Ceramics

The thing about drawing and painting is that it gives me a lot of time to think and reflect. I'm in the middle of a big ceramic painting project, which I can't really explain now, but I will post before and after pictures once I'm finished. Actually, I'll post the pictures in November after we leave Brazil, and it will make sense then.
When I was a teenager, our young women group at church would often paint ceramics. There was a lady in our ward whose great passion in life was painting ceramics, so every year or so we would have a ceramics activity. I didn't look forward to it. The painting was fun enough, but when ceramics scrape together, the sound of it makes me want to crawl up a wall. And then when you're done painting, you're left with this little ceramic knickknack, and I had enough knickknacks to start my own knickknack shop. I always dreaded ceramics activities.
One time, I decided I didn't want to have another little ceramic box for my shelf, so I skipped our activity that week. This was pretty rash for me, since I went to young women's activities every week practically without fail. But I skipped it that time and spent the rest of the week happy that I had spared myself another dust catcher. On Sunday when we had our young women class, people asked about my absence on Wednesday, and then my teacher pulled out a little ceramic box from her things. "Here, we made one for everyone who didn't make it." Gaaah!
Despite my reluctance to paint little ceramic knickknacks as a teenager, I did learn how to do it, and I remember our teacher emphasizing the dry-brush technique as we made little rosy cheeks on our bunny rabbit ornaments or whatever. And now that I'm working on my mega-awesome ceramics project (stay tuned), I am grateful for the practice and techniques I learned in my youth-- even if it did mean a shelf full of knickknacks to dust.

Rainy season

Penny's kindergarten class did a unit about the four seasons, which must be some sort of international school curriculum requirement, because in Brazil, there are only two seasons: rainy and wet.
Before coming here, the only thing I knew about a wet season was from living in Seattle and watching Forrest Gump. Thankfully, the rainy season in Brazil is different from both of those!
We had a couple weeks of alternating downpours and drizzle, which filled our pool to the brim and almost made it feel like we were having cold weather for Christmas. It was wet enough that we found the spots where the roof leaks, and it made my piano go out of tune within about 5 days of having it tuned. (I had it tuned a week before my recital, and it was already a bit wonky by the time it came around!) Humidity is new for this New Mexico girl.
Usually, though, the rainy season just means that we get a nice afternoon rainstorm every day. We sometimes go a few days without any rain, although this year has been longer between rains-- sometimes even two weeks!
We have a great laundry courtyard, which is like a laundry room, but it is outdoors and brings lovely natural light into my life. There are several long laundry lines hung up, and I love being able to hang out my laundry to dry in the fresh air. It saves so much energy and hardly requires much from me. But (you can see where this is going) this morning there were about 3 loads of laundry hung out to dry when the drops started. Thankfully, this time I rushed enough to bring in the laundry while it was still dry. This is blogworthy. I'm not going to blog about each time I have hung out laundry (I can't honestly say "to dry") only to have it rewashed several times before I finally bring it in, spin it, and throw it in the dryer.