feathers, flowers, leaves, and pie

I think I've decided how I got so much poison ivy on my face. The day I was over at the shop pulling out the dead cosmos, Minnie was doing her dog thing poking around among the heavy growth along the back fence of the shop property where poison ivy grows vigorously. She's a very sweet and affectionate little dog and will put her paws on my shoulders and rub her face against mine and my neck. I'm thinking she had a face full of urushiol (the oil in the sap that causes the allergic reaction) and she generously shared it with me (even though she pokes in there a lot and has never in the past transferred any to me). While I'm still getting small outbreaks on my hands, the places on my face are beginning to dry up and heal. And I discovered the the NP cardiologist that I wanted to go to is not in my network boo hiss and so I am giving the guy they referred me to a try. Still have to make the appointment.

We're going over to a neighbor's house for a get together and dinner tonight with our little social group on the street and I'm making a key lime pie to take as soon as Marc gets through juicing the limes for me. He volunteered to do that part because he knows the arthritis in my thumb joints would be screaming at me if I did it.

So the last bunch is out of the kiln. The third heron feather came out great and I'm really happy with it and will use it with the heron box. 

The hibiscus flower and leaf fired well also and that red is in-your-face red (in hindsight I should have used a 50/50 blend of red and white) though it shrank more than I expected. 

The three experiments with the transparent glass got weird. Well, two of them did. The star which was all transparent powder fired just like opaque glass (see above) which means that I can expand my color palette without having to buy more colors in the opaque powder. The two with transparent glass that had fine frit, the leaf all fine frit and the flower shape half fine frit and half powder got weird. The all frit leaf is heavily textured not having melted completely together at the low temperature and the color changed to more of a teal than the green it is supposed to be and the yellow flower shape turned a ghastly sort of murky green for which I have no explanation.

I still don't know where I'm going with this stuff. The next things I try will be a little more complex, more than one color, maybe pansies.

OK, pie is made...with blueberries!

medical shit and another firing

Monday morning I woke up with a couple of itchy spots on my jaw line near my chin on the left side of my face making me think a mosquito or spider chowed down on me during the night. By mid-day it had become a larger patch of rash. By evening a line of rash had appeared on the right side of my face from cheekbone to jaw line and Tuesday it had spread into a patch of rash, itchy or tingly off and on. Yesterday during lunch Marc says that's how shingles starts which resulted in a frantic internet search on shingles. Nope, not shingles which starts with severe pain and then a rash develops several days later which become little blisters. So far, no pain, just itchy which I'm treating with cortisone itchy cream. Wednesday morning a small patch on my hairline appeared and by Wednesday night the back of my left ear broke out. Today a small eruption on my right thumb and wrist and my left pinky finger have appeared. I have no idea what this is or what is causing it. Marc suggested poison ivy but I know poison ivy and stay far away from it, don't think I was exposed to any, and besides it's all dormant right now, no leaves, though it does seem like poison ivy and some blisters have formed. Sunday I had been pulling weeds, the same weeds and grass I've been pulling up for weeks, and the tall dead cosmos stalks which are rough and a bit prickly and probably brushed against my face (but the back of my ear?) but then why not my hands and exposed arms?  (well, now my hands.) Not to mention I've been pulling up those stalks and weeds for years and never had a reaction.

In other news, the goldfinches are mobbing the bird feeder and tea cup, the red shouldered hawks are doing their mating flights and calls, the cardinals are singing their love songs. The love-in-a-mist have put out a few first tentative blooms, 

the poppies are growing big, and the woodlands painted petal are beginning to put up bloom stalks.

a chilly sulfur butterfly waiting for the day to warm up

I've been working with the modeling glass and have a kiln shelf full to go in the kiln, most of which are experiments to see how different glass...transparent vs opal, frit vs powder...fires.

