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This is the view out the back door this morning, with
a bit of sunlight before the current snowstorm arrived. Snow makes
life seem more precarious, particularly if you're travelling, but has its
counterbalancing pleasures...
Today I spent too much time getting ready for our Clay
Arts Guild sale on Saturday. I had to put little tags with numbers
and prices on about 120 pots I'm bringing to this fair. I'm actually
looking forward to the event, but I'm already thinking that next year the
group should do it differently, assuming it's not such a bust that there
is no next year.
There's also a sale I'm doing Sunday, but this one features
3 of my musical incarnations as well, so I think it will be fun.
Dec. 2
Another 8 inches of snow means the picture above, if
taken today, would look similar, but the plant in the foreground is mostly
buried.
It also meant a good deal of the day was spent shovelling
snow. It's good exercise when your health allows it. Every
season has its own agenda--winter's agenda is shovelling snow and keeping
warm. Also the ski mountain opened today, which makes life normal
once again for our ski bum son...
Dec. 3
Dec. 4
As I was driving into Spokane for the Domestic Violence
Consortium's First Annual Holiday Sale, I thought briefly of a phrase I
heard on public radio the other day. The phrase was "Doing well by
doing good," applied cynically to some politicians greasing their own palms
while arranging contracts. The phrase sprung to mind because
I was heading in to this sale, which 15% of my sales would go to this worthy
cause.
I don't know how the rival Wife Beater's Association
Holiday Sale went, but for me this other one was a bust.
So instead of elaborating on the joys of "doing well
by doing good," the topic today is, "How you do in life doesn't necessarily
reflect on you personally."
The case in point is that yesterday, with the same number
of pots and same display, in another questionable venue sale (2nd annual,
but at a new location), I (and most everyone else there) did very
well indeed (without even pretending to do good), whereas if I were to
judge my life by today's standard I would be considering a career change.
Indeed, an important, and never conclusively learned,
art in choosing craft fairs to sell at is learning which ones are
worthwhile.
Back in May, I had a good experience with this same Domestic
Violence group in a similar sale, so it's not necessarily even choosing
the right venues. I don't doubt that having temperatures outside
suitable for ice cream storage had some effect, but the weather was the
same yesterday.
At this point I should pass on some valuable insights
on how to pick the winners, but considering my track record, I'll defer...
But, how you do in life doesn't necessarily reflect on
you personally....
Dec. 5
I went skiing for the first time today. It was
cold and foggy, so the skiing was slow. I fell about 3 times (mostly
due to the fog and bad lighting), but only hard enough to feel a bit stiff
now. Meanwhile my son Birrion is planning to ski daily through the season,
and generally accomplishes what he plans... He spent the afternoon
hiking up above the Terrain Park feature called a wall, which you ski up
to, up the side of, and then do something to avoid splatting when you come
down. I spent the afternoon napping, reading, and drawing out cartoons
while waiting for him to finish...
Dec. 6
Today was the weekly jam again. It was two fiddlers,
Sam on guitar, and me on banjo, whistle, and harmonica. The makeup
of a jam determines the kind of music played. Fiddle tunes are called fiddle
tunes because their strong musical line is well suited to fiddles.
A lot of fiddle tunes are difficult to pick on guitars, as each note (mostly)
must be plucked individually on the guitar, while the bowing accommodates
as many notes as can be fretted with the other hand. So there is
a secure common body of tunes like Red Wing, Little Beggar Man, Golden
Slippers, and others that can be comfortably picked by fiddles and other
instruments. And those were the kind of tunes we played.
Dec. 7
I edited both the Folklore Society webpages and the Clay
Art Guild webpages today. I posted a lot more pictures from the sale
last weekend at http://cagni.org/2005/holiday.html
Aside from that, I glazed two kiln loads today, and trimmed
a lot of pots from yesterday. As I worked on making some casseroles
today, I decided they're the pots most likely to not make it through as
first quality. They have lids, which means lid fit problems, and
handles and knobs, which can crack or fall off. So I made 8 yesterday,
and will try to remember to report how many make it through as 1st quality
pots...
