Brad Sondahl's blog

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Brad's Blog

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    Nov. 3
    My spare time lately has been devoted to making two wood bed frames with built in drawers under them, and the project is nearly done. These are for the 6 and 7 year old girls who share a bedroom. I spent a lot of the unspare time reading to them, supervising use of the pottery, and overseeing them watching a movie or two this weekend.
    This morning there was snow lingering on the hill tops as it starts moving to our elevation. Time to order clay with hopes of it lasting till Spring break-up limits are over for the local roads.

Nov. 13
    I've been too busy of late to blog. The last couple days I've been down with an upper respiratory virus, which gave me time to select from the 750 photos I took at last weekend's Fall Folk Festival and make them into web pages. The fruits of my labors are at http://www.spokanefolklore.org/FFF2013/2013.html
Yes, I did perform a half hour set with my bassist friend--our photo is at the top of the Underground Stage page. I'm so caught up in photographing the festival that it feels like an afterthought.
    Yesterday I did a pottery demo for two beginning pottery classes at a nearby high school. I advised them that it's not an easy life being a potter, although it's gotten easier since I can make pots so fast... The real drawback isn't how fast you can make pots, but how fast you can sell them...
The new yellow glaze has come out quite nicely in its first large batch test. I'm going to try a batch of milky tan gloss as well...
I moved a new shipment of 3000 pounds of clay and glaze materials into the pottery last Friday, so I'm theoretically ready for winter.

    The children have gotten involved in several after school programs (one church related, one jump rope, and one library). I found a mostly good doll house by a dumpster and have fixed it up some, and the girls are still definitely into Barbies. We have added a lot of school programs to our calendars, like the Veteran's Day program yesterday...

Nov. 15
    The weather is slipping into wintry--wet snow tonight and lows of 20 by tomorrow night.
    My cold has turned into laryngitis and stuffy head--not bad enough to keep me from working on some pottery orders today. Yesterday, knowing the weather was turning worse, I spent a couple hours trimming off this year's raspberry canes so they wouldn't get broken by heavy snow.

Nov. 20
    Since last post we had 5 inches of snow which mostly melted as we got an inch of rain the other night. My head is still stuffy but slowly recovering.
    I had to pull my blue crystalline glaze off the webpage since it's been such a pain in recent years, but I've added the gold glaze:
http://sondahl.com/mini-bowlset.jpg
    We took the kids to a magic show at the library last evening. The six year old is pretty sure magic is real... Cecil the Magician was quite entertaining, and it's always a challenge holding a large crowd of kids under control, so my hat is off to him there. Most of his tricks were "gimmicks" or trick gadgets rather than "slight of hand," which requires more skill, but they were still fun...

Nov. 21

I was looking back for an early picture of Manxome (here with catnip, taken in July, and secondly tonight, squinting at the flash), since he joined the ranks of civilized cats this week with a trip to the vet (to get "tutored"). He still likes to be outside overnight frequently, although that's changing with lows in the teens. He enjoys chasing a laser dot and chowing down on dry and wet catfood (in fact he looks burlier than this photo, leading me to believe he's less than a year old). He's also a lap cat alternating with Moby as I sit at the computer before the morning fire offers a warmer resting place.
While looking in past blogs for the photo for Manxome, it was hard to not long for the time of all the great photos in August of birds and Robert Cray and Summer. But a few more days of this cold and the lake may start freezing up enough to walk on the edges, which is always fun.
Next week we face a week off school with three somewhat hyperactive and sometimes hypersensitive children. They are looking forward to it :-)

Nov. 23

This was the view from Farragut Park boat launch last night at sunset, when we took a cold but lovely walk by the lake, empty except for a few ducks and gulls.

Nov. 30
We actually had very good Black Friday sales at the pottery shop, which is impressive since we never have any discount "sales." But I was gone for the afternoon at Autumn's Loft gallery, playing music for 3 hours. It helped that in the last hour a slightly older gentleman sat and listened and was knowledgeable of the old time and Grateful Dead music I play... I was also practicing Beatles tunes to make a CD at the request of a friend...
While at the gallery, a half inch of snow came in, and some of the road home was pretty icy. I came close to sliding off at the final stop sign before heading into Spirit Lake, and had my doubts about making it up a hill or two... The weekend forecast promises rain and snow, then cold setting in next week.

Books read and other media of note

The Game Players of Titan by Philip K Dick Although the game resembles Monopoly, the stakes are for the future of humanity. A deft plot twist in every chapter keeps this novel jumping... It's a paranoid conspiracy theorist dream.

Transcendental by James Gunn. A combination of the Wizard of Oz and Canterbury Tales, or Borgel (without the humor)-- a clever mystery of a search for a Transcendental McGuffin.

Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais At this point in his writing career, Crais tried separating Elvis Cole and Joe Pike into their own novels, which eliminates a lot of the terse action from this Elvis Cole whodunit, but the mystery thread is strong enough to carry the reader through...

The Sales Crime Policeman by David Rollins. More amusing than the title indicates.

The Best Short Stories by Philip K Dick When it comes to prophetic SF, Dick was pretty good, except he tended to think we'd have flying cars by 1982 and similar overly optimistic tech timelines. These stories published in the 1970's go back to his earliest published short stories (the Wub), and never fail to be both entertaining and weltanshauung adjusting... They do tend to follow the style established by O Henry in employing a twist ending...