my last night at the clay company was spent doing the 8-midnight shift with j.  at midnight matt said we might have as little as 45 minutes left so i decided to stay until the end.  approximately 5 hours later we shut the anagama down.  it made for a pretty delirious day at work, but it was worth it!  here are a couple of pics i snapped between side stokes.

"i'm hot to burn this sonovabitch" (paulina, what up!)

rearranging.

super hot and bright.

basically freezing except when stoking.

i found it really amazing to watch matt and don work.  they seemed to know what was happening inside the kiln at every moment.  or they would open up a peep hole and glean a ton of information.  when i fire the little soda, i’m never FULLY confident that i know what is happening.  in the anagama with multiple stoke points and all kinds of dynamics going on inside i was totally blown away by their extreme knowledge, confidence and control.  amazing!