Head to the grindstone...

I look out my window and the world passes by in streaks of water on glass. The sky is grey and kinetic. It has rained hard for the past three evenings. Thunderingly so. Very much needed, but not as appreciated by those of us without indoor workspaces.

It is just as beautiful as ever. But of a different sort. Where the landscape before had a ghostly gray wispiness, green fullness greets an eye wandering over the hills. But not fullness in its traditional definition. Really not full at all, just green...The rains came and went too quickly without enough fruit to lift the land out of the downward spiraling drought.

My project is coming along…slowly. Would probably be further along if I knew how to pot, but keep that on the down-low. I am learning, and can fake it quite well thanks to google. I had a major set-back this past week when I fired what I thought was going to be the best materials based on preliminary testing. I had the cow dung fire (“kiln”) hot. Hot hot. Before it was even at its peak I lowered a piece of straw down to the flameless mound of cow dung and about one foot above it the straw apparently had enough of its dull life and burst into flame. I didn’t get my face too near after that.

So my makeshift “kiln” seems to be working.

After enough time had passed for sintering of the clay to take place I parted the dung to unveil the filters. “I swear I put three filters in this fire. 1…2…hmm…” I looked around my site to see if I had forgotten to put it in somehow. “Nothing.” I stirred around the embers a little (while doing this my stick would burst into flame, so I would have to pull it out and stick it in the adjacent sand pile). Upon overturning a big lump of _ _ I noticed a large pile of ash…”it can’t be…” A closer look and low and behold I saw a shred of pottery amoungst carbon. Where once there was a coffee ground filter, there is only ash. You can imagine my delight. I was so excited my eyes watered and throat sobbed soft whimpers into the rising smoke. The other two filters were in better shape, but not by much. One broke in half, the other will if I look at it the wrong way. So I am back to square two. But now I am running low on time, so I am having to get out of my linear mindset and start parallel processing. So a long story short I need to grind and grind and grind (all the materials need to be crushed to a fine powder and dried). Luckily I bought a mortar and pistil (it be small with a capital t) with which to grind the cow dung and the clay. Before, I had a lovely flat grinding rock and everything, together with a smaller flat quartz to grind with. It was the talk of the town, or would have been if I was living at the beginning of the stone age. Not incredibly efficient, but I had no other means of doing it. I wish I could get my hands on a grinder of some sort, but alas, I am not in the right part of the world, nor do I have wheels to go somewhere to find one. Its probably best this way. Part of me says “Okay, everything can be done without machines just fine so in the spirit of time saving I should use a machine.” But if nothing else doing it by hand serves as a means of quality control. People will not have fancy grinders. But I can’t help think that I am even more primitive than the most rural person here. They would at least have a huge mortar and massive pistil to crush and pound. Sweat and toil that little bit less. Keep in mind it doesn’t take much to make me sweat.

In other news…oh wait there is no other news. I don’t get off the centre much. And by much I mean not at all. I went to get cow dung and soil once, but apart from that the opportunities are few and far between. With so many elephants around these days and no car to adorn as my armour, I can't go nowhere, I reckon. Some days I can not even run around the centre on account of the elephants. I did, however, go out with Jenn to watch Grevy’s zebra one afternoon. It was lovely. I slept in the car some. Watched the world’s leading expert on Hybrid Zebras do her thing some (ps. that’s Jenn …pretty crazy no?).

Anyway, I am off. Back to the ol’ grind.

Peace.