Brad Sondahl's blog

August 1

    These are the halcyon days of summer here--cool nights and hot days. Idaho leads the nations in forest fires currently, but they are mostly to the south (as is most of the state, for that matter), so life here is generally good. The raspberry season ended with the wasps taking over, particularly since the first branch I lifted several days ago yielded a sting. I did pick the first green beans today, but forgot to cook them for supper, as we were having filet of leftovers, using all four burners to heat up the leftovers... Other years we get buckets of green beans, but the deer pretty much decimated it, and although the makeshift deer fence has prevented further predation, green beans can only regenerate a bit. The carrots look likelier to make a full comeback.
    Meanwhile, in the pottery, orders and shortages keep me motivated to work daily. Two people in the last day asked for a covered jar to keep a can of grease in. It could be coincidence, or it could be the first people talked to the second about it, but I'm making several to order, and will see if this is a four leafed clover I've overlooked before (makes you feel like singing, doesn't it?)...

August 2
    My son is getting married in September, so I volunteered to make the Guest Gift. Most of their visit here has been wedding planning related. Weddings are juggernauts nowadays, and I'm supplying the jugs... Well, goblets actually. Small goblets, which, since they are nondrinkers, will be filled with chocolates. I started making 50 of them today, and will probably make 30 or more tomorrow, to cover the estimated guest list. Their wedding is at a rather out of the way location, on the Upper Peninsula of Lake Superior near Marquette, Michigan, so 80 is about how many are expected. As father of the groom, I'm the least involved in the wedding plans (fortunately), but I did offer the things I enjoy doing--pottery, photography, and music, so I'll be involved when it happens...

August 3
    I made teapots today. I used to make teapots with handmade rattan handles. I'd assemble them at art fairs to have something to do. Eventually I ran out of the caning supplies, and mostly didn't make teapots. When, after requests, I started making them again, I decided to make an over the top clay handle. The only problem with them is that if you bonk the teapot too hard, the handle might break. The same thing is theoretically true with a pitcher, but less of it is below the handle. Anyway, people seem to like the cane handles, so this year I bought some premade slip on ones, and my teapots have sold better than in years. They might sell better with hand made rattan handles, but I've looked into the supplies and can't see it as a profitable business strategy. Of course the framed nature photos I added this year cost a lot more, and I haven't sold any yet, so I'm still not the genius entrepeneur...

August 4

    We made our annual pilgrimage to the largest local arts and craft festival today. It's gone from being central to my yearly sales, to on-again off-again as the lottery of the jury decided whether to let me exhibit, to finally peripheral and just entertainment. This is the best way to attend an art fair, but of course memories of the old days cut into it. Mostly I remember some great entertainment there through the years. Even good sales at art fairs have a fair share of waiting and boredom, exposure to hot and cold, and stresses, so I'm glad to leave them mostly behind. They are valuable for public relations, getting your work seen, whether you sell a lot or not, but I think that only works if your pottery is easily accessible later (as mine is).
    Most of the family preferred swimming at the beach near the festival, such as my ski nut son doing the somersault off the pilings...

August 5
August continues hot and dry after the third hottest and driest July in local history. Because there's not a smattering of thunder showers on the horizon, fire danger remains extreme but stable. Campers can no longer have any form of fire in campsites, nor smoke cigarettes in the woods... Towns aren't restricted this way, but at the beach yesterday (where open flames are always banned), we saw two large flaming grills where the cooks got overly enthusiastic with the starter fluid. In one case he had to reach through the flames to get the fluid can, which was getting heated rapidly. Anyway, barring human malice and stupidity, these fire conditions often slowly lessen as the weather cools (though that might be a month still).
    The lake continues to be pleasant and a counterpoint to the dryness all around... We canoed the Mill Pond today.

