Sofia’s Dad’s Pots

Back from Thanksgiving and it wasn’t the most auspicious beginning at the outset of the trip last Monday. I think in the future I will just cancel trips if I’m sick because it’s difficult to enjoy yourself and if you’re not bedridden it feels like you’re being the party pooper all the time (btw… this thing is still holding on but I’m about 90% now.) Anyway Sunday evening before leaving the next morning, I put the bug to bed and got a bowl of pasta to eat before loading up the car. I walked with pasta in left hand and grabbed the tv remote with the right as I entered the dark living room and figured I’d just eat with the light of the stupidbox. We have a coffee table that rolls around on casters that is square with square edges that’s been up against the wall in the dining room for years because we didn’t want Sofia to fall and hurt herself on it. Lately Mom has been painting the trim in the dining room and the table has been rolled out into the middle of the living room… you can see where this is going. I walked rather briskly into the table and hit both my shins halfway between my feet and knees and toppled over the table landing on the rug between the table and the couch. After writhing in the intense pain for a minute or so I got up and was pleased with myself for somehow not spilling my pasta on the floor. Here’s the culprit…

About halfway through my pasta, I felt something strange and rolled up my pantleg to find the horror of a sack that had formed on my shin which was filled with blood and about the diameter of a plum and protruded from my leg by a little over an inch. I should have taken a picture because after telling the story a couple times, I think it seems like I’m exaggerating but I’m not… it was like a tumor. Anyway, I must have popped or severed the blood vessel that’s on the front of the shin and I didn’t know how serious this is (or if it even is) and started contemplating whether to cancel the trip or not. It was too late to go to an immediate care center and I can’t afford the emergency room so I elevated and iced it but was not thrilled about a half a cup of blood that wasn’t in the vein (or artery). (By the way, I arrived home last night and got some popcorn and went to sit on the couch in the same room and took a step into the unlit room and stopped. I looked down to where the table was and could not see a thing. I took a couple tentative steps forward before making it out… there’s apparently something about the color of the table that makes it disappear against the color of the rug. This at least made me feel like it wasn’t because I’m an oblivious klutz that doesn’t watch where he’s going.) The swelling went down to a large bump by morning (and is still the same as I type this) and I decided to go forward with the trip. So we get up the next morning, pack the car, get everyone in and put Sunglasses in the front seat for a 12 hour drive and I turn the ignition and… clickety, clickety, click, won’t start. We eventually jump it with my car but I’m unsure if it’s a dead battery or the alternator or the starter and not wanting to be stranded in some town in Ohio with a starter that’s kaput I decide that we cannot shut the car off until we arrive which means no lunch break and leave the car running while we’re getting gas (it turned out to be a dead battery that my brother and I replaced Tuesday morning). So… on the road again, we get about 30 miles out of town and Sunglasses, riding shotgun with me up front, vomits her breakfast on her bed that I placed on the floor in front of her seat. Driving along with the vomit soaking into her bed, I decided to wait until we get to the next rest area to clean it up a bit and about 10 minutes later she wretches again and throws up a second load onto a different area of her bed. By now I’m thinking that maybe we are not meant to take this trip but we soldier forward and after cleaning up the mess, the rest of the trip was relatively uneventful. Here’s the demon dog riding shotgun…

And here’s her partner in crime who weathered the long drives quite well…

Get back Loretta. It’s 55 degrees and sunny and going to 66 today, what a November. Sometimes though, what you want to wear doesn’t match the weather or anything else for that matter. Sometimes it’s snowing out and you feel like putting on a swimsuit. Anyway, here’s Sofia’s outfit that she put together… “tres bien ensemble” just jumps off my tongue…

The most frustrating things about being sick and not being in the studio, second only to not being in the studio and making work is that this blog is a ceramics blog and most of its content is about making pots. I haven’t made anything in 2 weeks (that will change today) and it pisses me off to no end that this has even lasted that long. I find it interesting when people ask… what is the purpose of your blog? In other words, why are you taking the time? I usually stumble through the obvious reasons… to get my work in front of more people, to connect with other people doing similar things, to make friends and acquaintances, to learn about how other potters do what they do, to hopefully sell pots and by extension be able to continue making pots, etc. One thing that I never say but that has somehow become obvious in the past 2 weeks of inactivity is that the blog is additional motivation to get things done. I don’t mean to say that I need motivation but more accurately I feel obligated to have progress so I can report that progress on the blog. Michael Kline’s idea which I may steal in the near future is to take pictures of the same pots from different angles and in black and white but that just gets you through a day or two dry spell. Anyway, this will probably continue because the dreaded holidays are imminent and notorious for lack of productivity. Thanks for all the well wishes on the previous post… don’t feel bad about thinking it was funny, I really intended it to be plus who can deny that from very early on in life the pain of others is always a great source of laughter (I mean pain in the 3 Stooges slapstick sort of way).

