178 cone 6 test tiles

Winter has arrived in force. Late morning, it was still only 14 degrees F, and it only rose to 17F, which is what it is now. So I decided to just sit tight and try to catch up with all the email that backed up the past few days when I had house guests. Our lovely house guests (Jim's sister, husband and daughter)left yesterday and I had the afternoon to relax and just vegg out with some reading,computer word games and movies.

With the snow, wind and cold temperatures this morning, I knew the water in the studio was probably going to be frozen because I forget to leave it on an overnight drip, so I opted to continue to go through some of the 300 plus emails and get some things filed and some read and deleted.

After a hot chocolate lunch I headed for the studio, watered the plants and transplanted a very small Kaffir lime tree which I'm growing mainly for the leaves, which I'll use in Thai recipes. I also made a list of the glazes and slips I batched for the cone 6 firing last week; and now I have to make a cleaner list and match it against the tiles. There are a couple of missing and unmarked tiles; and there's a really great looking oribe which is unmarked and that's the main one I want to track down. Fortunately I made a chart when I was dipping the glazes, and noted which glazes were on which clay bodies, so finding the skipped ones should be easy - just a bit time consuming - a good after dinner project.

After all the holiday eating and merry making, I started a one week liver cleanse yesterday - no wine and lots of liver cleanse herbs. Tonight I'm just making a simple bratwurst on crunchy hard rolls with sauteed green peppers and onions. This is the meal I had planned for yesterday, but instead we opted for just some easy and comforting chicken soup.