the eve of the best day of the year!

(new pottery by Gary Rith)
Glorious weekend, eh? The wife is out poking around in the yard here, wild purple phlox just opening up, surrounding our purple house with purple!
June 1, BTW, is my favorite day of the year.....

the day of the snakes....

I was poking around in the yard, exulting in the glorious abundance of flowers popping up and SUDDENLY there was this huge striped snake inches from my hand! Here in the far north we have few snakes, and fewer are poisonous, and most just wanna be left alone to eat their bugs in peace, but a LARGE STRIPED snake can surprise you. This guy was inside our picket fence, trying to figure out the mesh which covers the lower bit (which prevents beagles from tunneling out). I think he is a milk snake. Not our first. Those guys really just want peace and quiet.
Then, of course, a little later there was ANOTHER snake nosing around, a much smaller garter snake. Speaking of snakes, my best pal in Florida SUZ..............








...........lives in Florida where the snakes are abundant and scary, but she and her husband are never scared of them. Good thing they live in Florida and scaredy cat me lives up here where they are fewer. Anyway, Suz has a daughter who thinks mustaches are funny. I think mustaches are funny too, and I had one for ten years, and sometimes scare the wife and cats with one as a clever disguise....
anyway, Suz asked for a mug with a 'stache on there, and I am making a bunch....

my hairstylist was telling me....

(new pottery by Gary Rith)
Just another work day here. Of course, I love my work! A lot of fresh stuff out of the kiln, more later, have to deliver to a gallery later today, and the wife is working the Cornell U graduation. But about my hairstylist:

Michelle, who you will recall I saw last week, and although she is a stylist or hair artist, I am the one person who is like "just trim my hair shorter", no frills for me, anyway, she is a potter on the side too. She is telling me last week "I am obsessed with casseroles, its all I wanna make" and I started thinking, and made this one. I loooooooove it! So, I am taking the handle idea and using it on MORE today....

this little piggy......

(new pottery by Gary Rith)
Have a wonderful weekend :)

HEY HEY YOU get offa my......

The Beatles were OK, but OH BOY, the Stones, yesssssss. I am like, to Spike the cat who enjoys sleeping on the table on hot days "hey you get off of my cloud! I mean table!!!!"
Buster lives on his couch there, you can see I drew him, Penny sleeps around but here she is on the love seat, cute ear aflop. You can see how those guys inspire dogs lounging on mugs, yes?
I biked twice on a gorgeous Thursday. It is hard to believe how pretty it is around here. People think 'oh, Gary lives in New York' but it is rural like Montana or Tennessee. Check out my new cow friends! This vegetarian fears for the fate of those cows, because I doubt they are pets.....

the legend of the purple house....

The story goes like this: we came along March of 2006 on a muddy and grey day, house shopping. It had been a long day, but we knew in that gloomy weather anything that caught our attention was going to be SPECIAL, and we are driving around a corner and this bright purple house comes into view, and we are like "!!!!". It got out attention alright. Later, we both look at each other and admit "I like that color more than I thought at first!". Light purple with wasabi green and dark purple accents, that is.
The folks who owned the place before us painted it to match these very iris that just opened up this week. They were renting the house to a couple who planned to buy it. The couple planning to buy the place agreed to the paint samples, but when they saw the house actually painted, they packed up and MOVED OUT and bought a white house down the street. The house sat empty several months, the realtor warned that purple houses lost value and were barely saleable. But it was a brand new paint job. The house as a whole had been stripped head to toe inside, new everything (150 year old house, with new insulation, floors, windows, etcetcetc = NICE). SO, we got the place easily......
Here is a hanging flower pot I made, with a piggy!

let me WHIP my hair....

The wife gives me a stack of give certs. for Viva on my birthday and you KNOW we whipped right through them....I would kill for a tofu mole burrito, I think I would...the hippo was saying the same thing about eating people, actually....

You can see my new 'DO. I was down at Michelle's getting the haircut yesterday morning and with her magic fingers my curly mess becomes recognizably ME. Reminds of the comic genius Jimmy Fallon doing Willow Smith's Whip My Hair....
as he imagines Neil Young would have...GENIUS....


(new pots by Gary Rith)

Gary + Fitz and the Tantrums = true love 4 evah

(new pottery by Gary Rith)

You can dig these gorgeous new pots. Jacci down at the gallery in Aurora is like "MORE animals on there!" and I am like "dang, its hard enough getting 2 on there, plus, I would get bored with more than 2 per"

Fitz and the Tantrums 'Moneygrabber' = totally my song of summer 2011. Remember summer of 1985, you were always waiting for Tears for Fears 'SHOUT' to come on the radio? NO???? I was waiting, and this year, its FITZ. Back in 85, me and my friends would make up new lyrics for 'Shout' like "TROUT TROUT, these are the fish I sing about...."

