Bowls

Back in 2000, when I still lived in Florida, I took a pottery class. I made a lot of mediocre pottery, and a handful of pieces that weren't too bad. I made more in 2005 when I took a class in New York. I gave most of it away, but over the years some pieces have come back to me as people have moved or died, and now I have a little pottery collection in our dining room.

Some of these pots have become repositories for small items I've gathered here and there, like seashells from my childhood visits to Florida beaches and feathers I've found here in London (above)...

...or all the broken pottery chips I've found, mostly on Hampstead Heath.

Here are more seashells and pebbles, these from British beaches, along with some small toys and other items including a tattered artificial poppy from a Remembrance Day wreath. I found that poppy washed up on the beach at Pevensey Bay.

This bowl is just getting started, holding a couple of pieces of old pottery and glass, along with an old room key from the Hotel Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. (I bought that at an antique store in Jacksonville.)

More miscellaneous gew-gaws: broken pottery, lost costume jewelry, a couple of antique bottle stoppers, you name it. (I did not make this bowl -- my parents got it from the spouse of one of their colleagues in the Math Department at the university where they taught. She was a real potter, so it looks more professional than mine!)

And finally, sea glass from Sidi Ifni, in Morocco, and some opercula that I found on a beach in Madagascar. I think they're from turban snails that someone collected while fishing.

Yesterday morning, the gas inspector came from British Gas to do our annual home inspection, which I had scheduled and then completely forgotten about. Thank goodness I was home when he showed up.

Then I went down to London Bridge to meet up with my pals Gordon and Chris for lunch and a couple of pints. Chris has been away for a year so we had a lot to catch up on, but he'll be back at school this fall with the rest of us.

I also picked up my first scanned batch of Joan Tubbs' slides, and dropped off another 20 or so that I found while sorting. I said yesterday that I had about 250 of her slides, and I was wrong -- it's closer to 400! (Yes, I counted them.) Most of the first scans worked out well so I think we'll have a good little online photo gallery of probably 50-60 images when this is all done.