Dec. 8
I helped move stuff for the semiannual rearrangement
of furniture today. For this I'm pretty sure the safest course is
to use your back and not your brain. Men are genetically unsuited
to arranging furniture, but lifting is a useful addendum to the program.
Later we had a lovely dinner out in Spokane with my inlaws,
who may be reading this, so IT WAS WONDERFUL!
Dec. 9
Approximately two days per week are
spent throwing pots, the rest of the week dealing with the consequences...
Today was a throwing day. I made 24 serving bowls, around 25 1 lb.
mugs, and 51 small 1/2 lb cups. Being a bit bored, I checked my rate
of manufacture for the cups--51 cups in 35 minutes, or about a cup and
a half per minute. Those hundred pots mostly filled up my ware shelves,
which is part of the reason why I'm expanding my work studio in January,
to about double the current size. Besides shelf space, another usual
bottleneck is the kilns, which must be fired one at a time to not strain
our electrical system... But the chief bottleneck is sales--I could
produce more pots, but not without working harder to sell them, which would
be more work than I'm willing to do.
But speaking of sales, I got the sales
figure from the sale last weekend--over $700, which is quite satisfactory.
The same email also listed the sales of the other members of our guild,
and I was surprised to find some of them up to $2000 in sales. This brings
me to the topic of competition. While I was happy to have sold $700,
it would have been nice to have sold $2000 (which was actually more money
than the pots I brought along, so this is purely speculative.) But
I also felt bad for a couple of well qualified individuals who sold less
than a hundred dollars.
I do not have a fiercely competitive
nature. When I watch sports, I usually cheer for the underdog (which
means my team generally loses). It reminds me of a time in Holstein,
Iowa, when we were there for a pastoral internship, and decided to go to
the high school Homecoming football game. I don't remember the details
of the game, but the home team won, which left us feeling rosy as we were
leaving the stadium. That mood changed when we had to walk by the
quarterback for the opposing team, who, in a contritional act kneeled in
front of the school, dejected, like a monumental sculpture (on the
lines of Rodin's The Thinker, but in this case, The Loser).
So, yeah, I feel bad for losers.
So it was actually a relief to see that some of the amateur
potters did better than me, because now I don't have to feel guilty for
beating them out on sales. But I think it's better next year not
to know how everyone else did, because sales figures are too much like
report cards...
Dec. 10
The house rearrangement got a lot closer to complete
today, which leads me to reflect on the nature of memory. Everything
is in a different location, so there's the rational processes involved
in figuring out where anything now is (based on remembering what happened
to it in the move). There are also the subconscious built in memories,
such as where the garbage can is, which are harder to overcome, so I'll
head to where the garbage can was before thinking consciously of where
it went to. I think most of us acquire a map in our heads of our
surroundings which we can use to locate a lot of things without thinking.
I know if it's dark I can climb down from the loft I sleep in and walk
to the bathroom without tripping over anything using my visual memory of
the house layout.
This memory, though, can also be fooled, as we have several
different bedrooms used on different occasions. One night a couple
years ago I was sleeping in the loft, but woke up to use the bathroom,
and thought I was sleeping on the main floor. The result was I slipped
over the side of the loft and fell 7 feet to the floor, partially landing
on a chair, which both broke my fall and injured my ribs.
It will be a while before I do a lot of walking around
in the dark in the new furniture arrangement...
Dec. 11
This was a busy musical day--several hours of jamming
at
the bluegrass association Christmas party, then singing a song for a local
multichurch Christmas concert. The song I sang was "The Virgin Mary
had a Baby Boy," which I think I learned from my sister in the 60's, probably
with her ukelele accompaniment, but the song goes back to someone like
Harry Belafonte and probably to the West Indies before that.
It is a staple of Christmas choir music to try and do
some black gospel hymns, and it usually fails (in my estimation), and probably
would pall to others if they've seen a black gospel choir (which mostly
don't rely on written music).
Anyway, my approach to music is folk/ear, with my one
crutch the words (which drain from my brain like water through a sieve).
So I think with this song I was able to give a strong performance I think
a solo can do that more easily than a choir, which has to sound good and
balanced all together. I had to leave the concert early as our son
is flying home tonight, and the other family members are going to get him,
leaving me to grannysit, so I didn't talk to anyone who heard it...
