only about 85^o, and a 3-mile trip turned into 7 miles, so that I missed breakfast on the last day).

One of my Penland classmates, Joe, is a glass artist who was honing his clay skills. We had a shared interest in clay instruments; I showed him how to make ocarinas, and he showed me how to make a flute. It took until late this fall for me to finally attempt making a flute; the initial results are played below, with a chickarina for comparison (apologies to Beethoven for the flubs). Ocarinas are easier to play, although the tone quality and range aren't as good. Both flutes were tuned by ear; maybe next time I'll pull out my tuner. As with the chickarina, some pitches +/- can be replicated with multiple fingerings, which helps some with the tuning. It would probably help too if I actually knew how to play the flute. As it is, I feel disturbingly light-headed after playing these things. I'm sure good tone quality and hyperventilating don't always have to go hand-in-hand.

There are assorted online guides to making clay, wood, and PVC-tubing flutes. Handouts for assorted college-level acoustics labs tend to go into more precise detail than I was interested in, so I followed the suggested measurements in Barry Hall's book, From Mud to Music, which offers the same hole-positioning advice as this website by Mark Shepard. The detail that can't be stressed enough is that hole size hugely affects the tuning. After some trial and error, I abandoned the distance-of-finger-hole-from-mouthpiece measurements and relied on hole size to enable comfortable finger placements. But maybe that's part of why I have to hyperventilate when I play.

Another lesson I took away from Penland was to register for more workshops at Claymakers--way cheaper and way more convenient to get to than Penland (although the food and scenery, of course, can't compare). Thus I enjoyed a late-summer workshop with Susan Feagin (Penland's clay studio manager) and a mid-autumn brush-making workshop with Kent McLaughlin.

And now for some pastoral Beethoven...

Kitty hygiene and recreation

I was welcomed home from Germany by two happy and precocious cats. What did they do while I was gone? I suspect our house-sitter had a word or two with Schroeder about HYGIENE. I have previously blogged about our attempts to toilet train Homer. New kitty Schroeder has no problems using the litter box, but in my absence he has learned both to clean himself in the shower...

...and to brush his teeth.

Thanks Janet!

Incidentally, Homer and Schroeder's shaggy, tick-infested, gruff but tender-hearted Bavarian cousin, Döpferl, also has, like Schroeder, a fetish for stuffies. His is a larger-than-life cardinal rather than a carrot. While Schroeder's goal is mainly to play fetch, Döpferl's is to kill.

Tracking prey

According to Wikipedia, "Persistence hunting is a hunting technique in which hunters use a combination of running and tracking to pursue prey to the point of exhaustion. While humans can sweat to reduce body heat, their quadrupedal prey would need to slow from a gallop in order to pant....Persistence hunting requires endurance running–running many miles for extended periods of time. Among primates, endurance running is only seen in humans, and persistence hunting is thought to have been one of the earliest forms of human hunting, having evolved 2 million years ago."

In his bestselling book, Born to Run, Christopher McDougall argues that human feet evolved to support this type of endurance running. Forget those fancy over-engineered supportive sneakers: people can run longer and farther and with fewer injuries if they run barefoot. S and I have both bought into this reasoning; we've ditched our Asics and spend most of our travel time in minimalist Merrills and Stems.

I was thinking about this last night, as I listened to Schroeder pant. Perhaps prehistoric Man persistence-hunted Felis silvestris lybica into domestication; or perhaps prehistoric Woman simply tossed a few hand-knit carrot finger puppets into the Savannah, and Felis silvestris catus was born.

Unbridled talent

Proof that if you practice long enough with a hand-knit green dinosaur finger puppet, you can achieve great things. Note that Schroeder displays an artistic eye and an appreciation of parallel lines. Good kitty.

The new bedtime routine

I thought curiosity was going to kill the cat, but instead it looks like curiosity is just going to break a lot of my pottery. Suffice it to say that I have never before heard a crash like the one young Schroeder produced in the kitchen yesterday. Farewell, nearly perfect green cereal bowl; alas, we hardly knew thee.

Fortunately, the finger puppet dinosaur is a good distraction for all of us. If we can't keep Schroeder out of trouble, maybe at least we can tucker him out playing fetch. We suspect he might have been a dog in a former life, but the jury is out on whether he was a very very good dog or a very very naughty dog, and on whether coming back as a cat is a step up or a step down.