  August 6
    Some shoppers inevitably ask me, isn't it great that I can do what I want for a living, and I usually reply that anything you do for a living isn't by definition fun, or something to that effect. But for most people who do pottery, the throwing is the most fun, and glazing the most fraught with peril. Lately things have been going in spurts, since I glazed two kilnloads today, and have a bisque load waiting till they're done for firing. The result is no throwing pottery today. While glazing I managed to do some of the many errors glazing is prone to, including smearing decorations, drips going where I don't want, and even punching through a berry bowl with the glazing tongs (which gets bits of fired clay in the glaze bucket, requiring additional sieving). I didn't get to packing some pots for shipping (another less glorious but necessary chore). So at least I know what I'm doing tomorrow...

August 7
The weather was only in the lower 80's today, so in addition to the throwing and shipping pots advertised yesterday, I did some mowing to try to control the knapweed infestation in one of our yards. Knapweed is like a wildly prolific thistle, only not quite as spiny. At times I pull or chop it, but now the best thing to do is to mow off its blossoms to reduce the seeds. Most of the grass has gone brown from the extended drought, so the blue flowers make it stand out at this time. The grass is still lush in the orchard, where a lovely crop of apples is putting on size...

August 8
It must have something to do with our lake proximity, but sales seem to be strongly related to temperature here. Today the high was in the lower 70's and the sales were cool as well. This could explain our sales slump through the winter ;-)
The cool weather allowed me to weed our main garden, possibly for the last time this year. In spite of predations of deer and wasps, the carrots, corn, and tomatoes look good--may start picking corn tomorrow. There's no corn like your own corn...
Our newest vehicle (9 years old) wouldn't restart after stopping at the dumpsters (most of our town has no garbage service, instead we deliver it to some dumpsters 5 miles away). A jump start got it going again. Auto mechanics is one of my weakest abilities, but we've had enough bad batteries and alternators through the years that I'm feeling it's the battery, particularly since I charged it for a couple hours this evening and it's still dead. If I replace it and it's not the battery, at least I've got a new battery...

August 9
So I've put in a new battery, and the battery light is not lit, so that was good. Instead 4 little blinking lights are on, flashing. An Internet search yielded helpful info which may fix this, along with many disparaging reviews of the van in question. Ahh, life...
    Today I had a fine time playing music with some of my favorite slightly older musician friends, including most of the Musicians Anonymous group. This is a group which knows the standard songs from "5 foot 2" to "I'll Fly Away" and has played them together a lot.
    And the weather and sales both warmed up...

August 10
    I glazed another couple kiln loads again today, and because we're low on some items, I threw pots, even though I'm going to a bluegrass festival tomorrow. So I chose the pots I made so they would require a minimum of cleaning up tomorrow, like pie plates, spoon setters, and berry bowls.
    The CD project for the summer got put on hold because the recording studio in my "neighborhood" closed its doors, so I've been researching recording equipment so I can make my own recordings and mixes. This looks to me like a great way to spend the winter, and I can get started for about the same cost as I was going to pay to get the CD made (though with less classy equipment, admittedly).

August 11-12
I've been listening to and playing bluegrass all weekend at the Bluewaters Bluegrass festival. The weather was great and I had a fine time, including jamming till 1:30 last night, and taking my bicycle and exploring a lot of the area around Medical Lake this morning. Animals are so territorial that, for the places that I visited last year, such as the periphery of the lake, I saw the same animals in the same environs, including deer, yellow headed black birds, cormorants, quail and kingbirds. I took a lot of photos, but none of the nature ones seemed worth using here... I'll be putting up a page of festival photos in the next couple days.

August 13
http://www.sondahl.com/events/bluewaters2007.html
I will say that I enjoyed all the music, but true to form enjoyed the old time and more traditional bluegrass over the hot licks jazzy style which clearly has its adherents as well.

