STAR CHART

The other pieces I posted are cylinders, which was our second project and my first real experimentation with glazing. On some of the pieces you can see very rough edges on the bottoms. The students in charge of kiln firing somehow got the kilns a little too hot, and that combined with my over-zealous glazing caused several of my pieces to stick to the kiln shelves. So there are pieces of the shelf stuck to the bottoms of some of my cylinders. LOL!

There was a farmer’s market there as well, so we got some veggies. I think the tomatoes were the stars of the show. We put everything together in a salad, but the tomatoes were just a flavor explosion. We also got some purple bell peppers that were slightly spicy, some tasty greens, some fresh raspberries, and actually I think that’s all we got.

Tonight we made Chilean sea bass (Ha! I did discover that Whole Foods does get their sea bass from a sustainable sea bass farm. :D) marinated with African spices. It was absolutely wonderful. We also had turnips and salad…and I had some Pastel des Tres Leches I had gotten from Senor Moose this morning. OMG I love three-milk cake. :9

Had to do an hour portrait of Dan. It turned out OK. But when we finished dinner it was still pretty late. We’ve really got to figure out a way to make our Sundays more relaxing, especially in the evenings. Dan had work to do, and didn’t really get much of it done.

Don’t think about school. You’ll get overwhelmed and confused. Just take one day at a time. It’s already mapped out for you until the end of the quarter. : ) Juuuust relax.

Brunch tomorrow with Grant and Paula at Senor Moose. YUMS. nom nom nom.

Today I tried to trim the pots I made and throw a cup. I successfully trimmed one pot and its lid, but accidentally cut a hole in the bottom of my other pot. So much for that. I tried to throw a cup, but it’s all wonky. I’ll have to keep trying.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury -how ironic that this was banned.
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke - I might have read this in philosophy class, but I’m not sure.
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck - I may have read this in junior high, but I don’t remember for sure.
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I love my ceramics class. Have I mentioned that I want it to be a lifelong hobby? Have I mentioned it over and over? I went back to the studio to glaze my pots this evening because I wanted to. I got to bring my pagoda/mushroom tower home, along with six cylinders. I love my cylinders. They’re really crooked and lumpy, but I love them. I glazed five or six pots, one cylinder (well, two cylinders, but I dropped one and broke it), and put three more pagodas out to be soda fired. I’m so excited to see how everything turns out. Although, my favorite pot, which I named Love, had a problem when I went to dip it. The tong tip broke a little hole right through the bottom! It was very thin. I hope it survives the firing; it’s so cute. I dipped it in copper red, let it dry, and then dipped it in satin white, then put it out to be soda fired. The red should seep through the white and make it pinkish, and the soda will make it sparkly. 8D I also experimented with some new glazes, such as yellow and translucent brown. There is one pot that is really pathetically folded in on itself… it just collapsed into a folded pile of clay, basically, but I’m firing it anyway, because I think it looks cool. I named it Slump. I covered it with shino and then matte black, so it should have a really thick brainy texture! It will be so weird looking, like a writhing black cow pie, if it survives the firing. There is another pot I named Pie (because I treated the rim like a pie crust). I dipped just the rim in shino and then the whole thing in translucent brown…so I hope the whole thing looks like a pie. Well…a pot made out of pie crust. Really really shiny pie crust.

Tonight I cooked salmon for the first time. I bought Alaskan sockeye salmon, which, according to the internets, is supposed to be the best. I loved it, and Dan tolerated it. So I guess I won’t be making it again…I really hope I can make some good fish recipes that he likes…I really want to eat fish regularly. It’s so delicious and I’ve started craving it all the time since we’ve been having grilled fishes at Paula and Grant’s house so often. It turns out Chilean sea bass, which is so delicious, is something of an endangered species, which I find confusing, since they always have it at Whole Foods. Maybe it’s not really endangered anymore. Maybe Whole Foods has their own Chilean sea bass farm.

Stacey is coming to visit next week. I’m so excited. We’re going to explore tea shops and the Japanese Gardens and who knows what else! We’ll abduct Tamar to spend time with us too. It’s going to be great!

I have finally motivated myself to do some artwork in my spare time at home. I don’t know why I have had such an issue with getting myself going…probably because my art program is on the fritz and I keep avoiding dealing with Corel customer service because it feels overwhelming when I think about it. So I am pretty much tied to traditional art for the time being, which, for some reason, tends to scare me off because of the necessary setup work involved (and cleanup). The lazy part of me likes the idea of effortlessly switching from website games to digital art without having to do so much as wiggle my toes. LOL

I am getting even more excited about ceramics. We are beginning to work with glazes now, and the possibilities of colors to dip and paint and layer get my mind all in an excited jumble. I will be glazing my first cylinders this week, and starting on throwing bowls and plates.

