Episode 69 - Dogskulls and Servers, Frank Gosar

**Podcast: Productivity Alchemy**

**File Name: PA-Episode69**

**File Length: 01:16:30**

**Transcription by Keffy**

Kevin:                                       [00:00:00] This podcast is recorded in a house with animals. I have fed the cats so they have abandoned the office and gone off to do what cats do when there’s gooshy food in the bowls, which is basically shove their face in it and just devour. The dogs are hopefully sleeping somewhere and the chickens are definitely locked away and asleep outside where they belong.

Ursula:                                     [00:00:23] Yay!

Kevin:                                       [00:00:27] But that doesn’t mean there won’t be noises, just saying. The other thing to mention at this juncture is that we swear.

Ursula:                                     [00:00:33] Oh, do we…

Kevin:                                       [00:00:36] That is probably the worst that will happen on this podcast, but because of the rules and how the different podcast distributors don’t allow you to do anything but Clean and Explicit, consider this explicit, that’s why it’s marked that way. Mostly for language not for anything else.

                                                     [00:00:52] Welcome to Productivity Alchemy Episode 69. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Ursula:                                     [00:00:59] Obviously. 69…

Kevin:                                       [00:01:01] 69! Um. We have an interview with a production potter later this episode.

Ursula:                                     [00:01:08] Ooooh.

Kevin:                                       [00:01:08] And it was a good one, and Frank was a lot of fun to talk to, and we’ll talk to him in a little bit.

Ursula:                                     [00:01:13] My mother always used to say that potters were the only fine artists that ever made money.

Kevin:                                       [00:01:18] Yeah, he’s got a production schedule that is like nobody’s business and he’s running the whole thing pretty much by himself. It’s pretty amazing. It really is.

Ursula:                                     [00:01:26] Awesome.

Kevin:                                       [00:01:28] In the other news, my job hunt continues.

Ursula:                                     [00:01:32] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:01:34] It was sort of slowed down a little bit today, well the last couple days because, as I’ve mentioned on other shows, our hosting provider was getting out of the physical hosting business so I had to take a couple days to figure out where we were going to get new hosting and then purchase the new hosting and then before they would actually provision the server, because I got a dedicated server for dirt cheap… But then we had to prove our identities that we weren’t some random scammers and then they weren’t happy with mine because it’s coming out of Ursula’s card so we had to prove her identity.

Ursula:                                     [00:02:11] And it is your Patreon money that is making this possible, we are very grateful.

Kevin:                                       [00:02:14] So very grateful. And, end result is we now have a new dedicated server. I spent basically Monday and Tuesday migrating everything over to it so that today they can shut down the server I have over in the Colo in Raleigh, and I will be picking it up when they have time. Because the owner’s going to take hold of it, put it in his car, basically, and we’re gonna do a hand-off when things settle a little bit.

Ursula:                                     [00:02:42] This is one of those things where no one is happy that you’re unemployed, but if it was going to happen it really helps that it was a time when you weren’t juggling this and a job.

Kevin:                                       [00:02:48] Yeah, I basically could spend Monday and Tuesday doing nothing but moving the stuff over, tuning, moving stuff over, tuning… And I had it mostly wrapped up by the time lunch rolled around on Tuesday, which was good.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:01] Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:02] But then we… we did some other stuff, too. Say, what else did we do on Tuesday?

Ursula:                                     [00:03:09] Was that yesterday?

Kevin:                                       [00:03:09] That was yesterday. We went out to Dogskull.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:12] Yes, yes. I’ve been working at Dogskull Patch the last two days.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:16] And moved some stuff around and got stuff set up for deer season.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:19] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:19] Which is still a couple weeks away, mind you.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:24] It’s next week, technically.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:25] Technically, okay.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:27] But I’m not gonna go out this month, so.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:29] Well, does that mean that bow season is on right now.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:31] I believe so.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:31] Oh, wow. Okay.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:33] Another thing I don’t do.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:34] Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:37] So it’s—I was out today and it was really good. I set up a—I had an invasive species crew out to remove all the Chinese privet a while ago.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:49] Oh my God, the work they did.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:52] It is astonishing the work they did, and it is also astonishing to look at all of the brush piles like, every few feet. It’s just a brush pile as high as my head and I’m realizing, like, how much of the woods was Chinese privet. Which is an invasive species down here in the southeast. And it’s just like the woods have gone from this intensely tight overgrown kind of mess where you’re trying to hack your way through on various paths to this sort of open airy woodland with sun coming through.

Kevin:                                       [00:04:25] A managed woodland versus…

Ursula:                                     [00:04:28] Well, it’s… in the initial stages of being managed. And there’s a trail through it, now, laid out in chips from having chipped the privet. Which… the thing is that putting down trails and what I did today, I went around a chunk of the border, a very small chunk until I ran out of birdhouses and put up birdhouses basically along the boundaries so that when the little pink flags eventually fall off or whatever, I can track it by birdhouses.

Kevin:                                       [00:05:01] That noise in the background is Smokey probably about to have a hairball, because this is what he does before he has a hairball.

Ursula:                                     [00:05:06] No, that’s not a hairball noise. That’s a dismay and the world is not aligning to my liking noise. It may turn into a hairball noise, but it’s also a general, “I am outraged at existence” noise.

Kevin:                                       [00:05:18] No, Smokey generally does that just before he horks up something unpleasant.

Ursula:                                     [00:05:23] Well, horking does make him outraged at the universe.

Kevin:                                       [00:05:25] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:05:25] He also does that when the other cats won’t play with him.

Kevin:                                       [00:05:28] I don’t think that’s a problem right now.

Ursula:                                     [00:05:30] Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:05:30] Okay.

