Diabolical Clay

I know, it is a bit cheeky of me.

But in my defense, I am not talking about how to use your camera, I am talking about how to use your eyes.

You should click over and say nice things about my pumpkin.

The quick tutorial is called, Five minute photography for your blog.

I went to ring you the other night. I saw the lights were on in your house and I thought, I will just give mum a quick ring.

I hate it when that happens.

Today is My Mothers birthday, Mum would have been 68 today.

11/04/1945 – 24/06/2009

This blog post is nothing more than a desperate grab for sympathy, there is going to be wailing, whining, cries of WOE and possibly even a bit of begging.

Now that I have fully disclosed at the TOP of the article, all those readers who have been expecting witty words of wisdom have now been warned about the high probability of self obsessed sympathy grabs contained within. I have fully and transparently, *DISCLOSED MY INTENT DEANNA and now I can get right to the heart of the matter knowing that I have not tricked anyone into reading here.

Part One: WAILING.

Six weeks ago my hand decided to instigate industrial action and imposed a strict stop work policy. My head railed against this policy as important deadlines were looming but my hand didn’t care, it had declared itself CACTUS FUCTUS and was now in charge of all decisions relating to the work production schedule.

I ignored the stop work edict as my head was full of work that needed to be made and I knew the ideas would vanish and all the work would be lost.

My hand became increasingly militant in it’s enforcement of the stop work policy and we came to an impasse on the day when I could not pick up a coffee cup. So I took myself off to the doctor and had X-rays and did all the things you do when you are an adult and bits of your body stop working. I spoke to my doctor briefly on the phone yesterday and he said it wasn’t good news. I have severe degenerative arthritis in my wrist and thumb. My finger joints are a also bit iffy and I need to alter my work practices, sadly, my hand is cactus fuctus

Part Two WHINING:

I am a professional mud hardener, I work with my hands. There is a lot of hands on, hard physical work, that can not be avoided and the first step in making any pot is “wedging the clay.”

Wedging the clay is very similar to kneading dough and as dough must be kneaded, so clay must be wedged, or the pots wont rise and the bread cracks and I mix my metaphors and everything goes to shit because, CACTUS FUCTUS.

I can’t have a proper and sustained moan about my POOR CACTUS FUCTUS hand to my family because pfft what is a sore hand in the scheme of thing when your hips dislocate in bed overnight (The Spouse) your jaw makes an ominous “dislocation pending” clicking sound every time you eat anything (The Son) and your ribs move independently of themselves and your collarbone doesn’t like being near your collar (The daughter)

Oh I know they all made appropriate poor Mum sounds and here have some deep heat and oh do you want a pressure bandage Mum.

BUT it isn’t the same as the PROPER Sympathy I can get from you, my dear, dear internets.

Part Three BEGGING.

What do you do to ease the pain of arthritis? I am off to the physio to get a wrist brace made. I am currently using a home made job The Spouse suggested, which is a pressure bandage and a neoprene stubby holder and that is working well enough as a temporary measure. I already take fish oil and glucosamine tablets to keep my dodgy knee working properly. Heat packs give some relief as well. BUT I WANT YOUR MAGIC TRICKS. I need your home remedies.

How do you manage your arthritic cactus fuctus bits and pieces internet? How do you keep on working when bits of you go on strike? Did you grieve your previously usable body parts that now are a bit past their used by date? Did you cry a little bit?

And even though this artistically highlighted and sharpened to buggery, Xray shows my cactus fuctus hand in all it skeletal glory, I am forced to admit that I have quite elegant bones. Cactus Fuctus, they may be, but still rather Elegant.

*This blog post was brought to you by the dire need for bucket loads of sympathy.

Princess SnorklePants is my current name on twitter.

I like being Princess SnorklePants.

Why Princess SnorklePants I hear you ask?

The short answer is because the Internet is a ridiculous place and I don’t generally take myself or the Internet too seriously. Remembering if you will, that Klout regards me as an authority on Zombies, Chihuahuas, Crocs and Trombones.

The long answer is, that I had massive case of hurt feelings (again) and needed a way to cheer myself up after someone had called me a troll.

To deaden my fragile feelings I changed my name to Troll Queen Foale III and proceeded to faff about on twitter, posting arty photos of the undersides of bridges and talking about my comment policy on the blog.

Once the sting of the troll slur had receded, I then morphed into Princess SnorklePants, fulfilling a childhood ambition to be a princess when I grew up and tadaa due to the awesome power of the Internet I was able to become a princess.

Being Princess SnorklePants also enables me to swan about in public, telling people that I am THE QUEEN and asking small children if they have seen my missing Tiara. I really need to invest in a fold up wand that I can keep in my handbag so I can be the fairy queen as well. Do fairy Queens wear tiaras?

