Now go buy a goat:

The hens are molting. It’s a shame, too, because this is quite the coldest weather we’ve had in a couple of years. Not out of the 30s today. Doesn’t sound like much to you, maybe, but neither does your summer high of 90 sound like much to me. Remind me next summer: heat is annoying and icky, but cold is downright painful. And it kills more stuff. Hopefully not my chicken ladies out there.

It will kill my garden, and it’ll do so tonight, so I’ve been picking through whatever I can. I haven’t had much of a winter garden lately and I’ve forgotten–will my chard freeze? Will my lettuce? My parsley? I’m pretty sure the basil is done for, so I picked a lot of it and processed it for the freezer. It’s so good preserved in pre-pesto state, with a little garlic and olive oil, way more useful than dried…but I don’t care what time of year it is, if you crush green leaves it’s going to smell of summer wherever you are.

Such cognitive dissonance. It’s really COLD, did I mention that? We were virtually promised snow today, which is exceedingly rare here in central Tx. And it didn’t happen. Oh cynical husband, rejoice! You were right as ever. But I wanted to believe.

I brought in the five potted plants and the cats have gone nuts…primal jungle instincts to the fore. They’re hunting through the house, springing out from behind the leaves, panther reflexes sharpened, ready to catch and kill their own food, gut it and pick out only the nicest bits. Five little plants: complete character transformation.

Meantime we humans will throw another Duraflame (TM) log on the fire and dream our Christmas dreams. The tree is going up this weekend. Santa’s been perusing Amazon.com again, that lazy old geezer. And my recent glass projects are finally starting to look good to me–sorry no pictures; they’re meant for gifts. Want one? Leave me a comment or e-mail, and if it’s not the very first I’ve heard from you, maybe you’ll get one. It’s the least you deserve for putting up with all this drivel.

So, kiln carving, for those who asked, all one of you. I didn’t pick a very good project to illustrate it. Here are my soap dishes:

This glass wasn’t made for fusing, so it devitrified a lot. The fiber paper stuck to it quite badly. I had to get out the so-called dental tools I use for poking at hot glass beads, though I gotta say if any dentist came at me with tools like that I’d run screaming. Still, they worked well for scraping at glass, same as teeth. Generally, these dishes came out looking like somebody had (quite sloppily) cut various shapes of glass and stacked them up. Which you can’t really do, not in this way, but that’s what it looks like. I don’t have any cold working tools so they are crude and wavy…but hey, I love them anyway. They’re my kindergarten projects. I guess I should give them to my parents, right?

Where kiln carving begins to shine is when you use transparent glass. For this set I had in mind some complex snowflakes, but fortunately I talked myself into simplifying for the first attempt:

They completely swallowed their little wire hangers, for one thing. The first one has a wicked sharp edge on it. I thought it might, so I console myself with the thought that I’m beginning to understand what is likely to happen. You could shave with that edge, I promise you. The second one, created in reverse fashion, is well rounded.

Glass is liquid, behind our backs, in the heat, hidden from view. You can’t make it do things. You can align what you want it to do with what it wants to do. I will never reach the end of learning how to do that.

I’ve got glass in the kiln. I have some kiln carving projects in mind for Christmas, don’t know much about it, so I will label this project an experiment.

Kiln carving really has little to do with carving and is not actively manipulated in the kiln—who names these things? It is a relief technique, related to slumping, but instead of letting the glass sag into a ceramic or steel mold, you provide shaping with fiber paper or other layers and lay the glass on top, and it fills in the spaces you’ve carved or cut into your layers.

If your brain, like mine, doesn’t work well spatially, it’s tough! I have a mystery piece of glass from the craft store which means I can’t fuse it to anything but itself, so I cut it up and set my sights on a fiber paper soap dish. (Let’s face it, I’m a craftsman, not an artist.) Had a plan all worked up until I realized it was bass-akwards. You can’t build up edges or ridges down the center and have the glass respect your wishes. The top layer is going to be smooth and flat regardless. It’s the underneath that takes the shape, and that means if you want taller elements, you remove fiber rather than piling it on, so the glass can sag deeper. I can actually feel stretched-out brain cells, but I think I got all the layers arranged. I know there are plenty of people to whom this would be a no-brainer. And you don’t care about glass, and I’m a neophyte…but too bad. Who else am I going to talk to?

