The Transcendental Eclipse

Like much of the country, I spent Monday afternoon staring at the sun.

 

We have a cabin in northeast Vermont. Up there it’s referred to as a camp. Which is a synonym for shack. No running water and an outhouse. 

 

It’s in beautiful country and—despite having a difficult neighbor to the east—we love it. 

 

This year we especially loved it since it was in the bottom end of totality. We got 1 minute 38 seconds. If we’d driven thirty-seven miles north, we could have made over three minutes. But we were skittish.

 

Turns out we weren’t wrong, though we probably could have driven north and been just fine. We knew the back roads and many of the upcoming tourists did not. Near us there didn’t seem to be many people coming up for the day. Regardless, we didn’t try. We came up Saturday and returned on Tuesday. From what we understood from friends, this was the way to go. Some took twelve hours to get home.

 

Last time, in 2017, we were staying in Colorado Springs, many hours south of totality. We left at four in the morning, figuring to make it to Casper, Wyoming. We did not. We ended up stuck on the road about thirty miles south. Instead, we drove into a highway rest area and parked, along with a thousand other people. The toilets broke. People grumbled. But we were in totality and it was totally worth it.

 

Let’s be clear, any eclipse or portion thereof is wonderful. Seeing the sun carved in half by the Moon is terrific in and of itself. But totality is a different animal.

 

An eclipse takes a while—this one took about three hours from when the Moon first starts carving away until the time it  finally leaves the sun alone. Totality, when the Moon fully obscures the sun, is a tiny fraction of that. To me, it’s three hours of very interesting observation with a minute and half of transcendental ecstasy in the middle. (XKCD has a terrific graphic for this here.)

 

Total eclipses are a function of the Moon being close enough to the earth that it completely obscures the sun when it passes between them. In the distant past, when the Moon was much closer to the earth, total eclipses were much longer. The Moon is gradually moving away from the Earth. 50 million years ago, or so, the Moon moved out far enough to exactly cover the sun. In about 50 million years, total eclipses will be a thing of the past.

 

This year we had our neighbor yell at us when we pulled up next to the cabin. Then, the bed broke and we had to sleep on cots—only one of which really worked. Then, our friend Bill got stuck on Sunday when Gina Google misdirected him onto a road that is only open in the summer. My brother-in-law, Dan, got stuck on Monday the same day and we had to hurry to get him out before things started happening. My camera didn’t really focus properly—the picture above is a little blurry. Dan’s pinhole camera didn’t work as well as he would have liked.

 

But when totality hit and we saw Bailey’s Beads and the red and purple of prominences flying out into space, it didn’t matter. 

 

It was totally worth it.

 

Arts and Crafts V: Two Funeral Urns

About twenty years ago my parents died. First my father, after being treated for prostate cancer. Then, my mother, from a stroke. Through a strange set of circumstances, their cremated remains were on top of our piano until this year.

 

The story of why they remained there is a long one but has no place in this post. My parents were both veterans. During World War II, Dad was a retired Naval aviator and Mom was a WAC code clerk in the Pentagon. Mom had said she always wanted to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery but then, as I grew up, she quit saying that. I don’t know why but I suspect it was because Arlington filled up and no longer accepted the bodies of veterans except for special occasions. That’s how it rested until about four years ago.

 

At that time, I checked and found out that though bodies were no longer being accepted, cremated remains were and I had two on top of my piano. I passed the idea past my sister and after about a year of discussion, we decided to go ahead with it. Three years later—it took that long to get the documents together, apply, and be scheduled for an interment—we got a date. March 21, 2024. 

 

Mom’s urn was within the size limits but Dad’s was not. They were not very nice urns, anyway. I talked to the family and asked if I could build the urns for them. They said yes and I started.

 

The specifications were fairly simple: it had to fit inside of a 9-inch cube and hold the ashes of my parents. I had been through a similar situation with wood turning an urn with a friend and we’d already run into the situation where the result had been too small and we had to start over. I was not going to make that mistake. 

 

Just to make sure, I purchased two urns as a plan B.

 

The following is how I built them. They came out well but this is sort of like showing the ins and outs of a magic trick. So, if you like their picture up there and want to preserve the mystery, read no further.

 

I decided on a simple ceramic 9-inch cube for each of them, figuring it would shrink below the size limits. I settled on blue-green over black as the base. It seemed somber without being morose. I would use ½ inch slabs of clay “glued” together with slip. Finally, I would have small ¼ inch feet.

To this end, I first built a protourn, using the ½ inch slabs sans feet at a four-inch scale size. I liked the result but it seemed too dark. Also, the glaze ran a little bit. I resolved on the final product to use more blue-green on the outside. The protourn could be dipped in the glaze but the larger urns could not be. I would have to pour the glaze over the urns and then scrape off any excess glaze.

