Brad Sondahl's blog

   Jan. 1
    I spent some time today finishing off my bookkeeping for last year, and am happy to report a modest increase in sales, which was not at all certain, given the oil increases and economy cooling. So those of you who have purchased stuff from me this past year, I salute you.
    Mornings have been crisp, around 15 degrees (-10 C). The city work crews have been using a large front end loader to pile up the snow piles in anticipation of more, which may begin again tomorrow. There's a pile across the street about as tall as our 1 1/2 story house. I'm still enjoying bicycling around town, if there's not more than an inch of snow or solid ice on the streets. You can bicycle on glare ice, but you can't turn or stop very well...

Jan. 2 I had 243 firings this last year, up 7 from 2006... Back to throwing again, canisters and mugs...
    This afternoon I made recordings of the songs we're likely to do for a performance in February--to help a new guitarist learn them, reducing travel and practice time.. I'm using the free Audacity software to record and mix with. After I finished the initial recordings, I made a few overtracks of Stephen Foster melodies, "Old Black Joe" and "Way Down upon the Swanee River." My son said, "Who's Stephen Foster?" One way the generations differ...
    I debated a bit about the ethics of recording the tunes--both songs were discarded as racist in the 60's. So is a tune racist? Dixie (not a S.F. composition), as the theme of the Confederacy, still has powerful overtones for American blacks. When I was in high school German class, the other kids would encourage the old German teacher to play Deutschland Uber Alles on the piano, with a few winks and nods... It's a great tune, as were some of the German carols and romantic songs he taught us. But to the WWII generation, it carries a burden.
    In the case of Foster, he wrote some minstrel songs, but later tried to change the nature of them to promote the dignity of the (portrayed) black singers. Regardless, more>s change with the times, and any of his songs with reference to black servitude are out with Uncle Remus, for better or worse.
    One of my Youtube songs is "The Bluetailed Fly," which is also a dialectical song out of the Abolitionist Movement. Most of the young people that encounter it are looking for some rap version of the song--a few of them comment that they like my version better...
    Anyway, I think by now only historians would debate whether the tunes for Old Black Joe and Swanee are racist--popular society flows onward and doesn't look back much.

Jan. 3
    The weather changed from 2 inches of snow to rain, making some places icy. That probably contributed to the miniscule turnout at Steven King's guitar concert (there were about a half dozen of us, including some guitarists there for the open stage part). He and his wife (flute and hand percussion) had very nice arrangements of a lot of pop tunes. Since the crowd was so small, he took requests, such as the Beatles' Blackbird.
It's a funny thing that as musicians get better, sometimes their taste gets different. He didn't actually play The Girl from Ipanema, but I'm sure he'd do a great job of it. And of course jazz guitarists all love songs like that, because they can do things with them. I never saw him play a recognizable chord, but his fingers were flying on the fretboard...
    So when I took the stage, the first thing I said was, "I feel like a throwback," since I do all my picking starting from open chords. Then I played two of my more complicated tunes (Huckleberry Mountain and Racetrack), but it still was in a different league from what Steven was doing, which I was aware before I came, so it was no real surprise. Then I invited him to play along on Pachelbel's Canon, and his wife joined in on flute, and that probably sounded the best, so it ended on a nice note...
    Afterwards, because the location was shorter home via the back roads, I took the Blanchard road, which involves a minor lightly traveled pass with a few squirrelly turns on icy roads. Fortunately it didn't prove to be as stupid a choice as it might have been, since I made it...

Jan. 4
    It's been raining all day, making the roads in town slick, and the snow sloppy. I did a little trench work hoping to avert a wet garage from the street drainage. At least it's still falling as snow in the mountains, so the skiers are happy, and any moisture at any time is a plus in our semiarid environment. The noise of the rain falling made it so I didn't want to record any music today, so I spent some of my afternoon time experimenting with mixing. As with most things, it's GIGO--garbage in, garbage out--I'll have to be more careful in matching my playing when I get serious about recording.
    In the morning I made extra large mugs, which I added a few years ago in response to demand, but feel slightly guilty about in a "fattening of America" type way. Most of us remember when a coffee cup held about 8 oz., or even less in those genteel fancy porcelain versions. About 20 years ago some people began hauling 20 oz. plastic covered cups everywhere, and I finally figured out that people would like a nicer large mug than a 7-11 one, which proved true. Unfortunately a lot of the excess calories Americans absorb are in liquid form. So I recommend if you like large mugs, to stick with water (even though all the hype about "hydration" is just that).

