Rolling On One

Matt wants to sell me his old Nikon D70 digital single-lens reflex camera for a wildlife viewing trip in the near future. The big advantages are that it responds much more quickly to the shutter button than the camera I have now (in other words, you take a picture of what you see, not what you saw half a second ago — which is a long time when you’re talking about a bird or a person’s expression) and that it has a burst mode, allowing it to take three pictures a second so you can get something from a rapidly changing situation or pose.

I took it up Hacker’s Hill last Saturday. Before we got to Mayberry Hill Road we saw a flock of about 18 turkeys crossing the street, and I tried to get a picture; but at that point I wasn’t the least bit familiar with the camera, and the birds were way out in the woods before I could do anything.

I did get a couple of pictures of two, well, shrines I guess they are, on the way up the hill —

— and the view to Mount Washington from the top —

On Sunday we walked out the longest trail that Anne and Matt had made, which includes two bridges, or at least boardwalks, over swampy spots. I carried the camera for what I expected to be most of an hour’s walk to see how heavy it was to carry. It wasn’t a problem. Here are the bridges —

— and here, to test the close up capabilities, is one of the fir seedlings we planted this spring:

In The Music Man, “Professor” Harold Hill pretends that he has a new way of teaching how to play musical instruments, “the think system”. You have to think of what you want to play, and you can play it. Of course the audience knows it’s a scam, and when he finally has to get the school band to perform in public the first time, he crosses all his fingers, exhorts the kids, “Think!!” and launches into the concert, fully expecting to be tarred and feathered when the parents realize he hasn’t taught them anything; but “the think system” does something, and enough music comes out of the cacaphony that the parents are delighted.

I’m here to say yes, the only way I can get difficult passages out of the trumpet is to concentrate on each note and think of what I want to hear. It’s hard to think of fast music, I mean to think accurately of every single note, as fast as you want to play it. For me, the thinking is as hard as moving my fingers correctly. It’s not thinking of where the fingers go, it’s thinking of the sound I want to produce that matters. I don’t mean to say that thinking is enough; I’ve been working on those difficult passages for a year or a year and a half and still can’t play them as quickly or cleanly as I want to; but without the thinking there’s no chance at all.

Raku is a type of pottery produced by a traditional Japanese firing process. Actually, the Raku family has strong feelings about the name, and feels that for fifteen generations they have been the only people producing real Raku ware; but in most of the world, the term is generic.

To make most pottery, you form a shape out of wet clay, let it dry, fire it in a kiln to make the piece permanent, let it cool gradually, cover it (or the front side of it) with a liquid glaze, let that dry, fire it again to melt the glaze and bond it with the clay body, and let it cool gradually. The raku
process differs at the end of the glaze firing. Instead of letting the glazed piece cool gradually, you put it in a container of combustible material, close the container, let the fire in that container burn itself out, and cool the piece relatively quickly. A special clay is required to resist the rapid temperature changes of this process, and the results are highly variable — which made the traditional raku ware prized by masters of the Japanese tea ceremony. In fact, the story is that the person who developed the tea ceremony went to the leading ceramic artist of the time, asked for something with a special handmade look, and got the first raku piece (the artist was given that family name as an honor later.)

We didn’t make teacups at the Wildacres raku workshop. In order to get the work done in the few days we had, instructor Gary Lee limited our work to plaques. His assistant, Yolanda, rolled balls of clay out into quarter-inch-thick slabs with a slab roller, three slabs for each workshop participant. We arranged our natural material on the slabs, put them through the slab roller again to press the material firmly into the clay and leave a smooth top surface, and picked the material carefully out of the clay. We painted the edges of the slabs with a wax resist so they would dry without much warping and left the nature-printed slabs to dry. Gary did a sample raku firing in the afternoon, but we’ll save the description for later. That was all for Tuesday, but just the beginning of the fun.

Gary and Yolanda dried the pieces in a cabinet heated with light bulbs and fired them. By Thursday we had our bisque ware, the once-fired ceramic somewhat similar to a clay flowerpot (except that we were working with a white clay.) It was time to decide on how we wanted to finish the pieces. The choices were either to paint the piece with a colored underglaze, coat it with a clear glaze, and end up with a crackle finish, or to use a glaze that would get a metallic luster that can only be produced in the chemistry of the smoky raku process.

