Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Zappos Overlords are Following Me

So yesterday when I made my Twitter update about my shoes being UPS'ed to my apartment office, immediately two employees from Zappos hopped on Twitter and started following me. It makes me a bit paranoid.

For the record Zappos Overlords ... I really like my new shoes and service can't be beat! (but the following me on Twitter makes me feel kinda weird. Like I have to write updates on my shoes. 7:40 a.m. took the dogs out in my new Birkenstocks I ordered from Zappos. So far so good.)

. . .




Last night I took my first pottery class. It's through the Tucson Clay Co-Op and I was so excited to find it. After years of being shut out of classes—in high school because the class would fill up before my registration date, in college because I wasn't willing to take the Drawing I prerequisite because I could already sketch a vase. I wanted to MAKE one dammit!—I sort of forgot I wanted to make little jugs out of clay.

That is until I came across sfgirlbybay's post about pottery Whitney Smith's stuff on etsy.

Obsessed with her red dessert plates, I knew I needed to go learn how to make stuff on my own (and if I failed, I could just buy one).



So I called around on Monday and found a class starting immediately. $87 later, I'm enrolled in a pottery class for 6 weeks and am hefting around a giant bag of clay. But the class was fun. Many of the people in the class were a bit obsessed with traditional methods like those of the Mata Ortiz.



I have zero interest in making traditional looking pottery. I'm too shallow for that. I want to make smooth, cutesy pieces with birds on them. No whimsical story about how the spirit gods guided my hands. I just want to make cute stuff.

Probably going to be ostracized ...

. . .


On the garden front, we popped down on the weekend to check things out. My cherry tomatoes are making little green bulbs, the eggplant was in flower, and the squash was trying to take over. All the things I planted from seed are still trying to grow, but haven't become impressive or made anything to photograph.





It's kind of exciting to see everything as it becomes what you see in the grocery store. Who knew eggplant flowers were pretty!

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Happier Note

Jeffrey helped me put in some decorative wire fencing around my garden plot to give it some cuteness.



Some of the stuff is growing like gangbusters - the bush beans, the cherry tomato plant -- and some stuff is still working on poking out of the ground.

Here's what a baby watermelon looks like!

Sad News

One of the four baby doves has died. It was the largest of the group and I believe was the oldest. He wasn't missing any parts, so I can't deduce what did him in.

What's worse, is that not only did it make me sad, but then it totally creeped me out when I bumped it out of the nest (with a cut off piece of bamboo that could be discarded at will -- thing could have died of some weird communicable dove disease!) it got caught (or his feet have, well, a death grip on it) on the portulaca tendril hanging from the basket.

So you can imagine my dismay (as I'm standing there dancing on tiptoes uttering ew, ew, ew, ew, in little squeaks try not to flick the alive baby in the head) as it tipped over the side and instead of plummeting to the rocks below ... just sort of dangled there.

Ah! Nature!