Dec. 12
Aside from glazing pots, I worked on new shelves for
storing media in our living area--records, videos, CD's, and computer disks.
Now just books are on book shelves, and there's a central place with
enough room to organize the slowly accumulated videos, computer programs,
etc. Increased organization is one way to defeat the slow entropy
of daily life... Once you internalize the new locations for everything....
Dec. 13
Santa Lucia Day. Last year my son and his girlfriend
did the whole Santa Lucia gig--waking up everyone with a wreath of candles
on her head and a cone on Star boy Forrest's head and serving buns in bed.
This year Susa's not here, so she phoned in her performance, but that still
counts.
So I woke up this morning with a dream that I was sorting
clothes and came across a woman's under blouse which had "Asgard" written
across the front. This disturbed me enough to wake me up, since I
couldn't quite remember the significance of Asgard, which I've since researched
on the internet to remind others similarly mythologically challenged that
Asgard is the home of the Norse Gods. I was thinking Norse Heaven
was Valhalla, but that's just the home for dead heroes and heroines..
So in honor of this event, I've made up the following
Ole and Sven joke. Context is everything, so wait until someone tells
you of their dream of underclothes with Asgard written on them to try it...
Ole went out for a date with Brunhilde, and the next day
Sven asked Ole how it went.
"Vell, I got as far as Asgard, den she socked me on the
nose, and said if I tried that again, she'd help me to Valhalla."
Dec. 14
On Dec. 7, I mentioned how I'd made
some casseroles, and they've come out of the kiln a week later, with two
of the eight as second quality pots. That was about the percentage
I'd expect, although for most of the pottery I make it's a much lower percentage
of failures. The problem with casseroles is doodads and lids.
There are 5 parts to a casserole, and whenever one piece is stuck onto
or supposed to fit another, there's plenty of room for trouble. One
of the casseroles had a crack where the top knob was attached. The
other "second" casserole got a glob of stuff on it that fell off from the
kiln shelf above it, which didn't have anything to do with its form, except
wider items tend have a greater chance of getting gunked. Both of
them will still be sellable. Teapots have a similar number of doodads--knobs,
lugs, handles... It's time to make them soon... If I get too
high a failure rate, I quit making them for a while, but eventually I forget
how chancy they are and make another batch...
Customers sometimes ask what's the hardest pot to make.
None of the forms I make are intrinsically harder than any others, but
the failure rate of some of them make them the hardest to pull together
successfully.
Dec. 15
I made pfefferneusse today, one of
my favorite cookies (recipe on my cooking page). Although it's a
favorite cookie, I've self imposed a rule to only make them during Advent/Christmas,
to keep them a holiday tradition. This is probably also good for my waistline,
as the recipe makes about 500 cookies, and I tend to eat about 100 of them
myself.
While making them I reflected on holiday traditions.
We don't have a lot of Christmas traditions in our family. We do
have Advent devotions, reading a series of Bible verses I picked out years
ago which are key verses leading in Christian thought towards the birth
of Jesus.
When I was growing up, we had a typical,
mostly secular, Christmas, with the best part being the showing of 8 mm
family movies on Christmas Eve. Some of my brother's friends would
show up, and everyone would make wise cracks about the films, with topics
including airplanes taking off and landing, and the ski jump at Lake Louise.
The nice thing about 8 mm movies is that they were 2 minutes or less in
length, and expensive to produce, so no one could die of boredom (which
can happen with home videos) while watching them. With rewinding
and threading, more time was spent between movies than watching them, allowing
for plenty of socializing.
In my wife's minister family, going to lots of church
services was the norm, plus trying to prepare a Swedish Christmas dinner,
which I might remember to describe around Christmas, as we do it in parts...
Dec. 16
We've got these really cool miniature
robots that detect spills and mop them up.
Well, actually we've got these tiny
ants, and any time we leave anything sweet around, they make an antline
to it, and eventually clean it up, so I suppose that's as good as miniature
robots, but, like most of you, I go, "ANTS! Lousy little beings!"