Ursula:                                     [00:05:32] And the chimney at Dogskull Patch on the ruined house fell down in the hurricane and—which is lovely because it was an old fieldstone chimney. The house is condemned or should be condemned. Would be condemned if anybody cared enough to come out and condemn it. And—so, I suddenly have this massive pile of fieldstone, and—

Kevin:                                       [00:05:53] The important thing as far as I’m concerned is that the chimney came down by itself and did not require me to arrange to pull it down without hurting myself.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:02] Yeah, I mean… the slightest pressure would have done it, but we would have just had to throw a rope around it and like have the truck.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:09] Yeah, pretty much.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:09] –Haul it down. But the angles would have been complicated. So I moved fieldstone today once I was done with the birdhouses and laid out the base of the very first raised bed and I felt. And I mean—it’s one rock high at the moment. It’s not like anything terribly impressive but there is this intentionality to it and I felt very warm and fuzzy and like I had accomplished things. And then I went thing and put icyhot on all of my major muscle groups.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:40] All of them.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:40] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:40] Every last one.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:41] I would like just a giant sheet of icyhot that I could just lay down on and we could cut out in the shape of my back.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:52] Um… I’m going gonna need three tubes of icyhot and at least two sets of cotton sheets.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:59] Basically, I just want to be a mummy made of like mentholated bodyrub.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:07] Yeah, probably figure that out.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:09] Yeah. So, anyway. That’s what I did. I am proud of myself. I feel I am moving infinitesimally but importantly towards the goal of doing something with Dogskull Patch. Which is a goal I think I mentioned back at the very beginning of the show.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:26] Yes, it was. And I’ve also got someone to call tomorrow to look into removing all of the crap from inside the condemned house and possibly some of the garbage and crap around the yard, so we’ll find out.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:40] Hopefully he can at least give us the name of a junk removal, junk pickup and removal system, or person. Because I mean, there’s just a lot of junk and we picked up a bunch of it, but… There’s a lot of junk.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:54] There is. There is. We scratched the surface and we’re afraid of what we found under it.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:59] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:59] And that surface was mostly pine straw, let’s be honest.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:02] Yes, we took off the pine straw and discovered the ancient glass jar burial ground.

Kevin:                                       [00:08:08] And they weren’t even that ancient. Like ‘70s and ‘80s, something.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:14] Yeah, people used various parts of the property basically as a trash dump and we would like the trash undumped.

Kevin:                                       [00:08:19] Undumped.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:22] Yes. Anyway.

Kevin:                                       [00:08:23] Anyway.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:24] So I was also super duper productive this week. I finished off the illustrations I needed to do. I am getting the last rounds of copyedits on the novel coming out. And got a project that was not working. It was not working, and I basically said I think this is not going to work. It was a book. It was a publisher, I’ve worked with the publisher before. We’re all cool. It was nobody’s fault, really. It was just a what I delivered was not what they were expecting to get, and we tried very hard to make it work and… she would have kept trying and finally I was just like, I do not think I can turn this book into what you want. It would be easier to write a different book. And I do think we can make each other very miserable for another year trying to get this to work. And I am proud of myself for having recognized that point and basically thrown in the towel and said, this is not working. Let’s move on.

Kevin:                                       [00:09:40] And that’s—I think that’s something really important to talk about because I think a lot of times we do not stop and say, “This is not working.” We will just plow forward no matter how painful, no matter how much extra time and just waste time and effort and frustration and be angry and all of that when it may have just been easier to say, “This is not working, go somewhere else. Or try something else.”

Ursula:                                     [00:10:07] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:10:08] And part of my fail fast philosophy when I’m doing systems administration stuff. Yeah, if something isn’t working and it will take a whole bunch of effort to make it work then we call that a fail and we go onto the next thing. And that is not everybody’s cup of tea. I know several people I’ve worked with who were—who would basically just grit their teeth and say, “No, I know this can work.” And just push on and waste extra time. Weeks, sometimes. And miss delivery dates because they don’t want to say, “This is not working.” Or they feel that if they don’t make it work then it’s a personal affront or a personal failing. I’ve had that happen to me. I have done that, myself. So, it is something that I’m very familiar with, and I will get caught in it sometimes. But I’m trying not to so much, to be able to stop and say, “This is not working, maybe I should try something else.”

Ursula:                                     [00:11:11] And there are points on paintings where you can look at it and go, “This isn’t working. Done.” Honestly, ironically, getting back to our interview. One of the things that taught me about failing, and this is true, not just something I’m saying because it makes a great segue, was taking pottery classes. Because… there is a point that happens very early on when you’re wheel-throwing where you cannot be precious and fiddly when you’re throwing a pot on the wheel, because the clay will get wet and overworked. You—there’s a point where you look at it and you go, “I have thrown the wall too thin. It is not possible to fix this without enormous amounts of work and why would I bother.” So, at that point, when I was learning to wheel throw, and I took an entire semester basically that was nothing but come in and throw on the damn wheel over and over. I took it because that was the first time I had been bad at something I wanted to do. And… which, it’s good in college to—I came, perhaps late to that because before then there had been nothing that I had been bad at that I had really wanted to do. There were lots of things I was bad at, but I just didn’t care. Or I decided I didn’t care, but god damn it, I wanted to be good at throwing pots and I was not. I am still—I attained through sheer bloody-mindedness a certain…

Kevin:                                       [00:12:45] Competence?

Ursula:                                     [00:12:46] Yeah, I mean, I can throw a pot on a wheel, or I could ten—well, it’s sort of like riding a bicycle honestly. You still know how to a certain extent. I’m not very good. They’re not… no one’s gonna give me any awards, but I can throw a thing that I can cut off the wheel and put in the kiln and it probably won’t explode. And… I made a set of dishes. I think my mother’s still using them. But you learned not to—the work stopped being precious very quickly.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:23] Well, there was also—wasn’t there an exercise involving a dumpster?

