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Brad's Blog
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Oct. 5
Oct. 6
I woke up in the night feeling dizzy, and although most
of the time I get along fine, I'm still a bit dizzy when moving too suddenly.
From research on the internet and experience with friends and family, I
know it has to do with my inner ear, and that it will probably go away
on its own with time.
The other event of the day worth noting is that a gospel
group which I sometimes sing with in the local church was recruited to
play for two hours at an Alzheimer's fundraiser in Farragut Park tomorrow,
so we practiced for about an hour tonight. We haven't played much
together for a year, but fit together in a natural fashion both vocally
and instrumentally, so I expect it to go well...
Oct 7
The music fundraiser went well. There were about
100 people on a pledge walk for Alzheimer's.
Overnight we had the largest rain in 3 months- 4/10's
inch. One of the people I sang with had a stump catch fire a week
ago down where they were working on their fence. It smoldered into
the ground, eventually turning to flame. They put about 40 gallons
of water on it, and dug around it with heavy equipment. A week later
it started burning again. I'm told that, like coal mines, these old
stumps can burn underground, even spreading along the old roots.
My dizziness is better today, but not totally gone...
It's not unusual that I fall asleep watching football on a Saturday afternoon
(as I did today), but I slept over an hour, instead of a short cat nap--to
which I attribute my malaise...
Oct. 8
Today we moved a lot more lumber, cabinets, and
old windows and doors that someone gave us. They sorted out into:
firewood, new work bench, lumber, and windows and doors. We're considering
a moratorium on accepting stuff, since we're getting pretty full.
Most of the stuff we get we either think of a use for, or pass on to someone
else who can use it.
Also the day was cold enough to wear a coat outside (high
in the upper 40's). Suddenly outside projects don't look as fun...
Oct. 9
Ha! It finally froze hard last night. The dahlias
are totally decimated. No one (including you readers) really cares
when the frost hits Spirit Lake, but it's by far the latest we've ever
seen here in 25 years. It's interesting the flowers that survive
28 degrees--snapdragons, petunias, and even cosmos are still in the running,
as well as the predictable mums.
My dizzy spell has past, and I was full of vim and vigor
today, making large lamps and chip and dips in the pottery, which require
more work than most pots... The pottery was warm from allowing the
cooling kiln to heat it by choosing which doors to open and shut, since
the kiln room is adjacent to the pottery. During the firing some
gases are given off that are not good to breathe, but as it cools below
red heat the waste heat appears to me to be benign...
By the way, I started with "Ha!" because, as a northerner,
you expect cold with fall, and now it's back to "normal." Still highs
in the 60's predicted later this week...
Oct. 10
Since Google and Youtube just combined, it's fitting
that their combined views of my homemade videos just topped 100,000.
Considering all the viewers, the only concrete result I've had was one
CD sale. If they had only let me charge a penny a look, I'd have
a thousand dollars... Meanwhile, the founders of Youtube did finally
figure out how to make money from their free video service ($1.6 billion),
which may go down as one of the great Emperor's New Clothes stories of
our era. If it doesn't make any money, have a plan to make money,
then how much money can it really be worth?
Back on planet earth, I bought a gallon of roof patch
and applied it liberally to the new porch leak area, figuring it was less
work and less expense than tearing the roof apart. It will be a while
before the next rain, according to forecasts...
Oct 11
Potters wear a lot of hats--artist, laborer, shipping
room, clerk, salesperson, janitor, public relations. But the one
even I forget pretty often is dishwasher. So I spent a couple hours
washing pots today in the display. I'm not sure how many hundred
pots are out on display, but they're all too dusty to just dust, so we
wash them. Like Hercule's task of cleaning the Aegean stables, by
the time the task is done they're getting dusty again. Good thing
I'm not a perfectionist.
Oct 12
I'm still washing pots, plus I spent an hour or so retyping
the September Blog, which would be totally gone except for my mother keeping
a paper backup copy... Then this evening I'm working on music--since
I'm doing both a solo performance and assembling a new group effort for
the upcoming Fall Folk Festival--this is the time I'm considering changing
songs as I question my original sanity in choosing what I had. This
is, of course, a no win situation...
Meanwhile, I changed the "sondahl.com" to a cheaper provider,
and the webpage has been in a bit of limbo. Sorry. I'm counting
on my computer scientist son to help, but for some reason he wasn't sitting
waiting by the phone...