The kiln tells all and exposes all flaws. I’ll know more tomorrow.

I meant to be back sooner but I got stuck in this book for a couple of days there. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese is one of those wild gifts of happenstance, a book I picked up while browsing at the library, not knowing anything about it or the author…it turns out to be the best novel I’ve read this year. And it’s already November, so that’s saying something.

The author thanks John Irving–apparently he’s a long-term friend–and that’s saying something too. There are all kinds of parallels here to A Prayer for Owen Meany, which has stayed with me for years, years and years, and I think Cutting for Stone may well do the same. Curiously, not for the main character, but for a secondary, Dr. Ghosh. Yes, the whole story is rife with medicine and docs–detailed descriptions of surgery only cementing the deal, medic manquée that I am.

What a great read. This author, this doctor, achieves such complex characterization. It’s his first novel. The mind boggles.

I’m bushwhacking. Cutting my way through, chopping at the giant weeds that have sprung up, shaking off the moss, getting an encouraging glimpse at the sky now and then, even if it is balanced by the occasional boot full of mud. Sucking swamp mud. Lo and behold, a clear space ahead…why, it’s my blog! Poor old abandoned ruin. The blog, or maybe even me. Take your pick.

It happens over and over in my life: a kind of paralysis, anxiety run amok, a demand to know how it will all turn out before I even start. This is not conducive to anything, really, so instead I do nothing. For a long time. Sinking under the pressure. That swamp mud is vile, sticky stuff.

I escape the same way every time: one project, no thinking, just doing. Then another. Then another. I know I’m on the way back today. I’ve sewed the first approximation of some Christmas gifts. Mopped the kitchen floor. Went to the craft store. And then I cut glass. (It cut me back, but that’s only fair.) Played with all my new supplies, some fiber paper, Thinfire paper, circle cutter. Got some kiln-carving experiments in the kiln ramping down as I type. So surely the worst is over.

Thinking is still causing me some trouble. I believe I need more color and design, less verbal expression. Which is odd, because my talents have always been the other way around. But I was curiously happy just resting my eyes on a pile of bright transparent turquoise shards today. If they weren’t so sharp, I’d carry them around with me.

Hmm. Well, there’s beads. Duh. Bright transparent turquoise beads might do the trick. And I need more projects.

I ain’t dead. Yet. Haven’t even had the flu. Yet. And gosh I’ve missed me.

In the interim, fall has befallen. Befell? That’s a big deal here in Texas. Also, it’s raining again. Not right now, I mean, but in general. That’s another big deal.

In blog news, I’m thrilled to have been cited as an authority on the Finnish bathroom. Also I’ve attracted surprisingly high traffic searching on rubber boots, via the Nokia shot a few posts back. Must have strayed into fetish territory accidentally. Who knew?

Been to Arizona, yay, and not incidentally my 30-year high school reunion, wtf! Least said soonest mended, but I suppose I’ll have more to say about that. Fodder for several posts, really, though I’ll try to repress all the memories as soon as possible. There was one friend I wanted to reconnect with, and that part was delightful.

And then this: glass class. Fusing this time. These are kindergarten projects…more to come:

Now I’m scared. I’m just home from a buying binge in Austin…daughter Shan’s wedding reception/party is coming up and I need a dress, so I headed for Silk Road in Austin, which is the only fabric store truly worth its pins around here, and now I have six, lord help me, six yards of dupioni to cut into. I actually invented this fabric for a fictional character a while back, a peacock blue silk shimmering with purple overtones–or undertones, or whatever you call that shimmery thing dupioni does–and there it was in the store, fated to be my dress. If I don’t blow it. And I cannot afford to blow it. Shan keeps reminding me it’s a casual event, and the dress pattern itself is casual. The celebration is in the fabric.

