Bloomers!

Little Bloomers:



Here are our two little cacti blooming their little hearts out.

Summer is right around the corner, isn't it? Lots of blooming things coming and some are even already here in our little corner of the desert. Right now there's a big chive plant with fuzzy purple flowers in bloom as well as some marigolds and alfalfa. I'm tempted to cut down the alfalfa, but today when I went out to water, there was a lone bee buzzing around it and I don't have the heart to take away a bee's pollen source, seeing how bees have been having a hard time recently.

And this conversation that I recently had with someone just about killed me: I was talking about how the bees come down into the garden to drink whenever I water, and they told me that they used to have lots of bees come to their pond to drink but it's been a couple of years since they've been around. I asked if the bees disappeared about the same time they started to put something in the pond to poison the mosquitoes. And of course the answer was yes. And it had never occurred to them that the two things might be related.

Are we that clueless as a species? We are, aren't we? Let's poison the world because some insects and spiders and bugs are inconvenient for us. That sounds pretty good.

Grrrr.

Anyway, on a work-related note,  I took a bunch of cell phone photos of new work on Sunday and the f'n new phone refuses to upload the majority of them to flickr so I can post them here. Of the handful that did load, I got this little guy:



Not a great picture, granted. But enough to note that that is B-3 clay, white slip, underglazes and a sponged-on layer of clear over. It's a wee bit too shiny for my tastes, but I'm not going to complain because I'm just happy that the B-3 didn't crack in the kiln. (Thank goodness for small favors.)

Maybe if I can get my phone to cooperate, I can show off some of the other new vases in the near future.

And, lessee: In other studio news, I've signed on to run a studio-wide sale at the end of June. That should be fun. The summer sales don't usually do as well as the Christmas season sales, but it'll be a good chance to get some work cleaned out of storage. The sale's happening the last Saturday and Sunday of June.