I had planned to post sooner, but we had some Big Things happen here in Flagstaff in late-mid June. The Schultz Fire burned over 15,000 acres of our beloved San Francisco Peaks. I spent time volunteering at the emergency call center and taking a couple of weeks to recover from the emotional impact of seeing one of my favorite places on Earth decimated. It was a blow. Now we have moved on to coping with the changes and watching nature do its thing, slowly. It takes a long time for a coniferous forest like this one to regenerate, but it will heal over time.
Since then, things are moving along in my life, as they always do. My dream of working part-time didn’t last long. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be going back to full-time at the university. I’ll still make time for the studio, but the dream of spending 2-3 days a week is going to be put on hold for a while. There is a good reason, which I plan to divulge here in a few weeks!
In the meantime, I have enough pieces to do a bisque firing. I have to dismantle the gas kiln and give it a good cleaning before I fire it again. The pilot bar, which sits alongside the burners underneath the kiln and is essentially a pipe with tiny holes, is clogged with soot and the pilot doesn’t want to stay lit. The whole thing shuts off if the pilot goes out; it’s a safety feature. The best way to deal with it is to take the kiln off the burner stand and give everything a good cleaning with compressed air. I’d like to clean it up this weekend, if weather allows. We’re in full-blown monsoon season now, and it has been raining hard in the afternoons.
