End of the Year!

It's been a long year. The full-time job I have been working this past year has left me with no mental energy to work on my art. Plus, because I was off my game a little I had a bit of a kiln accident where it over-fired by about 10 hours, disintigrated the white low-fire clay pieces I had in there, which then ran all over the shelves and into the bottom of the kiln creating all sorts of havoc. I'm in need of a new one, but for now I'm going to try to insulate the bottom with the stuff you put in a raku kiln and see if it works. I'll have to manually fire it, because my "kiln-sitter" melted, but I suppose that's probably better anyway. At least I won't be able to get lazy like I did before.

Anyway, I've been selling some items on etsy.com, which has given me new life, and I will be adding some more stuff soon....including that rimmed bowl I was talking about earlier. Because of the job, I don't have a lot of new stuff, but something is better than nothing.

On a good note, at the end of the year I'll be quitting the full-time day job and will go back to doing what I do best (with something else to supplement, but not monopolize all my time) and should have new stuff to add soon.

Until then, here's a picture of the new pup in the brood. She's 7 months old as of this coming week.

Nothing like puppies to make the frustrations vanish!

Yawning puppies are even better. They're 6 weeks old today. Got shots and wormed.

The one on the left in this picture is coming to live with us. Tuck isn't so happy about it though.

More Schnauzers!

These are dog bowls that were a request order. The customer requested a "Dog from Hell" bowl for each dog (Max and Doogie) and told me each dog's vice....and tada! They're regular angels, I'm sure.

I had a great time making these. It might just be a personal problem that I can so easily amuse myself, but I was chuckling to myself while I was covered in clay dust. (And then wondering if I was just a little too proud of myself.

Most particularly the squirrels, I guess. I think it's the expression on their faces...but it made me think of a big tray and covered dish I've always wanted to make that was a chicken who was "crossing the road" but didn't make it. The covered dish is a tire. I guess I'm just sadistic. When I get some free time to amuse myself, for myself, I'll post the finished product on here.

Anyway, here they are "The Dogs from Hell". I'm guessing you'll see these come up again (minus the devil theme, since that wasn't really mine) Probably sitting on top of a covered jar.


These below are Doogie, who also appears below in his young master's mug. Doogie apparently has an unfortunate addiction to candy. Who can blame you, Doogie. I've been dipping into the peanut butter M&M's a little too much the past few months myself. :) Bon Appetit!

Custom Two-handled Child's Mug

This is Doogie...waiting patiently for his young human to emerge over the edge of the mug. It may be awhile though, since Doogie's young human can't hold a mug yet.

It's been cloudy, rainy, and snowy here for 3 days straight, so finding enough light reflection in order to cleverly conceal my dog nail scratched floor (let alone enough light to take the picture without rigging up my slap hazard light box...which, quite honestly is a couple of pieces of cardboard, some white paper, and some desk lamps) proved difficult. So, you can now see that the six hours I spent on my hands and knees refinishing my fir living room floors 7 years ago, has been for naught.

I still detest this blogspot formatting, and will be searching for a new host soon. Right after the six million other things I need to get done. I also finished a small rimmed bowl with an upside-down sleeping pooch on the rim, but I don't have enough time to post it yet. (Plus the pics don't do it much justice, but you'll get the point) My "day" job awaits.

Slacking

"Lean to the left, Tuck. It makes us look like we have no idea why she keeps pointing the camera at us."

It's been awhile since I've posted anything and I'm sure that makes me remarkably uninteresting, but a day job has left me with un-needed stress....and it had nothing to do with the at-risk teens I'm working with, but a ner-do-well assistant who is causing more problems than he's worth.

I've been sitting on a new rimmed bowl design for awhile now. It just needs some underglaze and a firing and a glaze firing and we're good to go. I suppose I could post a picture of it in process. That might even be kind of interesting. I'll work on that in the next couple of days.

