Killing two gee whiz pots with one stone

On Thursday, in the middle of an otherwise mundane afternoon, as I was walking from Point A to Point B, my potter's mind was struck by a sudden flash of inspiration. I'm hoping that by stating my idea in a public forum, witnessed by you five or so regular readers and the occasional visiting spammer who leaves comments of an inappropriate nature in Chinese hanzi that I subsequently have to delete, I will be more likely to make it a reality.

But first, some necessary background information. The photo above shows a small portion of "Dr. Lizardo's Museum of Gee Whiz Pots (being various works of a functional, semi-functional, impractical, or nonsensical nature)."

Exhibit 1 is a model of a Möbius strip--relatively mundane. The items in Exhibit 2 are more exotic: "We're 3-dimensional models of Klein Bottles—representations of 4-dimensional non-orientable manifolds," reads the Museum Guidebook. "We’re what you get when you sew the edges of two mirror-image Möbius Strips together. You can get from our outsides to our insides without crossing any edges—meaning our outside and inside are on the same surface. If we were actually 4-D, we’d have zero-volume; being 3-D, we have volume and make handy m&m and red-hots holders."

The Museum exhibit is scattered at present: all of the Klein Bottles have been dispersed to good homes, and all of the red hots and m&ms, if not already consumed, are inedibly stale by now. So it is clearly time for me to make some new Klein Bottles, even though they're labor intensive and relatively useless.

At the same time, as I have written previously, I am somewhat obsessed with the impractical habit of drilling holes in pots whenever the opportunity presents itself. I have some lovely, very large (9 pounds untrimmed) bowls in the works over at Claymakers right now. They're made from Loafer's Glory clay--a silky smooth white clay that's more forgiving than porcelain--and I'm fantasizing about bringing them home and staying up all night poking holes in them. But then they'd no longer make good mixing bowls, which is what they were born to be. And while the hole punching usually yields interesting results, interesting isn't always a good thing. Consider, for example, the bizarre could-have-been-a-vase thing shown here. We use it occasionally for votive candles, but since I wasn't thinking of candles when I made it, I didn't provide any easy way to get a match inside. Plus, who really needs a giant glowing first-trimester votive candle holder?

So my stroke of genius is this: why not kill two impractical birds with one stone? That is, why not make a Klein Bottle that's full of holes? Imagine being able to see the m&ms on the inside (which is also the outside) from the outside (which is also the inside). I don't know about you, but I find this idea pretty thrilling. I anticipate the hole punching will be easiest if I make a Klein Bottle of the less complicated double torus variety, as seen in the Hitchhiker's Guide model above. I plan to document my progress--if such a thing as "progress" can conceivably be associated with a project like this--in future installments of this blog, so stay tuned.

Weather event countdown

On Wednesday, the National Weather Service issued a winter storm watch for almost the entire state of North Carolina beginning Friday afternoon and ending Saturday evening. According to wral.com, "WRAL chief meteorologist Greg Fishel said he 'can't stress how unusual' it is for a winter storm watch to be posted so far in advance." Other area meteorologists advise stocking up on supplies today, in anticipation of anywhere between half an inch of ice and ten or more inches of snow.

Will this be the sort of twice-or-thrice-in-a-decade Extreme Winter Weather Event I blogged about earlier this year, or another let-down following a hyperventilating forecasting frenzy? Let the countdown begin!

Update 4:36 p.m.: The waffling begins. Forecasters are backing off earlier predictions: instead of 10-12 inches of snow, they're anticipating 3-5. Neighbors on the go say grocery stores are too crowded to navigate. Woe to those who go shopping tomorrow: there won't be any milk left on the shelves.

Update 9:41 p.m.: Aging Reader astutely asks, "Why [is the clock counting down to] one minute before midnight on Friday? That is several hours after Friday afternoon." The answer is that, given the snow forecasting track record around here, I am trying to be gracious. The winter storm watch was due to begin at 4 p.m. Friday; I figured as long as it started to snow by midnight, the forecasters deserved to earn some points. The watch, incidentally, has now been replaced by a warning that begins at 6 p.m. Friday (so you can see that had I set the clock for 4 p.m., no one could win), and the snow isn't supposed to start until after midnight. Oh well.

When I was growing up in central Illinois, a watch meant conditions were ripe for the formation of some nasty weather phenomenon (usually a tornado), while a warning meant the phenomenon was taking place. Here in North Carolina, a warning means significant weather is "expected or occurring." And, well, not to be cynical, but there's a big difference between expecting something to happen and the fulfillment of that expectation.

Update Friday 2:29 p.m.: Well folks, it looks like this might be the real deal. The current forecast is 6-8 inches of snow, starting around 9 p.m. and continuing for 24 hours. "There is still time to prepare!" said wral.com this morning, so I pretended to be a Southerner and went shopping. On the top of my list were bread and milk, because when it snows in the South, you will die if you attempt to go 24 hours without them. I also bought some red wine on impulse, along with some celery and a few North Carolina sweet potatoes because they're tasty.

