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Questar delivered and installed my new meter this morning. Installation included connecting the meter both to the house and to the new kiln line with a valve to shut down the kiln line. A picture of the new meter has been added to the end of the Kiln Construction photo album. Next on the docket is an enclosure for the kiln and assembling the frame. Glacial progress continues.
I scheduled time with Number 6 to pour a cement pad for the kiln I am currently building. Saturday morning quickly became Saturday afternoon as most anything that could go wrong, did go wrong. The auto parts places in Bountiful weren't open until 8:00a, the hitch that was purported to come with the truck we'd arranged to borrow didn't, said hitch was part of a display in a store that didn't open until 9:00a, and when we finally made it to AA Ucart, the two yard mixing trailer was already out for the morning.
The evening before, Justin and I set and leveled the forms and installed the rebar. I, however, neglected to remeasure and recalculate the final volume of the pad -- I strongly recommend against this course of action for those of you considering playing with cement at home. The difference between 2 and 2.75 yards is large. I somehow managed to convince myself the pad volume could not possibly have exceeded two yards. My preliminary calculation was 1.8 yards before I laid in a ton of gravel. A phrase often used by one of my drill sergeants regarding assumptions springs readily to mind in hindsight.
My constant readers may recall the pad we poured at Justin's house last easter and the subsequent razzing regarding his expertise in the volume calculation department. While Justin's pad was a miserable three trips for cement, I successfully stooped to a new low with four trips for cement to finish my pad -- two to Ucart for the first 2.5 yards and two to Home Depot. I was positive after recalculating 2.35 yards would be an excessive amount of concrete to finish the job and bought an additional half yard just to be safe. When it became clear the extra half yard was insufficient to do the job, the trips to Home Depot started.
This, of course, only doubled the crow I have to eat.
Stupidity aside, the premixed concrete is hands down the best way to deal with significant amounts of cement for the home owner. The price is a bit less than purchasing the same amount of concrete by the bag from the home improvement megastore, though the savings was almost eliminated by a price reduction this last week on the per bag price of cement. I'm told the premixed cement is a better quality cement. I chatted with Doug at Ucart while he mixed up my second batch. Mixing on the spot allows the supplier to add in small extras like a defloculant to reduce the amount of water needed to make the cement usable -- less water means stronger cement. Not breathing the concrete dust or moving the eighty pound bags of mix multiple times is another significant bonus. The twelve bags of mix allowed me to correct my mistake, but at a cost of an aggravated lower back and full activation of my allergies.
The kiln construction photo album has been updated with a few photos associated with the pour. The three photographs at the cement yard were taken with my Sony Clie NX-80 PDA. I am undecided whether the camera attached to the palm is worth its cost, but it was handy for the capture of these images.
On the same bowling trip I discovered The Darkness, I was also exposed to the video for "Stacy's Mom." It was my first experience with Fountains of Wayne and I was impressed with their infectious pop sensibility. Both Stacy and her Mom were pretty hot too, but I'm sure that had little to do with "Stacy's Mom" taking up residence in my mind.
After "Permission to Land," I had a very low level of expectation with regard to "Welcome Interstate Managers." Fountains of Wayne however, knows how to make not only a coherent but a fantastic, witty, addicting album and has left me awed at the quality and execution from the first listen through three weeks of heavy rotation. There is not a track on the album I dislike, but I find myself looking forward to "Bright Future in Sales," "Stacy's Mom," "Hey Julie," "Little Red Light," and "Peace and Love" marginally more than the other songs. It is not a significant margin by any stretch of the imagination. The tunes range from the straight forward, well executed pop of "Stacy's Mom" and "Bright Future in Sales" to songs playing as homage to the likes of Gordon Lightfoot ("Valley Winter Song"), Simon and Garfunkle ("Hey Julie") and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band ("Hung Up On You").
The lyrics are masterfully sardonic observations of popular culture. Topics range from the stock theme of the broken hearted, jilted lover torn between reconciliation and revenge to ruminations on the reality of the music business and the business of sales. "Welcome Interstate Managers" is one of those albums I can easily see myself grabbing in order to revisit the lyrics as much as the music. (Lloyd Cole's "The Negatives" still holds the title in my book, but Fountains of Wayne is definitely crawling up its way up my list.)
The liner notes include the lyrics, credits, photos of the band members and a brief round of "thank-you's" from the band. The design is interesting in its use of altered photos emphasizing the 2D nature of both the photos and the liner notes in a very postmodern way. The effect is of a photo of poorly made and badly arranged cardboard props in rows.
The album is so good, I hunted down Fountains of Wayne's first two albums, the 1996 self titled album and the 1999 "Utopia Parkway." My initial reaction is to like both of these earlier releases and they continue to grow on me as they get additional play time. I'm enjoying all three albums currently available and look forward to the next release by the band.
Rating: Strongly Recommended.
As a part of my final studio class for the ever useful Bachelor of Fine Arts with emphasis in ceramics degree, the instructor set up some studio visits with local potters and ceramic artists. I had mixed feelings about these field trips, mostly negative. It was a pleasant surprise after the first two visits to find myself excited not only to produce ceramic work again, but to complete my home studio.
One of our visits took us to the home studio of Aaron Ashcraft, where Aaron was in process of opening up his Olsen 16 updraft kiln. The virtues of the downdraft kiln have been iterated to me so many times, they have become a part of my thought processes. I believed high fire reduction necessitated a downdraft kiln design. This pattern of thought combined with my experience firing both types of kilns at the University of Utah left me unprepared for the sight of Aaron's opened kiln. Not only were Aaron's pieces beautifully reduced, the kiln fired evenly top to bottom.
