A list

Fall it seems has arrived. I mark it not by the leaves or the smell or the clear light, but by the fact that when I walk out my front door and down the stone steps I am wearing a sweatshirt. I might not wear it long, for the days are getting up around 80 or 85, but it is cold in the mornings. The fall always makes me feel slightly energized. There is always an incredibly long list of things to prepare for the winter.

Here is a small sample of the pre-winter checklist:

• Split the enormous pile of locust and red oak outside the woodshed asap.
• One final bush-hog of the meadows.
• Finish kiln.
• Move workshop from behind the house to in front of the kiln shed.
• Develop a new preliminary clay recipe and mix a batch.
• Wrap pipes under house.
• Jack up the joists under dining room floor so it does not feel like a trampoline.
• Haul jack pine and two red oaks out of woods and take to sawmill.
• Fix road into woods and move airstream to final location.
• Dig trench to workshop for power and water lines.
• Slaughter and process two hogs that are getting very large.
• Do a little fishing.
• Clean out the spring that supplies the house.

So there is never a shortage of work to be done. All this will hopefully put me inline for a firing around the first of the new year but I will say that I have got very used to the sound a deadline makes as it goes whooshing past.

And so here are a few pictures from last week.

Pictured above is the how I chose to terminate the bricks once they reached the top of the arch. There are nicer ways to do it but they are very time consuming. This is clean and fast, which at this point is just what I need.

Here is the cast key. The white tubes are pvc. They were removed once the cartable cured. The holes will be used for the pyrometer probes as well as blow holes to have a visual cue as to where the flame is in the kiln.

Two guesses what that is.... I needed a way to slide the pvc out of the castable once it had cured. I thought about saran wrap with a little grease slopped on it and then came up with a clever little idea. Condoms aren't just for contraception.

A view from the inside of how the main arch meets the door arch.

This side is now ready for buttressing. After much deliberation I finally found, with the help of my neighbor Steve, a quick and clean solution to the dilemma. But before buttressing it is on the chimney!