February of this year marked the onset of my plantar fasciitis (PF) which has been referred to many times on this blog and along with that started my relatively sedentary lifestyle (aside from ceramics) that doesn’t include running, walking or really anything that requires being on my feet. This condition is marked by pain in both heels from rising in the morn till retiring at night. Activities that are particularly excruciating are standing in one place for any length of time like doing the dishes, preparing dinner, going to a ceramics opening and squatting to rinse out glaze buckets and such. I have taken the normal route to a certain point that includes special shoes, expensive orthotic inserts and steroid injections into my heels as referred to on this post. I’ve pretty much given up as I’ve heard it all and the only thing left for the podiatrist to do is surgery which I will not do because I believe that post surgery will just be a different kind of chronic foot problem. Anyway that leads me to these…

When I switched doctors and went to my first appointment last Monday, we went through the gamut of personal medical concerns and since he was a general practitioner and I had mostly given up on professional solutions to my PF, I fully planned on not even mentioning my feet. But after he remarked that we had covered a lot of ground, I blurted out… now if I could only fix my plantar fasciitis. He immediately replied… oh, I can take care of that for you. I diplomatically said… well, I’ll listen to your spiel but I’ve heard them all at this point. He interrupted and mumbled what sounded like “nicemints” and after I requested he repeat himself it turned out to be night splints. Although I have seen the commercial version of these (which he adamantly maintained do not work), I had never heard them called that. I was about to dismiss the whole thing (even though he claims an 85% success rate) when he appealed to one of my weak spots… he provided a plausible mental image of why they would work. According to him the tendons/muscles that are injured hurt because they have microscopic tears where they connect to the bone and when you sleep these tendons/muscles are in the relaxed (unstretched) state. While sleeping the healing begins but as soon as your feet hit the floor in the morning that healing is immediately undone because standing up stretches the tendons/muscles out again re-tearing them and the endless loop starts all over. His solution… mold a strip of “air activated” fiberglass that’s inside of a soft cotton sleeve onto the bottom of the foot all the way round to the back of the calf while these muscles/tendons are in their most stretched position. At bedtime put your feet inside of them and wrap the “cast” against the foot and lower leg with ace bandages. So I got them made on Friday and after curing decided to try them last night. An added caveat to the process which the doctor says will or will not work in 2 1/2 to 3 weeks every night is that you cannot put your weight on them (the fiberglass will break) so getting up to go to the bathroom is not an option. I mentioned this to Mom who is also a nurse and she brought home one of those devices that allows you to stay in bed. I wasn’t sure I would actually use it but maybe just unwrap and rewrap the works but when I wrapped them up and found out how long it took, I realized that that wasn’t a viable option either. So here’s what the mummy looked like right before bed…

Since Mom had to get up early and go to work (it’s bug day here and I’m writing this in a hurry), I decided I would go solo downstairs on the couch so if my tossing and turning made a big commotion it wouldn’t wake her. Here’s where the fun starts. The next door neighbors decided to have a party and were on their porch in the balmy 58 degree evening jabbering loudly til who knows how late so this was inhibiting my falling asleep. After an hour or so that seemed like about 6 hours, both my feet were numb and I decided I had wrapped them too tight and I was probably risking a blood clot if they weren’t redone plus the wrapping smooshed my toes together on the left foot forcing the edge of a toenail into the side of the adjacent toe. I finally just undid everything and started over. I settled in, really sleepy now, and felt like the re-wrap was pretty good. I was trying to ignore the cacophony from the porch next door and then… I hear another damn mouse and it’s trying to get into some kind of plastic bag. So dammit now what? Well I decided since the re-wrapping session took so long and I thought I had it done correctly this time that I would crawl to the kitchen and find a mouse trap and set it and crawl back to the couch. It started ok because there’s a rug in front of the couch but when I hit the wood floors, my patellae hurt like hell. So there I crawled and froze at the portal to the kitchen to echo-locate the mouse but just as I stopped, it stopped. Did you ever look up from something you’re doing as if noticing it for the first time and wonder how it ever happened and if you could go back in time a year (or in this case, a week) and tell your younger self that it was what the future held, your younger self simply would not believe it? This was one of those times. After being totally motionless on my hands and knees for about a minute, my kneecaps insisted a return to the couch. My feet went numb again an hour or so later and when I finally drifted off, Mom came down to stick her head out on the porch to tell the neighbors to be quiet. Do my feet feel better this morning… well, no but the grand experiment has about 3 weeks to go and if last night is a litmus, it’s gonna be a fun ride.

It didn’t rain last night like they said it would which was good… low 50’s, clear and crisp with a not quite full moon. Sofia was on pins and needles all day and her and her neighbor friend had the exact same bat costume so they went out together and raced from house to house screaming, we’re twin bats! As pleasant as the weather was, Halloween was not designed for the sufferers of plantar fasciitis… by time it was over my feet felt as though I was one of those skeletons hanging from the tree, all bone and no flesh. Here’s the bat who insisted on getting an upside down picture for authenticity’s sake…

And of course I had to get a shot of Sofia’s proper bat footwear, fortunately she didn’t try to wear these out on our sortie last night…