Obstacles and Joys

Last Wednesday I made a trip to Lewiston (the Dirty Lew, as we cal lit here in Maine) to get hardbrick to raise the stack a couple of courses, as a reuslt of my bad firing in Jauary . I had decided I might as well get enough to rebuild the bag walls, because they'll need to redo sooner than later.

INFAB is a pretty small operation, and they sell things other than brick. Sometimes in the past I have made the trip only to discover that the brick guy is on a delivery and nobody there was able to help me, so I called down to let them know what I needed. Unfortunately when I got there, the brick dud ws in fact present, but the brick weren't. :( They had medium duty and high duty straights, and superduty arches, but no superduty straights.
So, decision time: the high duty are obviously not gonna work for the bag wall, because those are interior to the kiln. But they will work for the top of the stack. My only hesitation was: someday I will rebuild this kiln. If some of the brick are not appropriate for the interior of the kiln, I run the risk if getting them mixed up during some future rebuild and having a minor disaster. But it'll be a couple of weeks before they have the supers, and I didn't want to wait that long.

Think, think think! Hmm. I decided to get enough high duty brick to raise the stack, and then just spray paint them, and try to remember, when I do my rebuild some years from now, what the hell the spray paint meant.

Since then I have not had a good day to get up on the roof. We've several small snowstorms. Today is clear, but below zero! I ain't going out there, not when I can stay in here and join the cat pile.