“That’s only happened recently. That I feel like I’ve at least earned their respect enough to be sitting across the table from them. It probably makes them less nervous.” – Eddie Vedder
So, I got sick. Lost most of a week. Started freaking out about my sale deadline. Kept it in check, at least for a few days. Took angle iron supports to local machine shop, but it was going to be a while, so got them back. Called my guy, J, to help with the chimney, and see if he could do the welding for me, instead of trying to do it all myself. Gotta trade money for time sometimes.
Had a great visit from another J. He brought me a load of free used firebrick, to top off my odd stash of various and sundry refractories. These are the roughest of the bunch, so will likely go up top.
It’s so great to sit across the table from a potter I genuinely admire and just shoot the shit; go deep into the weeds and see what we find. And so rare for me — maybe once a year, if that? Fun, too, even though I was still sickly and my head was swimming by the end.
After having his studio in flux for a couple years, he’s starting to set up shop a few hours away, and I’m really impressed at how he’s going about it. So differently than me, and such a smart, alternate path. In a different life, I might have gone that way, too. Not that I regret it, or wish for it, but it’s interesting to think about how that might have been. I wish he’d landed in a spot a little closer, to give us more of a possibility to team up in the future, but that could still happen. There’s a lot of years left.