Monday, October 28, 2024

Museum of Vanished Pottery


This is one of the leaves of our canna lily. At some point during the Spring of Insatiable Slugs (SOIL), when the leaf was young and still tightly rolled up, something burrowed straight through it. When the leaf unfurled, this was the visual effect we were left with. There are actually a few places like this on the plant, where it looks like we took a hole-puncher to it. The pattern looks too neat to be from a slug, but I have no idea what the pest might have been.

Yesterday was pretty quiet. The morning was sunny and mild, so I walked the dog on our long loop around the neighborhood and through the nearby housing estate.


She was very patient with my photography, but you can tell she's thinking about barking.

I also made my way through another 80-something pages of "Bleak House."  At one point I was reading a scene and struggling to keep track of who the characters were and what was going on. I looked at the character list and counted 34 major characters and 23 minor -- Dickens really outdid himself stuffing this book with people! Anyway, I was able to sort out who was who, at least, but some of the relationships are still vague in my mind -- and some are supposed to be unclear, for purposes of the plot.

I'm still not loving it, but I am going to finish this book. As much as I complain about it -- and I am going to complain -- I also want the challenge.

I thought about putting my Botswana photos on Flickr, as I mentioned the other day. I dug out the hard drive and was going through all my old photos and realized that I actually have quite a few that I never put online. I don't necessarily need others to see them, but Flickr is how I view, organize and manage my "archives." (I have more than 40,130 photos on Flickr, including a handful of videos, and I've tagged them and organized them into chronological folders, so when I search for something it usually pops right up.)

Anyway, I didn't start the Botswana photo project, but I did find some interesting stuff, like these pictures of pottery I made back in 2005, during a class I took in New York:




I only have one of these pots now -- the rounded vase in the middle in the last photo. I have no idea where the others are. I'm sure I gave them to friends and family. I remember particularly liking the one on the left in the middle photo -- the beige speckled pot with the green rim.

I wonder when I crossed the 40,000-photos threshold on Flickr? I used to see how many photos I had right at the top of my "photostream," but Flickr has now taken that number away and hidden it in my stats, which I never look at. When I finally got around to it yesterday, I was amused to see that among my top ten most recently viewed photos are those titled Tits, Boner, Busty, Sexes, Desire and Boobs. Gee, what could people be looking for online? (Most of those are graffiti-related, except for Tits, which is a picture of birds.)

40 comments:

  1. Those pots you made were lovely.
    I'm glad you explained your Flickr titles!

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    1. Ha! I was going to let people just click the links but thought I should reassure them they weren't going to see anything they didn't want to see.

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  2. Your pottery looks great and at least you have photos of your works.
    I love the acronym SOIL.
    I am curious about whether you pay for Flickr? I have an account there but I don't what I've stored there. Just today I came across the name Dropbox, which I had forgotten about. I had an account there too. I will have the logins recorded. Another is Photo...I've forgotten.

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    1. I do pay for Flickr -- about $75 a year, I think? I used to have a Dropbox and also a Snapfish account, but I haven't used those in ages.

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  3. You wrote this of Olga: "...you can tell she's thinking about barking". Surely Barking should be spelt with a capital "B" as in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham! The fondly remembered pot in the middle image was indeed pleasing to the eye.

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    1. "Thinking About Barking: A wistful recollection of East London"

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  4. The hole looks like the work of a carpenter beetle, but they usually bore into wood. Maybe some caterpillar.
    The pottery is lovely, talented work.

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    1. Caterpillar is a good guess. Hopefully it grew into whatever butterfly or moth it was supposed to become!

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  5. I've seen that same bit of artistic insect damage before and it is cool, isn't it?
    I am very, very impressed with your pots. I mean seriously. Jessie has signed me up for a pottery class that she takes which starts tomorrow and I am nervous. For one thing it's at 9:30 in the morning which is early for me to get anywhere and for another thing- people! There will be people there.
    But your pots are so beautiful that I do want to try.

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    1. Oh, excellent! I'm so glad you'll be making pots! I can't wait to see them!

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  6. Wow! You really do have a lot of photos, Steve. I have probably not taken that many photos in my whole life!?!
    Your pots are lovely and I am wondering why you stopped making them. You definitely have a talent for it!