Oct. 13
Today was consumed with putting in a new door into an
old wall. Pretty much nothing was plumb and true on the old wall,
and it was a really tight squeeze, but I think it will work out.
Since it's an exterior door, and there's no handle on it yet, it has a
wad of insulation in the knob hole to hold it till tomorrow.
So I wrote yesterday I was waiting for my son to rescue
the website. Actually, he'd already given me some advice, which I'd
done, which hadn't fixed it. So later, my page was back, and I rushed
to thank him. He said he hadn't done anything, it just takes a while
for the new location to make its way around the web. In the
binary yes or no age, it's funny to think that some things on the internet
actually take time to "propagate.".
When he told me I'd already fixed it, I felt a bit like
Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when she was told she could have gone home
anytime, since she just had to tap her heels together and wish...
Later I got to thinking about how Dorothy really would
have felt when told that. "You mean I got subjected to dangerous
opium poppies, had to put up with the Wicked Witch and the flying monkeys,
when you could have told me how to get home right at first? You'll
be hearing from my lawyer about the mental suffering you've caused me..."
Oct. 14
Events over which you have no control can evoke strong
superstitious behaviors as results. Consider the many pro sports players
who follow arcane rituals to avoid bad luck.
For the first time in months there were two days here
without pottery sales. Rationally, this is the time of year sales
slow down, so it wasn't too surprising. But I wished I'd done some arcane
ritual (like petting the lucky cat currently in my lap), because today
people showed up all day, and sales were outstanding. So then I could
pet the lucky cat to try to induce such a sales day again. It might
not do the sales any good, but at least the cat would like it...
There was another forecast for rain tomorrow, which might
have been a factor--people out taking in one of the nicest days left of
fall...
Oct. 15
Oct. 16
It's almost refrigerator weather, drizzly and cold, ranging
from 35-50 degrees. Late fall is the season of darkness, particularly after
the time change (don't panic--it's a week and a half). Winter is,
of course, darker, but the snowy ground makes up a lot for the less overhead
lighting.
There was enough rain yesterday to show that the new
roof still leaks. I just have to adjust my expectations downward.
Meanwhile I just heard that the old time group I'm in,
playing for the Fall Folk Festival in 2 1/2 weeks, was given an extra 15
minutes, making it a 45 minute set. This is a bit of a challenge,
since we've only played together for a couple weeks, and have only practiced
about a half hour's music. Nothing like a challenge...
Oct. 17
I sometimes wonder how many things I can juggle at once,
metaphorically speaking (since I don't juggle). The upcoming Folk
Festival is my heyday. I get an assistant to watch my pottery booth,
so after setting it up, I try to go to all the 6 stages every half hour
to photograph whomever's performing for use on the Folklore Society webpage.
I also am performing in two time slots.
Then today I got an email asking me to help with rounding
up the musicians for the live radio performance, which lasts two hours.
The Folklore Society is mostly a small bunch of contra dancers, so I accepted,
knowing how shorthanded they are for putting on this circus of a festival.
I spent most of my professional day today dealing with
the 90 pots I threw yesterday.
Oct.18
Another day, another couple kilnloads glazed...
The highlight of the day again was playing old-time music
in preparation for the folk festival. It looks like we'll have played
some of the songs together only about 3 times before performing, but then
folk music is loosely contrived anyway... The fiddler (actually multi instrumentalist,
but so far has only played fiddle) likes the old obscure ones that I do,
so we're going with that, even though I also enjoy throwing in string band
versions of Beatles and Dylan for variety...
Oct. 19
It drizzled most of the day, but finally let loose with
hard rain and hail this evening. It added up to an inch of rain.
Last month I mentioned how a 10 square mile forest fire
was started by a woman burning her journal entries. She got sentenced
to some jail time, and a several thousand dollar fine. They sometimes
bill the person who starts the fire for the whole cost of fighting it.
In this case it was a couple million dollars. The woman was apparently
without major funds, and showed remorse, so received a light sentence.
Oct. 20
A lovely day, with cold nights predicted, so it was time
to pick the apples. This year only one apple tree really produced,
but it yielded about 100 lbs. of red delicious apples. About half
of them have codling moth holes (making them mostly suitable for apple
sauce), but the rest are very large and tasty.