Ursula:                                     [00:13:28] Uh, exercise. It wasn’t exactly an exercise. It was—the smashing of the ugly pots. At the end of the semester, we had created a bunch of stuff that, and we’d taken it through all of the stages of firing and whatnot. And a lot of it was, frankly, shit. Because, I mean, we were first year pottery students. And there was a large dumpster outside the ceramics studio, and our professor said: you can set these things on—and there was a sort of a concrete wall next to it. Sort of a low brick concrete wall. Like, you can set them on here, and this is the free to good home, and if anyone wants them, they will take them home. Or you can just throw them in the dumpster and smash them. And there were some people who could not smash them. It was a—they had worked on this and it was like, no, this is horrifying. I have to put it out on the free to good home. And then there were those of us who were like, all right, and flung it into the dumpster and heard the crash of ceramic and it was like about half an orgasm worth of euphoria. We were just like, “Whoa. All right, give me another one.” And—because there was this sort of liberating moment when you could look at something you had made and said, “Yes, I put a lot of time and energy into this, and I have not made something beautiful or worth having, so I’mma smash it and start again.” And it was really very liberating and it did a lot for me as an artist to be able to say, “This is not working. You’re done. Keep going.”

                                                     [00:15:06] Years later, I would casually take a ceramics class with a friend of mine who was like, “I want to take a ceramics class, come with me so I’m not alone.” I’m like, “Yeah, sure. Fine.” At a community center or something. And very nice woman teaching it who was very good at what she did but was used to people being very attached to their work.

Kevin:                                       [00:15:33]  Oh, God.

Ursula:                                     [00:15:33] And I sat down and threw something on the wheel and realized—and she came over and said, “How are you doing?” I’m like, “Yeah, I made the wall too thin.” And she’s like, “Well, if you cut it off now, we can use some slip and we can put some—we can put something on the outside and try to thicken it up.” And I’m like… “Or I could cut it off the wheel and make another one in 45 seconds.” And she looked sort of startled, and I’m like. “It’s just clay.” This literally took me two minutes and it should have taken me a minute and a half because if it had, I wouldn’t have thrown the wall so thin. So… you know. And she honestly stopped asking me if everything was okay after that.

Kevin:                                       [00:16:19] She knew what the answer was.

Ursula:                                     [00:16:21] It’s fine. I’ll fix it, or if it’s not fixable, don’t bother fixing it, just make another one. It’s clay. It heals itself. Wedge it all and throw it in the scrap barrel. Anyway.

Kevin:                                       [00:16:32] Yeah, and that’s—but that’s a valuable life lesson, too, in a lot of ways in that just because we make something, just because we maybe bought something that was precious to us once, or that we worked really hard on getting, it’s not permanent. And if we don’t like it later, we can get rid of it. It’s okay.

Ursula:                                     [00:16:54] Yeah, as…

Kevin:                                       [00:16:56] Don’t look around my office and give me that look that says, “I see you getting rid of all these things.” But…

Ursula:                                     [00:17:03] Uh…

Kevin:                                       [00:17:03] My office is a clutter. And I do need to clean it out because often what happens is we need to put something somewhere and I’m like, okay, and I shove it on a shelf and then three years go by and maybe I’ll look for it again or maybe not. And it’s mostly I just need to get this out of my way and so my office gets cluttered because I don’t purge the way Ursula does.

Ursula:                                     [00:17:23] I wasn’t—you got a lot from me, like glancing over your shoulder, okay.

Kevin:                                       [00:17:30] It wasn’t just… it was you glanced over my shoulder, then you glanced at that corner over there. You sort of glanced across the desktop across from you, and I could sort of hear the thought process going, “Here’s a man who hasn’t thrown anything away in this office” telling people it’s ok to throw things away, and yeah.

                                                     [00:17:48] I realize that I need to—

Ursula:                                     [00:17:50] You don’t get the money you spent back just by keeping it.

Kevin:                                       [00:17:55] No, you don’t. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff in here that’s just… a lot of it is stuff that just came in and I haven’t cleaned out.

Ursula:                                     [00:18:01] I wasn’t—I…

Kevin:                                       [00:18:05] But I think a lot of us have that attitude of we spent money on it therefore we need to keep it forever or find a good home for it.

Ursula:                                     [00:18:13] Because it’s not… it’s like—people feel like it’s like the stock market, you don’t lose money until you get rid of the stock for less than you paid. It’s like, I haven’t lost what I spent on this dress that doesn’t fit until I get rid of it.

Kevin:                                       [00:18:27] Yeah, the interesting things to get rid of. I have that pile of review journals and planners over there. Some of them that are actually dated for 2017 and 2018, so they’re useless at this point. In November of 2018, they’re useless. They should go. There are some that are crap that I don’t think I could possibly give away. I don’t even know if I could pay someone to take them away, so… they’re.

Ursula:                                     [00:18:56] Have you told the internet they were crappy, though?

Kevin:                                       [00:18:58] Yeah. Pretty much everything in that pile—

Ursula:                                     [00:19:01] Has already been reviewed?

Kevin:                                       [00:19:02] Has already been reviewed. What?

Ursula:                                     [00:19:08] [From a distance.] This pile here?

Kevin:                                       [00:19:09] Yes, that pile right there.

Ursula:                                     [00:19:13] [From a distance.] Which…

Kevin:                                       [00:19:15] Some of those have been used and have writing in them. Some of those are unused and undated. I need to sort them and toss them.

