Wow, an actual vacation

Unbelieveably I am actually on vacation. These photos are the view that I had waking up this morning at 5:45 am with the resident family of swans passing by the house...I suppose that a vacation with kids tends to change the time structure of a standard vacation and 5:45 is just another day. The only hitch was that Aurora had a fever of 103.6 so that was a bit stressful. Thank god for Motrin, although the fever spiked again this evening hopefully it will break over night sometime. The day was good and started with low tide and me oystering before the time tide came back in. Sarah's grandmother lives on the Long Island sound and you can walk across the back yard and over the sea wall and end up in the water. One of my favorite things is to go out and collect a bunch of oysters and then suck them down for lunch. There really isn't much like eating an oyster literally right after coming out of the water. Some don't eat them in the summer months, or those months that don't have an "R" in them, but I couldn't taste the difference. I ended up with about two dozen oysters and a fat clam, which was a great pregame lunch to the BBQ that was scheduled for the evening. Hopefully Aurora will be feeling better in the morning, as we are planning on taking the ferry across from Port Jefferson to Bridgeport CT and thought she would love it. She has been watching the boats pass off the back patio and getting a huge kick out of it.
The studio has been popping lately, and I finished up some new cup forms before leaving. They are these flattened slab forms that have Nichrome wire rims...we'll see. I'll take a fresh look at them when I return and see how they sit with me. I do that with new forms sometimes just to try to get a new look at an idea that has usually been tainted by rattling around in my head for a while. It seems like everything has been happening at the same time lately and I have about six deadlines all coming due mid July. I can't believe it's July already, but the kiln overhaul maintenance is almost complete and I'll post some pictures of the new work soon. I always say that, but sometime shooting the work in process makes it a bit too solid. I enjoy looking at other pictures of work in process, but it makes it a bit too real for me when it's my own.

We head home tomorrow, and I'll get into the studio a bit in the next couple of days. Somewhere here I need to start scraping the house to get it ready for paint. We have anew baby sitter starting soon that will come and hang out with the kids for the day while I am getting work done in the studio. I can't work in short bursts so this may make it a tad easier to get some volume done. It will also help Sarah as she has had an even tougher time of getting things made. Word...I'll keep you posted.