It’s that time once again for me to update you with my goings-on for the day, this day, this Saturday, this first official day of my Thanksgiving vacation that lasts through the first week in December. Due to the impressive blue norther that has dipped its arctic toe into my city, it’s fracking cold outside and I braved the wind chill and the mizzle – misty drizzle of the most annoying kind – to head out to my ceramics class. In addition to the usual tools in my bag, I also carried along tasty pastries from a local bakery, Upper Crust on Burnet Road, that would act as both sustenance for me and my classmates and a bribe of sorts for the professor.
Her idea, not mine, I swear!
After licking the last of the cinnamon off of my fingers, I got to work on my last three new pieces for the class. They used up the remaining clay from my first twenty-five pound bag (I’m saving the other for next semester), and I think at least one of them will be in the running to be included as one of the final ten to present for my grade. The rest of the morning involved dipping a freeform bowl into a vat full of honey amber glaze and adding complementary spodumene glaze with a paint brush to make the accidental drips into purposeful design, painting the finishing outlines for a vase for my mom with underglaze and beginning the design on another vase that will be a gift for a friend, and adding the green and brown stripes to a large square bowl initially painted deep yellow.
It was in the midst of this work that I realized, or should I say rediscovered a little something about myself. Patience often eludes me during the detail work, no matter how many deep breaths I take.
Numerous times today I found myself painting a line too fast so that it blurred over the edge of the previous one or widened the line and made the design messy instead of nice and clean, and okay, yes, perfect. This wasn’t because my hands were shaky, but rather as an effect of the counting down of the classroom clock.
The same could be said for this thing I’m doing called NaNoWriMo. I can hear the quiet ticking of the word count clock, reminding me that only a few days remain to get the necessary detail work (aka the words I have yet to write) completed and the final piece (aka my compiled document) turned in and accounted for.
I started today’s writing session about a day and a half behind, still trying to catch up from my Wednesday-Thursday break, and the ticking was tocking a little louder than usual. I started out slow, mostly because I listened to-slash-watched a movie on TV. Once I shut the DVR off and really got down to business, the detail work came out easily and clean so that as of tonight, my deficit is only 603 words.
Take that, tick tock clock.
Nikki and the Novels 