 

First, I had to layout and cut the slabs: six per urn. Five for the sides and one for the top. The bottom and top slabs were cut straight but the side slabs were cut with a bevel. This would prove a bit problematic later.

 

To keep the slabs straight as they dried to the point that I could assemble them, I dried them between sheets of dry wall loaned to me by my teacher, Cheska. Thank you, Cheska. Thank you for so many things. Drying took a bit less than a week.

Once they were dry enough, I assembled them. I did this by cross-hatching where the edges were to connect and then applied slip and pressed them together. There were some issues here. Fingerprints and indentations were left in the clay. I cleared much of them up but Cheska suggested I leave the remainder: they were my fingerprints in the urn of my parents. At this point, I trimmed as much as I could to make the surfaces flat and added the feet.

 

 

 

 

 

The process for making things in our studio goes something like this:

1. Make the raw clay product (greenware)
2. Let it dry to the right point.
3. Assemble and trim
4. Let it get bone dry
5. Bisque fire the clay (bisqueware)
6. Do any repair or sanding of the bisqueware
7. Apply glaze
8. Glaze fire
9. Any post glaze work

There was some warpage in the bisqueware. Unfortunately, I did not capture any images of the bisque product. I poured glaze, black first, then blue-green, on the sides and then the bottom. After that had dried, I tried to do the same for the interior. That just didn’t work. I ended up with far too much pour material on the outside which I had to scrape off. I did it differently on the second urn: I just painted the interior with black glaze.

 

At this point, the class went on break. I had scraped a great deal but it was too wet to do much. Cheska was in the studio during break and was kind enough to scrape off some more.

 

Then, the urns had to dry completely. If there had been any moisture from the glaze into the clay (bisque absorbs water) it might have exploded in the kiln. I did have a plan B for a reason.

 The result was... problematic. One of the panels had sprung away from the other and made a large crack.

 In addition, there was significant warpage between the lid and the chamber.

 

Finally, the glaze on one of the urns was too thick and dropped, making ugly pedestals. These, I would have to grind off. 

Cheska suggested several possible repairs for the crack. One was apoxie, a sandable epoxy product that was more like clay than putty. At least, so it said on the box. For the lid/chamber mismatch, I decided to seal the two with black beeswax. It would hide the warpage and blend in with the rest of the urn.

 

I had solutions for 2 of the three problems and a possible solution for the third, the crack.

 

I tried the crack repair first, thinking if that failed, there was no point in going further. Fortunately, it worked. I could see the repair but when I showed it to people who knew about the crack but hadn’t seen it, they couldn’t find it. There was a problem with sanding in that while apoxie could be sanded, it left streaks in the material giving a visible gray look. I covered that over with Sharpie.

After I ground down the bottom, there remained these pox pits (my word for them) that I found truly ugly. The apoxie had worked so well on the crack, I figured it would work on the bottom.

 

It didn’t. This was a schlimmbesserung: an improvement that makes things worse. Wendy suggested that I cover the bottom in black felt. I thought this was a good idea. I had planned on copying the label from the original urns to these new urns. Framing them with black felt might work.

It did. It was so successful that I wished I had left the ground surface without the apoxie.

 

Meanwhile, Wendy had been tackling the problem of the labels. She started with water decals and tried several brands. They didn’t print well. The one that did, curled up when it dried. She ended up using transparent vinyl decals. This worked well enough that one of the funeral people admired the “engraving” of the tops. We gracefully accepted the compliment.

 

The round image on Opal’s is the WAC service medal. Earl has Naval aviator wings.

 

At this point, we had a family Zoom meeting. I felt I needed family approval for this. To make a long story short, they approved.

 

Now, I had to seal them. Back to the protourn for a test. This was successful. But the warpage in the actual urns was greater than the protourn. Also, the wax I used for the test was not the wax I used for the final urns. (Both were from candle kits. I had trouble finding black beeswax any other way.)

I layered strips of the wax on the urn, using a heat gun to make it soft enough to adhere. When I had enough, I heated it nearly to melting and put the lid on top. Beeswax isn’t putty. There are only about fifteen seconds of malleability. After putting down the heat gun so it didn’t start a fire, that’s about seven seconds. When I was done, the wax was bulgy. Wendy has steady hands and she was kind enough to trim back the wax to a more attractive state. Then, I took the heat gun and softened out the cut marks.

 

They were done. Now, I just had to get them to DC.

 

We packed them up and drove down.

 

I have to say, I sweated every inch of this. They were done but they weren’t done until they were out of my hands and interred. We got to ANC and I carried the box in, thinking I would carry Earl and Opal the last mile. Inside, I took them out of the box and put them on a couch in one of ANC’s family rooms. There, pictures were taken and they were approved by the funeral liaison—a lovely man named Bill.

 

Who then informed me they needed to go back to our car and wait for him.

 

My sister and I each carried one of the urns back to my car. There, we waited for Bill to meet us. Once he drove up, we had to put Earl and Opal in his car. (This last mile was getting pretty long.)