Jan. 5
    This is 12th Night, of Shakespearean fame, marking the end of Christmas. Due to some scheduling issues, we celebrated the start of Epiphany tonight with several fireworks fountains. We used to burn our Christmas tree (and up to 80 others) on Epiphany as well, but the tree this year is still so green we're keeping the lights on it, on the porch, for an Epiphany tree. For another month there's still enough evening darkness that it helps (psychologically), as do the little white lights in front. So we leave them on through the season of Epiphany.
    The kiln celebrated the end of Christmas by overfiring, for the usual inscrutable reasons. All the pots looked like they had small pox, and had to be discarded, and one of the shelves was warped enough to be demoted. I decided to finish cleaning up the mess and checking the elements next week... Fortunately this only happens every year or two...

Jan. 6
    The day started well. I reprised a Christmas hymn for our church service. Someone from the United Kingdom ordered a CD (a semiannual event--selling a CD). So then I started thinking of getting through the long day making some musical recordings. And that was going well.
    I decided to make a pizza for lunch (a rare event--we don't eat much pizza). I decided to use the new food processor we got to grate the cheese.
That went well, even though there's a lot more cleaning to a food processor than a cheese grater.
    And that's where the problem was. I was washing up the parts of the food processor, and I reached down to get out the stainless steel slicer/grater mechanism. My finger stung, and my right index finger was immediately bleeding generously. It turned out I'd happened upon the sharpest part of the device, the slicer part, and it sliced right through my finger nail, and a ways inside as well.
    I'm very fond of my right index finger. I use it for everything, and currently for nothing. The fingertip is very sore. Suddenly no more music (80 percent of my picking is with my index finger), no pottery work, no cooking, no dishes (yes, some people might say whoopee, but I like to keep busy...) So I've been watching old movies and reading. The forecast is for snow (no shoveling). Fortunately typing doesn't hurt so badly. However, I don't like being a complainer, so the prospects seem a bit limited...

Jan. 7
    My finger's doing better. It would be just like any knife cut when chopping vegetables, if it weren't for cutting through the fingernail, which does a lot to support the fingertip. As it is, it resembles breaking a fingernail in the middle, which I've also done. I also got a finger protector (for 59 cents--cheapest medical device on the market), and swept snow, hauled wood, and cooked supper, so in the next couple days I expect to become mostly functional, although sometimes with a rubber glove on...
    I watched the movie "Being There" today, which is a lot like "Forrest Gump" only slower, with Peter Sellers deadly deadpan throughout. Comedy is better when fast paced--this was more a social satire than a comedy per se... I watched it only because of Sellers--I remember reading the book when it came out and being disappointed at the time... Peter Sellers will endure for the Pink Panther movies, and other quirky triumphs such as The Mouse that Roared (where he plays about a dozen characters--of course I also liked Leonard Wibberly's book for that one)...

Jan. 8

Unnamed cats sometimes called Fudge and Caramel, or Pequod and Moby Dick.

