Brad Sondahl's blog

Brad's Blog

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Oct. 5
The killing frost and the flu arrived this week... Late for the frost, early for the flu... Blech...

Oct. 11

Finally getting over the flu... Cold predicted to the mid twenties, so it's time to harvest apples. 10 bushels total this year--8 from the red delicious and 2 from the golden, not counting the summer apples harvested in September... As usual more apples than we can process or eat....

Oct. 17
Besides working hard to refill the empty pottery shelves, there are a lot of fall chores as well. Yesterday I threw 100 pots, loaded and unloaded two kilns, unloaded and stacked a half cord of wood, and made it to Spokane to practice for the Fall Folk Festival...
Butters and my favorite chore is the daily walk by the lake..

This is the view from up on the ridge towards Maiden Rock (named after a fabled plunge into the lake by native star crossed lovers, which may or may not have its source in a similar tale in Hiawatha). The rolling mountains behind are about 15-30miles away...

The fall colors are great along the mill pond as are the reflections in the water. The hills behind are probably typical brown out color for fall, although this was a record dry spell this summer, so it browned out early.

Oct. 22
We revisited the Lion's Head area at the north end of Priest Lake yesterday after church... The creeks run low at this time of year, but the fall colors were lovely, like the many tamaracks (western larch) that are "evergreens" that turn gold and lose their needles annually:

We saw a dipper and and a varied thrush. I got better photos of the dipper bird, but this had a nice backdrop of the creek flowing through bedrock:

this is the falls (my son says it's technically a cascade) above the area where people waterslide on the smooth rock creek in the summer... There was ice in the shady areas so that wasn't in the cards for today.

We finished at sunset at Lion's Head State Park for supper on the beach. There were two sets of campers in the park, and we drove 25 miles back towards home before encountering another vehicle on the highway... We did see a couple sets of hikers on the trail, but it was delightfully empty for the most part...

Our glass sign blew out in a recent windstorm at the pottery, and we were helping to clear some flourescent lighting panels from an old school building in town so we got some diffusers, and after painting this is currently our lighted sign at the pottery:

I'm not sure if Butters approves....

October 28
We walked up Brickel Creek yesterday and after the 1.2 inches of rain last week mushrooms were popping up, like this one that looks like a cross between a shaggy mane and a calla lily. Along with us was a young friend who sometimes does aerial work with the Cirque du Soleil of Montreal... She stayed on the ground throughout...

books read

The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse by Alexander McCall Smith. An interesting bit of historical fiction about how bit players were affected by the ending of WWII in Britain and Berlin... And a dog figures in it, but only in a minor fashion. Good storytelling, a bit meandering in the end...

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by David Wong The Perils of Pauline brought into the Twenty-first Century...

Pagan Babies by Elmore Leonard There's something a bit off using genocide in Rwanda as a backdrop for a con job, but suspending one's moral sense it's as good as most of Leonard's fiction...