I am adorable....

Laura named me an adorable blogger, yippee! Of course I am adorable, this blog is adorable. Hers too!
I am to nominate other bloggers as adorable, but let's just say that if you are one of my readers, YOU are adorable.

Now I am to list ten things about me. Can I do it? I am shallow and uncomplicated, I think, so are there ten?

1-I was shocked to notice that the Levi's I wore Saturday were so old they had 'made in USA' printed on the label
2-I baked bread last night--I am experimenting with recipes--I think potters often like baking, so similar to pottery!
3-I have felt a bit weird, I must confess, since giving blood Friday through the double red machine---they told me not to overdo it, and I think Friday and Saturday I overdid it--the weather is so darn nice, but today I am a bit whipped, you know? But what Monday does not feel like MONDAY?
4-I am super shy. I would have a hard time meeting and talking to you. But it happens :) I was just reading that the mystery writer Agatha Christie was too. People surprise you, they may write all these wonderful mysteries about murder and poison etc, as she did, but she was this quiet person....
5-I say I am vegan, but I techincally vegetarian no dairy, eating the occaisional egg or baking with eggs. These categories mean a lot to some people. What it means to me, I s'pose, is that I avoid dairy because it makes me sick, and I do not like meat or fish.
6-I live in an adorable purple house, yes indeedy. I didn't paint it, the last owner did. Will it always be purple? Maybe, maybe not....
7-I am the house husband in this family-not working outside the home, I try to keep the dishes done and the cat box clean, etc. I do not do a good job at these things, but I try....
8-Speaking of purple, under my hair? A big purple birthmark. A very pretty lilac-violet color. Maybe it affects my thinking?
9-I must admit to being a caffeine-a-holic. My day is fueled with buckets of coffee and tea....
10-I did not know I was a beagle person until I got a beagle. They are like that, adorable and full of personality!

Speaking of adorable, I had this nice metal glasses case with an outer leather cover and an inner plastic cover that was coming off. I did some surgery on one of Georges Le Soq old sock cousins and made a new lining for glasses case. Tres adorable, yes?

biking the FULL MONTY

Me and the wife had the most gorgeous morning to bike, and off we went! My friends who have teased me all year about all the snow will see why we love it here, just gorgeous. The FULL MONTY is when we combine 2 rides with a little road in between to make one big ride, about 2 1/2 hours for us, around Ithaca, starting at Cornell Arboretum and then over to the East Ithaca Rail Trail and up Tudor Park.

I am rapturous about:

Things to be rapturous about:
Spring! SUNNY DAYS!
Flowers!
Bikes and biking!!!!!
BEAGLES!
MY FAMILY!!!!!
What are you rapturous about?


(new pottery by Gary Rith--wicked difficult to do but looks great)
The wife gets home and the beagle is all over her.....
I was all over this Audi TT convertible, ohmygosh, if its owner is whooshed up to heaven this weekend, it is MINE....but I would say chances are slim that person would be righteous enough, eh? Probably a lawyer....




The wife is in the market for new glasses, aren't these HAWT! They will be back from the optician in a few days and the wife will be impossibly chic....the whole time we are at the optician she is like 'you're gonna blog this aren't you???' and she is lucky: think about all the photos I DELETED. So much for her prohibition against my blogging her cute little self: I am unstoppable and don't seem to follow directions well, do I?
My old frames, with new updated lenses so they can serve as a backup pair instead of collecting dust....
Spike cat hangs out with old Buster dog. The femmes in our house, Penny beagle and the missus, are very powerful. We 3 boys hang together....

BUCKETS of my BLOOD for real!

Well, maybe just a bag. I am O negative, the universal donor, and you KNOW the Red Cross bothers me all the time. Of all the blood types, anybody can take O negative. So, for example, in an ambulance or emergency, when somebody needs a transfusion and the patient's blood type is unknown, they just grab the O negative.

I don't especially like giving blood, who would? The worst of it is the long lines etcetcetc I decided I had enough of that and today became a double red donor. Cancer patients receive double red, I guess, needing something special. For the donor, it means 2 things: NO LINES. They just grab you with a smile and bring you up to the front. They hook you up to a machine. The machine pulls out blood, circulates it, keeps the red cells, then sends back your plasma and stuff plus HAPPY JUICE. Happy juice being some kind of solution that you would get with surgery, I think. Then they suck out some more, circulate it, keep the reds, send back your plasma and more happy juice. Bonus: not only are there no lines to wait in, you can only donate double red half as often as regular blood, and the needle is SMALLER.

Did you see that? They take out blood, and give you stuff back. There they are pumping some tingly stuff into you, YES, TINGLY STUFF! My veins, my lips, my arms, tingly all over with happy juice, I kid you not. Don't feel faint like a regular donation, as long as you don't look at the blood and needles all over the place....