Snow! Sale! Strange! Stuff!

Snow!

Ollas in the snow:



We didn't dig up the ollas this year; they won't survive the winter probably. But, oh well! I'm going to replace them with some painted ladies this coming year.



This poor guy looks pretty distressed. One of his little horns came off! Pobrecito.

Sale!

The studio sale was this past weekend. We set up on Friday evening, sold like mad Saturday and Sunday, and struck on Sunday evening. Lynn and I were the first in-last out, but we also sold more than anyone else. Dave and I sell as one, and when you add in Lynn's sales, combined we had more than half the studio's total sales. So there.

I traded here and there (got a mug and two cone 10 pieces from an artist who worked over the summer at a studio in San Francisco) and did my usual purchases of small pieces from people who otherwise would've sold nothing in the sale.

In my next life I'm going to be a jeweler because as I get older, unpacking and packing pottery gets less and less appealing. My back was killing me after setting up and unpacking--and my back was killing me after packing. It would have been worse if one of our buddies in the studio hadn't helped me while I was packing up. (We'll have to think of something nice to do for him since he was a bit knight-in-shiny-armor-y on Sunday evening.)

Strange!

On Saturday Dave and I had dinner with my brother at a local Mexican restaurant. My brother wanted to go try it out because it's owned and run by a man that we both used to work for (me when I was waitressing almost twenty-five years ago--god, I feel old typing that!--and my brother up until a few years ago).  While we were finishing dinner, I got up to use the ladies' room and ran into the guy who said, "Your name isn't Brenda, is it?" And then we ended up chatting for about twenty minutes. Talk about a trip down memory lane.

It's strange. I really haven't waitressed in decades, but I still sometimes dream about it, about being so busy that I can't get out of it. The restaurant that I worked for when I worked for this guy was ridiculously busy and I remember that I used to get this awful, doomsday-like feeling at the same time every morning, about 11:00. It took me a long time to realize that it was related to the lunch rush (should really call it a lunch crush). The restaurant would fill up almost instantly every single shift and I dreaded it. It was nightmarish.

The guy, my then-boss, was very brusque. He hated dealing with customers, so often we'd have to run interference for him which sucked. He was very sarcastic with everyone and didn't hesitate to gossip about people. He used to charge his very elderly parents for every single thing they ordered in the restaurant. Seriously, I waited on them once and the only discount I was allowed to give them was the senior discount that everyone over 65 got. (His father, not coincidentally, was a Nazi. That's not a joke or an allegory or anything. His father really was in the SS in Germany during the war. If asked, he would explain that he had five children and no choice. They would have killed him if he had refused to join up. So as soon as the war ended, he brought his whole family to America and never looked back, never returned to Germany once.)

But at the same time, I should give the guy his due. Despite his not really liking me, he treated me very, very fairly when I worked for him. Every semester, he'd make a point of coming to me to ask if my schedule was going to change when I started classes. And he put me on decent shifts so that I could make enough money to support myself and pay for school. And there was one year when I was having a really hard time, personally and financially, and he gave me a Christmas bonus that was about ten times what I was expecting to receive (and about ten times what other people on my same shift received).  So yes, there are good people in this world--or at least people who do their best to act ethically regardless of how they feel about things.

Stuff!

And this is funny:



This is Dave and Lynn, the woman I mentioned above as  being the top seller in the sale. There she is playing one of Dave's ocarinas. He's laughing because this is the ocarina she was playing: