Sunday, May 12

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for:

Being able to let my husband and his parents go one way, while I did a day that was more or less a normal day for me. Then, we still all had supper together and played some cribbage, and that was a good amount of socializing.

For my Mom. She's still around, still pretty sharp, and I don't see her a lot but I talk to her on the phone a lot.

That my husband could be with his Mom today. I don't know when the last time was that he was with her for Mother's day (and her birthday a few days ago).

A good ride on River. It was just us in the arena, which is good for him sometimes. Riding with other horses around all the time can be a crutch.

Seeing my barn ally. She's going to be moving her horse soon. She will not tolerate the issues with poor quality hay that we've been having at this barn, and I can't blame her. I am thinking of checking out the barn she is moving to; it's worth consideration.

Some items at the pottery studio were finished, and the mugs especially are amazing. Right now, they are candidates for wedding gifts.

For the ability to recycle clay from the studio. When people trim a piece and have a pile of clay shavings, or have something happen to a piece like crack irreparably before it's fired, or find a dried out ball of clay, they put it all in a big container, where it gets soaked until it is mud again. You can put it on a plaster block which takes out excess water, and leaves you with a sheet of workable clay. It's a pain to work it back to an even consistency (there's always lumps), and most people don't bother with it. Anyone in the studio can take clay from this container to recycle, but it's mostly me. I'm so grateful, because it ends up being huge amounts of clay. It makes it easier for me to throw a lot of pottery, and big pieces, because I'm not rationing myself or freaking out at how much it costs per piece.

One of the things my husband did with his parents was to take them to the mushroom growing place that we went to a few months ago. They enjoyed themselves, and my husband brought home two giant bags of the nearly spent mushroom material (a bag of hemp fiber infused with spores, and they get tired, but this should still produce a few mushrooms and then will still make good mulch).