Ursula:                                     [00:19:20] [From a distance.] I can’t just go pitch them out right now?

Kevin:                                       [00:19:23] No. Like, you’ve got the original notebook, that one with the raven on the cover?

Ursula:                                     [00:19:27] [From a distance.] Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:29] That’s all of my first year notes for Productivity Alchemy. I don’t necessarily need to keep that one, but…

Ursula:                                     [00:19:36] [From a distance.] It’s just your raven cover’s coming off and Sergei has dug into it.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:40] Yeah, it’s mostly a reminder of how far I’ve come. That one has a little bit of symbolic meaning. But like, the one with the silver discs on the very very bottom there. That a perfect notebook, no…

Ursula:                                     [00:19:53] [There is a thudding sound of something dropping.] Aaaah.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:54] That’s the… not the Story Clock… yeah, let me see this one. This is the… yes, the Perfect Notebook, which was a slightly weird size and the rings, while ring-bound are a slightly weird shape and don’t quite work with the regular paper. I think I talked about this one. It’s undated, so if someone… maybe I will give this one away, because this one can be given away. What have we got there?

Ursula:                                     [00:20:16] [From a distance.] This is the Evernet notebook… the evernote…

Kevin:                                       [00:20:18] Oh the Evernote Moleskine where you write in it and you take pictures of it in the Evernote app and supposedly it does magic things with it, and it didn’t really do the magic things with it.

Ursula:                                     [00:20:27] [From a distance.] Then throw it away!

Kevin:                                       [00:20:28] Hold on. Make sure—what did I write in it? Because I was using it for—this is all notes from my old job that don’t matter for shit anymore.

Ursula:                                     [00:20:43] Throw it away! Liberate yourself from the tyranny of the material.

Kevin:                                       [00:20:47] I will, as soon as I take out the stickers because fuck yes, stickers. I need to take out the garbage after the show’s over, too.

Ursula:                                     [00:20:55] He has thrown it into the trash can. Ladies and gentleman we have practiced briefly what we preach. All right. Feeling good! Feeling—we’re moving forward.

Kevin:                                       [00:21:07] Yeah. And I still have the stickers that came with it which were okay. I will add them to the useful stickers in the back of the thing. I wouldn’t try to use those stickers to actually take a photograph and have them autofile the way they said they would because it didn’t really work that way. And it might have just been that the photo on my—the cameraon the phone I had at the time wasn’t very good, but—

Ursula:                                     [00:21:29] You probably don’t need the little life and death of Moleskine saga.

Kevin:                                       [00:21:35] And then the little quality control sticker that comes with it, yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:21:38] Yeah. Woo! We are purging here, people.

Kevin:                                       [00:21:40] Yep. Now the Plot Devices Story Clock notebook that I have in my hands right here, it is—if you’re a script writer and use a very specific writing style this is fantastic. If you’re someone like me who’s not writing stories necessarily and isn’t writing, like, plots using the story structure build your story structure as you’re outlining your thing here, then um… yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:22:10] Not so useful?

Kevin:                                       [00:22:11] Not so useful. But, again. Undated, so the—these two could actually go back and I should give one of those away.

Ursula:                                     [00:22:19] Yeah, give the Story Clock away.

Kevin:                                       [00:22:20] Let’s do—yeah. Okay, so I’ve got a Story Clock notebook by Plot Devices. PlotDevices.co.

Ursula:                                     [00:22:27] It is small, it is just a stapled notebook with paper covers kind of thing, not like a big ring-bound type of…

Kevin:                                       [00:22:32] Actually, there should be—I think there are two more in the pile over there. There are one or two more.

Ursula:                                     [00:22:36] All right. We will send you all the Story Clock notebooks we have.

Kevin:                                       [00:22:40] We can find, yes.

Ursula:                                     [00:22:41] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:22:41] So, comment on this episode at ProductivityAlchemy.com saying, “I want the Story Clock notebook” and any other comments you might have, and when we do a letter show… no, not the letter show, because the letter show is only a week away. Let’s call it Thanksgiving week on the 21st. When we… well, it’ll be the 22nd, actually, but, when we record on the 21st, we will draw a name and we will notify so that the winner, before it airs on the 22nd.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:14] Woo!

Kevin:                                       [00:23:16] Woo. So, yeah. The Story Clock notebook. If you’re a script writer, if you like using, like half hour or—the episodic structure of TV shows or something for… you’re planning your books or something.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:29] If you don’t know but you want to give it a try for plotting.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:32] We got one.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:33] Or two.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:34] I got one.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:34] Or three. We don’t know. We’ll dig them out.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:36] We’ll dig them out.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:36] Woo!

Kevin:                                       [00:23:39] So that’s that. Now. Going back to before that.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:44] With the smashing?

Kevin:                                       [00:23:44] With the smashing.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:45] And the pottery.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:45] And the pottery. Frank Gosar is a production potter in Eugene, Oregon.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:52] Aww, Eugene. I used to buy drugs there.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:55] He throws…

Ursula:                                     [00:23:55] In my youth, people. You can’t pin anything on me now.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:59] I want to say he throws hundreds if not thousands of the same pot, plate, cup, whatever over the course of a year. He does shows. Like, actual pottery shows and travels with it, so…

Ursula:                                     [00:24:14] Well, I don’t know if they’re actually the same pot, because you know… when…

Kevin:                                       [00:24:18] Well, the same style.

Ursula:                                     [00:24:19] Same style, there we go, yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:20] The same style, yes. Like, if somebody wants a set of four of a particular style he goes out and he makes four. Sometimes, and he talks about this, he has eight in stock but now he’s down four so he’s got to throw four anyway.

