Summertime

Back home again. Syc Hill was great. We were on top of a mountain in North Carolina at an artist's retreat with no television, no radio, no phones in the room, no internet and no air conditioning. It's a beautiful place. It rained most of the week which made me happy because it kept it very cool. The mountains around us would appear, then disappear in the mist and clouds, then appear again. The shingles behaved and are pretty much gone and other than a day or two where I was grindingly tired, I felt very good. The twelve of us at the workshop shared the the artist's retreat with the Florida Society of Goldsmiths and they easily outnumbered us six to one. They were busy learning to forge, granulate, fabricate, and bond, hammering and using little torches and generally doing really fun stuff.

Because we were in the middle of nowhere, we ate in the dining hall. The food was contemporary southern. This meant that deserts often included something like cool whip.

While I was gone, Mothers & Other Monsters came out and my mother turned 90.