Very, very small farmer's market

On my drive home after morning coffee, I often take the back road past the high school to avoid the crush of summer traffic. Either no summer people know about the road, or it would take them nowhere they want to go. Either way, I know I can drive more or less uninterrupted.
Plus, my favorite roadside vegetable stand is on the road. Every day from mid-June into the fall, an Asian family puts out lettuce, rhubarb, basil, parsley, cilantro, Swiss chard, mint, and a variety of other greens that I don't recognize but often buy. The prices are good, the food is fresh and clean. What's not to like?

Tomorrow, with Dee's two sisters visiting, we'll have dinner on the deck with a pesto made from the freshest parsley and cilantro in town. 

Pots in a new Cahoon Museum show

The Cahoon Museum, a small but lively organization in the Barnstable village of Cotuit, will show "Come Eat at Our Table: Items for the Meal" from July 24 to September 16. The show will include work by a number of Cape Cod potters, as well as other Cape craftspeople.

Museum director Richard Waterhouse looked at several of my pots yesterday and selected six for the show, most of them plates or serving bowls (including the one shown here) and platters. The museum is in a two-story building, a former tavern, dating to the late 1700s. Lovely old rooms and narrow stairs. Very Cape Cod.
It should be a fun show.

Fireworks kayak paddle

   With Independence Day in midweek, local fireworks displays were scattered over about a 10-day period. Which meant that last night the village of Onset, a few miles over the bridge from the Cape, held its annual show of aerial explosions. 

   We paddled in the sunset out from Monument Beach about 7:45 with friends Mike, Tammy, Diane, Jamie and Jordan and paddled in the general direction of Onset. Close enough that we could see the fireworks, not so close that we had to portage or risk crossing the Cape Cod Canal approaches.

It was a lovely, cool night on the water, the noisy fireworks impressive, though distant. We paddled home in the dark, past the rocks and through the anchorage, everyone arriving safely. 

Adding the coffee beans ...

How could I forget to put the coffee in the photo???

Among friends, a kiln-opening July 28

The work of five Upper Cape Cod potters will be in the Hatchville Pottery kiln when it's fired July 27 and opened Saturday, July 28. My pots will be joined by that of Kim Medeiros, Annie Halpin, Angela Rose and Denny Howard. Angela and I fired together in this kiln eight or nine years ago, before her landscaping business took off and she stopped making pots for a while. We started the Hatchville Pottery holiday kiln-opening and open house together and it became a big December event for us in Falmouth. Now Angela's back making pots and the two of us thought this summer thing might be fun.

The July opening and sale will, I suspect, be much less crazy than the holiday party. There are many more things for people to do here in July than in December, so I don't think we'll need to hire a policeman. Though I could be wrong ...
Joining the potters will be coffee roaster Michael Race, whose freshly roasted beans did very well at last December's holiday show.

There will be more details as we get closer, but I just shot photos for our e-announcement so I thought I'd give all of you a bit of a preview.

Left to right, top: Angela Rose tumbler, Hollis Engley faceted vase. Left to right, bottom: Annie Halpin chalice, Denny Howard Shino teabowl, Kim Medeiros vase.

Post-postscript to the Skutt ...

Perry Petersen at Skutt Tech Support diagnoses my recent KM1027 kiln nervous breakdown to bad relays, which some of you have already suggested. Perry got back to me quickly, for which I'm grateful. I've ordered the relevant relays and wiring harness from Portland Pottery and should have them in a couple of days.
Thanks for the advice and encouragement, all. I'm going to go out to the studio and begin some long-necessary shelf-removal and slight re-arrangement so that I can actually get to the kiln and work on it.
Two more photos attached that are not particularly relevant to the kiln problems. First, a bow to you in the U.S. South, who have dealt with temperatures near and above 100F for the past week. Maybe a little snowy barn gable end will help you remember winter is coming. Second, a look at some of Vermont potter Bob Compton. Great potter, kilnbuilder extraordinaire, nice guy, drop by and see him if you're ever near the pretty little town of Bristol.

Postscript to pots exploding ...

Those of you who look at this blog occasionally may remember my post of a few weeks ago, when a bunch of serving platters became thousands of shards in my electric kiln. And you may remember my bafflement at that circumstance. Well ... still a bit baffled, but this time the bafflement is all about my electric technology and not about how I was pounding out the platters.
I normally set the Skutt KM-1027 to rise slowly to 160F and sit there for 20 hours to make sure the greenware inside is fully dry. Then I set it to cone 07 and let the temp rise slowly until it hits 1779 or so and shuts down. I did this the other day with a fresh load of greenware, kept an eye on it through the day (it rose to 160 and stayed there for hours), and then at some point in the night it went rogue on me and rose at least to 1300F. That's where it was when I came down in the morning. I hit the "stop" button and it made the requisite "beep."
But it didn't shut down. It just kept pumping. Only way I could stop it was by unplugging the kiln and letting it cool.
I emptied the kiln this morning and the pots appeared to have been bisqued, but they had the sort of dull "thunk" of pots fired below my usual bisque temp. As far as I know, I have no way of telling what temp they fired to. (Maybe the computer stores that somewhere ... ) Anyway, I've gotten in touch with Skutt, but it's the Fourth tomorrow and it's unlikely I'll hear anything for a few days. And I can always (very carefully) bisque in the gas kiln, I guess.
Does anyone have any ideas this time?
I'll attach a couple of photos that have absolutely nothing to do with this problem. I'm preparing a story about my work in photography, so I'll let you see some of those images.
Happy Fourth, everyone!
Top to bottom: Creek, off Chatiemac Road, North Creek, NY; summer cottage, Maine; summer cottage, Orleans, Mass.; cathedral candles, Greece; Dan Finnegan workshop, Chatham, Mass.