Here we go again... It's 11:15 am, and the number one hottest search according to Google Trends is... Minka Kelly. Huh. Evidently, she and Derek Jeter are splitting up. I have to say, I have no idea who those people are. So I'm not going to talk about Minka Kelly.
Instead, I'm going to tell you about my lake kiln. I took several ceramics classes back in college, so I had to become familiar with different kinds of kilns. My favorite was the wood fired kiln. It was a huge, blocky structure that I thought vaguely resembled a squared-off locomotive engine. I liked it for two reasons: First, the wood fired kiln gave the most interesting and beautiful glaze patterns on pieces. Second, because you couldn't just turn it on and leave it. The whole time it was firing, it had to be monitored. We kept track of the temperature, adding more fuel or opening up ventilation doors as needed. This wasn't a fast process. As I recall, it took almost 2 full days to fire the kiln. So we took turns, two at a time, minding the kiln for two hours at a stretch.
Now, my lake kiln will be like that. I'm going to build it near a lake, with light forest around for preference, on the western shore. That way, when I fire the kiln, I'll be able to sit next to it and watch the sun come up over the lake. I've always liked that time of day, when the nighttime rhythms fade away and the daytime rhythms slowly take over. On boy scout camping trips, I would almost always wake up in the pre-dawn before everybody else.
So, that's what I'll do if I ever own a bit of lake-front property and get back into ceramics. Sit there, sipping coffee, with the soft crackling of the kiln behind me and the warmth from the bricks soaking into my back, watching the mist dance slowly on the surface of the lake as the sky to the east slowly brightens.
In other news, any elk milk? We don't really drink it in the USA, but I'm told that it's commercially harvested in both Russia and Sweden.
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