    Since nothing new is happening (snow and sore finger continue), I'll tell two cat stories. Cats, while not as personality prone as dogs, do have distinct traits, even two littermates such as the still unnamed pair of neutered Toms (I think of them as Tims) which we've had for a year. One of the two, the caramel colored one, resembles a fine previous cat named Candide who disappeared abruptly. Candide and Caramel both have(or had) very outgoing personalities, trotting to the sales area to greet pottery shoppers. They both play(ed) creatively as well. Candide liked playing with a small bouncy ball, which he would carry in his mouth to drop in one of my moccasins, then enjoy fishing around for it with his paw.
    What set about this reminiscence is that Caramel also has a similar game, using a door in a similar fashion to Candide's play. Yesterday he did his whole routine, which starts with knocking over my small office waste paper basket to find a plastic wrapper to play with. Then he carries it to the door which separates our sales area from the kitchen. This door is usually open, pushed against the wall. The cat likes to push his toys under the door, and fish around for them with his paw. If he can't get them back with his paw, he goes around the door to get them.
    The interesting thing about both of them is the way they would take the toy to the best spot to practice their prey capturing technique. Caramel's littermate isn't as playful or outgoing, although he does steal a toy from his brother in sort of a school yard bully way...

Jan. 9
The weather is such that I am reminded of Christina Rosetti's poem (made into a hymn) "In the Bleak Midwinter." We got another 8 inches of snow today. I was able to work, glazing a kiln load and firing it, but later, with the bandage off, managed to ding the wound open again, so it looks to be next week before I try the muddy environment of throwing with it...
    Generally feeling better with the sore finger, I got more into cooking today, making leftover chicken noodle soup (leftover chicken, broccoli, cheese sauce, and corn, with fresh noodles and onion), applesauce (cut up apples, put through rotary colander to remove skins), and carrrot cake (hand grated carrots)...

Jan. 10
    In my valiant effort to do something while my finger recuperates, I mixed a couple batches of glaze today. I use about 6 main glazes, and in order to keep the buckets deep enough for dipping, I have second buckets for all them. When a bucket gets low, I mix up a new batch, and replace the low bucket with the new one. Then as the new bucket gets lower, I add the former remnant. Mixing glazes is one of the least glamorous parts of an unglamorous profession (mud), so usually I put off mixing new batches as long as possible, meaning most of the second buckets are empty. This is a system I worked out myself, so I don't know if other professionals use it or not...
    I also unloaded the kiln from yesterday. The new clay that I switched to is really good for some items (such as chicken cookers), but I was surprised to find cracks around the knobs of 4 out of 10 canisters that were in the firing. I can remake the lids, firing them on pedestals, but it's a bit of a hassle. I can't remember back to when I made them--hopefully they were a bit too dry, which is a frequent cause of such cracking. Every clay has its Achilles Heel--a smooth clay (as this one is) tends to crack--a sandy clay resists cracking but is rough on the unglazed surfaces...
    We only got about an inch of snow today, and it got above freezing, resulting in ice crust on the ski slopes and temporarily improved road conditions (till it refreezes).

Jan. 11
    The thaw continues, compacting the snow, and making everything slushy. I credit these January thaws to living a couple hundred miles from the ocean, where the ambient temperature is generally well above freezing.
I fired another kiln today, and attended a wrap up meeting of our pottery group for the Christmas sale in December. We're considering moving the venue, since the rent got raised.
One of our Maine St. businesses, C's antiques, is moving down the block for the same reason. The former landlord will have a hard time finding as good a tenant... It's a bit sad for us, as they were a close walk for customers to shop both shops... Now we're separated by 3 bars...

Jan. 12
    When all else fails, you can always clean the house... These are wise words, best taken not too seriously. But at least I vacuumed today. I also emptied and priced the last kiln load of pots until I can start making them again. My injured finger got reopened somewhat yesterday when the loose piece of nail caught on my pocket as I removed my hand. So I was just researching the use of superglue as a wound sealant on the web--apparently a form of it is used, but not exactly the commercially available one. I'd like to stabilize the two parts of the nail, as with a fake fingernail, or supergluing a bit of plastic as a splint, but I'd hate to do something not easily reversible... It's really a little injury, just in a bad place...
    It rained lightly today, but wasn't warm enough to run down the streets much--it just sank into the snow, helping to contribute to a good snowpack for our rivers, hydropower, and aquifer. The piles of snow along our sidewalk and driveway now are often over 3 feet high, making shoveling more of a chore than when you can just push it to the side...