I think, back at the beginning of my blog career, I reflected that we used
to have big wood ants who nested in our walls and came out mostly in the
Spring and never bit us, but occasionally filled the windows with their
winged youth. Then for some reason the colony moved out, and since
then, only when it's too cool outside, we've got these miniature sweet
ants. They don't bite either, but they tickle if they end up on you.
The reason the subject is ants, is that after making
the pfefferneusse last night, I washed out the measuring cup and put it
in the dish drainer. This morning there was an antline leading to
the drainer, and a bit of light detective work revealed I hadn't washed
out the cup well enough, of the honey that had gone into the dough.
So in spite of the ants not being
the ideal robot housecleaners, they do a nice job of quality control on
the sweet cleanups...
Then my son Forrest was showing me
some computer programs that make little turtles simulate natural systems
by giving them simple programs. One example was how they could simulate
with random activity and scent trails the food gathering system of ants.
I agreed that the program was doing
that, but it's much harder to explain with a simple algorhythm how their
relatives the Monarch butterflies all migrate to the same area in Mexico
every winter, with brains the size of a pinhead. There's even another
kind of butterfly that migrates in stages, taking several generations to
complete the annual migration. Science approaches understanding of
the natural world, but only through models. Inevitably some mystery remains...
Dec. 17
We're getting close to the end of remodeling the
pottery house, although adding a large outdoor show area will wait till
next Spring. Currently we've spent less than $50 on the remodel,
which is probably significantly less than most people associate with a
remodel. So far we've added bookshelves, media shelves, shelves for musical
instruments, and new cupboards in the kitchen. Most of these shelves
were made with wood we're recycling from other projects. Other wood
has been scavenged. We got some hollow-core bifold doors in Minnesota
the last time we were out there, that have been remade into kitchen cupboards.
Some of the support boards for it were molding scraps someone had dumped
along a path leading down to Spirit Lake.
So I thought we were doing well on this
project, when my wife mentioned a granite countertop would be the best
top for some recycled drawers we were installing in the kitchen.
Unfortunately, I think she's right. We've already got one granite
countertop, and since pottery is sort of artificial rock making, granite
really appeals to me. Fortunately I can probably get some credit
for upcoming Christmas and anniversary celebrations by conceding on this
point. After all, the last one was purchased under the same circumstances,
at about this time of year a couple years ago... Besides, the only
wood we've got left at this point is needed for the cupboard doors...
Dec. 18
Dec. 19. Two kilnloads glazed today, a couple late orders for Christmas. My spare time was spent working on redesign of my webpages menus, result to appear soon.
Dec 21. I'm overhauling all my webpages, so things are a bit mixed up at present. It should be sorted out in a day or two...
Dec. 22 Hopefully the website is in good shape again.
I spent the afternoon going over music with a talented
multi-instrumentalist that I invited to join the Sondahl Hawkins duo for
a bluegrass concert in February. It was fun, but a bit stressful,
as I view him as a superior musician, so I was always a bit nervous.
At times though, we really meshed in a way that I wish had been recorded...
Both of the groups I play in are looking to record new CD's, which may
help get us through the post Christmas blahs.
Speaking of blahs, it's been raining a lot today, melting
the snow in these lower elevations, and challenging the ski areas to keep
open, although some snow was reported there today by my daily skiing son.
It was a bad combination when the storm that broke up a month of dry cold
brought warm wet rather than more snow, as is typical of this time of year...
On the Christmas countdown, we still don't have a tree,
which is about par for us, trying to live Christmas on the liturgical instead
of commercial calendar. We're surrounded by evergreens, so it's not
a real problem getting one, but the way is not yet clear to this year's
tree. Also I'm currently making fruit soup--canned, dried, and fresh
fruit cooked till soft, a traditional wife's family food. I got some
potato sausage at the local grocery, one of those foods that used to be
eaten by pioneers stretching their sausage with potato, I assume, like
lutefisk--reconstituted cod. It's better than lutefisk, anyway.
Dec.23
I heard from two blog readers today, first from Linda
Lander in Australia:
As usual our weather is the exact opposite of yours.