The dogs have been remarkably boring lately. Tuck did take a dramatic spill off of his trunk/windowsill perch, so I moved furniture around. Also, one of my favorite things to do is troll Target in between seasons for the clearance items and I found a denim love seat cover for a mere $20 which has turned what used to be a really fun piece of furniture for tearing off the cushions and pillows and pulling out stuffing, into a rather nice little couch. (The pillows still get thrown on the floor, but I can deal with that.

I also learned that if Tuck frees himself, he comes back to the word "Stick". Border Collies are the weirdest dogs on the planet. :)

Special Orders #2

This is a custom bowl designed for Claygreys two greyhounds, Stoney and Beans. Fun to do skinny bodies and long legs!

Special Orders

A custom border collie mug. This was a "blue" border collie, which is charcoal colored. I'm afraid it's a little dark....but such is the idiosyncracies of working with glaze. I love the red on the mug. Bright and cheery. Yay, Dugan's mom for requesting it!

ARRGgghhh!

I'm having the type of day artistically where everything I touch turns to crap. On these days, my brain, eyes, and hands don't function together. Each one has its own agenda. My brain is off on a tangent, thinking about something that's bugging me, my hands break everything they touch, and my eyes won't "see" properly, therefore the clay dogs just don't look right.

My furnace is banging for some reason, and every time it kicked in, I jumped like I was being stalked in a horror movie. When swearing became the most productive thing I was doing, I just decided to just pack it in.

So I left the studio and came upstairs. Sometimes, no matter how much a deadline looms, it's best to just give it up and go do something else, before the neighbors start to wonder who, or what you're screaming at...or if they should call 911.

What better way to calm myself down than to write about the dogs? I can't think of one. Tuck has been up to his usual weirdness. I'm not sure where he thinks the bone in this picture will go, but in typical border collie fashion, he's not giving up until the work is done. I wonder if he's swearing? ("Why won't this bone MOVE?" "SHIT." "MOVE!" "Dammit.") They do say people pick the breed of dog that is most like them.

I was spending a good part of one day this week preparing for a program I was teaching on anger management (Yes, I see the irony in this) by reading the book. At one point I got up to check my email and put my book on the coffee table. I heard the book shooshing across wood and looked up just as Tuck nosed it off onto the floor. He then pushed the book around to the end of the coffee table where it was hidden from my view. Hmmmm.

He's also taken to standing in my front windows and watching the bar action across the corner of the town square. Front feet on the window sill, back feet on an old trunk with the front half of his body under the matchstick blind. There's a lot of interesting action going on over there. In summer I like to sit out front and watch it myself.

Finally, I figured out how he's opening the back gate. Front feet on the top of the gate, walk backwards with the hind feet ----and he's off to herd cars and hassle the neighbor dog.

Thanks. I feel better now. I'll work on the pottery tomorrow.

Dogs Can't Fly

To introduce my new refrigerator magnets, I thought I'd tell a brief story. I hinted to this earlier. I'd always told people if Tuck were a human boy, he'd be the kid who tied a towel to his neck and would jump off the garage roof to see if he could fly. Then he tried it.

He didn't mean to try it. He was merely attempting to rip the head off of his archenemy, the giant black lab (aptly named Zeus) that lives in the apartment level with ours, but in the building next door. They have a wooden walkway (like a deck) that crosses across a garage roof, from the stairs they take to get up to the second level. My deck stairs run parallel to this garage, and at the top, there is one stair that is dead even with the top of the roof. For some reason, the space between the spindles (or whatever you call them) is a little wider here, and Tuck figured out he can fit through and onto the roof.

This one night I was in the yard, and thinking ahead, knew he would try it. The lab and his boy were walking across the walkway into their apartment, and I ran up the stairs to beat Tuck to the wide space. I made it, unfortunately Tuck decided to try a different wide space that was a hair lower than the roof line. It was snowy. He didn't make it across.

