Sixtieth weight progress report

This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015.

 

 

Over the past year, I’ve lost about 7 pounds, most of it in the first half of the year. I’d like to lose another 5–10 pounds this year.

I’m still about 3 pounds above my immediately pre-pandemic weight, but I’m holding the weight more stable than I was doing then.

I’ve cycled about 1455 miles in 2023 (4 miles a day), about half of that in the past 4 months (5.84 miles/day).  My exercise has been reduced somewhat for 14 December 2023—29 January 2024, because I’m not cycling to classes at Cabrillo College during break. I will be cycling again next semester, but the new bus schedules reduce the time savings of bicycling. I might take the bus in rainy weather (though I worry a bit about picking up respiratory infections—buses tend to be full of people with coughs and sneezes in bad weather).

During break I’m taking a few short, fast walks up the Laurent St hill (Escalona to Moore—2 or 3 repetitions at a time) in preparation for a stress ECG done on a treadmill. I want to be able to walk fast enough to get my heartbeat up near my maximum heart rate during the test, but most of my aerobic exercise has been bicycling. Because bicycling exercises muscles differently than walking up an incline, I’m not sure my walking muscles can sustain maximal cardiac effort.  So far, I’ve not been able to walk fast enough to get my heart rate over 156 bpm, which I think is considerably short of my maximum heart rate.  I may have to try jogging up the hill.

Hand throwing

In Glaze tests, I provided pictures of several of the piece I got back last week, but I did not include the hand-built and thrown pots.  There were not very many—I’ve not been very successful with my throwing and trimming in this class, partly because I have been spending a lot of time playing with the glazes. Here are the 4 pots I got back on Tuesday:

This blue bowl is still a little too thick and clunky, but the noxema blue glaze rescues it a little.

The inside was done with shiny milky white.

Only a little of the shiny milky white dripped on the outside, but I rather like the combination of blue and white.

This handbuilt tray was just dipped in shiny milky white.

Because the bottom was flat (no foot), it was not glazed, but painted with black iron oxide before waxing.

This is one of my better attempts on the wheel. The walls are still a bit thick, but the base and foot are a decent shape. The cup is a decent size and shape for drinking Japanese tea.

I put shiny milky white on the inside and painted the outside with Western’s papaya gloss. I probably should have done another layer of papaya gloss, as the bravo buff clay shows through in spots.

The inside of the orange cup shows a good glazing with the shiny milky white.

This small bowl has shiny milky white on the inside and robin’s-egg blue on the outside. The lighting here does not do the outside justice.

The color rendition of this picture of the bottom of the bowl shows the robin’s-egg blue more accurately. It also shows that I failed to dip the bottom of the pot properly into the glaze. A second dip was probably needed, as the bravo buff shows through in many places.

The inside of the bowl is a decent white, with none of the robin’s egg intruding. I probably needed to give it another coat of white, because the bravo buff clay shows through, particular on the rim.

Glaze tests

This is another update to Ceramics update.  I’ve done a number of the little dishes shown there as glazing experiments, and I finally got them all back (except for the pieces I glazed on the last day of class—I won’t get those back until next Thursday, Dec 21).  I did no work with wet clay on the last day of class—just show-and-tell on my glazed pieces, glazing the last of my bisqueware, and doing a lot of cleanup in the studio (we try to stay welcome in the high-school studio by leaving the studio cleaner than we find it—especially at the end of each semester).

I am now using the slab roller to make an initial slab about 7mm thick that is cut out with my circular cutter and then pressed in the mold. The slightly thicker slab seems to work better than the 6mm thickness I got with the rolling pin and sticks. Scraping the slab with the edge of a credit card to remove the canvas texture from the slab roller improves the impression of the mold. I’ve also gotten better at using the corn starch as a mold release (putting it on both the mold and the clay circles), so the clay is not sticking much to the mold.

Here are the little tea-ball holders with information about the glazing:

These 4 were dipped in “Noxema blue”, a glaze who color comes from cobalt. Cobalt blues are one of my favorite pottery colors.

Here are the tops of the same 4 tea-ball holders.

I also did 4 that I dipped half in shiny milk white, then the other half in Noxema blue, with only a small overlap

Here are the tops of the dishes in the previous picture.

I bought a commercial glaze at Phoenix Ceramic Supply: Papaya gloss from Western Ceramic Colors. I was not sure how it would come out on Bravo buff clay, as the samples at Phoenix were all done on Danish white. Glaze info in the next caption.

All four have iron oxide painted on the bottom before waxing. The two on the left were painted with the papaya gloss. The bottom right was dipped in shiny milky white before being painted with papaya gloss. The top right was dipped halfway in shiny milky white, then the other half painted with papaya gloss. The papaya gloss does give the bright orange color I was hoping for.

I made several more half-and-half dishes. All had the bottoms painted with black iron oxide, then they were dipped half way in another glaze. Clockwise from the top left we have woo yellow, floating blue, tasty purple, and candy red, with black beauty in the center.

I think that all these glazes worked, except the woo yellow, which is a matte glaze, not a shiny one, and the effect next to the shiny milky white is not really showing it at its best.

This dish was dipped in iron oxide (before waxing the bottom) then in shiny milky white.

As seen from the top, the effect is not really what I was hoping for, looking dirty rather than giving a good contrast between the oxide and the white.

The bottoms were painted with black iron oxide (though the bottom two got only a little flowed into the stamped hallmarks). The two on top both had cobalt carbonate painted around the rim on the outside (way too much) and were dipped half in mulberry and half in noxema blue. The bottom right is half tasty purple and half noxema blue. The bottom left is tasty purple, noxema blue, and shiny milky white, overlapping.