August 14
    I fired three bisque kilns in a row, which will probably result in 4 or more glaze fires in a row. I can't recall them ever clumping so much before.
    This evening my son and I went to see the movie "Stardust." I'd read the book when it came out 10 years ago or so, long enough ago that I wasn't constantly comparing the movie to the book. The author, Neil Gaiman, is a very talented fantasy writer. I particularly enjoyed "Good Omens," a comedy about the endtimes cowritten with Terry Pratchett. I heard an interview with Gaiman on NPR, in which he said he wrote the book longhand with a fountain pen to get in the spirit of fairy tales, which this one definitely was. To me it compares favorably with "The Princess Bride," combining romance and fighting evil in a highly entertaining way. Modern film techniques lend themselves to rendering plausible the impossible, so this film benefits from liberal use of computer graphics. Like the actual old fairy tales, few punches are pulled--characters die off frequently to advance the plot--which makes it a great "guys" movie. But the crossdressing pirate captain helps us get in touch with our feminine side... On the other hand there are also lovely young actresses to make us grunt and go "huh!" in a decidedly macho fashion, much like the pirate crew.
    It may be the only movie I'll see in the theater this year. I was not disappointed.

August 15
    We're getting another venture into the high 80's/low 90's, to assert that summer isn't over yet. What that meant today was that the 45 mugs I threw this morning were turning white at the top tonight. This generally means the handles are likely to crack off in drying. So to reduce losses, I dipped them all halfway in a bucket of water. You can also use a squirt bottle type mister, but the water goes on more evenly with dipping. Then I covered them with plastic to save the finishing work for tomorrow. I may redip them in water before adding the handles tomorrow, depending on how they look.

August 16

    I began the final batch of around 100 small goblets I made for the "wedding gift" to be given to attendees of my son's upcoming wedding. They were again so dry by evening that I misted them and covered them.
    Currently our street is being torn up to put in a natural gas pipeline. I have mixed feelings about using natural gas. In so far as our area uses hydroelectric power, it's cleaner (though with a cost to wildlife), but as the region has grown, they've started adding natural gas and even coal plants to supply electricity, so it makes sense to consider switching to natural gas for water and house heating, as it supplies the heat directly. I don't like it for cooking, because I feel I have more control by setting the electric knobs at preferred settings, although I suppose I'd learn preferred settings with gas. The biggest issue would be switching to gas for kilns. Because I'd have to buy new equipment, and probably switch to reduction firing, I'm not eager to do it. Even though it may be cost effective, using fuels to fire kilns seems to me to waste a lot of heat up the flue. I watched a woodfiring one time, where good sized chunks of wood were tossed in almost continuously, with fire belching out the chimney, and it still took many hours to heat (and enough wood to heat our house for months). Electric kilns confine the heat inside the insulated enclosure, with only a minimal space to allow gases to escape.

August 17

This piece of Pine Creek was photographed today on a trip to the Silver Valley, outside Pinehurst, Idaho. It lies at the foot of a mine in a major mining area (silver gave the Silver Valley its name, but lead, zinc, and other metals were mined as well). The question with many places in the Valley is "How polluted is it?" A friend of ours reported in his youth hanging a wood handled hammer in one of the creeks coming out of the smelter, and that the head had dissolved within a week. Most of the mines have stopped operation, but their legacy remains forever in this area. I didn't see any fish in the water, but lichens and algae were surviving. The old mine had plastic containment walls around to catch sediments during spring runoff.

This is what is left of the mine portal. It has a sort of dignity. There's a pile of rotting lumber I cropped out of the photo. There was also some spray painted grafitti about a girl loving some guy. Although it's not more than a hundred years old, it has the feeling of antiquity about it, looks a bit like Abu Simbel in 5000 AD. What the mines did was produce the metals we all use, meanwhile unlocking poisonous biproducts, which, though perfectly natural, had been mostly secure in the rock matrix. So this relic is both a monument to progress and stupidity.

August 18
This was a real up day--lots of sales, a comfortable day for shorts or long sleeved clothing, and Sondahl and Hawkins played at an outdoor Pig roast for actual money. We had a good time playing as well. Things were tense in the days leading up to this--two days ago I got a sliver on my picking index finger, but fortunately not the exact part I pick with. Then yesterday I was putting away a wooden vase that had a metal "frog" in it and it slipped and poked one of my fretting fingers enough to bleed. These are minor details, but some guitarists get their fingernails insured, so you can see how important a few bits of fingertips are to musicians... All went well with the concert, except the bassist started developing a blister (both of us have not been keeping our callouses up by sufficient playing... And you thought practice was to help with musical ability instead of just toughening skin...)