He lost his grip and slid down the side of the garage between my steps. It's about a one foot span, but a 15 foot drop. The neighbor boy and I looked at each other (I think the lab laughed) and I ran down the steps. (25 of them) When I got around underneath, Tuck was still clinging to the side of the garage, nails dug in tight, resting on top of a group of antique windows I'd bought and some ductwork leftover from the remodel. His head was turned toward me with a look of abject terror and "please save me" on his face.....

And, after I pulled him free.---all 45-50 pounds of him---and detached his claws from the wood while whispering soothing "poor baby's", I realized that the image of him clinging there was permanently etched in my mind, and since I'm kind of cruel that way, I decided to permanently imortalize the moment in a refrigerator magnet.

The claw marks were still visible the next morning---more reminiscent of a Warner Brother's cartoon than real life.

Various Ramblings

I'm in the process of trying to figure out how to get my photos exported with the changes I made out of a new program (Lightroom 2) so while I'm fighting that nonsense I figured I'd post a bit about dog behavior. Most specifically, I guess, border collie behavior since that's what I know.

Tuck is my third. You would think I would have things down pat by now, but each dog has been completely different in their styles and manners of daily living and I've had to learn as I go along. He seems to be a combination of the first two. Marengo's cunning combined with Rave's eagerness to please makes a pretty good dog, if that was what I was used to, but I'm used to dealing with either cranky and calculated or excited and slipshod---not a combination of them all.

So I brought Tuck home, expecting all training to be fairly easy. I'd done it all. I've had tons of experience with these dogs, not just counting my three---should have been a piece of cake. Tuck is smart. I could tell from the beginning. He learned to sit in under 5 minutes, to lie down just as quickly, and went from a lie down to a sit without any extra prompting. This is a difficult command for dogs to understand. "He's smart. Why can't I get him housebroken?" was going through my head from the first week, all through the first year or so.

Marengo was difficult, but I was a pushover and stopped crating her when she was four months old. She couldn't stand it, and I couldn't stand her screaming. Consequently, she picked a hidden corner of the living room and used it as her toilet. I bgan to associate the smell of "puppy odor neutralizer" with dog urine and it got to the point where I couldn't tell the difference. Never fear. I hired a trainer (who trained me not her) and she was housebroken and completely trustworthy by month 5. In fact, she was a dog who banged on the door when she was sick. And when I say "bang", I mean bang. Hard. She didn't ask to be let out, she demanded---and the more urgent she got, the louder the demand.

Rave was relatively easy as long as I was paying attention. She once walked into the middle of the living room floor, turned and faced me and peed. I was apparently too engrossed in ER and had missed her delicate pawing at the door. She learned that she could paw on anything, an open living room doorway or below a window and I would get the hint. These days, if I miss the hint, she stands and stares at me and cuts her eyes toward the back door, and back to me, and back to the door. I figure this is her last chance attempt before getting angry and defacing the rug like she used to. I get the hint now.

Tuck didn't have a tell. At least I didn't think he did. He was occasionally, however, extraordinarily affectionate. From the time I brought him home, he would jump up on the couch, drop his head and upper body onto my chest and stomach, and look up at me with adoring brown eyes. "Awww...isn't that cute. Hugs to you too." Meanwhile, he's going to the bathroom on the floor and driving me crazy. I gave up and tried newspaper. Big mistake. He went on it, sure, but he still wasn't telling me he had to go. I took away the paper and he went to the bathroom where the paper used to be. Still, he kept on hugging me. Awww...it's a good thing he's so affectionate.

Long story short, I started associating the "hugs" with the messes on the floor. He'd come in to the living room, or the office and hug, and I'd go and find a mess back in the kitchen. I started equating him with a two-year-old human who could only figure out he had to go AFTER the fact. I decided those hugs were the equivalent of "I pooped in my pants." To counter this, I started blocking him into the living room with a baby gate. Hugs, messes, hugs, messes. I finally got the hint. When Tuck dips into my lap like a cast member of Dancing with the Stars, it's time to go outside. I wish I'd figured it out 10 months ago.