And finally, I've almost got my referral for the cardiologist. I have to say that Memorial Hermann is not instilling me with confidence. First of all, they have my husband's phone number as the primary number and mine as secondary totally ignoring what I wrote on the info sheet and despite me telling them over and over of their error. Second, my primary care doctor told the desk worker she was referring me to cardiologist NP Mazel but failed to submit whatever written form which I learned last Thursday when I called the Patient Concierge Services for Memorial Hermann which sets up the referrals and so had to call the doctor's office to get that remedied. When I still hadn't heard anything by last Tuesday, I called the PCS again and they told me they had the referral and were processing it. Today, they called me, again on Marc's phone, to tell me my referral with Dr. XXX was set up and to call them for an appointment. Dr. XXX is not the doctor I want to see and not who my referral was supposed to be to. So, now waiting once again. I asked the woman at PCS if this was going to take another week since it had already been nearly two weeks since I was supposed to be referred. No, she said, she'd try and get it taken care of today.

dividing my time

Sunny days, cold nights. I wander about in the yard off and on during the day pulling up weeds and field grass, filling the wheelbarrow to overflowing and now the garden cart and looking out at the yard which holds not the slightest effect of my efforts. Out front pulling up the clover from amongst the growing bluebonnets my neighbor Leonard drives by and stops beside me. It will all come back, he tells me. I know, next year I'll be out here doing the same but if I don't pull it up it will smother the bluebonnets. Leonard asks me if I'm getting ready to plant my spring garden. No, I'm just not feeling it yet. Me neither, he says. I finally pulled out all the dead stalks of the orange cosmos over at the shop, two wheelbarrow loads dumped on the burn pile, and eyed the three raised garden beds so overgrown with johnson grass and other weeds that I feel it would just be easier to start over in a different spot. It rained Friday, 1/2”, and so the ground is too wet to dig as has been the norm all fall and winter. This seems to be the new normal, rainy winter, drought summer.

When I'm not wandering the yard I'm working with the modeling glass. I've done the base with the quill for another heron feather, this time using a dark brown and white for the quill instead of black and white, and the hibiscus flower and a leaf which I sculpted pretty much like I would have done if I'd been working in wax and it was so much easier and faster! I dried the three pieces yesterday and started cleaning and refining with sandpaper, the leaf and feather done, the flower still to do. 

The kiln shelf has a fresh layer of kiln wash but I won't fire these until I do several more leaves trying a different approach and also making up a few colors in transparent glass powder and maybe one in the fine frit, all for comparison, to see where I might go with this.

just more of the same

Thursday morning I woke up to frost on the ground 

crunchy

and a layer of ice on the birdbath. Uh oh. Some of the foliage on the angel trumpets and most on the morning glory bush is shriveled but not all and the little jasmine buds seem OK so that's good but I think I lost the porterweed. It might come back from the roots, maybe. The ponytail palm looks unscathed. 

It was a beautiful day out there today, mostly sunny, with a predicted mid-60s high and mid-40s low. My kind of winter weather. The turtle was out on her sunning board and the dog was going berserk.

you can't tell from the picture but Minnie is barking hysterically

The goldfinches got over whatever shyness they started with and have been mobbing the tea cup and bird feeder the last several days.

crappy picture through the window on zoom, two goldfinches and a cardinal, the cardinal got tired of waiting and ran the goldfinches off

I've been working on a hibiscus flower in the modeling glass the last two days. The flower, about 5 1/2" wet, is done, 

now needs to be dried out before firing. I'm thinking of expanding the piece, adding leaves on a rolled out square with the intent of using it on the other hinged box from last December that I never used but first I need to draw out the composition which is proving to be elusive because I can't decide if I'm trying to do it for the box or maybe a piece not constrained by a square border or just an exercise with no final intent for its use. I should probably go with that last though, otherwise this could balloon into a BIG PRODUCTION, especially since I made no progress today. So, tomorrow I'll just do a single leaf shape and another try at the heron feather.

yo-yo weather and another feather

Yesterday it was 71˚ and then plunged to 30˚ during the night with a light rain, currently 38˚. Such is our yo-yo winter weather. Once again I gambled and didn't cover anything though I don't generally worry about quick dips between 32˚ and 30˚. I haven't been out yet but the foliage on one of the angel trumpets and the jasmine that I can see from here look fine.