Long time readers here know that “The Spouse” has a serious disability: Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. A genetic disease, one that causes him all manner of problems, the most significant being chronic pain due to his hips, pelvis, shoulder and various vertebrae dislocating.

Have you ever dislocated anything Internet? I smashed my knee to smithereens in 1993 in a serious drinking accident. From 93-98 my knee used to dislocate, causing me to collapse onto the ground sobbing with the pain. One memorable dislocation occurred at 2 am when I was heavily pregnant and on my way to the outside loo IN THE RAIN. I landed in a puddle, where I lay like a glorious beached whale sobbing for The Spouse to come and help me up.

So yes. Dislocations, they hurt a bit.

Through the power of genetics, my children also have Ehlers Danlos Synrome. The level of pain my daughter Veronica deals with on a daily basis boggles my mind, so I try very hard not to think about it. My son used to have a cute little party trick that he would do just to make me growl at him. He would make a musical popping sound with his jaw as it subluxed. Now his jaw dislocates on him fully when he sneezes and all the “I told you this would happen” in the world will never ever fix his jaw. He is only eighteen, Internet.

Do you know how it feels as a mother to stand by and watch your children suffer excruciating pain all the fucking time and not be able to do a fucking thing about it? It is horrible internet, it is horrible.

To watch helplessly as my husband slides in and out of a black depression. To watch as my daughter struggles with Post Natal Depression after the birth of her gorgeous but seriously medically complicated third child. To listen as my son tells me that he couldn’t go outside today, because his anxiety attacks were so bad and could I please drive into the city to see him, as he would really like a hug please mum.

To do all this without my own mother here to tell me everything is going to be okay, that I am doing the right things that it will all be okay, is a bit hard internet. Actually sitting down and typing this out, it is very hard and I have forgotten where I was going with this post.

Oh that’s right.

Princess SnorklePants.

Knowing my own experience with depression,, as outlined above, is it any wonder that I came out vociferously and loudly voiced my disapproval of a poorly written blog post proclaiming that depression IS the new black?

I lobbed a hand grenade into twitter with three tweets (yes that is correct, only three tweets from me) and then I wandered off to talk about container deposit legislation and my experiences as a child in the seventies collecting cordial bottles, as they provided a well needed boost to childhood coffers. The discussion then returned to depression, which apparently the author of the blog post did not like and she promptly blocked me.

Oh dear. Blocked again. Poor Princess SnorklePants.

Over the course of the next few days there was much talk of dreadful bullies on twitter. Dreadful loud noisy bullies, with agendas instead of opinions.Remembering that after the initial tweets, I didn’t actually speak to the blogger in question, though my initial disapproval was a catalyst for some heated discussions that I did not actually participate in.

Passive aggressive blog posts popped up like mushrooms after a good rain. There was much wailing and wringing of hands, no-one let the truth get in the way of their righteous indignation and I am sure I heard some pundit ask, “Won’t somebody please just think of the children.”

BAD BAD Princess SnorklePants.

It gets very tiring. Very tiring indeed. After that champion of democracy, Anonymous, had emailed me and accused me of being a horrible, horrible bully who had no right to pick on and viciously attack poor defenseless bloggers, I decided to go back and screenshot my tweets. For posterity.

Ignoring rowdy villagers on a witch hunt is exhausting and so Princess SnorklePants morphed into Colin the Labradoodle.

If I am going to be accused of running with a PACK, well then I was going to be a LABRADOODLE.

Colin is a very nice Labradoodle, I have met him a couple of times and he is always pleased to see me. Colin doesn’t run with any packs but he does go to doggy daycare and for a time Colin was my twitter avatar. I enjoyed being Colin as I dealt with and diffused the hurt I felt at being labelled a bully by using humour.

Colin’s tagline on twitter was, “Leader of various packs. Loud Woofer. Labradoodles are the NEW BLACK”

I don’t think that people were very impressed with Colin, as the blockings, wailings and gnashing of collective teeth continued.

After a few days as Colin I morphed back into Princess SnorklePants and commenced the interrupted search for my lost tiara.

Princess SnorklePants is here to stay I think Internet. I met an acclaimed philosopher on the weekend and he called me Ma’am, which whilst not quite the proper Royal protocol was still quite funny. The silliness of my Princess persona enabled two people who would not otherwise talk, have a lighthearted conversation before returning to face the weightier matters that deep thinkers deal with every day.

And that, dear Internet is the story of how Princess SnorklePants came to be.

edited: I have now morphed back into plain old Kim as I sparked a bit of a trend and there are now, Queens and Baronesses, Ladies and Commanders everywhere I look. Trends, I sometimes set them.

Yesterday was the Foale Family Edition of the World’s Greatest Shave.  Veronica and her Father decided to cut all their hair off for charity and You, my dear internets came to the party and helped us raise over $1500 for the Leukemia Foundation.
Thankyou so very much for your generosity.

