Wizard Training Camp

I just finished another Peak Potentials course, entitled Wizard Training Camp. What a ride! Peak Potentials isn't keen about us giving out the details of the course, so I can't share the meaning of the two of us standing in front of a stack of bent rebar, but trust me when I say that there really is a lot of personal meaning in that stack!

The setting is the Glacier Valley Farm campground located in the beautiful Squamish Valley in British Columbia, Canada. The campground itself is quite lovely, and has chickens and pigs for onsite recycling of our table scraps. The campground personnel provided the cooking for the camp as well, and it was quite good, with a wide variety of different entrees for lunch and dinner.

By the way, did you know that it's cold in the Squamish Valley, even in August? Well, I can now confirm that it is. I brought a sleeping bag rated for 30 degrees and I was still freezing at night, so I wound up sleeping in my clothes and fleece jacket.

Darn that Weather Channel website! I need to stop trusting that thing! It said that the lows would be in the 50's. If their data was really accurate, then why was I seeing my breath every night between 9 pm and 9 am!?

Our group was the largest camp Peak Potentials has ever held, with about 450 attendees. Since the campground only has five showers, sinks and toilet stalls each for both the mens' and womens' facilities, that was a real challenge in personal hygiene. Many of us opted for only one or two showers during the 5 day camp experience to keep the bathroom lines down. For me, brushing teeth daily is a must, so the twice daily line up at the sinks for brushing was worth the wait. Luckily, Peaks did get in quite a few Port-a-Potties, so the wait time during breaks wasn't too bad.

Back to the reason for the camp: the training is a great way to learn how to manage your thinking in order to manifest your highest good more and more of the time. Since none of us is perfect, I can't say all of the time, but with practice it can be most of the time. The exercises were designed to get you to catch what you are thinking in the moment, evaluate it, and then change it if it isn't working for you. With all of that practice, you can't help but get better at catching yourself and manifesting something better instead.

The exercises were lots of fun, even as they were challenging. Some of them were challenging physically, but all of them were challenging mentally and emotionally. They are designed to make you examine how you look at the world around you, what thoughts empower or dis-empower you, what holds you back from expressing your gifts fully, and how to shift your thinking immediately when you catch yourself getting stuck in negative thinking.

Here are two great examples of how well that training worked from the journey back home. When I got to the airport, I couldn't find my passport. I kept thinking, it's got to be here somewhere, but as I started to exhaust the possibilities and was on my second round of looking in every nook and cranny of everything I brought with me, I began to panic. I caught myself doing that and said, "Okay, lesson learned - keep track of important documents. Now that I have that lesson, my passport will be waiting for me at the Lost and Found." Sure enough, it was.

Then, when I got up to the check-in counter, I was trying to get on the early flight from Vancouver to Los Angeles (via Phoenix). As I checked in at the kiosk, I noticed that I was upgraded to first class. Okay, that's very nice, but I'd still rather get on the early flight than fly first class. When I went to the counter, the gentleman informed me that I could indeed get on the early flight to Phoenix, but the early flight to L.A. was already overbooked, so I couldn't get on that segment.

Instead of getting angry that I didn't get what I asked for, I recognized that here is a valuable lesson in clarity - I had to admit that I was only thinking about the first leg as I was considering the switch. Instead of sulking about the lesson, I switched to being gratefully enthusiastic that I got to fly first class from Vancouver to L.A., despite it not being the early flight that I had wanted.

As a result of allowing myself to be enthusiastic with what happened, I was rewarded with a great couple of hours chatting with several other members of the group who were also on my later flight from Vancouver to Phoenix. I have to admit that previously I might have buried my head in a book ignoring them because I was upset about my circumstances and wallowing in my victimhood. This feels so much better! I am a Wizard! :-)

Continued weirdness from the kiln

I'm not sure whether it's me or the kiln at this point.  It could be either or both, I suppose.  At any rate, I'm feeling very frustrated with what the combination of both of us are producing lately.  It could be that the kiln's temperature controller has gone wonky - that's Australian for "not working very well."