Here's the new heron feather, 7 1/2". Eventually they'll be slumped to have some curve to them.

Overall it came out better than the first one but a little too blue I think. Still shiny even though Marc adjusted the firing schedule so I think that's a function of using transparent powder over the base rather than opaque powder but since I haven't done one with opaque powder I don't know for sure. I'm using the transparent powder for the blue heron feather because I don't have the right blue color in the opaque glass powders and I think I can mitigate the shininess with my finishing process buffing it down. I have two more feathers I want to try which will be done in opaques which is what many of the samples are about, trying to get the right browns.

I had an appointment with the GP Monday. I finally broke down and made the appointment as I've been having almost daily episodes of irregular heartbeat of varying intensity and varying lengths of time, usually minor lasting only an hour or so but it's been going on for a couple of months now. The good news is my blood pressure was fine and while I was talking to the doctor it started up so she was able to hear it...three beats, drop the third beat, skip a beat...she sent me down immediately for an EKG but as usually happens, by the time I was hooked up and relaxed on the table, the little pumper was beating along on a happy rhythm so she referred me to a cardiologist to wear the 24 hour monitor. Still waiting to set the appointment.

It's still raining lightly out there but should stop soon and clear up some this afternoon and then off to yoga this evening.

I'm not even going to comment on the state of the government, the Republican traitors in charge of the continuing shut down and the 30% of the population that still supports them, or the smug little MAGA hat wearing bastard whose rich family hired a PR firm to spin his smirk and of course the MAGAts were invited to the White House or that his school sent a bunch of privileged white boys to protest women's reproductive rights or that Trump's main WH lawyer graduated from Covington. What is there to say that hasn't been said ad infinitum by better writers than me. At this rate there won't be much left of this country by 2020 which is exactly what they want. Putin is celebrating our demise.

short stories number whatever

I've been relatively busy the past three days making more samples though not as many as previous firings, about half of which are transparent powders over white, and another blue heron feather. In true Ellen fashion, I did not take a picture of the kiln shelf before it went in the kiln with a slightly altered firing schedule. This week I'm going to try a hibiscus flower.

Back in the days before digital photography, we took slides of our work. I have four binders of slides of old work, stuff we don't do anymore, so I took four of the slide pages and dumped the slides in a paper bag and used plastic sleeves to hold my samples. Much better than the jar I had been keeping them in. I should probably do that with the samples I have of different transparent frit combinations.

I finally got a halfway decent picture of the goldfinch. This one got over its fright and perched on the tea cup and chowed down but the lighting wasn't great and mostly it showed me it's belly perched as it was on the hanger.

The last weather forecast on Saturday had the temperature dipping down to 30˚. Hmmm, 32˚ I don't worry so I checked to see how long it would be below freezing. About 4 or 5 hours. It was so windy Saturday and cold, low 50s, which make it an unpleasant and difficult struggle to get the ponytail palm covered, I rolled the dice gambling that it would not get cold enough to do damage and did not cover a damn thing, not the angel trumpets or porterweed coming out nicely after our first dip into freezing weather, not the little jasmine which is already putting on buds and hasn't bloomed for the last two springs because of freezing weather. Sunday morning, this time the House paid me. Not a single ruined leaf or bud.

Speaking of windy, I've written about the howling wind which before the house reconstruction I never seem to remember hearing. You can stand at the door to the garage and hear it wail, open the door and nothing. Very peculiar. As it turns out, there is a 1/4” gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold on one side tapering to none on the other side and cold air was pouring through the gap. A well placed hand towel stopped both the cold air and the howling. I'll have to see about a more permanent fix for that.

I set my alarm for 11 PM last night as I nodded off trying to stay awake. At 11:15 I stepped out the back door to gaze up at the Blood Wolf Moon almost directly overhead and the blazing stars, at 11:40 a bright thin crescent of white light was edging it and off I went to bed.

Photo credit: Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station