Jan. 13
    On my walk today, I saw some ruby crowned kinglets, on the edge of our property. I'd seen golden crowned kinglets on a trip to British Columbia, but never seen these birds before today. They're easy to overlook, small as wrens, resembling pigmy nuthatches (which I thought they were, at first), but with a little tab of red on their heads. I had my camera handy, but they stayed in deep brush and flitted about continually, making them very tough candidates for photography. Their high trilling whistle alerted me to their presence. The birds seem so few with the deep snow... I don't know where the quail are hunkering, but I haven't seen any of them for a month or more either.
    But the tracks in the snow show there's plenty of activity still in the woods. I followed a deer trail down to the lake--they follow ours if it suits their travel, so it's only right I should follow theirs... Besides they tend to pick fairly safe routes, excluding the ones over the frozen lake... When we lived in central Idaho, the Dworshak reservoir was built over elk migration routes, and we'd frequently hear reports of elk breaking through the ice and drowning when trying to come down to their historic winter range... These animal routes are topographically bound, and very old, and at their most noticable in the winter snows.
    Regardless of how deep it snows, I've noticed the regular trails reestablish themselves in the same area. There's a small animal trail that follows the crest of the hill facing the lake, that is very well traveled. I think it's raccoon, or possibly skunk. These nighttime creatures I've seldom seen aside from their tracks. Shortly after we moved here though, I'd added a small kiln room on our house which proved to be an easy access for skunks. One night I stepped into the room to see if the kiln was done, and found a skunk at my feet. We both retreated quickly, without incident...

Jan. 14
    I started by doing some cleaning in the pottery. Then I remembered an order I'd gotten, and tried throwing pots with a rubber glove on my right hand. That worked well--it turns out, though I would never have guessed it, that the main finger applying pressure on both hands is the middle finger, which makes sense since it sticks out the farthest. That reminded me that in the novel, Zorba the Greek, Zorba is a potter, and cuts off part of a finger because it got in the way of making pottery. That's absurd, but a good story. Anyway, I threw pots all morning, so that was good.
    Later I was dozing with my bandage off my finger (to air it--bad idea), when the phone rang, and I banged the finger hard enough to get it bleeding again. This is getting to be an ordeal...

    Jan. 15
    I found today that I use my index finger more on cleaning up pots than throwing them, so it was a little harder adding coil feet and handles to the pots from yesterday, but I succeeded. I also glazed another kilnload, so the rhythms of life go on.
    Last night as I walked home, the roads were slushy. Then the weather cleared and the temperature dropped, so as I walked down the street today I could see that my footprints were temporarily immortalized (an amusing oxymoron) on the street. The parking lot next door could be used as a skating rink with no difficulty. It may get under 10 F (about -10 C) tonight, similar to temperatures we had for a while before Christmas. When it's calm, as currently, it's not hard to heat with wood at this temperature.
    In an NPR story about a fire in Charlotte NC from last year (which I heard today), the report cited a fire safety instructor at American Military University. This cheered me considerably, as my son just graduated from that institution, which only exists on the Internet (although accredited), so it gave me a bit of independent reassurance of its reality. Several other of my sons's friends have taken courses there to pick up a few needed credits as well.
    He is, of course, daily skiing, faithful as the Post Office in its appointed rounds. He hiked up a rail all day to keep warm, since there was a strong wind earlier and cold temperatures as well. The rail was U shaped, ending at the same elevation as you start, so it may require a bit of perpetual motion to slide from one end to the other...

