JD and I signed the lease and got keys yesterday for the house that is so far called the Outpost. I think JD might prefer a different name, but nothing's come up yet, so I think it will probably stick, with a full name of something like The Nameless Outpost What Could't Be Named (cf. The Evil Midnight Bomber (What Bombs at Midnight)). We move in Sunday, but since we've got it starting tomorrow, I'll probably start moving some things over to make Sunday easier.
Oh, hey. Your cell phone records are for sale.
On Tuesday I passed the one-year mark at the current job. Still the best job I've ever had. I'm starting to break stuff again this week, which is good: if you're not breaking anything in the interim, you're probably not creating anything interesting.
My first ceramics class run by the Palo Alto Adult School was tonight. The teacher is odd even by my standards, but once we started working on the wheel and I watched him talking to people, I started to think he's a better teacher than when he was just talking. (There was a lot of talking. Always is at the beginning of these things.) In my past experiences with ceramics, people are reluctant to fire things in the kiln: kiln time and space are at a premium, I guess. According to this guy, his job is to fill up the sizable gas kiln (roughly the size of a closet) with as much stuff as possible, so my two decent-looking pots, provided they dry okay, will get fired. I'll have pictures as soon as I see them, of course. Hopefully they won't explode.
I have a decent knack for making things with my hands, I guess. I'm always so tied up in ephemera, like thought (writing and programming) or music (singing and guitar), that I haven't spent a whole lot of my life crafting real physical objects. It's a very different process, and while I do apply a certain standard level of obsessive correction, imperfection lends a beauty to physical crafts that it does not to music, writing, or programming. The side of one of my pots has a marvelous lined finish from the smooth curves of my fingers--except for the finger-smudges where I picked it up off the wheel. Mistakes in music jar the ear; mistakes in software render it useless; mistakes in writing, constructing awkwardly a sentence, disturbing the flow of literary pulchritude with a word poorly-chosen, or rambling on, thereby testing the patience of a reader...you see my point. Visual art needs a certain amount of structure, but nothing like what I'm used to.
It's very...grounding.