Underglaze is a material that you use a lot like water color paint. It thins and washes off with water. Different colors of underglaze can be mixed to produced subtle shading, although the color that shows through a glaze may be a little different from the color of the liquid underglaze. To get a crackle finish, we were going to spray the red-hot piece with water to cool the molten glaze quickly and make it crack; some of the smoke in the raku firing vessel would fill the cracks, making them much more visible than a normal crackled glaze. Painting underglaze in the space left by every frond of the fern I had printed was by far the slowest part of the entire process.

The luster glazes rely on a chemical process called reduction, which is the removal of oxygen from a chemical compound. It happens during the smelting of metal. In our raku firing, the soot produced by burning newspaper has a stronger affinity for the oxygen in copper oxide in the glaze than the copper does, which makes the glaze red or copper-colored rather than green. These two pieces were glazed with the same glaze, but the one on the right wasn’t hot enough when it went into the smoke-firing vessel, and didn’t get reduced:

The glazes were applied by pouring them on the piece. To prevent the luster glaze from filling the nature-printed areas, we could paint those areas with wax resist. The wax resist would burn out in the kiln; in fact, if we had missed any of the natural material we had pressed into the clay in the first place, it would have burned out in the bisque firing.

We started the raku firings on Friday evening and did most of them on Saturday. There was a special kiln for the process, with a cage of insulation that could be lifted by a counterweighted pulley arrangement so the fired pieces could be removed easily.

Three pieces could fit in at a time. We filled metal trash barrels with newspaper torn into strips. When the kiln reached a temperature of about 1800 degrees F (a self-cleaning oven doesn’t get above about 8 or 900 degrees)…

it was time to open it.

The pieces with the luster glazes had to be handled first. Someone wearing heavy gloves (that was me, for my pieces!) reached long tongs into the kiln, picked up the glowing piece, and put it into a trash barrel. The newspaper burst into flames!

The lid went on the barrel, and we moved on to the next piece. There wasn’t so much rush for the pieces with clear glaze. The person who picked them out of the kiln could hold them until they stopped glowing, and someone else sprayed them with water.

Though not glowing, the pieces were still hot enough to make the sprayer’s hands uncomfortably hot — and plenty hot to ignite the newspaper when they went in their trash barrels.

After fifteen or twenty minutes we could take the pieces out of the barrels, let them cool in the air, and then wash off the soot. And there we were, raku! (Did I mention that this process is very rough on the pieces? Several pieces, including the one of mine, below, with the fern that had taken so long to underglaze, broke during the firing or cooling.)

We spent the night at the La Quinta motel in Bristol, Virginia (and had supper on the 1st at the Kobe Japanese steak house, sort of a Benihana wannabe, across the interstate from the motel) and managed to find the bi-state main street:

Tennessee on the left, Virginia on the right, state line on the yellow line in the middle.

We went into a pawnshop that was in a former Woolworth store and had a real Woolworth lunch counter — very likely the site of one or more lunch counter sit-ins during the civil rights struggle era, and certainly similar to many such.

Heading south from town we passed the Bristol (TN! I said south) Speedway, which sounded familiar from glancing at sports pages — I’m sure some Nascar people have been in the lead because of winning at Bristol — and then followed the GPS’s directions off the main highway onto some county roads that led up over the mountains into North Carolina. It looked as though we had lots of time. In Spruce Pine NC we stopped for lunch in a cafe that felt just like trendy cafes in places like Northampton MA or Brunswick ME, and went into a stationery store that was a lot like non-Staples stationery stores, except that their stock “No Trespassing” sign said “or burl digging” in addition to “no hunting.”

We stopped at the mineral museum next to the Blue Ridge Parkway, missed the entrance to the parkway and drove a couple of miles out of our way along a very winding road (route 226 A; trucks are discouraged from using it, follow 226 proper) and a couple of miles back, and eventually followed the proper directions to Wildacres. Even after all that, we were an hour before checkin time.

I installed a beta version of the Google Chrome browser for Mac the other day. I forget just where I found it, but it was probably linked from something linked from MacHeist which Charley mentioned on his blog. At any rate, while looking through the Help page I ran across a page of Javascript benchmarks.

When I looked at that page in Chrome, I got something like

Score: 3696

Richards: 3663

Delta Blue: 3875

Crypto: 3224

RayTrace: 5585

EarleyBoyer: 6534

RegExp: 1026

Splay: 5499

The latest Safari, which I just downloaded from Apple Software Update, 4.0.4 (5531.21.10) has

Score: 2068

Richards: 2530

DeltaBlue: 2154

Crypto: 2154

RayTrace: 3844

EarleyBoyer: 3085

RegExp: 1024

Splay: 1134

Firefox 3.5.5 shows

Score: 318

Richards: 1270

DeltaBlue: 83.4

Crypto: 784

RayTrace: 189

EarleyBoyer: 298

RegExp: 178

Splay: 400

Does that mean that Chrome is about half again as fast at processing Javascript as Safari, and ten times as fast as Firefox??