Ursula:                                     [00:24:34] Yep.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:34] Or maybe they want a custom color and oh dear God. But there’s a lot of interesting things we talk about, especially about how he keeps all of that organized between the shows and his inventory and things like that. So, we’re gonna go ahead and we’re gonna talk to Frank right after this.

[00:24:48] [Productivity Alchemy segment change music plays. Jaunty, pleasant jazzy piano with accompanying bass.]

Kevin:                                       [00:25:28] Hi folks. I am here with Frank Gosar who is a full-time professional potter, I think. Is that right?

Frank:                                       [00:25:37] That is correct. I’m a full-time production potter. We call it a production potter.

Kevin:                                       [00:25:42] Production pottery.

Frank:                                       [00:25:42] And sometimes sculptor. Been doing business since 1993 as Off-Center Ceramics.

Kevin:                                       [00:25:48] Wow.

Frank:                                       [00:25:50] I hand throw functional stoneware pottery, hand-paint everything using brushes I make myself out of roadkill squirrel tail. Birds and animal patterns mostly. And fire it all in a 50 cubic foot gas kiln.

Kevin:                                       [00:26:03] So we can skip the first question, which is introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do, because we’ve just covered that, right?

Frank:                                       [00:26:09] Well, I got a little bit more, because I have had a very checkered past. I have been an editorial cartoonist, rubber stamp designer, children’s storyteller and musician, teacher—both in pottery and science fiction. Graphic designer and for 25 years hosted the Saturday Café, a weekly folksinger/songwriter music program on KLCC which is our NPR affiliate out here in Eugene.

Kevin:                                       [00:26:33] Wow. Okay, so… that is… and now you’re making brushes out of squirrel tails.

Frank:                                       [00:26:41] Squirrel tail, yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:26:43] Now are you just… I’m sorry, now I have to ask these extra questions, because now I just want to know. So, do you—and you said roadkill squirrels. So you’re just like driving along, someone’s hit a squirrel and you harvest?

Frank:                                       [00:26:55] I live on a sort of semi-suburban four-lane 45 mile an hour street where the city planted red oak trees right up my side of the street.

Kevin:                                       [00:27:03] Oh.

Frank:                                       [00:27:05] So every fall I’m out there giving them the last rights and checking their donor card to see if they checked off for artistic purposes and burying the rest of it down at the bottom of my garden.

Kevin:                                       [00:27:15] Well, that is ecologically sound and I would say cruelty-free, but a car impact was in there somewhere… but… at least we know it’s not going to waste. And you’re not endangering the buzzards or other scavengers by leaving them in the road.

Frank:                                       [00:27:35] Good point.

Kevin:                                       [00:27:37] So, okay… so we were on the—how do you keep yourself organized with all this going on?

Frank:                                       [00:27:44] Lists. So many lists. I actually started saving them on the computer. I’ve got a couple of checklists for roadshows, one for indoor shows, one for outdoor shows. I have a special orders text file. I take a lot of special orders. People will want a particular pattern on a particular pot, or maybe they’ll send me a picture that they want painted on a dinner plate. And most of them come in by email, so I can just cut and paste them into a text file. I have Excel files—I do—because I was a graphic artist, I do publicity for three different pottery shows.

Kevin:                                       [00:28:18] Wow.

Frank:                                       [00:28:18] Ceramics Showcase out of Portland, Clay Fest in Eugene, and Clay Folk in Medford. And deadlines. I started keeping an Excel file a couple years ago so that I could track the deadlines easier and have specs about ad sizes and that’s been really really helpful. I also write paper lists for ongoing projects. I do a throwing list for every kiln firing. The 50 cubic foot kiln holds a lot of pots, and so I’ve got a list of things in the studio right now to throw. I will also make lists when it’s time to glaze. I’ll check my inventory and see what patterns I’m low on, in what forms, and so that I don’t have to sit down with a brush and a bowl and go, “What goes on this?” It’s all written down in advance.

                                                     [00:29:06] I have also started doing, I guess I would call it a disposable bullet journal for every [inaudible] stuff. My inlaws donated to a gazillion different charities all of which gave them notepads, and…

Kevin:                                       [00:29:21] Oh, they always do, yeah.

Frank:                                       [00:29:24] Yeah. So it’s a handy thing. I’ll just keep a notepad at the table either right before bed or at morning during breakfast, I will make up a list of everything that needs to be done that day and kind of prioritize it, and then cross it off as I go. If I finish a page, great. I can tear it off and start a new one tomorrow. If I’ve got leftover stuff, I will still start a new one tomorrow, but I’ll keep the partial pages until I’ve checked the last thing off, and then it goes away. It’s gone.

Kevin:                                       [00:29:52] There you go, yeah. And I was just thinking about keeping the kiln list on paper, and like, why wouldn’t you do that on computer? And then I realized because you can’t take the computer and put it on the kiln or next to the kiln or, you know… once it’s in the kiln.

Frank:                                       [00:30:08] Or even in the studio where my hands are all sticky from clay.

Kevin:                                       [00:30:13] Right. Right. I mean, it just… There are places where the technology literally will not work, right?

Frank:                                       [00:30:18] I do take the tablet down to the studio when I’m glazing because it’s got all my reference photos on it.

Kevin:                                       [00:30:24] Right, but I think, I guess glazing’s a little different from throwing and firing.

Frank:                                       [00:30:28] A little, yeah. My hands tend to stay cleaner.

Kevin:                                       [00:30:34] Yeah, so. So through all of that, I guess lists falls into this category, but are there any systems or habits that are valuable to you through all that?

