Brad Sondahl's blog

Brad's Blog

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Nov. 14
It's a busy month when I don't post for two weeks. With winter getting to be more of a reality, there are lots of things like sawing and stacking wood that take time...
Then there's the bluegrass showcase that I took photos and videos at :See photos and videos from the November showcase at this link
But that was just a warm-up for the Fall Folk Festival, which happened last weekend, and I took about 500 photos and am awaiting thousands more from the other two photographers before I start archiving them...
Last week one of our 3 old hens got nabbed, probably by a coyote, since there was fresh snow and they looked like small canine tracks. The hen had been lame for the last several years--initially we thought she was dying but she hung on until now. She roosted lower than the other two old hens. Between the three of them we only get one egg every other day for a while in the spring... We've decided to retire from poultry when these two shake the mortal coil... Until then the 10X12 shed which used to house 6 or 8 hens is getting subdivided so we can store some lawn and garden equivalent, so that's what I worked on this afternoon.
We built the shed from scrap lumber shortly after buying our house, so I have no qualms about revising it... Today we added 3 windows and a wall to enclose the chickens a little more confined...

Nov. 24
Busy month continues. The Fall Folk Festival two weeks ago takes a lot of time afterward to edit the 4000 photos. Still working on that one... Today I played Christmas music at the only gallery that sells my pottery, up at Priest Lake. They had Santa and Mrs. Claus visiting so I brought in Butters:

Nov 27

So here's what I've been working on in my spare time for the last two weeks--pictures from the Fall Folk Festival: http://www.spokanefolklore.org/FFF2018/2018.html
Here's a photo of our performance there:

Nov. 28
Now that the big push of the Folk Festival photos is over, I had a little free time today to set up for recording on my laptop the trio pictured above. When it was set up I recorded a version of Your Cheating Heart. While editing in the new Windows photo viewer software, I got to playing around with the effects so I left a bunch of them in the video, which detracts from the poignancy but adds visual interest...
We got over an inch of rain in the last couple days, enough to unfreeze what had been the mostly frozen over Mill Pond... Buffleheads and goldeneye ducks predominate on the lake, although a few stray eagles are checking for spawning kokanee salmon on occasion...

books read

The Puppetmaster by Robert Heinlein In the 50's alien invasions, especially hidden ones, came into prominence in Sci Fi as the writers picked up the zeitgeist of the commie subterfuge. The Invasion of the Pod People by Jack Finney was probably the most successful as a movie. Philip K Dick wrote the Father Thing along those lines as well. Heinlein made the invasion realistic, and even sucked one of the main characters into the Borg for a while...

VALIS by Philip K Dick. I struggled through half of the novel, feeling that Dick had seriously flipped his wig. Then the tide turned and he pulled off a great first person drama about another form of alien invasion...