It has been a HELL of a long time since I’ve bothered to post anything, and I am (pretty) sorry about that. I really am. BUT– You know what they say, guess I’ve been too busy living life instead of writing about it 😛

But I feel like it’s important to sit down and make a written checkpoint about what I’m doing with school and art and life in general, and my journal has suffered just about as much (Okay, maybe I share the few juicy details with my journal every now and then). I don’t intentionally neglect my blog and journal. It’s just that life seems to have picked up pace since I was lounging around last fall. Australia was a nice vacation where I found time to write every once in a while and when I got back my only actual responsibility was working to pay the rent. Over Christmas break, I managed to be completely useless for about three weeks straight with the exception of recording some new music (mostly just learning covers and editing old originals), but now my life has a whole new rhythm.

Every week day, I wake up at 7:10 am, get ready, pack breakfast and lunch, do my best to get out the door before 8:15, drive to school/work, and stay there until about 7 or 8 pm on average every day. On weekends, I’ve been trying to fire kilns. Last week I fired a test kiln mid-week because I was so damn excited about my ceramic knives and stayed at the studio until 1:00am (knives pictured above: which are a huge personal success). I cut them out of slabs of clay, waited for them to set up a bit, carved them down to a basic knife shape, bisque-fired them, used coarse sandpaper, carefully wadded and glaze-fired them to about 1280 Celsius, then sanded them first with coarse (100 grit) sandpaper, then refined them with 220 grit sandpaper. I’ve sanded them to a point where they are sharp enough to slice tomatoes, pickles, onions, pears, and bacon (I know this because I’ve used one of them to prepare my last three or four meals).

My point is that I am working towards progression, and writing in my blog has fallen a bit to the wayside. It’s not just ceramics and work that are taking up time. Those are just my life-defaults. The stuff that has been taking up time is attending classes, writing papers/doing assignments/readings, and trying to wrap my mind around this Windgate Fellowship grant proposal writing project. I’m finding a finishing point- I can see light at the end of the application tunnel. After February 8, I will just have to wait two months to hear whether I won or not. After that, everything is up in the air, which drives me crazy. Even if I do get the award, I still need to decide what I want to do this summer, because the visa will most likely take about 6 months.

I’m really at a cliff here. I dunno how else to describe it. I know I need to keep making money to work on paying off student loans, but I can’t decide on where to look for another job. I could keep working where I am now and look for something to add to it– or I could just chill out, keep working one part time job, and get organized for the trip and show (assuming I get it). Another idea I’ve been mulling around in my head is that I can look for a summer job in or near Jackson Hole. I’ve always wanted to experience Jackson in a closer sense. My home town reads the same newspaper, but I almost never go to Jackson. I want to actively experience the bluegrass music, art, nature, and maybe even the political scene of the place just for one summer. I think it would be a good life experience. I have plenty of friends who work in Jackson, and maybe after I graduate with a Bachelors in Fine Art I can find some pee-on job in a gallery there just to get my big toe in the door. But– right now everything is just an idea, a silhouette in smoke.