Yesterday was certainly my day for yard work. I am not quite sure what possessed me to finish stacking the cord of wood we had delivered several months ago. I was just going to stack a little bit of it to make more progress. (Last week I stacked about 1/3 of it.) It was a nice sunny day with temperatures in the low 40’s by the time I started. The dogs helped. Well, sort of. Alex and Hailey supervised from the deck and Bella was a huge help in moving the wood piece by piece. The only problem was she moved it out into the yard instead of over by where it was being stacked! She happily chewed on bark while I loaded the wheelbarrow up, wheeled it over to the wood stack and started stacking.

I got one more row done and thought to myself “just one more wheelbarrow-ful to just get the third row started ...” After each consecutive wheelbarrow-ful I vowed it to be the last. The stack kept shrinking and shrinking until I could not leave that little bit unstacked. My back was aching but I persevered and before I knew it — violá! — the job was finished!

The last two rows were done yesterday.

Such a pretty sight to my sore back! Now I don’t have to feel guilty any more when it rains since the wood can be tidily covered up now.

That was the morning’s work.

Just after noon our lawn tractor Johnny (as in John Deere) returned home from his spa trip to Goshen, New York where he underwent a transformation. His return home has been greatly anticipated. He was being fitted with a new bagging attachment so we can now pick up all our leaves. For the past few years we’ve just been mulching the leaves, but our grass was slowly being smothered. Plus, it would take hours of driving slowly over and over the leaves to break them up enough. Tedious.

And my oh my do we have leaves! I think in some spots they are over two inches thick! You see, we hadn’t done anything about our leaves because we were waiting on Johnny and it’s taken several weeks between the time we ordered the bagger and they came to pick Johnny up.

The guy who delivered Johnny stayed to make sure I knew what I was doing. He shook his head when he saw the amount of leaves on the ground and told me I wasn’t going to get very far before I would need to dump the bags. He was right. I took one tiny swipe and jammed up the whole blower and leaf chute. I’m glad he was around to show me how to un-jam it! Plus he told me I should probably go over the leaves without the bags attached to mulch them up a little so there wouldn’t be so much mass. He demonstrated and bits of leaves, dust and anything else the mower picked up flew crazily through the air. Oh boy.

I knew I needed to get as much done as I could since we were expecting rain (and it is indeed rainy and dark out there this morning), so after a brief visit with neighbor Kim I changed into my old yard shoes and shirt and got started. I first mulched both front yards and it went pretty fast. The regular mowing blades seemed to mulch the leaves up better than the mulching blades! I kicked up a lot of dust and I think most of it was coming from the mulched leaves. A haze hung over the whole street. Quite the mess without the bags attached! I didn’t realize just how dirty a job it was until I needed to add some gas. I looked down at myself and was horrified! I was covered from head to toe in a thick film of dusty dirt. These pants were once black ... yuck.

Once I had taken the sheer mass of the leaves down, I put the bags back on and proceeded to pick them up. It worked like a charm except for a few times when I didn’t dump the bags as soon as I should have and ended up jamming the blower attachment, but overall it went very smoothly. And the end result was very pleasing!

Here are the before and after shots of one side of our front yard:

I only got one side of the yard completely done but at least the dirty mulching part of the job is completely done (at least in front). I wish I could have finished the rest before today’s rain but it was not to be. At least we don’t have that heavy carpet of leaves covering the grass anymore. The rest of the job should be easier. Next year we can keep up with the leaves as they fall and it should be a real breeze!

A very satisfying day of work.

Today I do not plan to be covered in dirt. No sir. I am going shopping to Garden State Plaza (the biggest mall in our area) with neighbor Kim. I hope to come home with a new pair of boots (thanks to the generosity of my in-laws). A perfect way to spend a rainy day!

Today was my first pottery class that I am taking through the town’s adult education classes. I tried pottery once before way back in the late 80’s but I’ve pretty much forgotten everything I knew. If I really ever knew anything at all about it! All I remember is that for some reason our class time was cut short and the instructor ended up doing all our glazing and firing for us. One pot I did hand-building and the other one I threw on the wheel. It was my first experience with “throwing” and I quickly realized why they called it that when my would-be vase literally flew off the wheel and landed on the floor like I had thrown it there.

Today was different. After finding my way through the security gate (she lives in a really cool gated community where all the houses are sprinkled among the woods throughout a very large complex) me and another woman were were welcomed into Kathy’s home. She wanted to show us things she had made so we could get an idea that we weren’t limited to just making small pots or (god forbid) the dreaded school-project-ashtray. It was also a tour of her very large home as we peeked into each and every bedroom (including her own) to see the object d’art that she had crafted. After the house ceramic tour we marched down to her basement where her pottery studio is. A work bench, a wheel, and two kilns, (one large; one small) took up one room while the the other part housed glazes, forms and molds, and other tools of the trade.

She’s a very open and friendly person, and obviously a very talented one if her pieces are anything to go by.

There are only three of us in the class and both of the other women have had a lot more experience with this than I have. One woman who has already been taking the class for two weeks (she started early due to being gone for the next two weeks) was already on to making lovely wall plaques and leaf platters. She had imprinted the clay with a leaf from a water lily and some other exotic elephant ear leaf for a large platter. Gorgeous! She said she’s done it all before—only 30 years ago. She said she’s taking multiple art classes. I got the impression she was not there to learn but to have use of the tools, glazes, and kilns. The other woman who arrived with me has also had a lot of experience, plus she paints. Me? Well, I guess I feel a little inadequate right about then, but isn’t that what taking a class is all about? (The class was listed as Beginning/Intermediate.)

We did two things today. The first was a hand-built bowl. We took out our frustrations by throwing the ball of clay down onto the table to get all the bubbles out. When we reached the desired thickness we played around with different textures from Kathy’s basket of toys. I just grabbed what I thought looked interesting and started imprinting the clay with a variety of things. I think I took a coil of spring, some corrugated cardboard and a string of different sized beads. My bowl consisted of probably six or more slabs of clay, slightly overlapped and put into a plastic bowl lined with plastic wrap that served as a form. Once that was done we had to scrape, scrape scrape the inside until it was smooth with no sign of the overlapping pieces. I’m not sure my bowl is going to be very even in thickness, but c’est la vie!

The second thing we made was a ball shape. This time, we “bounced” the ball of clay on the table while trying not to flatten it until when we cut it in half we couldn’t see any bubbles. Then we hollowed out the center by pressing the clay down. We added some shards of some other kind of medium (not sure just what it was) in the middle of our ball so that it will rattle once fired. We could make our ball into anything we wanted. I made an apple with a stem and one leaf. It was pretty one dimensional, and I kept thinking it should somehow be more. But what? Apples don’t have a lot of texture to them ...

Meanwhile my co-class mate was whipping up a intricately carved pumpkin from her ball of clay. I was very impressed. Looking from one project to another, mine looked like a fifth grader had made it and hers looked like an artist had made it. Oh well.

Finally, when we were about to walk out the door, it occurred to me just what was wrong with my apple. What I had needed was an apple in front of me as a model. Apples go in at the top and slope slightly on the sides but mine was pretty much round all the way around. I wanted to grab it off the table and start over again but I didn’t. I did learn something though, so that’s good.

I think it’s going to be fun but I do wish everyone was starting on the same playing field. Why oh why do I have to be the only “beginner?”