Friday Again?!

I'm dog-sitting this little pooch this weekend. Her name is Zuni and she's eight years old. I took that pic this morning after our walk. Her owners sent me a text from their hotel in San Diego to ask me how she was doing, so I took this pic to send them. Look how nicely she's sitting. (There's a treat being held just out of frame on the left.)

This week, I've done the following:

1. Slept lots in the effort to fight off some cold or something. Seriously. I slept nonstop for about two and a half days, only waking up to drink hot tea. I never got sick, I just slept and slept and slept.

2. Took a miniscule walk with Kelly downtown to check out some graffiti. (I have pics, but I can't find the right cord to download them from the camera to the computer.)

3. Read three different housekeeping manuals from the mid- to late-1800s on my Kindle (Enquire Within Upon Everything: The Great Victorian Domestic Standby, The Book of Household Management, and The American Frugal Housewife).  I went on a free Kindle download spree on Amazon a few days ago and ended up downloading a bunch of stuff, including Tales of Old Japan, An Englishman's Travels in America: His Observations of Life and Manners in the Free and Slave States, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart, My Antonia by Willa Cather,  A Little Princess (a sort-of sequel to The Secret Garden) by Frances Hodgeson Burnett,  On the Decay of the Art of Lying by Mark Twain, Understood Betsey by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and the three housekeeping manuals.

The housekeeping manuals kind of crack me up. They're full of tips and tricks for the housewife who had to pump her own water and beat her own carpets and make her own soaps and mercury-based depilatories. I just love all that weird, arcane knowledge, rendered obsolete by time. 

I've been reading lots recently. Just before my free download spree, I read a book called Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood by Julie Gregory. It's her memoir of growing up with a mother who had Munchausen by proxy syndrome which caused her for years and years to drag her poor daughter to doctor after doctor for tests and medicines, ultimately pushing for her to have open heart surgery (which the doctor sensibly nixed). I also, to get that book out of my brain, re-read The Secret Garden, which is a charming, charming book.

4. I also went to the studio and started teaching myself how to pull handles on mugs. I'm sure you'll find this endlessly interesting.

There are a couple of techniques to pull handles. This is the one I hate:



That was Simon Leach, by the way. He's got one of the most famous names in pottery in the western world, largely because his grandfather, Bernard Leach, was one of the first British potters to travel to Japan and bring back Japanese pottery techniques to a large, appreciative audience of Western potters.

He's pulling handles, putting them on a board to let them dry up a bit, then attaching them to the pot later.

Here's the technique that I'm trying now, one in which you attach the handle to the cup first and then pull:



Doesn't the joy just pour off of the woman in that video?