What were you thankful for yesterday, friends? Your health? Having a job? A home?

My friend from college, Suz, has had some back luck in recent years, falling ill with stage-four autoimmune disease, dealing with surgeries, getting fired for her illness, and now trying to simply survive while she deals with a debilitating illness. So her friends have put together this auction to help her stay in her home until she works through the bureaucracies of our legal system and dwindling government safety nets. Check out the full auction here.

I have donated the barnacle bowl you see above. It has one more day to go in the auction. Bid it up!

 

Over at habit, they are having another open posting month. So if you want to check out my photos over on flickr, I'll be there most days in November. It seems like I've been lax with my photo-taking, so this has been fun.

Here are some of my pottery works in progress. These are all in the greenware stage. I just just got some of them back from their first firing Wednesday, and the rest went in for their first firing. I am waiting on some pieces I glazed two weeks ago, but the Clay Guild still doesn't have them ready. This is one of the reasons I want my own kiln! I have cleared the homeowner's insurance part of setting up the kiln; now I just have to give the electrician the go-ahead for wiring!

The bear and elk mugs are for my mom. She wanted some "Colorado" mugs, so she bought me some stamps to use for images. I don't even know if there are elk in Colorado. We were going for deer, but the stamp says elk. He's still cute though. They will be glazed in a shino to bring out the iron oxide animals. The urchins have a raised texture for the dots. I love how it feels. I hope the coat of clear glaze doesn't bury the texture. The turquoise pots are an experiment with drippy colored slip. I kind of like the randomness of them. It's good for a perfectionist like me to be a little out of control sometimes.

This past week has been pretty stressful around here, and I finally feel like we're starting to get back to normal. One of my daughters was in the hospital because she developed a platelet disorder, but she is on the mend and we're all trying to relax a bit. Little things like my fancy new-to-me gold shoes brighten things up a bit. The girls are pretty tickled with my vintage eBay version of these too-expensive shoes, and so am I. How do you not smile when you see gold shoes? Gold feet! Fancy!

I haven't been doing as much pottery while all this has been going on -- just getting things fired and wrapping up loose ends like attaching mug handles. Later I'll post some pics of some fun drippy-dot pots I'm working on.

We're also starting our Halloween prep here. I think we're going to have a fairy princess, a Dorothy and either a bee, a princess or a Tinkerbell, depending on what sort of information I can get out of my littlest girl. I'll just be the lady in the gold shoes.

We have survived the first illness of the season! Oh my, that wasn't a fun one. I'm finally starting to feel like a human with ambitions beyond getting a shower or guarding my box of lotion tissues. (Lotion tissues: wonderful invention, says my delicate little nose.)

Here's a shot of my oldest daughter helping the squirrels with their acorn harvest. A leaf plate AND a sign. Spoiled squirrels.

The acorns were collected on my mom's driveway the last time we ventured out of the house. We celebrated my middle daughter's birthday outside on the driveway, both to enjoy the beautiful fall day and to prevent my mom's house from being completely contaminated with our germs. We did take our germs over to Red Barn Farm, where we picked the last remaining apples and inhaled lots of gravel and hay dust. Since then, we've been in our PJs, coughing and crying and watching television.

So it's been a couple weeks since I've had a Parent's Day Out day or a work night. I've been spraying a number of pots in an attempt to keep them from drying out. Maybe they will get trimmed tonight! It's good to be alive again.