Our aging cat started walking around in a curious manner
today, that led to a trip to the vet. Unfortunately after $200 in
tests, they still don't know what was wrong with her. But when she
got home, she seemed better.
The coffee shop across the street got the idea this fall
to show free movies outside in their deck area. As I write, some
tough souls are enduring 50 degree temperatures to watch some animated
movie. I imagine they got the idea from a Spokane supper club, which
shows old silent movies on the wall of a building across the street.
Both events take me back to when my wife and I were first
married, and living in a church community house in Portland. Part
of the mission of the house was to extend hospitality to the urban neighborhood
we were in. My own interest in old movies led me to use the church's
film projector and 16 mm movies from the Portland Public Libray, and invite
people in for walk in movies. It did indeed draw in a few local residents,
and it also caused me to get a Harold Lloyd film (The Freshman) on a whim,
which was a marvelous movie.
But our movies were in the hot nights of summer, not
the crisp nights of fall...
Oct. 21
I went to the local bluegrass concert tonight.
It mostly made me miss my musical companions, whom I'd usually sit with.
After Sam died, Toody moved back to her home in New Mexico, so the Musicians
Anonymous group is gone... Some of the music tonight was nice though,
and a new group played, including doing one of Sam's songs (by total coincidence).
My new group is scheduled to perform there next month, so I guess life
goes on...
Oct. 22
We drove across the hills to visit our relatives in Spokane
for a birthday. There were deer hunters parked near the most mountainous
area. We got to the more agricultural area, and, as is almost always
the case, there were a dozen or more deer grazing in two alfalfa fields.
As the native environment gets trashed with inedible exotic weeds, the
deer naturally go where the food is. The only curious thing is why
the hunters didn't just go where the deer were. There was at least
one fairly large doe, but it could be most hunters don't have doe tags.
Not having hunted, I'm not clear on all the rules, but being immersed in
the culture (hunting is big in Idaho), you can't help but get involved
in it. For example, in church this morning the pastor mentioned in
the announcements that the little old lady who sits in front of us got
her first elk this year, in her second year of hunting. It's
pretty incongruous to pair up this frail appearing person with killing
an elk that probably weighs 6 times her size... I can't imagine how
she and her equally elderly husband got the elk home...
Farmers generally don't like deer for the damage they
do to their crops or orchards.
But I like the deer that aren't eating my garden...
I don't even mind the ones who raid my garden much, since we had a lot
of surplus anyway, though I feel a bit bad at being part of the system
that lures them into town...
Oct. 23
Whenever I get involved in selling pots elsewhere than
from my Spirit Lake showroom, it's enough of a mixed bag that I have misgivings
about it later. Craftspeople who sell from booths every weekend have
to be extremely organized and dedicated. If you only do a couple
fairs a year, it means a lot of packing before, and unpacking and packing
again and unpacking, and hopefully somewhere in between the sales will
be good enough to justify the bother.
I'm reflecting on this because the potter's group I'm
in met again today to plan their Christmas sale. Last year it proved
to be both fun and profitable (except for the selfless group treasurer
who had to do the sales and accounting...) So this year we hope it
will be more so, but we are doing lots of planning to encourage those possibilities.
Meetings are not my idea of fun, so my feelings are running
more to the negative. In fact, mostly I like doing pottery sales
where I get to play music, so I think I enjoy playing music more than selling
pots. Of course it's harder to make a living from music than pottery,
so I have to stick to my day job, regardless of what's more fun...
Oct. 24
My pots are currently in migration.
Customers frequently wonder if I take all the pots in at night, or whether
I take them in for winter. The answer is no, and no. The reason
is historical.
When we moved here, there were 3 rooms plus a bathroom.
We set up one room as the pottery workshop, one room for sales (which we
slept in at night), and the remaining room was kitchen/living room.
All this with two young children (and a third born here). After the
first year it was clear that to gain customers, we'd have to put the pots
out where they could be seen. So I built the first kiosk, added a sleeping
loft, and then added pottery workshop space in back. There was no
other place to store the pots, so out front they stayed.
Large houses and large cars are all
the fashion, but our model was more the midwestern farm, with a small modest
farmhouse and bigger barn, as well as other outbuildings.