Yesterday was summer solstice. Its been really hot the last few days. it
was 40 degrees celcius but I don't really complain when its hot.
I live about 3 1/2 hrs drive from the snow here in winter and a 1/2 hour
here is about enough for me, then I want to be warm again. I can't
imagine the amount of snow shown in your picture, it would never happen
in Australia.
I don't anticipate visiting Australia, and sometimes think some of the stuff I show on the blog is mundane, so I appreciate that someone enjoys my different locale, and I enjoy hearing about hers as well.
May Luk in London wrote:
Those potato sausages - it reminds me of my grandma
back in Hong Kong. During the war, (as the Chinese saying goes; 'when the
Japanese came', which stands for the war) there wasn't enough rice, so
the rice was cooked with yam or taro, a purple cousin of the potato. They
could be dug everywhere. It's actually more nutrious (and tastier) than
plain rice, but they didn't know that. Rice was everything. My grandma
was still cooking that way after the war. And I also make that sometimes
because that's what I grew up in, even though it was war time food.
I reckon the potato sausage is probably better than
whole meat sausage, nutritionally speaking.
May's comment reminded me that my mother would at times
fix Philadelphia Scrapple for my father (none of us kids liked it).
As I recall, it's corn mush with bacon fat mixed in, sliced in lumps and
fried. I don't think it would win any nutritional contests, but when
calories are what's needed, it works. I learned from my parents that
during the Great Depression my father ate a lot of corn mush. His father
had died when he was young, and his mother struggled raising 4 boys in
Sioux Falls, South Dakota. During the Depression, commodity prices
bottomed out like many other things, so that a bushel of corn could be
bought for pennies. Sometimes corn mush was all they could afford...
The whole generation which lived through the Depression
was inspired not to repeat those dire times, and their intripid will resulted
in the great wealth of the last half of the 20th Century for much of the
world.
Of course greed always serves as sufficient "carrot"
to drive capitalism, but the generations in business today have never known
the kind of want which propelled that generation to succeed through World
War II and beyond...
Dec. 24
So we're waiting for the Turkey button to pop.
I asked my mother why she started serving Matzoh ball
soup on Christmas Eve. She said it was because she wanted to be ecumenical.
I said I guessed that was in part because she was strongly
against religious discrimination, having experienced it herself when she
first moved to the Twin Cities during World War II, and her last name,
Rosenwald, made some people think she was Jewish. (Actually, being
German, she might have met with some discrimination on that count as well,
but German ancestry is common in Minnesota).
Back to our own traditional Christmas dinner. My
wife's clergy family would not only have a bunch of services on Christmas
Eve, but prepare all this Swedish food for the Christmas Dinner, which
inevitably would result in her mother freaking out and chewing on her knuckles
as the gravy burned... As I first experienced it, it included the
fruit soup, potato sausage, boiled potatoes, lutefisk, Crem (another fruity
pudding), Swedish Tea Ring, and rice pudding. Rice pudding had special
prizes hidden in it, with portentous meanings-- like a ring (next to marry),
a nut (smart), and a silver coin (rich). I think there also would
be ham or turkey as well.
Having no desire or need to stuff ourselves, we now spread
the traditional foods out through the Christmas season. Tonight's
supper includes turkey, Swedish tea ring, fruit soup, apple sauce, cooked
carrots and broccoli. The pffefferneusse are gone, so I made some
Oatmeal nobake cookies, which aren't traditional Christmas cookies for
us, but a family favorite.
After supper we plan to decorate our Christmas tree and
go to an 11 pm candlelight service 50 miles away in Spokane...
May you feel good about whatever you're supposed to be
celebrating.
Dec. 25
I won't go into details as to our Christmas felicitations,
except to note that now computers outnumber humans in this family by a
ratio of 1.5 to 1. It's also the year we got more phone lines (cell
+ land) than family members, although that had nothing to do with Christmas.
Neither of these I would have thought probable 20 years ago. Our
supper this evening quickly lapsed into the eclectic realm, as traditional
Christmas requirements merged with the need to push leftovers. So
we had the potato sausage (two of the four of us, anyway), Swedish meatballs
(actually just beef meatballs, no pork sausage mixed in, due to son's preference),
with leftover spaghetti, and rice because rice is needed to make rice pudding.