Our main sighstseeing stop today was Natural Bridge off I-81 about an hour south of where we spent the night. We weren’t sure we were going to stop until we got right there, because it was raining on and off along the way, and we didn’t want to do a big outdoor activity (and this one had an admission charge of $16 per person, so it had better be good) if it was raining; but the weather had cleared to a minimal drizzle by the time we were there, the AAA book listed it as a gem attraction, and we decided to go for it.

It’s amazing! First of all, you walk down a trail alongside this mountain stream:

The natural bridge is much higher and wider than I expected. That’s spectacular in itself.

Besides that, it has connections with both Washington and Jefferson: Washington surveyed the area and left his initials on the cliff below the arch (clearly pointed out for visitors!)

and Jefferson owned the area, having bought about 150 acres around the bridge for 20 shillings from the king. I’m sure that means the royal land office, which knew it had thousands of square miles in what was then called Virginia and wanted to turn some of it into cash, and if a colonial said, “I’d like to buy these 157 acres, including a stone bridge, at the going rate”, was happy to get the money.

150 yards past the bridge was a reconstructed Indian village, with three young people as interpreters. The first of them we spoke to was a man dressed in a coat made from a Hudson’s Bay blanket.

He said that at the time the village represented, aboutg 1720, the people in that area had been trading with the English for over 100 years and were happy to have the European trade goods. The French and Indian wars were fought over who had the right to trade with the Indians. This guy said that the French treated the Indians better in general, but made special low-quality stuff, “Indian trade goods”, to trade — guns that would fire five or six shots and then fall apart, that sort of thing; the English sold them first-quality goods, which of course were much more desirable. He also told us that at that time the Indians had no domestic animals. Anything with four legs was a resource — stick an arrow through it and cook it for food. He said, “They didn’t start riding horses, even though the Europeans were riding horses and they saw that, because they just weren’t thinking that way. If you rode into my village, and I was responsible for 90 hungry people in the village, I would look at that 1400 pounds of protein, and you were going to walk home. I’m barbecuing that horse to feed my village.” He’s very excited about an archaeological site recently found in South Carolina that’s been carbon dated to 35000 years ago, almost doubling the length of time humans have been known to be in North America.

Besides the shelter that guy was sitting under, there was a nice big wigwam (“ati” in the local language) with cattail thatch.

The young women working in there told us about how those were built, how you maintain a fire in them and how the smoke in it helps keep the bugs and mice away and helps preserve food.

Farther along the trail was a cave where saltpeter was mined to make gunpowder, the outlet of an underground river, and a substantial waterfall.

As a bonus, when we left, we saw an animal along the road a little past where our highway (US 11) went over the natural bridge. Was it a big black dog? No — a small black bear!

We got close to the end of Virginia early enough in the afternoon that it was obvious we wouldn’t have any trouble getting to Wildacres long before checkin time for the conference. There was plenty of time to do more sightseeing. We got off the highway at Wytheville, VA, and followed signs for tourist information. It was as good an information center as I’ve seen, with the possible exception of one or two on interstates as you enter a state.

Besides normal tourist trap brochures, there were trail brochures for dozens of state park trails along the blue ridge. There was a little museum of local history and crafts. The women staffing it were extra helpful, and when one of them asked what state were we planning on staying in, I said I thought we’d try to get to Bristol. “That’s what I mean,” she said, “because there’s Bristol Virginia, and Bristol Tennessee.” I slapped Arlene on the shoulder and said, “That’s the place the song is about, where the Ku Klux Klan wasn’t allowed to march on the Tennessee side of the street!”

We took booklets listing accomodations in both Virginia and Tennessee, and followed the women’s advice to go up to the Big Walker Mountain lookout and country store, whose owner would give us a free ice cream cone just for saying they had sent us. Maybe on really clear days you can see five states from the top, three more often; the view is up there with anything on the Mohawk Trail for sure.

By the time we got to Bristol, Virginia, Arlene had remembered that the song is “Number One in America” by folk singer David Massengill, who comes from there. Because the singing Carter family comes from there, it claims to be the birthplace of country music — but the monster guitar monument we saw was on the Tennessee side.

I need to go see that main street with the state line down the middle!