 

We followed Bill to the site of the ceremony. There, a representative of the Army and a representative of the Navy took the urns to the site and the ceremony was held. I’ll talk about that sometime but not today.

 

Then, we had to carry the urns to the actual gravesite. This one my sister and I delegated. My son carried Opal and my sister’s daughter carried Earl. They were just as nervous as we had been. In the back of my mind, I remembered that there in the back of the car was still my Plan B. Just in case.

The urns were put on the ground for the benediction. And we were done.

We did not stay to see the urns actually put into the ground. There was no ceremony for that and, frankly, if there was an accident, I didn’t want to see it. Instead, we went out for dinner. 

 

Thanks to Wendy, Ben, Cheska, Hana, the whole Hopkinton Center for the Arts ceramics gang.  I couldn't have done it without your help and support.

That was last week and even now, I can’t really believe they’re not in the front room holding down the piano. 

 

Still, I think they approve.

 

 

State of the Farm, March 2024

I like this time of the year. We’re just starting to pull together what we’ll be doing this year. We’ve been going over seed catalogs and looking at plants since the first of the year.

 

But, even more than that, there’s a certain blasted look to a New England landscape after winter. The snow has flattened the grass. The rot has settled into the garden where we didn’t prepare in the fall. This is the time of year where we start to remedy all that. In that blasted landscape lies infinite possibility.

 

In the two pictures above, the first is a before where I pulled out an old arbor—visible as a black structure—and cleaned up a pair of grape vines. The after picture is the resulting new arbor made from cattle fencing panels.

 

We’ve been doing a lot with these panels for a few reasons. For one, there are a lot of things we like to grow that benefit from trellising and cattle fencing panels make good trellises. Last year we grew beans, cucumbers, and melons on them with good success. 

 

For another, we’re moving away from perhaps the more attractive wooden trellises and arbors in favor of metal. This is mainly because metal structures outlast wooden ones. The wooden arbor in the background is about twenty years old and  needs to be replaced. The cattle fence arbor in the foreground of the second picture should outlive me. 

 

We’ve decided against doing runner beans again. They grew well but I’m not happy with the taste. We’ll replace them with more pole beans. In addition, we want to grow pinto beans. We found a source of good beans with Baer’s Best Beans. Pintos can be raised as either a half-pole bean or a bush bean. We tried them last year without success but I think that was because I asked too much from the plantings inside the arbors. 

 

We’re going to try a succession planting with early spring peas, followed by beans, followed by fall peas. I very much like pea soup. This will give the trellis double duty.

 

We’re going to try sugar beets again—in spite of the failure from last year. We tried to make sure from them but the impurities in extract made it hard to manage temperature. I ended up with a taffy that tasted like grass. Not great. This year we’re going to attempt to filter the syrup and see if that helps.

 

We have two new fruit plants, a goji berry and a new kiwi. We’re still talking about where to put them. Turns out Wendy had ordered a new kiwi for the kiwi/grape arbor and I’d forgotten when I picked one up at Tractor Supply. The goji berry will replace a Manchurian apricot that wasn’t doing well.

 

We finally processed the medlars we harvested last year. In previous years we would get one or two. But last year we got more than a dozen. We tried to turn them into jam but the temperature got away from us and they ended up being a very tasty soft candy—more of a taffy, really. Maybe this fall we can bit the bullet and make hard candy out of them.

 

One experiment we’re trying is goldberries or groundcherries. These are a member of the tomatillo family only much, much sweeter. More like a berry than a tomatillo. We had some this winter from the market and they were quite tasty. More to try.

 

One thing we’ve been trying to do is move away from hybrid seeds. Hybrid seeds come from cross breeding two different varieties. Often, the result is quite strong but they do not breed true in the second generation and consequently are no good for seed saving—which we are trying to do. Heirloom seeds are usually not hybrid.  We have to be careful, though. The reason people generate hybrid seeds is they often have good disease resistance or other valuable qualities the varieties themselves don’t have. It doesn’t make sense to get a nice heirloom cabbage only to see it eaten by pests because it has no resistance.

 

The alternative is called open pollinated seeds. This means that they breed true when pollinated with each other. But that has its own issues. If you plant one open pollinated variety of corn next to a second open pollinated variety, the result can be a hybrid—defeating the reason you started this confusion. We have a couple of varieties of the same vegetable and we’ll have to plant them far enough apart the wind and insects don’t cross between them.

 

We invested again in more Birdie Beds this year. Two more big ones to replace a long raised bed that has finally rotted away. We like them a lot for many of the same reasons we’ve been moving to metal trellises and arbors. In addition, they are tall enough I don’t have to bend down to work them. I’m getting less flexible every year.

 

That’s the news. Now, it’s time to go out there and start preparing (ripping apart) the garden for spring.