The bottom layer of this piece is half transparent blue and half semi-transparent brown, a layer of rainbow dichroic glass with a bubbles pattern on top with a ring of different sizes of copper washers around the edge of the bowl, and a capping layer that had black stringers melted into it.  I had thought that the combination would be very striking and it is.

The problem is that this piece has now been through 3 firing cycles and it still didn't work out right.  If you double-click on the photo, you should be able to see the crack that runs around the edge of the bowl on the left and top through the area with the washers in it.  I guess that the cooling cycle was too fast and the washers cooled faster than the glass, cracking it.

I will try refiring the piece to full fuse temperature in the hopes that it will go back to flat in a reasonable way and heal the crack in the glass.  Then I can try slumping the glass into the final form with a very slow cooling cycle to see whether I can get it to finally work.

Then, there's this piece.  I've seen quite a few pieces like it and assumed (yeah, I know) that it would work with the regular slumping schedule.  Not so much.  Perhaps it's the thickness of this particular bottle, or perhaps it's something else.  It was in the mold for an entire hour and it barely began to drop.  As you can see, it has barely lost it's round shape - it's now oval instead of round.  That's it.  It should (yeah, I know, again) have dropped fully into the mold in that amount of time.

If I take the temperature up too much higher, I might wind up losing the raised decoration on the bottle.  If I don't, I don't think that extra time is going to make it fully drop down into that mold.  I guess I'll run it again with a relatively modest increase in temperature and time and see what happens.

Days like today make me wonder whether I should be doing something different for "fun."

Breakfast!

Breakfast of champions on a special day!  Sorry for the fuzzy picture - I didn't realize it was fuzzy until I loaded onto my computer and by then it was already eaten, so no re-shoots were possible.  By the time I thought about taking a picture and ran to get my camera, it was already starting to fall a little, but you should definitely be able to get an idea of what it looks like as it comes out of the oven.  This tasty little beauty is called a Dutch Baby.

The first time I made one was - if my memory serves me properly - in 1983 on the occasion of the first time my family came over to my first apartment right after I moved in.  Since my mother was known for being a great cook, I wanted to impress her on her first visit to my new place.  I found the recipe in the local paper and thought it would work well for my Sunday morning, after-church family gathering.

Since then, I'm sure I've made thousands of them.  It's basically a baked pancake or crepe, made from a simple egg, flour and milk mixture.  You can flavor them with powdered sugar, syrup or my favorite, a thick fruity apricot or raspberry jam.  They make a very impressive breakfast feast, even though they are super easy and quick to make.  If folks are interested, I'll post the recipe...

Need another strategy...

Well, the oddness out of my kiln continues. The results of the second pot melt firing were no better than the first.  There were still glass strings connecting the pot with the fused disk below even after doubling the melt time.  Here's a shot of the disk after the second firing so you can see the cool pattern that results from the melt pot:

This disk I'm going to fire one more time at full fuse temperature to allow the three pokey bits on top to lay back down into the glass surface and to allow the disk to get to a more even thickness and roundness.  Then, the next part of the fun begins.  I have a texture plate with a swirl design embedded into the surface.  When I lay the fused disk over it and do a slump firing, it will embed the texture into the bottom of the glass.  Then I will slump it again into a wavy bowl mold to create the bowl shape.  Personally, I have to admit that I don't get how the texture will stay in the glass as it slumps into the bowl shape, but I've seen quite a lot of great results of people putting textures into bowl and plate blanks, then slumping them into shape so I'll just take it on faith that it works.

The new strategy for the next pot melt will be to keep the doubled melt time, but increase the temperature of the melt from 1600 to 1650 degrees.  Hopefully, the extra heat will create a better separation between the pot and disk.  If that doesn't work, I'll try increasing the temperature yet again in the next firing until I can get a clean disk.

First melt pot results

Cool!  Well, I found out that the instructions that come with the melt pot don't give a long enough melt time to get all of the glass out of the pot.  I've added a little more clear glass to the pot and refired again with a much longer melt time so that the glass can flow out further into a thinner disk and the rest of the colored glass that was left in the pot can flow out.  I do like the effect, though - it kind of reminds me of tie-dye.