Brad Sondahl's blog

Here's the best pseudo Irish band in the area, playing Sept. 1 at Pigout in the Park in Spokane, with my friend Don Thomsen on mandolin... They're pseudo because I don't think any of them are Irish, but they clearly love the music.
Then I got to see Charlie Musselwhite with a fine blues band.
Charlie Musselwhite band

He is a really fine blues harmonicist. I think he's technically as good as Paul Butterfield was, but never assembled as fine a band as Paul did at his pinnacle. But Butterfield died young of drugs, and Musselwhite's still chugging...
    The morning started off with a Least Weasel running across our cement patio. I've only seen them a couple times---they look like a drawn out gopher, but with white below and dark brown above. They feed mostly on mice, so I was happy to see it. They can even catch rabbits, according to Wikipedia, but mostly babies...

Sept. 3
    The kiln that I rebuilt the kiln shutoff on successfully fired today (always a concern after a rebuild). The weather remains pleasant and sunny, and customers streamed in all day, while across the street several canopies were removed from Maine St. businesses in preparation for sidewalk and street work starting next week. There are lots of colors of spray paint indicating where various pipes and cables lie under the concrete. It should be interesting to observe... I'm also considering a dusty pottery sale, anticipating that things will get.... dusty.

Sept. 4
    A relative of one of our church members decided to put on the one woman play "Zelda" in the small community building in Coolin by Priest Lake, and we attended the performance this evening. It was a capacity crowd of around 30, reminding me of the small theater in Paris where I saw The Bald Soprano (in French) in the early 1970's. (The Bald Soprano was written in English, which was Ionesco's second language--I saw it in his native French, which I had no comprehension of whatever. It seemed fitting for viewing that Absurdist masterpiece). Given the astonishing intimacy of this theater setting, as well as the exhausting demands of a monologue, the actress Denise Paulette did a wonderful job with a difficult portrayal of the madness of the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald... In spite of my literary bent, I was pretty well left out in the literary allusions to people like Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein, and even Fitzgerald (of whom I've read Gatsby but didn't like it). But over all it was a very worthwhile experience.

Sept. 5 Labor Day

With a minimum of critical faculties employed, I decided to be in the Labor Day parade as the Spirit of Agriculture. This is shortly before the short parade started--I'm the one with the corn stalks and pumpkin. To the left was a group of adults and kids who play a war game similar to paint balls.
To the right with the orange beacon is one of the town's tricked out lawnmowers--resembling an army ambulance. The little girl was on roller blades, and the other flag was part of a disabled vets truck. I teased the kids, who were all wearing camoflage, that they didn't know anything about camoflage... The photo was by son Birrion.
The rest of the day I spent quite a bit of time playing music in the park, some solo, and some with a group of musicians most of whom I'd never played with. In an instance like that, I went with Hank Williams and some household old time songs like Golden Slippers.

Sept. 6
I made the round trip to Seattle for clay again today--took about 12 hours round trip, including an hour and a half walking the waterfront downtown. There I was lucky to see a fireboat spraying out its hoses:

It was behind the breakwater, so it appears to be coming out of the moored boat in the foreground... It was a lovely warm day, no clouds in any of the 650 miles I drove. I stopped near Ellensburg and got 5 boxes of peaches for canning. It seems like canning always happens when the weather is hot, as it's expected to be through the weekend...