Brad Sondahl's blog

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Brad's Blog

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July 5
The weather for the 4th was perfect this year, around 70 and partly cloudy. So the turnout for the parade was great!

(photos by Althea)
I rode my bike and played the neck holder harmonica, ranging from "Oh Susanna" to "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring", with the ad for music and fun in the park on the back. The music worked out well, thanks to a local fiddle group, particularly since my sound system started giving out woodpecker sounds and died. That made my solo part of the afternoon pretty quiet. I used some birthday money from my mother to order a new PA system today...
The timing of the 4th, on a Monday, led to a lot of people being out at the lake through the weekend, and a sales peak for us on Sunday, which is usually self-service but son Birrion ended up opening the shop since there were so many...
So today I've been glazing and firing two kilns and making order pots to try to refill the shelves...

July 9th
We had some friends visit, and since it's cooler than beach weather (except for fishermen), we decided to hike up the Brickel Creek trail. It follows an old logging trail along the creek, with only occasional glimpses of the creek. In warmer weather, with sandals, it's fun to wade, although pretty much rocky bottomed. We started late (around 5 pm, and enjoyed various late summer wild flowers like asters, delphinium, and twin flowers, and the always catchy paint brush:

It was too dark to photograph some of the mushrooms as well...

July 15
I finished picking the cherries for this year--not a huge crop due to bird pecks and some rain splitting... So now it's just picking raspberries and peas for a couple hours per day for a while... That and the pottery work...
The weather fluctuates between swimmably hot and temperate--could swim or not today... I did take Butters for a walk along the Mill Pond...

This could be a repeat of last year, baby wood ducks with the mother in the non native lilies... I don't think we got any baby red necked grebes again this year, which I ascribe to frequent space incursions by fishermen and kayakers, both of which have increased greatly with the new park which wasn't too busy today for a Friday in July:

The road to Rathdrum is getting redone in a week, with 45 minute waits for pilot cars, making Spirit Lake a circuitous or tortuous destination, hopefully only until tonight...

This is a local common bush in our area, can't ever remember the name, but very pretty when it blooms...

July 17
I spoke too soon about the baby grebes--this evening I saw at least one speckled duckling on the parent's back, like this photo I took in 2007.

July 29
The days of July whiz past, cranking out pots and garden produce as fast as I can... But in the 95 degree heat today, with my son and his wife visiting, we took a late afternoon trip to Farragut Park for a swim in water cooler than the bath water that Spirit Lake currently is... And after swimming I was astonished to see a bat fly across the water, then land on a nearby tree. In "broad daylight." So we grabbed cameras and saw it first like the Batman emblem:

Then it crawled around on the bark and ended up looking well disguised as a knothole bump.

July 30
I got to see Charlie Musselwhite in a free concert at Liberty Lake, just as I had in Spokane 5 years ago. Here's the old photo, and the new one. He's been touring for 50 years...

A neighbor there told me he's 72... I'll be lucky to start touring by age 72... His 3 piece backup band was excellent and surprisingly never introduced. But they're a couple generations younger than Musselwhite...

Books read and other media of note

The Heist by Daniel Silva. I like a good heist book, but this proved to be much more--a spy novel, art theft investigation, touching scenes of humanity in an inhumane world..

Something New by PG Wodehouse. Apparently the first Blandings Castle novel, with the McGuffin being an Egyptian scarab... Lovely as always...

Ubik by Philip K Dick. A philosophical work on the nature of reality...
Percival's Planet by Michael Byers Similar to Ragtime, it evokes the era when Pluto was discovered, turning a boring poring over photographic plates into a thriller with love triangles, madness, dinosaurs, and death.