August 19
Today pottery sales were 20 times slower than yesterday, but I don't think I'll jump out a window in a Wall Street style panic, because I might hurt myself. That datum says more about Saturday's sales than Sunday. I expect the drizzly rain had a lot to do with it, adding up to 3/10s inch so far, enough to crank the fire danger down a notch for a few days. The rain arrived with no lightning, so that didn't add to the fire danger either.
    I worked on snoozing today, and changing the keys to some of the songs I do, having finally figured out that most of the singing I do sounds better in a higher register.

   August 20
    It rained on and off again today, which initially prompted me to work on pottery in the afternoon, making some items like large pitchers that tend to have problems with handles in hot weather... But then the first piece of audio equipment arrived, and I spent most of the afternoon and evening getting frustrated with technology. The equipment is so you can hook up microphones and instruments to your computer for recording, and came with some limited software. The software took me an hour or more just to find how to make it record. This shouldn't happen, since that was the main purpose of the software. The best software requires no manual, and installs and works immediately. Hard to find that sort...
    I heard on the radio that Idaho has 600,000 acres burned this year from fires. Hopefully the rain will be general enough to improve conditions.

August 21
    In a classic screwball comedy, there are several plotlines, and action and words pile up faster than one showing can recount. This evening felt like that. By day I'm continuing to churn out pots. Meanwhile the corn and tomatoes ripen, and my son's marriage starts to loom. The corn exists in 4 different plantings. I wish I could remember the order I planted them in, but they all seem to be ripening about now anyway. But the first planting was heading towards overripe, so I determined to pick them, parboil them on the cob, and cut the corn off for freezing. This worked well last year. Customers kept coming, so I couldn't get to the corn till nearly suppertime. While picking corn, I saw the last peas on the verge of overripeness, so I picked them and some tomatoes as well. I'd sold a set of DVD's today, the last in stock, so I set about manufacturing more of them on the computer as supper happened. I also wanted to print out some pictures for cards, so as usual the printer needed all the print cartridges changed, and I had to order some replacement cartridges as well. We had corn and peas for supper, and I froze the leftover peas and corn. Then I checked the garden here and found more corn that should be picked, so I pushed the corn project off a day, onto tomorrow when peach canning seems imminent. Looks to be a long day.
    On the wedding front, I packed up a hundred goblets for the wedding guest gifts, then found out that about 70 are all that are likely to be needed. Also I've been chatting about table arrangements for the wedding dinner with the bride, so the wedding is gaining ascendancy in our thoughts.

  August 22
I only got the corn ready for freezing today--peaches tomorrow? A couple hours of food processing is enough for one day. Both today and tomorrow require 50 mile trips to get one or other of our cars serviced. We're driving to the wedding next month, and the big question is, which of our 3 cars is likeliest to make the trip? According to our mechanic, it isn't the newest van we own, which he says is due to lose its transmission and engine... Time to car shop again, only not enough time before we leave... The mechanic suggested trading it in, since it looks good, but I've got ethical qualms about passing on lemons, which is part of why we keep cars till they die.

August 23
42 quarts of organic peaches canned, no cracked jars... Although it was about 80 today, there's a distinct feel of late summer, and the house gets shut up at night instead of opened. My relatives in the central U.S. report flooding in basements from leftovers of a hurricane producing 7 inches of rain in a short time. The hurricane season started late. I think that the storm systems normally spawned through the summer didn't happen, resulting in drought in the midwest, as also here.

