Recently in hegira.org Category

Photos, primarily of ceramic art work, from my recent trip to NCECA in San Diego.

Number 6, Matt and I spent some quality Easter time mixing and pouring cement. The question, it turns out, is whether the master engineer can actually calculate volume.

What was that? Icecubes in hell? Maybe.

Number Six (also, gecko.org in the when that was) and I spent the president's holiday completing the gas line for the studio heater and applying much sheetrock to the ceiling of the studio. Insulation and sheetrock on the walls to follow -- eventually. No sense in getting carried away at this point.

Huge thanks go to Justin for making the sheetrock fit around all of the recessed lights.

If you are interested in a funny story, get Justin to tell you how I tested the black pipe joints for gas leaks.

Here is a set of follow-up shots to the pictures I posted back in November. The pieces are mostly done, poorly implemented and appear huge on screen. The little teapots are based on about a 3" sphere and the wall pieces are about 8" and 14".

Here is just a handful of pictures of ceramic work currently in progress for those not specifically fond of their eyes. I've been chatting with a couple of my friends about this crap, uh, I mean art, so here it is.

I did go as far as to crop and scale these pictures, but they are still fairly huge by dial-up web standards. You have been warned.

The above pieces are part of my work for a class in low fire ceramics. The illustrated assignments are designed to introduce the use of cast elements as a method of working and the use of underglaze as a medium of surface treatment. As the headline indicates, these are incomplete pieces still in progress.

Yes, at my current pace, the studio is scheduled for completion December 30th, 2030. I know I'm slow -- you can quit e-mailing me to remind me.

Since January, I've added a 3.5 ton, through the wall air conditioning unit, removed the old siding and resided the south exterior wall (the patchwork of my addition and the previous owner's original siding was not pleasing to the eye), installed a louvered vent for the exhaust system which will handle electric kiln venting, a spray booth and whatever other crazy ideas I come up with, framed the wall seperating the garage and studio, added about 300 square feet of overhead storage, dropped the ceiling to the bottom of the beams, insulated the ceiling, added 1080 watts of recessed, halogen lighting on three-way switches in four banks of three, ran wall base power and rehung the outside door with a real threshold. Fun.

The studio is an unusable disaster, but I took pictures anyway. As is typical of my laziness, the smaller images link to unprocessed, full size (read -- pretty big) versions. You have been warned.

Need to know where jack is when? Yeah, I didn't think so -- unless you happen to be Natalie.

In an amazing lack of coordination and motor skills, I seem to have broken the two smallest toes on my left foot. How, you might ask, can one be so clumsy? I'm not sure. My legs simply didn't work when or how I expected this morning. Aren't the toes a lovely eggplant color?

Finally, after much delay, the S.J. Quinney College of Law website is allowed to be released into the wild. You are welcome to have a look.

After much delay, procrastination, general foot dragging and basic laziness, I managed to muster the gumption to get busy on the studio. So far, I've installed one inch compressed foam insullation to the tongue and groove ceiling; built the south most section of the wall which divides the studio proper from the garage; and installed the first fourteen foot section of storage deck above the parking space.