@#$%!

This is a failure. I'll have to throw it away and remake it. I wasted way too much time on it. When I tried to fix it,the humidity made the clay too gooey. I should have known.
The weather is beautiful outside and I have the windows open. Just enough moisture in the air to make things difficult. Damn!
This will be pack rat. Next will be rat pack.

Two Funny Quotes

"My apartment is infested with koala bears. Cutest infestation ever."
- Mitch Hedberg

"The eyes are the nipples of the face."
-beauty advice from the main character in "House Bunny"

Persian Rugs

These are bases I plan to use . They have photo transfers on the clay. I used t shirt transfer paper and my printer. I really like the effect. I think I'll remake my genie coming out of a lamp. I was wishing I could do something like this when I made it last year. I didn't know about this process last year. I would have used it if I had known.

Many Elephants

Well, I sold an elephant in just a few hours.
Things are looking up. I'm thinking of sticking to elephants for a couple of days. These are pink elephants. Baking a glass makes me nervous, but apparently it's no problem. I could make white elephants and Republican elephants. Ooh! I just thought of one of my favorite childhood stories. "How the Elephant Got It's Trunk" by Rudyard Kipling.
Yeah!

A Thousand Clowns

I'm working on a clown car because I like the words. There is a speech about them in "A Thousand Clowns", which is a movie I liked a lot when I was young, but I noticed that it didn't age well to me. It had a lot of great lines, though.

Athens

The Parthenon took my breath away.
The first picture is a view of the Parthenon and Acropolis from our hotel. The next morning Jim and I said goodbye and thank you to Giorgios. With map in hand we set off for the subway to the Parthenon, remembering Giorgios' admonition,"Al Capone", which Ilias translated as meaning that Athens is full of thieves. Be careful.

The Parthenon has stood for two thousand five hundred years. It was in fair shape for two thousand years until it was used as an ammunition dump by the Turks and exploded by the Venetians in 1687.
In 1806 the Earl of Elgin vandalized it and sent several sculptural parts to England where they reside to this day.(yeah, I know there's more to it, but I think they should give them back to Greece) I could go on and on, but I won't.
All I can say is that the Parthenon was the perfect ending to a most marvelous trip.

Home of the Gods

The first picture is of the sun setting over Mt. Olympus. I took it from the beach house on Kassandra. I was thrilled when Ilias pointed it out to me. When I was a girl I was really into Greek mythology.
Giorgos drove us five hundred miles from Thessaloniki to Athens. He averaged over a hundred miles an hour. I'm not used to that. No conversation, since we didn't speak Greek, but I saw the signs that said Mt. Olympus. I said,"Oh! Mt. Olympus!" Giorgos nodded and he took the next exit and we zig zagged up the mountain to a small village. This is a picture from the village.We walked around and Giorgos drank from a pipe embedded in a rock and gestured that I do the same. I figured ,what the hell, I've eaten things with tentacles this week, water from Mt. Olympus sounds special. I'll take a chance. It was fine. More than fine. Wonderful.

Barbie & the Manatees

Someone asked me to remake my "Saving Manatees" piece. I wanted to print the label because my handwriting is poor. The ink on my printer was going out so we went to Walgreens. They advertised refilling ink cartridges. They were unable to do it so now I have no ink. I'll have to call on Molly to write it when she gets up.
The dog is going to Greece as part of a gift box for Giorgio's family. She is Barbie the dog, who his daughters named after Barbie doll. House dogs aren't popular in Greece. I felt sorry for her until we went to the beach house and she ran free and played with all the other dogs there. It's kind of like dogs were here years ago. They didn't come in the house, but no one minded when they ran loose.
Here in the suburbs it's a big deal if a dog is loose. The dog catcher is called. I had to get Truman from the pound before we got a fence.

More Greece

Pictures of Greece

Honey, I'm Home!

I've never been interested in taking a cruise or having a little cabin up north. I'm back from the most interesting trip I will probably ever have. Jim and I flew to Thesalonikis, Greece to wonderful hosts who took us to their beach house on the peninsula of Kasandra, showed me how to make frappes and Greek salad, loaded the fridge and loaned us a car. Then they left. We spent nearly a week knocking around the peninsula. The Greek alphabet is nothing like ours. It was like we were illiterate and dyslexic. The English-like spellings on the map were often not what were on the roadsigns. This compass from our map gives an idea of how lost we would be if it mattered. The peninsula wasn't large so we didn't worry if we didn't know just where we were. Beautiful, just beautiful!
More later.