Then on to Blue Moon to buy glass for our next fusing class project and it was all the same scheme, peacock dichro and irid on black, shimmery and shiny and food enough for my glass hunger for one week. No, never enough. But sufficient unto the day is the credit card damage thereof.

It’s a thing we want to know about when we travel: the toilets. Tell us about the facilities. We’ll be visiting several times a day, and we don’t want to make embarrassing mistakes.

The Finnish bathroom is entirely familiar, only better in some respects. The toilet fixture itself is likely to be low-flow, but not those awful sluggish low-flow things we find in the States. I exposed myself as an American chauvinist right there, privately, in the john. I mean, didn’t you always just assume we ‘mericans would have all the best stuff? We’re such good little greedy consumers. So why don’t we have these toilets that work?And then there is often a little hand-held thingy hooked to a sink bowl crowding you in the public stall…a bidet attachment! It took me two visits to figure that one out. How civilized. I want one in my home bath.

In public, the WC is available at cafes, gas stations, indoor markets, and for cash at fully automated pods situated in high-touristed areas. It was a news story widely picked up, for some reason, when the Finnish Roadside Authority started requiring users to text-message the toilet to open the door at rest stops–supposed to reduce vandalism. Finns say it was pretty much a non-issue, as they are all on the phone all the time and already do all sorts of things by mobile phone, including paying for parking, metro tickets, various entertainment…why not for relief?

As an aside…Finns are on the phone all the time. Maybe that’s why they’re so reserved…they’re too busy on the phone to notice the people out there. When we arrived at the Helsinki airport, we were greeted with hugs and a phone–and very handy it was in a family group of six or eight highly impulsive people all headed out in whatever direction looked good at the moment, rarely in synchrony.

As another aside, Nokia made rubber boots long before they made phones. Guess where the higher profit margin resides.

As for the private bathrooms, my experience all comes from relatively new construction, from the 1980s or later. The Finnish bathroom first of all has a handy feature in the door, a “bolt indicator” as I learned while trying to shop for some…I’m looking to adopt the custom here, although all the (expensive) choices I find are sold from the UK. It’s a deadbolt that shows a tiny “occupied” or red dot marker on the outside when locked, just like in an airplane…makes sense to me, a lot more than the dumb doorknob locks we have in this house that don’t actually work anymore. Very subtle sign that I missed until it was pointed out to me, but it saves rattling doorknobs and walking in on your visitors.

The bathroom is divided roughly into four quadrants. There’s a drain towards one side and the floor slopes there…no shower stall or bathtub but a showerhead, maybe with a ring from the ceiling with a shower curtain that can close around. A sink near that, sometimes using a single diverter for the shower and the sink. There’s a big floor squeegee nearby, perhaps, and in that case you squick off the floor after your shower. The other two quadrants hold the toilet throne and a smallish washer and dryer. There might be a towel rack or there might not, and that door over there is not the master closet you’re accustomed to in your American master bath. Clothes and storage are elsewhere. This door leads inward to the electric sauna.

The sauna I love, though, is the one at the summerplace or lake cottage out in the country, a separate little building with a wood stove, the place that’s warm when you’re cold, the place that’s clean when you’re dirty and there’s no running water to be had. The place that smells heavenly, of heated cedar and birch smoke and steam…at least until your husband decides to try throwing beer on the stove. Honestly. He said he saw it on the Simpsons. I said, “and if Homer threw a pig off a bridge, does that mean YOU would–” and then realized that Homer has thrown a pig off a bridge, and it’s better not to give the man ideas. Scorched beer fumes, gah. Pretty much any bad idea you can have, Homer has done it. Although come to think of it, it was Marge who poured the beer on the stove. Hmm.

I guess Marge knew her man. And this topic has been derailed. Oh well. It was time to stop, anyway.