Caterday

[offcntr]

I shoulda featured wild horses, for my "Today's Theme Is." Ducks were playing the Boise State Broncos Saturday evening, and there were so many fans in blue and orange, down on the park blocks. (Not that they bought anything...)

But the random distribution of mugs out of the load-in box put three big cats in a row on the tall mug shelf, so I declared it Caterday.

It was nice to be back at the Market. After a week of long days glazing and decorating--70 pieces on Thursday alone!--just being able to sit down was a treat. Still a little muggy and inversion-ish, but the worst of the heat had passed, didn't even get over 80 until take down.

Had a bunch of old friends drop in, which is always nice. Janet Hall was a member of a group that used to gather to celebrate birthdays and go to concerts, back when Denise and I first got married. They've mostly scattered to the winds since then, from Pennsylvania to Palau to Montana and northern Idaho, and even the ones still in town rarely cross paths with us. So we had a nice chat, and I promised to forward an email I'd gotten from another member of our group who moved back east to take care of aging parents and only recently got back in touch.

Later in the afternoon, Julia Siporin stopped in to introduce me to her visiting cousin. Her husband Alan and I were contemporaries at the radio station, and they're also teddy bear collectors, though not to the extent Denise and I were. Showed her my Anacortes postcard, featuring bear and sailboat, and she showed me vacation pictures of their traveling teddy on an actual boat.

Also got to see an old potter friend. Jim Keith had the most amazingly consistent copper red glazes I've ever seen, and had some fun dragon-handled mugs made in collaboration with his wife, Tracy. He lost her to cancer a while back, moved down to California forsaking pottery for automotive work. He said he still has his house in Oregon, and introduced me to his companion, Katherine, who seems to be local here. So he might be moving back?

Every now and then, we get what we used to call in Radiothon days, a flurry. In this case, a husband, wife and adult daughter were looking at the bunny dinner pasta bowl, or maybe the batter bowl, and had she seen the bunny colander? She definitely wanted a cat shaker for cinnamon sugar, though she'd rather it were brown than black. Well, it happened I had a chocolate-point Siamese and brown spotted doggie in restock, so that was a definite yes. But she kept picking up and putting down pots, stepping outside to think, coming back in. So another couple, long-time customers, eeled in, went through the stack of plates and settled on two more, crab and dragonfly, for either home or their coast cabin, couldn't quite make out which. And then a young woman slipped in and snagged the hummingbird covered crock. And finally the original group decided to get the dinner pasta. And the colander. And her husband tapped her on the shoulder and handed her the batter bowl as well. So in a bit over ten minutes, we made three sales and over $200. Wheee!

Sales were back up to normal after a super-slow day two weeks ago (barely topping $200, compared to today's just over $600). Still feel a little awkward about all the empty spaces in my line-up, but I'm firing a kiln on Monday, so that'll be fixed before next weekend.