The updraft kilns I've fired on campus have differed up to two full cones top to bottom. I have heard rumors that it is possible to fire an updraft evenly. Until our class visit to Aaron's studio, I had never seen proof. I walked out of Aaron's studio knowing two things: 1) I could build a high fire, reduction kiln fairly inexpensively and 2) it was possible to make some money selling pots. I hold few illusions about being a potter or ceramic artist. I will most likely not ever make enough money to pay the mortgage and support a family with clay, but given Aaron's figures, there is a potential for a significant secondary income source.
I began to scheme, plan and research.
I was shocked to learn how expensive insulating fire brick and other refractory material is. Over one third of my total cost will be refractories. My estimate, given pricing from the local Harbison-Walker rep, is $2,400.00 and should cover two courses of brick on the floor and walls, the sprung arch and mortar.
The install fee for an upgraded natural gas meter was educational. Local lore tells stories of the gas company installing larger meters without charge save an increased meter fee. This is sadly not the case at present. The kiln I'm building will run seven burners at seven inches of water column pressure (the same pressure for natural gas in most US homes) and have a peak consumption of 350,000 BTUs/hour. The sales engineer calculated a larger capacity meter at the current pressure. My meter fee remains the same, but I get to pay about $500 for the privilege of buying more gas from the gas company.Though a painful immediate payment, paying for the meter up front is better over the long term than a quadrupling of the meter fee and the necessity of regulating each of our home's gas appliances. At least I keep telling myself this is so.
Friday, March 19th stopped me cold in my tracks. After trenching 55 feet from my gas meter to my kiln location, I popped into the local plumbing store and asked for a pair of risers and plastic gas pipe. At which point, I was informed of the necessity to be both licensed and certified in order to so much as gaze on either item. A couple dozen phone calls later, I got connected with Marv from Shamrock Plumbing. His bill will be in the neighborhood of $700 for parts and labor to install and test the line in my trench. With a bit of luck, he'll be done Wednesday, March 24th and I can back fill the trench before a storm changes my dirt to mud.
The gas line delayed a fun Saturday morning of mixing and pouring concrete as I was not willing to pour nearly two yards of cement with an open trench a few inches away. If all goes as currently scheduled, the new kiln pad will be curing this weekend.
I've uploaded some photos of the project in process as well as a couple of notebook page scans with preliminary elevations and measurements for those with nothing better to do.
Friday brought the happy news that all appears well with The Chap. We also learned The Chap is a chap and not a chapette. His feet are about one inch long, and his body is about 9 inches in total length. Nat informed me we are halfway through.
Though I was looking forward to ballet practice, I suppose I'll have to make do with soccer practice.
Stills and video from the ultrasound are in the normal bat place.
Last May, I put together a slideshow of photos from the shops and projects of members of the fine hand tools group. The photos include a number of fantastic ideas for managing space and storage. It is a huge PowerPoint file (~15M). You can grab it here.
Occasionally, Nat and I go out with our friends Jason and Anne for dinner and bowling. Friday and Saturday nights are the best as the alley turns off the lights and then cranks up the classic rock, the fog machines, the disco ball, the black lights and the strobe lights.I've found that my bowling improves with distraction and I've got plenty of room for bowling improvement. On our previous trips, we've enjoyed AC/DC, Kiss, Cream and the like during "Thunder Alley." Saturday the 28th, however, we experienced bowling to Brittany, Beyonce, Outkast and Christina with music videos. I discovered the fine line between levels of distraction -- music I enjoy is good while buxom young women in diaphanous attire is also good, but not for bowling.
Shortly after I experienced why "Toxic" was pulled from prime time rotation by MTV, the fellow running the show queued up The Darkness's "I Believe in a Thing Called Love." I was jonesing for some new tunes and was amazed at the tongue in cheek nods to classic rock groups from Peter Frampton to Boston throughout the video. I went right out and bought their album, Permission to Land. Luckily, the album ran me just under $11.00.
The music is actually fairly decent with three stand out tunes. My buddy, Dan, and I managed to listen to the whole album driving to and from lunch. Dan plays a little guitar and I caught him jamming air guitar and humming along -- at least when he wasn't bursting out laughing when I translated some lengthy lyric crammed into a third the space it ought to have. In fact, "Love is Only a Feeling" is a sufficiently good power ballad to bring The Darkness back for a second album in the event their current single doesn't generate sufficient income.
Mr. Hawkins's voice could be a huge plus for The Darkness, but at present it wallows in a combination of Freddy Mercury, Ric Ocasek, Freddy Curci and Miss Piggy. His voice is potentially offbeat in a good way, but is presently prone to painful falsetto without reason.
I paused three times over two days while considering opening this album because of the parental advisory warning. Explicit content is generally a bad sign and "Permission to Land" is no exception. I'm aware that the f-bomb is weighted much less negatively across the pond. I'm prone to its use from time to time myself. I believe, however, it is not necessary to include it in virtually every song, several times, ad nauseum. The lyrics surrounding lack any sense of wit or restraint and seem to exist primarily as a vehicle for dropping the bomb in its various forms.
The liner notes are of fairly decent quality, include the lyrics, photos of the band and "thank you's" from each member. The liner notes indicate some sort of copy control, but I cannot seem to bring myself to make mp3's to find out the specifics.
Rating: Strongly Not Recommended