If you take a sec and drop by our Face Book Page  then you can take a guess at how many mugs I was able to fit into one 7 cubic foot kiln.

Wait… a little background is due I suppose… Ever since we were little potters we have always wondered if we would ever fill a kiln completely with one specific item – mine of course being mugs.  At that point I was happy if I could make 10 at a time that at least looked similar.  Well fast-forward a couple years and here we are.  On Sunday night i loaded our first-ever completly-full-of-mugs kiln!  How about that?  To celebrate I put up a contest on our Face Book Fan Page where if you take a look at the pics supplied and took a guess at how many mugs were in there, you could win one of them !  This Saturday I’ll select the three folks who guessed the closest and I’ll mail them a mug for their troubles.

Take a guess, leave a guess, and let’s see if you can win yourself a mug

We Played in the Clay with the crew from Katimavik – Wellington PEI today !  Natalie and her bunch had a great time making among other things, a shoe !  Carley and Bentley of course got their share of attention

Man Oh Man we’ve been doing some workshops here at ROTB WORLD HEADQUARTERS!!!  This week was mostly a promotional affair (except for the Pathfinders) where we wanted to bring professionals from the Accommodations, local government, travel, community service and arts sectors together here at ROTB to introduce them first-hand to Kinkora’s fastest-growing business and to show them all what we do here.  We wanted them to take part in an Experiential Workshop and take away a real sense of what Playing in the Clay is all about.  I can definitely say it was a success !

The week started out with us hosting a group from the Bonshaw Women’s Institute   – that would be here on Prince Edward Island in the BEAUTIFUL Bonshaw Hills.  Anyhow, that was a fun evening spent with 7 of the nicest ladies you’ve ever met.

Then we had 14 folks in from a Pathfinders Group, lead by Mary Beth Guptil on Wednesday evening.  That was a heap of fun as well.  We always get different results from youth groups such as this one and from Katimavik  because they aren’t so concerned about the how and the why… they just make stuff and they’re not concerned with whether or not they are doing it right.  Really, when the grown-ups are asking “Am I doing this right?” or “Is this supposed to look like this?” the kids are full-blast and totally focussed on the wonderous creation that is before them

  On Thursday night we Played in the Clay with 12 folks all together.  There was Nancy Quinn from The Summerside Economic Development Office and her husband Oliver who is a photographer, Wendell and André who own a B&B called Comme Chez Vous  in Summerside, Paula, Melody and Elizabeth from the PEI Business Womens’ Association , and a few more from the Bonshaw Women’s Institute who couldn’t make it Monday night!  That was a really interesting workshop because it brought together folks from 3 or 4 different groups who would have never met otherwise.  That’s always fun.

That brings us to this afternoon when we hosted Cate Proctor from “The Guild”  in Charlottetown and her Mom Margaret, and Tracey & Jennifer from Travel Places International  .  Funny thing is… Tracey made all our travel arrangements for our trip to North Carolina last month, and even all the arrangements for Cindy’s trip to Jamaica a couple weeks ago, yet I had never met her before !  How about that?

So ya, I guess we were a busy bunch!  The way I see it, we managed to get the dust knocked off our workshop skills and got a great chance to try out our new Class Space.  Now to dry, clean up, bisque fire, inspect, sand, wax, glaze, glaze fire, inspect, sort, and contact the new owners of all those masterpieces!

Cheers !

Oh man oh man, I think my brain is numb !

OK, at least I think that I think my brain is numb.  How would I think anything if it was actually numb?  Over the past 3 hours I have been digging through the maze we / I / you / my dog Carley calls Social Network Marketing.  I suppose though going back in time a little bit would be the proper thing to do…

A while back we contacted Nancy Beth Guptill who has a company here on Prince Edward Island called Sweet Spot Marketing.  We wanted to investigate the whole world of social network marketing (let’s call it SNM just for tonight to speed this all up, OK?) since I had heard it was a very cost-effective way to market our ever-growing beast we like to call Right Off The Batt Pottery – or ROTB for tonight.  Nancy Beth is really great at what she does… she tolerates all of my stupid questions and she is always super-quick to recognize when my eyes gloss over and I start thinking about how big a pot I could actually throw if given the time and a heap of clay.  So, she started to ease me into it all in conjunction with Duct Tape University (how could I resist a handle like that?) and I started to get used to Facebook and created a Fan Page, reconnected to LinkedIn and established an ROTB presence on Twitter (look for @ROTBPottery and there we are).