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    1. I take at least one picture every day, and sometimes many more than that, and they do stack up! I stopped making pottery partly because I didn't know what to do with it all.

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  7. That leaf photo is outstanding!

    Years ago, a former employer would publish a top ten list of websites accessed during work hours that weren't work related. I was always shocked at what sites people were using during work, especially some porn themed ones. So your list of popular photographs doesn't shock me much.

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    1. I had a friend back in New York who told me he watched porn at the office. I couldn't believe it. That's when you know you have a problem!

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  8. Love the pottery. You had quite a knack for it. That leaf is pretty fantastic, too. Nature rocks!

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    1. Nature is amazing, isn't it?! I hope your jet lag is getting better!

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  9. Awesome pottery. I have to look at flickr.

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  10. I should do something like Flickr - I can never find a photo that I'm searching for, especially it I don't remember the exact year. Those pots are lovely!

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    1. Yeah, the tagging helps tremendously. But as I said I have a lot of pics I never put on Flickr and those are dwelling in obscurity on my hard drive.

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  11. your search results made me laugh. back when I did a post on every letter of the alphabet s was sex. omg, I got thousands of hits for a long time, mostly from the middle east and asia.
    there is a new pottery studio here in town that gives lessons. I've only checked out the website. I did take ceramics back in college but my hands at the time weren't strong enough to center the damn clay. al least that's what I blamed it on.

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    1. It does take a LOT of strength. I remember being surprised about that.

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  12. That pottery your made is beautiful. You did a great job with those.
    Those Flickr search results are funny and probably predictable.
    Interesting pattern on that leaf. The insects are making lace out of the leaves.

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    1. Yeah, I have a few other pictures with provocative titles that get regular hits. It's like an army of teenage boys are out there browsing the web, but I'm sure most of them are actually adults!

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  13. So glad you kept that particular pot...as it's glaze (not to mention the shape) is quite difficult to achieve...the black over brown turned into "oil spots" as I see it, where neither one is dominant but they don't merge exactly.

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    1. "Oil Spots" is a good way to put it -- yeah, it's one layer atop another but they don't really blend.

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  14. Your leaf reminds me of the symmetrical damage on the moonflower leaf I posted last month. It's bizarre how that happens!
    I've found when there are multiple characters in a book like that, I have to read it pretty quickly or I'll forget who everyone. And sometimes it helps if the book has a Wiki page with a "cast of characters" listed!
    I'm impressed with your pottery.

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    1. This volume lists all the characters on two pages in the front, but it's tiresome to have to keep flipping back to that! I think Dickens wrote these chapters to be read in more easily-digestible serial installments, with just a handful of characters on deck at a time, rather than end-to-end in a single book.

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  15. That's a lot of photos. I'm currently dependent on Google photos for long term management, which is basically a sequential search. Nice pottery, you are a man of many talents.

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    1. Can you tag them in Google? That makes all the difference for me -- so I can search "olga cemetery mud" and get a pic of the dog rolling in mud at the cemetery, for example.

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  16. A worm? I use Google photos and have nearly filled up my iPhone storage with pictures too. I miss using a camera but it was so unwieldy. :( The pots are beautiful!

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    1. A worm or caterpillar, for sure -- the holes are so clean! Yeah, cameras can be a drag to carry around.

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  17. Perhaps you should take up pottery when you retire. You certainly have a talent for it. Your pots/vases were beautiful! Glad you kept at least one of them!

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    1. I have several other bowls and vessels that aren't in these pictures. I took another class earlier, in 2000, and many of mine are from that time.

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  18. That many photos stored must include everything during your adult life. I like your system, especially when you state photos are easily found.
    Your pottery is really nice. I could be happy with each and every piece.

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    1. No, I have TONS of pictures from my film-shooting era that aren't on Flickr at all. (Though some of them have been scanned and added.)

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  19. Your pottery is wonderful. Perhaps the missing pieces are in a museum somewhere.

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  20. Your pottery is beautiful, I love every single piece.

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    1. Thank you! The photos are a bit deceptive. Some were clumsier than they look. :)

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