Frank:                                       [00:30:45] There are a couple. The first one is: put stuff away. When we bought our house 18 years ago, the first thing I did was went down to GoodWill and got myself a used four-drawer filing cabinet. And the top drawer is all business folders. There are gallery folders for inventories, there are sales lists, there are—pretty much everything involved in the business goes in the top drawer. Second drawer has bills and insurance forms and a couple of estimated tax and tax folders. The third and fourth are more freeform. They’re more a place to stuff stuff when it starts sliding off my desk because sadly, in spite of trying, I still utilize the nearest flat surface form of filing a lot.

Kevin:                                       [00:31:34] Yeah.

Frank:                                       [00:31:35] I also, with my business—financial records. I built myself an Excel spreadsheet that has 12 pages, one per month and a blank column for each space on a Schedule C.

Kevin:                                       [00:31:50] Okay, yeah.

Frank:                                       [00:31:50] When I get expenses, I pre-sort them, when I get income, I pre-sort that. If it’s a 1099 or just a straight income. I even have a couple of columns to track stuff that’s local and that isn’t, because we have a local self-employment transit tax that only charges on things within our transit district. So, all of this information gets filtered into the proper places within a day or two of the receipt or the check coming in, and then I don’t have to worry about sorting through a box of receipts at the end of the year when tax time rolls around.

Kevin:                                       [00:32:25] Wow. That’s—yeah. And—so, I can tell that you’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while because I will admit, both Ursula and I are box keepers. Here’s the box where we shove the receipts and we’ll sort them out later.

Frank:                                       [00:32:42] I started with a paper ledger and it was just income, expenses, and then I would go through with a highlighter at the end of the year and highlight the different categories and add them up, and then I realized that paper ledgers came in 13 column format, so I could break the stuff out as I went. Then, when my wife was working as an assistant at a local community college and she helped a blind student with an Excel class and came home and said, you should really try this. It’s really wonderful. I even got a macro at the bottom of each month that adds up the columns and then I can paste them onto my year summary and add that up, and I don’t have to math at all.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:24] And there’s a secret, too, and that was, I discovered that you can take, with the right syntax, you can take cells from one page in the Excel workbook and have it autopopulate in a different page, in a different tab.

Frank:                                       [00:33:42] I did not know that. What I just do is command + = on the summary line and then copy it and paste it.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:49] Yeah, no… if I could remember. I think it’s if you do something like = and then the name of the page, colon… or… there’s some reference. Look it up, it’s really cool, because at my last job, I was doing a big spreadsheet… two jobs ago, two jobs ago, now. I was doing a spreadsheet where I was calculating out certain percentages from our ticketing system and so I would have one page that was all these big raw numbers and totals, and then rather than copying the totals over, every time I would change a line, it would update the totals, and then it would update the page that I was doing all the graphic on with the totals.

Frank:                                       [00:34:30] Brilliant.

Kevin:                                       [00:34:31] Yeah, so… and I’ll prob—when I record this, I will have looked it up to see what the syntax is, because frankly, that was one of my favorite features out of all of it was just that, oh, I no longer have to copy and paste. Right? I just entered this formula and it fills it in for me, and when I change it on page 1, it updates page 3, and that’s awesome.

Frank:                                       [00:34:58] Yes. That sounds great. I’m going to have to try it once you’ve let me know what it is.

Kevin:                                       [00:35:02] Yeah, yeah.

Frank:                                       [00:35:03] Okay, habits and systems continued. The biggest thing is kind of consistency and repetition. I find a system and I stick with it. Back when I was doing radio, my show broke on 20 minute intervals for underwriters and stuff, and I always did the weather on the first 20 break, the folk calendar on the second 20 break, live interviews—and I had a bunch of them because I was late enough that musicians would be awake, but early enough that they weren’t doing sound checks. It would either be the 20 minutes before or after the mid-point of the show, and then I would actually build my sets, and I’d have first song, six sets, stacks of music, last song. And have them all planned out before I even went on the air, which… allowed me to kind of create a narrative flow, and it also meant that if somebody called in a request with an idea that was better than something I’d thought of, I could dump a set, rebuild it, and then 20 minutes later I would be back on track again, I wouldn’t need to worry about the whole rest of the show, because it was waiting for me.

Kevin:                                       [00:36:10] Yeah, we—when I was a on-air personality for radio we had a structure through the course of an hour very similar to that. You know, at the top of the hour, station identification, then news, and then you play something from the top ten that week and then we had it broken down by category. And it was much more—it was almost a full hour, but there were sponsors who had bought a certain time slot for a certain type of song. And so you had to be prepared for that, and yeah, you’re right. It does make it—if that’s what you’re doing hour after hour after hour. And the one thing, listeners know what to expect, but also you can plan a lot better because you already know what’s happening through the course of that hour, and you can—yeah, if you’re doing musical shows like that, you can plan your playlist in advance. Or, if you’re going to do a narrative because it’s a one time show, if you’re doing a daily thing, then it’s like, yes. I can do a rotation very easily between the top ten, say, over the course of the day.

Frank:                                       [00:37:14] The pottery equivalent of that… We do a weekly Saturday market from April through—the market itself runs ‘til mid-November, but I bail out after my first show, or after my first weekend in October so that I’ve got studio time getting ready for Christmas.

Kevin:                                       [00:37:30] Oh, yeah.

Frank:                                       [00:37:32] That means that every week we’ve got the same set-up and takedown and so all the bowls go in the same order on the shelf. I’ve even got names on the bowl stands so we know which one is missing. The mugs go in this order, the stew mugs go on that spot. The animal banks here. The whole thing is carefully laid out and consistent and all the pots come out of one set of boxes and go back into that set of boxes at the end of the show. We have a set of load-in boxes, and then there’s restock boxes in the back, but we don’t have to dig through them while we’re loading in or taking down. We only open them up if we sold something, and get something else out. That makes it a lot faster to set up a show and to take down a show. We always really impress the neighbors when we’re at out of town shows because it looks like we’ve got so much stuff and we can get it out and back in again in an amazingly short amount of time because we’ve practiced all the time.