So there I am… working away updating my Google profile, which leads to a Yahoo profile, which leads to a Bing profile.  Then the nice man on the video says Flickr is a pretty darned good idea. Off I go.  Hey, 411.ca has some room on it for us, as does Google Maps.  Oooohhh, how about Weblocal?  Yup, there’s some real estate to claim there too.  In the mean time I started to explore the fantastic and somewhat mystical world of Google Analytics.  Ever been there?  You can find out what someone in Bolivia had in their coffee when they happened to click on your website.  Amazing I tell you, simply amazing! And free too!  So, ya, back to my story…

I’ve spent the last 3 hours working away.  Updating this, expanding that, adding tags to pratically everything I can think of.  I even know what SEO means!  Imaging… I can throw a whole dinner table full of pots AND I know what SEO means.  More amazing stuff.  Now I am getting completely and entirely hooked up and interconnested on this whole SNM thing.  If I post something to our Fan Page it carries over to our Twitter cubby hole, which splashes over to the lot I picked out in the back corner of LinkedIn (you know, under the tree near the brook).

Speaking of the tree near the brook… I can smell my remaining brain cells start to simmer so I best get home   Oh… it appears I have enabled “Pings” on this post… hope that’s a good thing.

There are a great deal of benefits to snow days that other provincial governments would be wise to take note of.  First, with a heap of places closed there is far less traffic on the roads.  This of course makes it much easier for the road crews to clean everything up instead of navigating around cars and leaving huge-big piles of snow everywhere where huge-big piles of snow don’t really belong.  Then there is the mental health aspect of it all.  I mean come on… who doesn’t remember the anticipation of listening to the radio an hour before leaving for school and the incredible joy that came from either hearing your school bus on the cancelled list, or hearing your school is completely shut down ?  That was like a get-out-of-jail-free pass for kids.  We’d be into our snowsuits and headed out to play with our friends before the news announcing the blessed occasion was done.  So now we’re adults, but I still feel that little buzz when I think of it.  A whole day to hang out at home in my slippers – I don’t normally wear slippers, but slippers just seem to be something one should wear during a snow day – and do all those little chores that you never get a chance to do like watching 5 hours straight of HGTV or sorting out 100s of CDs and DVDs that have that amazing ability to mix themselves up when no one is looking.

Living in the country lends another aspect to a snow day that our city friends don’t get… silence.  It’s so silent outside on a snow day at our house that all you can hear is the odd crow cawing at my dog who seems to be too near to a speck that may or may not be a bug for the crow’s lunch. Yes, I know there are very few bugs out crawling around on a snow-covered field this time of year, but I won’t tell the crows that as they seem to enjoy poking about none-the-less.  Carley and I (Carley is our goofy Chocolate Lab) like to just walk around and find stuff to do outside in the snow, much like kids do on their fortunate days off.  We just don’t build snowmen and forts, all due of course in part to Carley’s lack of opposable thumbs which really reduces the amount she can help when building a fort.  However, she is always ready to entertain me by chasing her Frisbee at least 367 times an hour

I had to go into town yesterday – during the snow day – to go to the bank which of course was going to close down at noon.  Afterwards I decided to take the plunge and get myself some real snowshoes.  I’ve had snowshoes for many many years, but it wasn’t a sport to use them.  They were the big clunky cargo-carrying jobs the Army gives you to make your life miserable, not to mention to leave large bruises across each shin from falling face-first on their outrageously sharp ends.  Wait now… I never fell face-first on the actual snowshoes… Mostly my face landed very close to where my shoulders hit the show, driven forward of course by the 60-pound rucksack I was fortunate enough to carry, and equally propelled by the nasty weapon someone thought I should carry along as well.  So I bought some snowshoes and to make a long story slightly shorter, Carley and I have discovered how much fun it can be to trek out across the fields and along the wood lines, me huffing and puffing as I walk on top of a couple feet of snow and Carley running back and forth from wherever I’ve thrown her toy to wherever I happen to be.  Fun stuff.

Here’s a thought… why don’t you try a Snow Day of your own?  I bet you’ll love it !

Cheers !