The tops show spillover from the cobalt carbonate painting. I like both the bottom ones, with the overlap of shiny milky white and noxema blue being particularly nice.

Again the top two had (too much) cobalt carbonate painted on the rim on the outside. Then dipped half in mulberry, half in shiny milky white. The bottom piece is half tasty purple and half robin’s egg blue.

The tops look better than the bottoms, because they don’t have the excessive cobalt carbonate.

I also wanted to try some browns. Again all the bottoms were painted with varying amounts of black iron oxide, then the dishes dipped halfway in shiny milky white. The top two were then dipped in eggshell and the bottom two in Ohata.

The eggshell does not really show up over the shiny milky white, coming out almost the color of the underlying bravo buff clay, but the ohata blends well with the white.

Several of the dishes have flaws on the outside, near the foot, because one of the other students, when cleaning, accidentally knocked the mold onto the floor, and part of the center insert was chipped. I’m thinking of redoing the bottom mold to have the center plug extend to the first ring on the outside, rather than ending on the foot. If I do that, I’ll also make the foot a little larger, though probably not enough to allow me to glaze the bottom of the dishes (except maybe in the hallmarks).

Acting update for November 2023

Continuing my updates from Acting update for October 2023, which was about a month ago, I’ll try to bring people up to date on what I’ve been doing in my new acting hobby.

• I’ve been rehearsing Hamlet’s scene with the Gravedigger for my community-college intro acting course at Cabrillo College. The Hamlet is fairly young and very busy. We’re doing ok on the scene, but we have a rehearsal scheduled for tomorrow, and we have our showcase Monday night.
• I’ll also be doing a monologue at the showcase (the one from The Worker by Walter Wykes).  The acting teacher suggested cutting a couple of lines, so I’ll have to practice that monologue some more this weekend.
• The cast of The Artist had a pretty long break (a full month) but has started rehearsing in my living room again (three more rehearsals so far).  The play is getting pretty good, but we have a problem—the running time for the best run-through so far was 16 minutes (and we are supposed to be 10 minutes).  By rushing a bit, we got it down to 13 minutes, but the director is going to contact the author to see if we can cut a line here or there.  The hardest thing may be getting the sound cues right—one of the character is going to have entirely pre-recorded lines played as sound cues (not my character, luckily). So far we have had 13 hours of rehearsal for this 10-minute play, and I suspect we’ll have another 10–20 hours of rehearsal. I had not anticipated a 150:1 ratio of rehearsal to run time, but the rehearsals are fun, so I don’t mind.
• The radio-acting workshop ended on Dec 4, and I’ve only gotten the first of my niece Sari’s children’s books (the Robotastic! series) finished and released at https://youtu.be/4gpa6-oQ3xk
• I’ve joined an online reading group: the Shakespeare Online Repertory Theatre, which meets on Discord (audio only—not even Zoom talking heads).  Last Saturday we read Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and I read the parts of Chebutykin and Ferapont (though I missed Ferapont’s first scene, because I did not know I had been assigned him).  I’m the oldest in the group (by about 25 years, I think), but the quality of the reading was much higher than in the Saturday Shakespeare group I’ve read  with in the past.  I had a lot of technical difficulties—first Discord under the old version of Chrome that is all I can run on my old Mac would not recognize my mic (or even the internal mic), so I had to download the Discord app at the last minute (missing the discussion of how to pronounce the Russian names). Then at the end of Act II (just before our intermission), I lost internet connectivity.  As I panicked (power cycling everything), my wife reminded me that I could set up a hot spot with my phone, so I did that and got back just a few minutes into Act III.  We restarted Act III, since I was not the only person having trouble with their computer, and the phone worked fine as a hot spot (only using about 79MB of data for two hours, so only costing about 79¢). It turned out that a car had crashed into a power pole, taking out electricity for half the city for about 2 hours, including the other end of the radio link that connects me to the internet.  I thought that CruzIO had put in generator backup for the radio connection, but apparently it isn’t working.

Coming up

• This weekend I’ll be reading Malvolio in Twelfth Night with Shakespeare Online Repertory Theatre.  We use the Folger edition, which is convenient, as the text (minus the notes) is available free online at https://shakespeare.folger.edu/ Also, there is a very useful read-aloud tool at https://www.bardbase.com/ that uses the Folger text.
• In the Theater Arts 10A class at Cabrillo, we have the showcase on Monday Dec 11 in the black-box theater (a small space at the right end of the lobby for the Crocker Theater).  After that we just have a “final exam” slot, where we’ll be turning in our reflections on the course.
• I’ll be going to see Macbeth on Dec 29 at the Broadway Playhouse—the same production I saw this summer, but this time I’ll go with my wife and my son. The woman playing Macbeth is also performing in The Artist, as well as in another of the 8 tens @8 plays.
• The 8 tens @8 are coming up January 19–Feb 24, and The Artist is scheduled as the second play of Part 2. I’ve transferred the dates on the ticketing calendar (https://ci.ovationtix.com/35410) to my personal calendar, but I haven’t bought tickets yet—I’ll probably get tickets for late in the run, when all the plays should be running smoothly.  I’ve no idea how the other 15 plays are going, but the one I’m in seems to be shaping up nicely.
• I’ve become one of the “board” for the Saturday Shakespeare group that used to meet in Aptos and now meets on Zoom.  The plays this year are
  • Pericles: Jan. 20, 27, Feb. 3, 10, 17.
  • Hamlet: Apr. 20, 27, May, 4, 11, 18.
  • Much Ado about Nothing: Oct. 5, 12, 19, 26, Nov. 2.