Kevin:                                       [00:38:28] Yeah, if you’re practicing every week, then… we are down to, I think, one big show like that a year for art and Ursula’s pendants and things like that. So, we’re not as good at it as many of the other people at the same event who are going to conventions or shows every weekend the same way. So, we might take a little longer, but then, we’re usually in early enough that even if we take a little longer we’re still done the day before and not five minutes before opening, and oh God, where’s the thing?

Frank:                                       [00:39:08] Oh yes. The one thing that I’m still working on for organization is inventory control. Because I have so many items and so many patterns on the items. I have a checklist and it’s on the computer, of course. We print it out and mark things off. I’ve been trying to keep track of what’s in the van and then marking things off of it when it sells, and then marking things off of the shed inventory when I move them into the van, and it’s mostly working. But because I have like three lists in a row with a lot of the same patterns, sometimes my brain farts and put—check something off of the bowls list when it should be coming off of the mugs list, and…

Kevin:                                       [00:39:49] Yeah. And that, again, that may be where—well that, I think it depends on the show if you have good cellular internet access, because a big win for a lot of the people who are doing similar, like here are the regular things we always take with us, kind of art stocks, here’s our print list, here’s that… is using something like their tablet with Excel on it, or I think Square has it built in inventory management now. But if you’re not used to using that, that’s a big shift, and I… and it may or may not be a help.

Frank:                                       [00:40:30] Well, the problem is I’ve got like 30 different kinds of items and as many as 24 patterns on it, on each of them. So it’s easier—

Kevin:                                       [00:40:39] A lot of it’s set up time.

Frank:                                       [00:40:41] Yeah. Set-up time and finding the appropriate place to check it off, and I think I will stick with paper for now.

Kevin:                                       [00:40:49] Yeah, no… a friend—and it is, there is a big job in doing inventory control like that. Some friends of mine own a game store and they were shifting from one point of sale system to another and as part of that, they basically had to re-inventory everything, because there was no easy import, or maybe there was an import but it didn’t catch everything, and so they had to go through and check all the lines. And even something that should have taken, that should have been a very easy import was still several days and nights of work. No, inventory systems are hard. And, anyone who tells you anything different is lying.

                                                     [00:41:36] All right. So, got all that. Anything else in the systems or habits that are valuable?

Frank:                                       [00:41:44] Well, I used to be much better at using a pocket calendar and I kind of stopped carrying it around, and trying to get into Google Calendar and have had some problems with that. Especially when Denise was still working at the college, because it kept flagging me every time she had a class she was working at. So, still need to learn a better use of that.

Kevin:                                       [00:42:07] Yeah, no… I’ve… believe me, I’ve had the—in my case, I typically have two different calendars. The work calendar, which may or may not be in a system that is compatible with Google, and my home Google calendar, and so, you know, if I’m not careful or whatever, I’m getting meeting notices for things I’m obviously not going to attend because I’m out of town, or I’m getting notices for the school calendar. The school that my kid goes to has a Google Calendar, and I’ll be getting notices for picture day at work, and it’s like. No. I don’t need to know that, right? Because yeah, no. That’s the other thing in technology. For some reason, calendars are hard. Calendars are not easy, especially when you start getting into beyond just me and sharing and trying to manage it with multiple people or multiple types of accounts, right?

Frank:                                       [00:43:03] You tend to get buried under false alarms after a while, and then stop paying attention.

Kevin:                                       [00:43:10] Exactly, and that’s the exact opposite of what you want to happen. You want to know what’s going on but you don’t want to be so overwhelmed that you can’t tell what’s important what’s not.

                                                     [00:43:24] So, given all of that, how do you decide what to do first on a given day?

Frank:                                       [00:43:28] Well, the list helps. When I was a graphic artist, back working at the print shop, I discovered that mornings are my best time to be creative. If I was doing design work or illustration, that was a morning job. Afternoon was straight cut, paste stuff. So, the equivalent here is, I will do my throwing in the morning as much as possible. Trimming and handles and finishing stuff I’ve got currently a couple dozen desert plates in the studio that are off of the bats, but they still need to be flipped over and smoothed and stamped. That’ll be an afternoon job. If I’m making ads for the clay shows, and I have to get back to that again soon. That will be a morning job because that requires a creative mind. Converting them to PDFs and emailing them off to the appropriate newspapers, that’s an afternoon thing. Loading kilns can be an afternoon thing, although with the big glaze kiln, Denise and I both working together take all day on that. When I’m glazing, I initially thought, oh, you need to warm up before you do the big challenging stuff, so do the easy things first. The soup bowls, the coffee cups that are just 24 patterns that you know in your sleep, and then discover I was exhausted when I had to do the special order snowy owl about to catch a mouse giant bowl at the end of the week. So I now do the hard stuff first and so I’ll start doing 20 or 3o pieces a day and by the end of the week, I’ll be doing 60 or 70, because it’s the easy things.

Kevin:                                       [00:45:04] Right, and I think there’s an important thing. You have taken the time, or I don’t know if it was a deliberate act or something, to figure out what type of tasks are best done at what time of day. And I think that’s something I’ve heard a lot of people talk about is, these are my—and I’m gonna—I’m using air quotes, “peak times.” A lot of people talking in technology say, you know, understand when your “peak times” are and schedule like, if you’re a programmer, you’re a designer, block that time off for doing those tasks and schedule meetings or whatever around it. Not that we always can, but…

Frank:                                       [00:45:44] And then, you have to avoid wasting that time, too. I never read my email in the morning because I know I’ll fall down the internet hole and I will have wasted the whole morning by the time I’m done.