Jan. 16
    Besides pottery work today, I made 9 quarts of applesauce to freeze. It's a basic law of economics that you don't value what you have a big supply of, so it's hard to remember to eat an apple a day, even with having hundreds of pounds of them. And time marches on, so they're starting to get a little soft, and some wrinkly skins. All this doesn't matter for drying or applesauce. I was drying a lot before Christmas, when I was firing kilns frequently (and setting them above the kilns to dry). Now there's enough room in the freezers to add more frozen sauce, so that's what I was doing today.
    There are several ways to make apple sauce. Some people peel all the apples, cook them down, and they're mashable into a coarse sauce. I prefer cutting around the cores of the apples, with the skins on, steaming them in a large kettle with the lid on for about 45 minutes, then putting the mush through a Foley food mill, which is a metal pan with a heavy perforated steel bottom and a rotating handle thing that rotates to force the mush through it...
    My footprints remain temporarily immortalized in the ice, which is so widespread I've given up bicycling till better conditions occur. My chest still hurts from a spill I took on glare ice a week or two ago off the bicycle. Add that to my other ailments... I've been adding to my reading list, and I've decided to move it to the bottom of the month, to make it more accessible for those who read this blog daily.

Jan. 17
    I spent too much time today doinking with my inkjet printer. After changing all the inks, aligning the heads, cleaning the nozzles several times, it still has some streaks in the printout. I think printers are a weak point in the computer world--you can hardly run a dozen copies without something going wrong with them. I keep a folder of the rejects to print more printer tests and things like shipping labels on the back. Since I'd installed my last ink cartridges, I spent an hour or so looking for more of them on the internet. My regular supplier is out of stock for them (this is not an old printer--only a year or two old). One place I found had a cool system which connects the ink supply to bottles of ink equivalent to 5 regular cartridges, but it said "coming soon" under availability.
    January seems to be a good month to complain... The weather could be better (but then it could be much worse).
    My mother called today and said she's having heart valve surgery next week. News like this tends to put inkjet printers and the weather in proper perspective. Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to do much about any of them, except I'm starting to consider plans to travel to be with my mother through the procedure. She's 85, and sharper mentally than I am, and in fairly good health otherwise, so she's a good candidate for the procedure. She had to give up teaching a literature class to local senior citizens to have the operation, a major regret for her.

Jan. 18
    I'm leaning towards driving to Minnesota, because it's the ultimate in flexibility, and costs about the same as flying. It's irritating that most air tickets aren't easily changeable, and even train and bus tickets are for specific dates rather than just general tickets. So that leaves cars... And icy roads, and temperatures well below freezing. Brrr. January.

Jan. 19-31
    Sorry for the hiatus--my mother went in the hospital earlier than expected and I left without warning on Jan. 19. Aside from the constant blowing snow drifting over the freeway in South Dakota (which is fairly constant in the winter, and mostly creates problems with whiteouts when trying to pass trucks), the trip east went smoothly.
    My mother's heart valve replacement surgery went well. Originally I thought I could take care of her at home for a week or so, but the hospital wisely talked her into going into a short term nursing facility for a couple weeks. Aside from visiting her daily, I had a lot of time to read and watch tv, since the weather was typical for Minnesota January--extremely cold. There was one day which would have been a blizzard had it snowed more--a drop of 50 degrees in 12 hours with -34F (-34C) windchill.
    I also made two trips to see the Minneapolis Art Institute, which was a visual feast for me. Aside from great art from great artists up to the early 20th Century, there were lots of pots, sorted by cultures. The Chinese was well represented, arranged by dynasties.

This is 11 or 12 Century Tzu Chou ware, which I learned as an apprentice by the Japanese name, Tobikanna (and is featured elsewhere on my website).

This pot was in Shoji Hamada's collection, an example of early 20th Century folk pottery from Onta, Onda ware. I also learned this decoration, using a wide Hake brush with white slip over a dark clay, raising and lowering the brush rapidly as the pot turns. The green glaze was not part of the decoration I learned.

This is as close to downtown Minneapolis as I got, looking through the window of the Art Institute. When I was young the small tower on the right labeled Foshay was as tall as they got there. We'd come to visit from very flat Brookings once or twice a year, and I'd be thrilled to ride on an escalator or elevator. I remember my parents letting me wander around the hotel (when I was about 10 or so), and riding on the elevator till the attendant suggested I should find something better to do.