At the beginning of the shave everyone was very interested and there was much filming from multiple media devices.
Here we have an extreme close-up of one of the “action” shots

The clippers were a bit blunt and so The Shave took longer than we thought, a lot longer actually. So the children entertained themselves with a complicated game of chasings.

At the completion of the GREATEST SHAVE EVER, Father and daughter were happy.

Thanks to your generosity, Veronica has raised  $1245.00
The Spouse raised $330.00

Thank You very very much.

This morning I was writing an article and mid sentence the phone rang, it was my daughter Veronica, we speak on the phone every day, sometimes to the annoyance of our respective spouses, numerous times a day. The longer our conversation continued, the less chance I had of picking up where I had left off with my article. As baby Evelyn started to demand more of her Mother’s attention, Veronica and I said our temporary goodbyes and I returned to the computer.

My train of thought had been broken and I had lost all my sentences, they were good sentences as well Internet, possibly even GREAT sentences. So I saved the draft and started to write this post instead and as I write I am wondering where do all the lost sentences go?

Will I get them back do you think? If I have thought the thought, surely I should be able to retrieve it later on, or are thoughts like snowflakes, pretty and completely original but fleeting and irreplaceable?

Oh the thoughts I do think as I sit here daydreaming.

Today is Thursday and the intrepid Adriana Christianson sends out a reminder email every Thursday reminding me to write a post for the Mud Colony Blog.

Today I would like to share some photos of beautiful pots that make me smile every single time I use them.

This is a cup made by Malina Monks, I was priviledged to listen to a talk by Malina at the recent Woodfire Tas conference and afterwards I bought one of her cups and took her words to heart. Malina signs the bottom of her cups boldly, with her name, as she believes that the positive energy she receives from people who smile at the sight of her name as they are washing up her cups is a good thing. I believe this also and due to Malina’s influence I continue to sign my name boldly across the bottom of my work as well. This cup is my morning coffee cup.

This is my breakfast bowl, another woodfired bowl by a female artist whose name I can not remember. It is a lovely bowl and I have been known to carefully pack this bowl and take it with me on my travels, because breakfast is important.

This is my afternoon tea cup, I bought this wonderful Truly Southurst unicorn cup as my Christmas present to myself. It holds the perfect amount of tea and is just thick enough so that I don’t burn myself holding it. The unicorn makes me smile and also appeals to my inner fire horse very much, they nicker quietly to each other in the back of my mind.

This is my lunchtime salad bowl, made by me. The colours make me smile and also give me hope that I am moving away from the bleakness of spirit I have battled with since my mother died in 2009 and broke my heart.

The Spouse dislikes the fact that my work does not stack neatly in the cupboard, I think this stack looks pretty neat. The uneven edges of my bowls make the user think about the object they are holding, think about their relationship to the bowl and thus their relationship to the food contained within the bowl.

This is my newest favourite bowl, made by Sallee Warner. This small bowl cups perfectly in my hands and I bought it to use as an dessert bowl for myself. I have found myself using it as a drinking vessel as I love how the rounded rim feels on my lips. Even though I have only owned this little bowl for less than a week, it has already influenced my work as I am now making the rims on my cups even plumper and rounder, so that drinking from them becomes a more sensual experience.

If you feel like checking out a fantastic group of mud hardeners, professional and amateur, dabblers and obsessives, just click on the photo below and by the magic of the internet, you will be taken to to the Mud Colony Blog. If you dont want to use magical internetty dust to go and see potters, leave me a nice comment here instead and tell me where you think all the lost sentences go.

This is “The Spouse” Internet, this is a very recent photograph of him.

Yesterday, we were talking about the upcoming Great Shave Adventure,where our daughter Veronica is shaving off all her long hair for charity. I told The Spouse that Veronica wanted him to do it, meaning Veronica wanted him to shave her head for her. As apparently I shave heads like I am a gun shearer and apparently I vigorously channel my inner Jack Thompson when ever I have a pair of electric clippers nearby. I think that rumour was started by a very wriggly boy child of mine who wouldn’t sit still and just let his mother cut his damn hair.

But, I digress.

I am doing it, said the Spouse

Cutting Von’s hair?

No, I am doing the Shave with Veronica

Oh! Are you? Ok.

Why do you think I have been growing my hair?

Well I was a bit afraid to ask.

And that is how, Dear Internets, with twelve days to go, I am sitting here writing a post begging you to please sponsor my husband and support the Leukaemia Foundation in its important work.

I opened an email today from my daughter, the subject line was, “things that make me think of you”.

There weren’t any words in the email, only a photo.

A photo of a dead Praying Mantis.

A dead Praying Mantis whose belly was full of baby spiders.

My children send me photos of dead things.

I am winning at parenting.