Notices by Emily Velasco (mle_online@social.afront.org)

This clay that I harvested yesterday is so different than the last batch of wild clay. If the other stuff was like chocolate, this stuff is like cream

Self-imposed cartoon hard labor (smashing rocks with hammer)

I went on a trek for wild porcelain clay today and i think I found it

Something is going on in my town that has two law enforcement helicopters and three news helicopters watching, but there's nothing on TV about it

It looks like it was a police chase that started in South Pasadena. Apparently the driver turned themselves in at the El Monte police station??

What an odd way to end the pursuit.

This started as a restraining order violation. Why did the driver head to the El Monte police station?

Glazed ceramics i got back today

There's a bigger log mug too

Those vintage style LED Christmas lights that I splurged on last week arrived and they are perfect. They look just like the ones my parents had.

@botvolution

I guess I could boil it down to two sentences, but there's just so much there to include

Here's a grim little tidbit. I was just talking to a friend of mine who still works at the newspaper where I used to work, and she told me that pedestrians get killed by cars so often these days that they don't cover them as news anymore unless the victim was well known or the driver was arrested.

@botvolution It's very technical, but presidents are given the right to choose US attorneys, but the Senate has to approve them because of the advise and consent requirement in the constitution.

However, the president can name someone as an interim U.S. attorney while they await approval from the senate so that the position doesn't sit empty.

The Trump admin has been naming people to these positions who might not make it through Senate confirmation, so when their 120 days of interim-ness are up, they are just giving them new titles, like assistant US attorney, but with the same duties. Some defendants are arguing that this is an illegal attempt to get around the Senate confirmation rule, and so the US attorney overseeing their case isn't legally holding the position and can't bring cases.

Halligan's case is a bit different. They already had an interim US attorney for that district. Then he resigned rather than bring charges against Comey. Trump named Halligan as the new interim US attorney. Defendants (or their lawyers) are saying she isn't legally in that position because there already was an interim US attorney in that position, and that if a president could just keep naming new interims, it would render the advise and consent clause moot.

Ahhhhh! A free Juki! Why do i have to live in such a small cottage?

As I've been washing clay over the last week, I noticed that that was some portion that's very slow to settle out of the water. Even while most of it has sunk to the bottom of the barrel it's in, enough has stayed suspended that the water has not cleared up.

I got to thinking about flocculation yesterday, so while I was on my bike ride today I stopped by Walmart and picked up a little container of alum, a well known flocculant.

I filled these two jars with the same water from my big clay washing container, but I added a tiny bit of alum to the one on the left. It's almost like magic how quickly the alum caused the clay to settle. This has been about thirty minutes.

A wheel-thrown flower pot that I did to challenge myself try throwing a large amount of clay.

It suffered some bloat on the inside, but that's just been an occasional feature of our recycled clay in the studio. It won't affect the usability

There should be a Nobel prize for helping your parent fix their computer over the phone.

Another one of my ceramics from yesterday.

I really like the way this this swirly clay technique is working out, and i will have to try more of this next semester.

Swirly rice bowl

I've made the mug

The completely unreasonable but nevertheless intense anger of being stuck behind someone going exactly the speed limit