We got to sleep around 2 AM at Millie’s house. They have a new cat named Lynx, a long haired animal with an unusual very dark tabby color. Joel cautioned us to keep the bathroom door closed when we used it because otherwise the cat would jump in the sink to drink from the faucet!

We stopped at Gettysburg, at the visitor center of the historic park, and saw the multi-media presentation, a 15-minute film and then a recorded audio presentation at the cyclorama. The cyclorama is a big round hall with a huge painting, done in the late 1800s, all around it. When I say huge, I mean the painting is 4o feet high and 377 feet in circumference. It was in disrepair 20 years ago and needed careful restoration. There’s an extensive museum in the visitor center, too, which discusses the entire history of the civil war. There were more cars and people at Gettysburg than almost any place we’ve been in a long time. Our car has North Carolina license tags, which made us look like Confederate sympathizers, I guess.

Our motel room at the Village Inn in Harrisonburg VA has a hookless shower curtain. There are reinforced rings near the top with slits between alternate pairs. The shower curtain rod goes through those reinforced rings in the curtain rather than through rings that will tear out of the curtain.

On our way to the Nature Printing Society conference in North Carolina.

We got a rental car from Hertz in Dedham this morning. We figured we’d rather pay for a rental than put two thousand miles on either of our old cars, and this gives me a chance to drive a new car (it’s a 2008 Mazda 5 with 45000 miles on it, but has cruise control, remote keyless entry, and a CD player that our cars don’t have) for a week. As I was driving it home I noticed something on the dashboard behind the rearview mirror, a box that said “slide open to use SpeedPass, keep closed to pay tolls by cash.” As soon as I got home I phoned the rental place to ask about it. Sure enough, you can use it for highway tolls, which will be billed to your credit card separately from your rental charge, but there’s an additional $2.50 per day charge to use it. We’ll only have tolls the first and last days of the trip, so it seemed silly to pay extra for all the days in the middle; but the guy at Hertz said, “just take it off the window, put it in the glove compartment, and put your own fast lane box up on the velcro.” So we’re doing that.

Cruising along I-84 ten miles east of Danbury CT around 11 PM I saw something light colored moving rightward straight ahead of me. I slowed way down and almost came to a stop with a deer moseying out of my lane to the breakdown lane next to us. I could have stopped in time if it had stayed in my lane, or if another one had been right behind it, but it was very unnerving and I resolved to back the speed down to 5 miles below the limit.

Another pair of red-orange eyes were on the left of the road just off NJ 15 near Millie’s house, and two more deer crossed the road in front of us two blocks from her house (but I was going less than 30 at that point so they weren’t a hazard).

So, just when you thought I might be updating again, Rolling On One goes quiet. This time it wasn’t just normal laziness, it’s that we were away for a week (or ten days, more like) and I hate to tell the whole world that nobody’s in the house. Of course, any burglars out there shouldn’t just assume that we’re away if the blog goes quiet; most of the time it IS just laziness.

This trip was to the Nature Printing Society‘s annual conference at Wildacres Retreat in the mountains of North Carolina. Wildacres is at 3300 feet; Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts tops out at 3491 feet, so for the week we were just a tad lower than the highest point in our home state. Of course, the lowest point in Pocatello is higher than that, but that’s the West.

We drove down there between 8 PM on Friday Oct 30 and midafternoon the next Monday, and back between 8:30 AM on Sunday November 8 and 4:30 PM on Monday, putting a total of 2045 miles on a rented Mazda 5.

Arlene took classes in plant printing, gelatin plate (or in this case agar plate) printing, and paste paper. I took ones in fish printing and raku ceramics. We both took loads of pictures. Mine are heavy on the raku process. Hers include a better balance of all the work there, the place, and other attendees.

* Indexing stamp mounts, 108 last night, another dozen tonight

* catching up on paying bills

* voting by absentee ballot. We went to City Hall, filled out the absentee ballot forms, filled out the ballots. They go into an envelope, which goes to out polling place and gets checked off the same way we would if we voted in person.

* gathering equipment for nature printing (really, Arlene was doing all that. She says all the stuff I need is packed)

* That doesn’t sound all that busy, but the indexing took time.

* Say, are you aware of “passport cards”? They look like a driver’s license, but work as a passport for surface travel (drive or go by boat) to places that you didn’t used to need a passport for — Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Bermuda. We had to apply for passports, and got passport cards in addition. I figure, carry it all the time, and if we decide to go to New Brunswick or Nova Scotia or Quebec on the spur of the moment, we’re all set.