    I bicycled around town this evening, which I hadn't done for a couple months. There were a couple new homes going up, but the largest new developments are stagnant. My own understanding of the current housing/economic mess is that the Federal Reserve put the pedal to the metal for loans a few years ago, bringing the prime rate down almost as far as it could go. The result did indeed stimulate the economy, but resulted in land/property inflation when everyone was buying, due to the cheap credit. This in turn led to a building spree, also funded by cheap financing, and the subprime loans, ditto. This building spree you can think of as a growth ring on a tree in a wet year--fat, and spread all around. So anywhere the economy was doing well, a growth ring of new building was happening, providing lots of construction related jobs and a feeling of well being. The Fed finally had to reign in the rate, to prevent rampant general inflation, and the brakes, in the form of tightened credit, caused a crunch. So their current response is to step on the gas again, hoping nothing got too damaged to recover. Unfortunately the billions they pumped in last week, and the lower loan rates they will probably have to revisit, will probably work, at the cost of inflation, which hits the fixed income and poor folks the most. But what do I know?--I'm just a simple potter...

    I read a story about Spirit Lake in the Spokane Spokesman-Review this morning. I was amused to learn I was cited in the article as one of Spirit Lake's biggest boosters and best photographers, and included this quote; "According to Sondahl, half the businesses along the main street have stood empty for the last 25 years, at least." The author never spoke to me, just got the info off my website... That does make journalism easier...

August 24
August is proving to be the biggest month for the pottery this year, and I was running low on the roll ends of newsprint that I cut up and use to wrap pots. So I was dismayed to learn that the local paper had just improved their print process so there was no waste. Of course I applaud their effort to reduce waste, but I also think a lot of teachers, artists, and others benefit from their end rolls, which often have 100s of feet of usable paper on them.
    I initially viewed this as a major setback. I know of no cheap alternative... Then I decided to place a free ad on Craigslist in the "wanted" category, and within a couple hours I got a solid lead on free roll ends at a printer in Spokane Valley. So today I got 11 fairly short rolls for free, whereas previously it cost $3-5 per fuller roll.
    This evening I made peach pit jelly (or syrup) from the leftover peach pits that resulted from canning. We initially got the idea from an old church cook book. Pretty often it doesn't gel, in which case it's syrup. Both the syrup and the peaches are mostly eaten on pancakes, waffles, and French toast. I tried making two batches at the same time, one with low sugar pectin, and the other with regular. Tomorrow I may know which produced better results--they're too hot yet.

August 25
    The low sugar pectin wins in making jelly--the other remained liquid syrup, so why bother even adding it? I don't make a lot of jelly, so I'm pretty behind on the learning curve for this.
    The wind's been blowing all day, with a cool day predicted arriving tomorrow. Traditionally we can expect a frost any time from here on out. I'm still enjoying the shorts weather today.
    The local annual blues festival is in process of moving from half a block away on the street (where the street band permeated our house) to the bars for the night. I love blues, but don't like bars, so am ambivalent. Most of the bands played some classic Willie Dixon blues, but actually seemed to have pretty short blues lists, turning to 70's rock and roll like "Feelin' Alright," a song covered by Joe Cocker, written by Dave Mason of Traffic. The pottery sales and those of other Maine St. businesses tend to go down on this event day (except for the bars, for whom it's the biggest event of the year).

August 26
    I've been places where the deer seem tame (and the people there chase off bears by beating on pots and pans). But I read in the local news today how an older couple got beaten up by a mule deer which apparently took exception to their dog. They kept getting knocked down by the deer trying to get their dog. As the article (and I) like to point out, such events are frequently related to people bringing in wild animals by feeding them. (Unfortunately that's an unintentional effect of my unfenced garden). The fattest ground squirrels I've seen lived in mountainous rest areas along the freeway, with lots of free food from passersby. With the food comes a sense of entitlement.
    Every time I open the door to my hens, the distinctive dark red one is always in front there hopping up to assert its first dibs on whatever food I brought. They're only afraid of me if I grab for them, and then, not much. I suppose there's a moral here related to welfare and international aid, but I don't think I want to stretch the point...