This meal could be a paradigm of the modern life, a free adaptation of
cultures and lifestyles...
Dec. 26
Because of the blah rainy overcast weather, there was
nothing better to do today than work, so I glazed a couple kiln loads of
pots and threw about a kiln's worth on the wheel as well. Of the
two kiln loads, only two large tankards were orders, so of course I poked
through the side with my glazing tongs on one of them. Fortunately,
when I took the order, neither of us mentioned Christmas as a deadline...
Some of the pots I made today are for a wholesale dinnerware
order due next spring. This order has got me wondering how much wholesaling
I (or other potters) can really afford to do. If I priced my pottery
at gallery prices it wouldn't be a big deal, since those prices imply someone
else is getting around 50% of the selling price. My prices are mostly
based on getting a good return when I sell them directly to the customer,
with no sales commissions involved. So when I sell at wholesale (half
my usual prices), the work-time and materials expenses make it much less
profitable.
Aside from the price issue, the other issue is that while
factories just keep their machines rolling longer to make the widget, craftspeople
have to make every widget, so there's no advantage to doing a larger order.
The 500th mug takes exactly as much work as the 5th mug, so there's no
setup or labor savings in doing large orders.
The only plus is that you do get some income you wouldn't
otherwise. This brings us back to the dinnerset. Although I'm
going to work several weeks to make the set (actually making a lot of other
pots at the same time, but my kilns won't fire 36 plates at a time...),
the sales outlet will get half of the total price for several minutes
of work. On the surface, this seems patently unfair, but as a seller
I know the overhead costs of making sales that justify them earning their
percentage. But it still seems patently unfair... Fortunately
I don't do a lot of wholesale business, or else I'd have to actually do
something about this instead of grousing about it here...
Dec. 27
The weather returned to good wholesome snow (well, sleet
actually, but we have to take what we can get, this year--some years there's
5 feet of snow on the ground here). I unloaded a nice glaze kiln,
and fired another. That kiln is either taking too long, or I forgot
to set the timer for a sufficient time, because it shut off without finishing,
meaning I had to restart it after it had cooled significantly. I'll
know tomorrow if it's kiln troubles or brain troubles.
I was back to manufacturing pottery DVD's today, as there's
been a new flurry of interest in them in December (Tom said frostily :-)).
My son Forrest glazed the pots yesterday which he made
as part of a new beginner's video, so hopefully I'll assemble that video
in the next month or so. A beginner's video is actually pretty daunting
for me, as there's so much I think is important for beginners to know,
that I can't remember to tell it all on camera... For the intermediate
one, anything I forgot I can tell myself, "Well, they should have known
that already...."
Dec. 28
The kiln problem was brain related yesterday--forgetting
to put enough time on the timer. It's sort of like feeding a parking
meter--it's an extra shutoff for the kiln based on time instead of temperature.
Otherwise today was sleety again, and after-Christmas-blah.
This is not the weather that kicks northerners out of their winter depression
sufficiently by invoking the survival cortex--"shovel snow or be trapped,"
for instance, or "chop wood or freeze."
The Christmas turkey is now turkey noodle soup.
A late addition to the traditional Swedish Christmas meal got ordered today--lingonberry
preserves, from a family farm near where Althea grew up in Western Washington.
We haven't had them for many years. But leftovers are controlling
the menu these days.
Dec. 30
Things are getting complicated again--today is our 28th
anniversary, our son is leaving to return to grad school tomorrow, and
my wife's lifelong friend is here for a visit, with another friend visiting
tomorrow. Throw in the funeral of another close friend of my wife
tomorrow, and it's easy to see there's a lot of energy around. So
we celebrated our anniversary taking our son and the friend out to lunch.
Then I made a second batch of pffefferneusse, to send some to Chicago with
my son. I'm still doing some pottery in the idle minutes.
Winter also has made a special guest appearance, with
a couple inches on the ground, and unknown quantities expected overnight,
with unknown effects on flights out of Spokane, leaving at 7 am...
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