While I was taking it easy in Minnesota, reports of big snowfalls, up to two feet in 24 hours, came in from home. So I was eager to return today to join in the shoveling. There was more snow here than any pass or anywhere else I'd seen on the 3000 mile trip. It's easily 4 feet deep. Apparently the area's been declared an official emergency. There was no place off the street to park my car, and I'd hardly gotten out before a local police car informed me I'd have to find some way to park off the street. Fortunately our location near the bars proved for once to be of benefit, as locals with plows and backhoes were partaking of their windfall of services by celebrating at the bar, and we soon got one to plow a couple parking places for us.

Books read this month, and films of note:

Saucer Wisdom by Rudy Rucker: Another clever bit of Sci Fi from a mathemetician, who uses alien abduction as a vehicle (figurative) for exploring possible future trends in technology, often with a strong basis in science. His Thurberesque drawings add a homey touch to his clever extrapolations.

Now and Then by Robert B. Parker. Parker has owned the hardboiled detective novel since taking over from Ross MacDonald. Although the Spenser novels are fairly formulaic, he manages, like P.G. Wodehouse, to make interesting twists with similar settings. This one was as good as any of them, and I've enjoyed reading most of Parker's works.

High Profile by Robert B. Parker. I think, for a switch from his Superman Spenser persona, Parker created Jesse Stone, a flawed (i.e. alcoholic) small town cop, in a bad relationship with an exwife. Not surprisingly, this isn't as easy reading as the Spenser novels. He also created a female P.I, Sunny Randall, who is in this book as a romantic complication for Stone. The mystery part still worked, but the book spent too much time navel gazing for my taste.

Blue Screen by Robert B. Parker. This one precedes High Profile, but I read it afterwards. It's more of a Sunny Randall story, who emphasizes brain rather than brawn...

Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks. A rather wordy S-F assassination plot, which takes a good way into the book for the disparate threads to become moderately coherent.

The Neddiad by Daniel Pinkwater. Think Illiad, only in the 1950's, at least so far as the title goes. Mr. P has managed to have great fun with most of the Grade B horror staples, mixed in with a bit of Zen. This book represents a great return to his classic Juvenile novel format, with more promised.

Skeleton Canyon by J. A. Jance. She crafts good suspenseful stories, mingled with interesting relational bits.

Film: Ride the High Country Randolph Scott's final movie, and with Joel McCrea. This was the first time I saw this wonderful classic, good for aging boomers... Unlike a John Wayne, the romance is reserved for the young lovers... Packed with ethical quandries and strategic situations.

Film: The Man who Knew Too Much-- James Stewart, Doris Day, Alfred Hitchcock. Although made in the 50's, still holds up pretty well as a thriller. "Vertigo" was more clever, "North by Northwest" probably the best representative of Hitchcock's spy genre, although he was around long enough that The Man who Knew too Much was a remake of his own movie from 1934.. He also made "The 39 Steps," which remains a classic as well. This film includes "Que Sera, Sera," a bit of nostalgia for us older folk.

Film: Happy Go Lovely (1951) If you've got Broadband and an hour and a half to enjoy, click on the link. This is a feel good romantic comedy quite comparable to Singing in the Rain (including over the top technicolor dance sequences). The only stars familiar to me were David Niven and Cesar Romero, but the show is clearly dancer Vera Ellen's. The music is the weak point--the lyrics of one of the 3 tunes featured had the discount lyrics "one, two, three." Perhaps the lyric writers were on strike...

Film: The Saint Louis Bank Robbery 1958. This is a tragic reenactment of a bank robbery in the vein of Dog Day Afternoon and Bonnie and Clyde. Heist movies fall either in that camp, or more favoring the moral lowground as in Butch Cassidy, the Sting, and Ocean's 11. This one is nicely acted, mostly by actors that look more like they should be in a police lineup than on the silver screen, except for a young Steve McQueen, who was just breaking into the movies with films like this and The Blob at this time. Although showing a sometimes sympathetic eye to the robber's plights, it also did a nice job of foreshadowing their downfall. In an interesting touch of realism, the actual police who stopped the robbery reenact their roles. Considering the outcome, it seems like they would have had some emotional issues reenacting it, but I guess these guys hadn't heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.