August 27

It was a nice quiet day at the Mill Pond. I bicycled around to the big rock, then walked along the shoreline. There were several shorebirds that I flushed without first noticing them. Then I saw a hawk agitated at something fly away, so I went to look, and found this other hawk (probably the source of agitation) about 10 yards away. It perched there long enough for me to circle around it so the sun was behind me for better lighting, which is how I took this photo. I think it's an immature Cooper's hawk, by the stripey tail. I did wonder if it was wounded, but soon after the picture was snapped, it flew off. In this photo it's balancing on one foot, but others show both...

August 28
    Summer is winding down, although 90's temps are predicted for the next two days. The lows are in the 40's so it won't take much of a dip to get the first frost. Since we'll be traveling to my son's wedding in Upper Michigan around Labor Day, I'll have to get a lot of gardening done before leaving, such as picking most of the tomatoes, and freezing corn. As it is, we're eating corn once a day, since it's so good, and the season for it is so short.
    I woke up last night around 3, and walked out to see the total eclipse of the moon. I considered setting up a tripod and taking photos, then I thought "naw," and went back to bed. It looked like the full moon, only subdued and reddish.
    Since Idaho senator Larry Craig is in the news, I'll relate my one experience I had with him (not in a restroom). About 20 years ago, our Spirit Lake church had a speaker come from a now forgotten Latin American country, who detailed for us some of the ways our government was causing great trouble for the poor people of their country, and recommended we write our Congress people. The speaker made a compelling argument, so I wrote to Sen. Craig, briefly outlining what the speaker said. For all I know a staffer wrote the response, but being such a small state, and considering its vehement tone, I always believed that Sen. Craig wrote to me himself, saying, if I would send the name of this person he'd see that he'd be deported.

August 29
    The weather was just pleasant 80's. I mostly worked on throwing pots today, pitchers and plates, and unloading two kilns.

August 30
    I spent a couple hours picking and shucking corn (left the shucks in the row, just like a corn harvesting machine), then I blanched and froze about 23 quarts of corn. If there's anything that seems like harnessing sunlight and turning it into energy, it's corn. As I peeled back each perfect ear (no earworms around here), the corn glowed back the sunlight at me.
    My new recording microphones arrived today, and inspite of a busy schedule I set them up enough to be reassured that they'll work well with my software and hardware interface. I'll have to put the recording project on hold until at least October, with the busy month I've got going ahead...
    Also the weather barely broke 80 degrees here (instead of the 90 predicted), staying cool and overcast till afternoon. I think this area is one of two places weather forecasters are sent to suffer. One area is the Southwest, where they have to say it will be hot and dry every day. The other is here, where the weather often has a mind of its own.

August 31
    I went to Spokane to stock up on books, and books on tape, for the trip to the wedding. I also picked up a piano, as it's a gift for the wedding. Our van fits it well, on its back. I imagine a lot of new pianos have come from Chicago to Spokane through the ages, as many are (or at least were) made there. This will be a first, as we bring a new piano from Spokane to Chicago (assuming the van makes the trip--there are no other contingencies allowed for currently). Our church in central Idaho had a piano brought west by covered wagon. Because of its age, it couldn't be tuned to standard pitch, but was a half tone lower. This made it basically impossible to play along with the organ (tuned in standard pitch), although it was hard to explain to the non musicians in the church why this might be so.
    I also read the other day that even standard pitch (A440) isn't standard with symphonies around the world, especially period musicians who want to emulate an earlier sound. This was in an article on people with perfect pitch, who can usually tell what note is being played, but occasionally falter at certain ones, which researchers reflected might relate to the variation of tuning around the world.
    Because weddings are (in my opinion) wildly extravagant nowadays, the new piano, which was in tune at the store, will need to be retuned on location of the wedding, which is a beach. It is possible that the tuning will be out from the moving process, and there's no way to know until the day we set it up for the wedding, so I guess this is best.
    I have a friend who's a classical violinist, and tells the story of someone she played with in Arizona, who was badly out of tune, but defensive about it, saying she'd tuned before she left home. It turned out the home she left was up in Canada... Fortunately for those of us without perfect pitch there are good electronic tuners available to help avoid similar embarassment.