Sunday, GRRR!

Sunday

I was feeling pretty grumpy Sunday morning. Maybe it's PMS, maybe it's whatever is in the hazy smoke from the California and Oregon wildfires that hit New Mexico this morning.

Dave and I went out to breakfast, to a place where we go from time to time, and this morning the service was so bad that when my order came out wrong, it was the last straw and I told the young, sullen woman who served it to us, "We're ready to go, so we'll just take a refund." And, after getting a refund (and an apology from the other, more competent server) we walked out and went to another place for breakfast.

(Normally, I'm very tolerant in restaurants. I used to wait tables and I know that things sometimes go haywire. I've seen it happen enough times that I know when it's someone's fault and when it's not. So when we walked in and stood and stood and stood at the front counter while the server did something in the back--she could see us, we could see her, but she just carried on with whatever was more important than customers standing at the counter--and then she walked to the front, right past where we were still standing, to take out food to one table (a process that necessitated two trips past us since she didn't know how to carry more than two plates at a time) and then she slowly bussed a long-empty table (no one had been sitting there when we walked in) and then she slowly scraped the dirty plates into the garbage, all while we just stood there at the counter, watching her, obviously ready to order. I was already getting pissed by the time she sauntered over to the counter to take our order.

The cooks were relatively quick, which is usually a good thing, but today all that meant was that our order then sat and sat and sat on the counter, where we could see it sitting, getting colder and colder. Finally, she sauntered over to our table with two plates and it was the wrong order--well, mine was anyway, Dave's was right. And that's when I lost patience. I told her we'd take a refund because we were ready to leave.

See, any one of those mistakes would have been fine. Inexperienced server not knowing the right sequence in which to do things? Fine. (I've been that server, back in my earliest days as a server.) Slow service? Fine. (I know that sometimes a server is not incompetent, just overwhelmed by something like a slow kitchen, inept management, too-demanding customers, a huge rush of customers, bad scheduling, a bad day, and so on.) Cold food? Fine. (Not great, but it often means that the kitchen is putting out orders piecemeal and the server is waiting on them to put the entire order up before bringing out everyone's food.)  Wrong order? Fine. (It happens; turns out humans make mistakes.)

Any one of those things? Fine. All of those things, one after the other? Nope. I'm out of there. And it's likely that I will never be back and I will encourage other people to give the place a miss as well.)

After breakfast (huevos rancheros and decaf coffee for me, a quinoa power-something-or-another for Dave, at Flying Star, which is a short walk down the street), we went off to Target for a few things we needed. (I don't know how, but "a few things" always turns into "way too many things" at Target.)

With that done, we headed off to the studio. Judi and Paul were there, but they also had a visitor, a man from Mississippi. He had driven to New Mexico from Mississippi to see them and also to bring Judi a collection of skulls because she's been wanting to try skull carving. (I tried her set up--a dremel with an extender arm, basically--on a bit of deer jaw and it's an interesting but very, very slow process.)

In the meantime, I worked on my own piece(s):

Underglazing, of course. I never really considered, until faced with recreating it, just how Van Gogh was using color in The Starry Night painting. There is, for example, a surprising amount of green in there, the result of the blue he was using for the sky mixing in with the yellow he was using for the stars. There's also a lot of white, some of it the canvas peeking through, some of it white paint laid on to emphasize the light around the stars and the biggest swirls in the sky. And though I didn't use it because I didn't recreate the village that sits at the bottom of the painting, there's a fair amount of black, too--used to outline the building and mixed into the dark green of the cypress tree.

This is just the base layer of underglaze. I'll have to put it in a kiln and see how these colors morph--I expect some darkening--then I'll adjust and add some more.

Her proportions are way off, but I still like her.

We didn't stay at the studio very long because we had some errands to run, including a trip to the grocery store because the pickings were getting pretty slim, food-wise, in our place. We plotted out a simple menu (tacos, veggie burgers, etc.) and made up a grocery list and then went to Whole Foods.

Dinner was veggie cheeseburgers and sweet potato fries. Yum-yum.