I have been reading Andy Goldsworthy books. He is my favorite artist at the moment. He makes ephemeral, organic sculpture in natural settings, and it’s just amazing what he does. He keeps a daily journal of his successes and challenges, which is inspiring to me. You should watch some Goldsworthy video on You Tube. Watching him work is so peaceful and inspiring.

I haven’t had a chance to get to Paula’s garden this week, or the last week either. I feel bad. When school picks up like this, it starts kicking my ass, and I hardly have free time on the days when I have a car. I really, really need to get out there Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Somehow. D: The plants are going to start choking I think. The weeds are becoming ground cover. And strawberries need pickin’!

Today ended up being a gallery day! Hahaha…in my drawing class this morning, we visited SAM, and this afternoon for my photography class we visted the Henry. It was great, but I went straight home afterwards without thinking, when I had lots of photography homework to do at school. If I had stayed, I probably would have been able to finish my project for Monday! Or at least make really, really good headway on it. I was hoping to work on ceramics tomorrow and Friday. It would be nice to have a little extra time this weekend so I can go weed.

I finally successfully made a loaf of wheat bread. Next, French! I also made some mahi mahi from frozen on Monday. Dan liked it…it wasn’t too fishy for him. I liked it too, but I would prefer getting local fish next time. I keep forgetting, but there is apparently a great seafood market in the University District I need to try out. I must go there next time!! I really want to get into having fish at least once a week. It’s been a dream for living near the sea, to have a life that is close to the ocean. I always pictured myself living on the beach and having a grey, damp house full of seashells and ocean smells and eating seafood all the time because it’s free or cheap. If only I had a grizzled white beard and a pipe. LOL

We had our July 4th party yesterday. It was great! Dan and I just kept talking about it all day today. We really need to keep in touch with everybody better. We made a beef tenderloin…we found this great sauce to go on it, with tarragon and cornichons. OMG I loved that sauce. We also made a tomato/goat cheese tart which was pretty good, and Paula and Grant brought shrimps and Rika brought nummy Japanese things that I don’t know what they’re called and we had lots of yummy alcohols and berry shortcake for dessert! It was an all-around success.

I’m a little bummed as to the nature of this weekend…I actually don’t have a holiday, technically, because I don’t have classes Friday anyway, and I have tons and tons of homework to do this weekend. So I’m actually working more than usual. Oh well! The clay gods were not with me this afternoon. I tried to throw cylinder after cylinder and they were all coming out badly and worse than before…I finally had to give up and go home. XD Tomorrow I need to draw two twenty minute portraits and two ten minute portraits…probably of Dan and Paula. I just kind of want to play! I also need to pull some weeds.

We’re planning our September trip to the east coast. I’m so excited to see Cady!!! We’re also going to see Dan’s aunt Madeleine, and the rest of his family, and we’re going to hang out in New York for a bit, and then we’re going to DC! I’ve never been to DC. The Smithsonian and everything! I’m really excited. ^_^

So I’ve been really super tired lately. I’ve been getting up at six Monday through Thursday, and am tired all day, and then ten o’clock p.m. comes around, which is bedtime, and suddenly I get hyper. I always get a second wind at ten…I usually can’t go to bed earlier than that because 1. It’s still light out, and 2. We’re still eating dinner. I’ll keep trying to go to bed. Maybe I could go to bed around 9:30 and just read until it’s dark. That might work. XD

Cooking has been going great. We’ve found so many interesting things at the market. I bought a salad mix of spicy greens which are amazing, and more radishes, and some green zebra tomatoes, an heirloom variety which are excellent. I also bought some farm eggs…I can’t wait to see how they compare to the stuff I buy at the store. They might not be that different, since I already buy cage-free eggs. (See all those eggs, running free!) I also made some dark rye bread last night. I used whole weat flour and dark rye flour, and the bread came out about half the size of a normal loaf, which was weird. But it wasn’t dense or bad; it was actually very good.

4th of July is this Friday…so far we only have five people coming. Oh well, it will still be fun! We still haven’t decided what to make yet.

My drawing class is very stressful for some reason. Maybe because it’s 8:30 in the morning on Mondays and Wednesdays, and we always hit the ground running, and I’m always hungry, and by the end of the class I’m irritable and hating whatever it is I’m working on and getting so frustrated with every suggestion that I just want to cry. Then he dismisses us and I look at my work and I’m like, “hey, that looks pretty good!” LOL I’m definitely seeing some marked improvements in my work, actually. I just wish it wasn’t so stressful. XD I’m still loving my ceramics class. We’re throwing cylinders now. It’s so relaxing. And photography is easy. We’re working on diptychs now.

I’ve been taking leftovers to school every day, but I haven’t figured out how much to bring yet. Today I learned that meat, salad, and raspberries aren’t enough. I had to buy yogurt in the morning and pop tarts in the afternoon. So next week I will also bring yogurt and a power bar or trail mix. Hopefully that will be enough!