Wral.com's leading headline right now declares "'Potent' winter storm on its way to N.C." I am enjoying the scare quotes around "potent." Do they mean the folks who called it potent don't really know what they're talking about? ("'Potent'? [snork] Yeah, right.") Do they mean "potent" is a particularly catchy turn of phrase that the author of the article couldn't possibly have arrived at him/herself, or that it's an adjective we should take especially seriously because it was spoken by an authority on winter storm types? Or do the scare quotes simply mean "Be scared! It is going to snow!"?

Update Friday 6:31 p.m.: Someone flipped the on/off switch and we suddenly have substantial snow coming down. Points will be awarded at midnight, unless the transformers have already exploded by then.

Snow in the Triangle

According to local news media this morning, some 220 schools, businesses, and organizations in the North Carolina Triangle area are operating on a two-hour delay or have decided not to open at all today. This is because the weather forecast yesterday evening was for the possibility of "a light dusting to one inch of snow." Thanks to this advance warning, everyone went out and bought milk and bread, the two staples no Southerner wants to be caught without when an inch of snow falls.

Just after the first flakes appeared at 10:30 p.m. (so the rumors say), an unexpected surge of warm air blew in, with the consequence that there's no snow on the ground this morning (see photo above). Fret not: there are a few icy patches on outlying country roads. These patches have caused some drivers to skid, justifying the two-hour delays to work, school, and the local economy.

One reason for the flurry of cancellations and delays is that two or three times a decade, rather than overestimating winter precipitation, forecasters underestimate it, and the world as we know it grinds to a halt. Our first year in North Carolina, we heard stories about the legendary Blizzard of '00. With voices full of awe and eyes wide, friends described how the city shut down, immobilized under a blanket of snow for two solid weeks.

Generally, massively disruptive local events like blizzards, floods, and the invasion of giant cockroaches occur when S is not around, a trend that began with the Great Ice Storm of '02. S had been gone for a few days--at the Materials Research Society conference in sunny Boston, I do believe--when Triangle meteorologists started mentioning the possibility of snow. As the inclement weather approached, the forecast became more specific: sleet, Tuesday, 3 p.m. Citizens were advised to get their bread and milk before the doomsday hour.

I was holed up in a coffee shop near campus, grading essays. As the drizzle transformed into tiny pellets of hail, a murmur spread through the room. I sipped on my decaf latte and shook my head, wondering, with the smugness of a transplanted Midwesterner, why a little ice was such a big deal in the South. When the sleet became snow, I headed back to the office, where I was intercepted by an anxious receptionist: my son's daycare had closed early, and I needed to pick him up three hours ago.

The freeway was clogged, not by the snow but by drivers who were perplexed by the curious white stuff. A drive that usually took ten minutes took an hour. When I arrived at Kidspace, E and the daycare director were the only two people left in the normally bustling building. I apologized for being late and said something about regional weather differences, and then E and I went home and continued life as usual. Play time, dinner, a toddler's bedtime routine.

I went to bed shortly after the transformer box near our house exploded. All night long, I listened to the sounds outside. ShhhhhhhhhhhHHHHH--BANG...shhhhhhhhhHHHHH--BANG. I thought it was ice sliding off our steep metal roof and crashing onto the driveway, but it turned out to be branches falling off trees all over town. When we got up in the morning, the power was out.

I called my parents in Illinois. "We're fine," I told them. "Don't worry about what you hear on the news. People here get overexcited about real winter weather." I hung up, and then a huge branch fell off the tree in the front yard and knocked out the phone line. (That's the branch, to the right; of course, I forgot to take a photo of it before all the ice melted.)

E and I bundled up and went outside, where we met bewildered neighbors in the street. Every surface was coated in a thick layer of ice, radiant and beautiful in the bright morning sunlight. No one had power. Falling branches had punched holes in roofs; toppling trees had raised great mounds of earth as the weight of the ice pulled them up by their roots. Streets were impassable.

Ice storms build community. That evening, everyone on the block gathered at the home of the only neighbors with a wood-burning stove. I borrowed another neighbor's telephone and called American Airlines to ask whether my husband had boarded his flight home; the sympathetic operator violated post-9/11 security policies and confirmed that he had. S returned home to a ravaged town with no street lights and a mandatory curfew.

Some friends camped out in offices at the university (a prosperous private institution with its own backup generators), while other friends left town. We alternated between sleeping at home and bumming shelter from friends with power.

Our house had warm water but, for six days, no heat or electricity. Our old-fashioned radiators ran on a gas boiler, but our thermostat was electric. S kept the fish in our aquarium alive by filling milk bottles with warm water and floating them in the tank.

After the world thawed, S went down to the basement and wired two car batteries and an AC/DC converter to the thermostat switch and the fish tank power supply, so they'd have backup power the next time there was a blackout. That's the engineer's version of going out to buy bread and milk.

Is it overreacting for several counties to delay the start of school, twelve hours in advance, due to the possibility of a light dusting of snow? In the car on the way to school, E and his friend D tried to explain their unexpected windfall this morning. "Maybe people are just dumb," suggested D, fresh off a visit to Connecticut, where she saw life continue as usual despite two feet of snow. "Or maybe," she conceded, "they were worried there might be ice on the roads." We'll make Southerners of these kids yet.

Preparing

In anticipation of returning to the U.S. at the end of this month, I figured I might oughta should stake out some new blog territory. This post is a place holder, as an empty blog is a pitiful thing.