Brad Sondahl's blog

    Rainy cold Fall is hard to love, but lovely when you catch the right moments. Yesterday morning the frost lined the edges of these plum leaves, making them stand out sharply. This was before the latest inch of rain fell (and is falling)...
    The Folk Festival is this weekend, my favorite festival of the year, even if I do only catch snippets of the dance and music, being too busy photographing it all. The Saturday Spokane newspaper will be using 3 of my photos from last year in a story promoting this year's festival...

Nov. 8
Although the Fall Folk Festival is a lot of things to me, I'm also (with the aid of relatives) selling pots there, and with the economic turmoil expected sales to be worse, but they were actually $100 better than the first day last year, so I guess there's still hope in America... Yes we probably can...
    The other thing about the Folk Festival for me is seeing all the musician friends I've made through the years, and hearing snippets of a lot of them. I also took about 300 pictures that will take a lot of editing and labeling and web stuffing over the next week or so. The last band of the evening, Wide River, is also the most versatile of all the bands I saw today, with all of the group switching instruments frequently, and using cello and slide banjo to good effect. (They're playing again tomorrow at 2:30 somewhere).

Nov. 10
    I've been too busy to blog, with the end of the Folk Festival, and return of the work week. It ended on kind of a down note--Our Sondahl and Hawkins act was scheduled for nearly the last slot, and although we had a pretty good turn out last year, this year there were fewer than a dozen listening by the time we ended (fortunately for my ego my Youtube videos just went over the 900,000 view mark). But Jonathan and I are feeling good about how we're playing, and will continue recording that particular set to make a CD.

Nov. 11
    We had an annual workshop at the main library today. Like any workshop, the 'Hello" name tags were handed out. It was interesting to see the resisters--one had a question mark, one wore hers upside down, another said something like "I'm Mark and I'm antisocial." One that amused me was a woman whose tag said, "In Cognito." I thought about it for a while, and finally told her I liked her name tag, that it reminded me of that famous saying of Rene Descartes, "In Cognito, ergo slum." Unfortunately she wasn't familiar with the original expression ("Cogito ergo sum"-- I think, therefore I am), and wit is pretty wasted when it has to be explained. A lot later I learned she was the manager of one of the larger libraries in the area... Getting back to the joke, in case it's too private even for this elect audience, I thought if one one was incognito (not recognizable), one could therefore slum (hang out in loose dives) with impugnity.

Nov. 12
    One of the daycares I visit has two little boys with Spiderman and Monster trucks as their favorite things. So, the last two times, when I asked for songs they want to sing, they just mention Spiderman and Monster trucks. So I made up a song about Spiderman riding around in a monster truck, and they were both happy...
    When looking through catalogs of stuff for kids, there are some prevalent themes there, such as princesses for girls, and pirates for boys. So it makes some sort of sense to have a pirates and princesses tea party... Actually, having seen Errol Flynn in Captain Blood, that's sort of what a lot of the old pirate movies were about... My son had a pirates video game, that, after you won a battle, you'd go to a dance at the governor's, and have to be able to dance well enough to please the governor's daughter. This is training for real life...

Nov. 13
    One mark for a successful children's program is their attitude--after the the older session today three of them stayed behind to clean up, and one of them wanted also to keep decorating the cardboard puppet theater. The nice thing about puppet theater is they are doing most of the work... I hope to have some videos up soon, but need some parent permission slips to make it feasible.
    I'm commenting less about pottery lately--mostly it's the boring repetition part right now. I did have a wholesale sale today, which helps, but also helps deplete the pottery supply.

Nov. 14
    I glazed a couple kiln loads today. After work I spent the evening editing all the photos from the folk festival. If I make some time tomorrow, I may get them pasted into some webpages. Spare time is so hard to find these days...

Nov. 15
    So I spent a lot of my free time on a nice sunny day adding the photos from the folk festival, and they're now posted at
http://www.spokanefolklore.org/FolkFestival.html
    We're considering moving the chickens to our other house, since it's fun to watch them. This will probably just be till Spring, so it will be more temporary then some coops we've built...

Nov. 16-17
    So we built the latest model chicken coop, with a compost heap at one end, and parts of my son's ski ramp for the roof, and moved in the chickens. Avid readers may recall that one of our hens was being henpecked enough that we separated it from the others. Since then its feathers have all grown back, and we hoped in a new location they'd leave it alone. But after putting them all in together, the big blond bird was afraid to get off the roost with the others there. So we moved it into the new compost bin (still have to add a roof and nesting box).

Nov. 18
    I'm back to producing as many pots as I can (given the library job), to have a good selection for the CAGNI Christmas sale in two weeks. I'm also getting more orders by phone or internet than in person, as old customers start thinking of the holidays. I heard from a nearby town business today, trying to establish "the world's first Green general store chain." They're interested in logo mugs. Their website is http://blog.sevenplanet.com/ if you're curious. It appears to be just starting out...

Nov. 20
Life continues too busy and mostly mundane to document daily on the blog. But I have started posting videos of puppet shows made by the library kids. They will soon have a new location, but it's currently up at http://www.sondahl.com/wha

Nov. 22
    We're traveling about 90 miles this weekend so my wife can interview at two yoked rural churches--Davenport and Egypt. The Egypt one is reputedly frequently photographed due to its setting, so I'm bringing my camera. A Google search for images of Davenport comes up pretty slim, so I'll probably take some photos there as well...

Nov. 23
    The trip went well, but the day wasn't too photogenic. Davenport is the same size as Spirit Lake, but has a lot more businesses and services, being a county seat in the wheat country of Eastern Washington. It felt a lot like central Idaho, where we used to live.

Nov. 24
    The Millpond is mostly frozen over with the cold nights we've been getting. Keeping the woodstoves stoked is generally remembered these days. Our exchange student Emil is looking forward to snow, as Denmark only gets snow in small amounts, being mostly close to the sea, and near sea level. We've also gotten ski passes to Silver Mountain this year, so skiing is again on the winter agenda for us all. My son Birrion, who moved to Colorado, has already skied 40 days this season... But currently it's just cold, no snow forecast...

Nov. 25
    I was at the dentist today for teeth cleaning, and my dentist also has an exchange student, from Norway. The student taught him to say in Norwegian, "My name is ____, I'm from ____, and Danes are stupid." Emil said early on that Danes hate Swedes, and apparently there's plenty of rivalry between the different countries in that area. I would hope it's mostly good natured, as in sports rivalries, but it's too easy to lapse into cultural and ethnic prejudice.

Nov. 29
    We had over a friend and her new boyfriend for Thanksgiving dinner. She met him on a plane trip. When I've traveled by plane, there are those who totally ignore the people next to them, and the ones who converse. I was impressed on a ride once to meet a former pilot in his 80's who had flown through the radioactive plume of one of the Pacific nuclear tests. He was told he might live a shortened life due to it, but went was still going strong 50 years later. My sister once sat next to the guitarist for a rock group I enjoyed as a youth called Jethro Tull.
    Of course anything a stranger tells you might be a lie... I don't know why someone would want to claim to be Jethro Tull's guitarist, but if I were my sister (who reads this blog), I might want to check Martin Barre's picture on Wikipedia and see if it jibes with what she remembers. Of course, my sister is getting on in years also (it's her birthday today), so she probably doesn't remember what he looked like. Happy Birthday, Susan...
    In other news, we had the first build up (over an inch) of snow today, so winter seems likely, about on schedule.