Back to the migration. The pots
don't actually migrate, but where the pots are destined from the kiln does.
In summer as many pots as possible are outside, as that's where the customers
mostly shop. By September the inside was nearly empty, but now with
colder weather the shoppers we get seem happier inside, and so do the pots...
So the shelves are filling again inside.
Oct. 25
I spent the afternoon rooting out
a wild blackberry patch that Brer Rabbit would have been proud of.
I liked the blackberries, but it was so overgrown and mixed with wild oregano
that very few berries could be found. And being wild, it had thorns
upon thorns, making any picking hazardous. It took a couple hours
to clear it with a loppers, then finish up with a heavy duty weed wacker
(mostly to get the oregano). The task is only half over though--they
have put out underground pathways that rival the Viet Cong's, so there
will be lots of root digging for the next year.
These blackberries weren't native
to this area--it's too dry around here. This helps me feel less guilty
at rooting them out. We'll probably replace them with raspberries
when the roots are all gone.
Oct. 26
One of my glazes went bad a while
ago. It's the yellow crystalline--the whole batch acted underfired
at cone 10, and at $40-50 per batch, I can't afford to just mix up another.
Most glaze ingredients are dug out of the ground and pulverized, and their
composition changes from batch to batch. I'm assuming that's what's
happened, or that I made a mistake in weighing the ingredients.
Anyway, rather than waste the whole
batch, I've been adding cheap ingredients in hope of lowering the melting
point and getting some interesting (if unrepeatable) result. For
a couple times, I added Copper Carbonate, as it melts at a low temperature
and adds a greenish hue. Every firing I'd stick in a sample of the
new mixture, with only slightly better results. The current firing
I've gone to adding some Calcium Carbonate (pulverized seashells), as it's
another ingredient to lower the melting point of a glaze. In the
end I may just have to discard the results, but the process is sort of
interesting.
Meanwhile, in the garden, I cut out
the old raspberry canes today. Next to each of the old canes were
equal sized or better new canes--assurance of berries for next year.
Most raspberries grow the first year as a single stem, which branches the
second year into the fruiting sprays. I noticed some plants that
forked in their first year of growth. As I removed the ones from
this year, I noted that the same plants that forked last year forked this
year--showing a genetic disposition for an undesirable trait (the branching
ones don't bear as well, I think).
Oct. 26
The glaze test I mentioned yesterday
worked, in that the glaze is now glossy. It's also yellow crystals
on a green background, which isn't a combination that jumps at one.
I'll try it on some larger pots and if they come out I'll include a photo.
But today is A Tale of Two Butterdishes:
Oct. 28
Although today was lovely and in the upper 50's, a winter
storm is due tomorrow, with lows below 20 by Monday night, so it's time
to batten the hatches.
I spent part of the afternoon digging about 200 lbs of
carrots. There's still 200 lbs or so in the ground, that may with
luck withstand the winter and be good in the Spring. About half of
the carrots I dug will go to the local food bank. The rest will go
into our root cellar.
I posted a fairly recently composed guitar rag today
at Youtube: G and
C Rag . Its name derives from the two keys it modulates between.
It's only had a few views, but one comment was added saying it "sounds
like something van ronk would play." This was amusing because I got
another comment several months ago implying that I was no Van Ronk.
I also use Dave Van Ronk in one of my literary blog stories. He was
one of the leading folk musicians from New York City in the late 50's,
and a fine fingerstyle guitarist. One of the first records I bought
was his, along with several of Lightnin Hopkins, for 33 cents in a deeply
discounted record pile at Kmart. I should have realized then this
was the fate for folk musicians.
Oct. 29
Along with some sleet which fell today, and more snow
predicted, my son and I are hit with sore throats, making life more to
be endured than enjoyed. The storm was sufficient to close the major
freeway to Seattle at the pass, but just dusted the hills around us so
far.
This storm is like training wheels for winter.
It's a perfect storm to stay off the roads, since every year there's a
new crop of Californians that move up here with negligible winter driving
skills. Fortunately I don't have to go anywhere until Thursday...
Oct. 30
Although it's possible to continue working when sick,
since I work by myself, throwing pots with a runny nose is not a fun activity.
So I didn't do that, but I did glaze a kiln load of pots, and fire two
kilns today. This sore throat/cold seems settled in for the long
haul...
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