Kevin:                                       [00:45:56] Right, right. And I’m the kind of person who hits their stride around, like… mid-day into mid afternoon. So, 10 to 2 is really when I have my quote-unquote “peak energy” and so that’s fantastic, because that’s when I can often do those tasks, and it’s also bad because two jobs ago, the majority of the company was on the west coast and they wanted to have meetings starting at 9am Pacific. Nine my time which means they’re right in the middle of that and then, boom, all that energy just goes out the window. But, a lot of east coast companies, again, they want to have their—if you’re an engineer, you’re in development, they want to do that first thing in the morning at 10, and that isn’t so bad. Usually it’s done and then focus on the rest of my day, and push through the—do the energy stuff. I worry about the companies that expect an 8am meeting followed by get right in there and push for the next thing, because that is not me.

Frank:                                       [00:47:12] It’s a good thing to be self-employed sometimes. You can build your schedule a little bit.

Kevin:                                       [00:47:17] Oh yeah, around what works best for you versus what works best for other people, right? So, what about the best advice or feedback you’ve been given?

Frank:                                       [00:47:30] I’ve got two here. One of them was from another potter. When I first was out of graduate school I was a resident potter at the U of O craft center and the senior resident there said, “When you start selling for yourself, Saturday market’s all cash sales, and you report your sales at the end and give them a percentage, and he said, you’re gonna be tempted to lie. Don’t do it. Report it honestly, accurately, because otherwise, one of these years, you’re gonna be doing something that will require that your income be verified like getting a bank loan for a van, and you have it there.” And so, I followed that advice and I did it, and when it came time to get our first van bank loan, the loan officer looked at our records and said, “Well, I’m kind of amazed. I’ve never seen anybody with this good of a credit rating with so little income, but here’s the… it was like $2500, go get your van.”

Kevin:                                       [00:48:28] Wow. Yeah, so…

Frank:                                       [00:48:30] The other one was before I came out to Oregon for grad school, I lived in Wisconsin and that last summer I went to a pottery workshop in Nevada. There was one other student there and we worked all—it was a two week workshop, we worked all week, fired the kiln, went trout fishing, hung out, and then she flew back to Seattle and I flew back to Wisconsin, both of us having checked our boxes of pottery through airline baggage handling. Since she got home first, she opened her boxes before I did and called me and said, “I wanted to catch you before you saw what they did. Just remember, they’re just things. You’ll make more.”

Kevin:                                       [00:49:13] Yeah, yeah. Ursula talks about a pottery instructor she had who at the end of the semester, this was when she was in college, they went out and they literally threw their mistakes, their—the good and the bad whatever, basically, into a dumpster with the concrete and the breaking and all of that. And he was like, “Look, this is all stuff, right?” And mistakes—the mistakes aren’t permanent, and you can always just go back and do it again.

Frank:                                       [00:49:49] I had a professor who said you weren’t a real potter until you’d intentionally broken your first hundred pots. I actually reblogged—she had a blog entry on that back in the Squash Blossoms day, and I got permission from her and reblogged it on my blog, so it’s still out there on the internet.

Kevin:                                       [00:50:08] Yeah, no… it’s one of those life lessons that you really only can learn from potters. Right? I can’t go out and throw my computer into it… no actually what it would do is, okay now that you’re done, I want you to take a magnet and erase all the floppy disks that you just spent the last semester building this code on, because guess what, that’s about as permanent as it gets.

Frank:                                       [00:50:28] But you don’t erase all of them. You save the best few, and then you erase the rest.

Kevin:                                       [00:50:33] Oh yeah, absolutely.

Frank:                                       [00:50:34] That’s the thing. It’s not wholesale destruction, it’s retail destruction.

Kevin:                                       [00:50:40] This one. This one I want to make again.

Frank:                                       [00:50:43] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:50:43] Or, maybe I don’t want to make this one again, because if I don’t make this one again I can make more money with it.

Frank:                                       [00:50:47] Or maybe this one is getting there, I need to keep it around to remind me what I want to do differently on the next one.

Kevin:                                       [00:50:57] Okay, yeah. And then, two generations later, you say, well, this one’s no good anymore, out it goes. Or not.

Frank:                                       [00:51:04] Exactly. There was a science fiction story that took place in a culture of artisans and they had something called a chrostith which is the best example of your work so far. And the main character was an alien silversmith who had adopted a human and the idea of the chrostith was that it changed as you got better and better. What was your chrostith when you were just out of school was replaced by a later one and a later one. Ultimately at the end of his life, the silversmith decided that his human apprentice was his chrostith. It was a really lovely—and I can’t think of the author’s name for the life of me. It’s on my shelf across the room.

Kevin:                                       [00:51:55] I’m gonna bet that in the weeks between when we’re recording this and when this actually airs, one of us will find out.

Frank:                                       [00:52:03] Well, it’s the same author—I think it’s—it’s the same author who did the Eye of the Octopus and Emile and the Dutchman, it’s the Emile and the Dutchman universe, so it’s Rosenberg. Joel Rosenberg.

Kevin:                                       [00:52:16] Joel Rosenberg, who I do not know, but I am now going to be researching. Once I’m done with—I’m currently reading season one of Book Burners, which—a shared universe and it’s collaborative, and our friend.

Frank:                                       [00:52:32] I’ve read season one.

Kevin:                                       [00:52:34] Oh my God, it’s… no spoilers. It’s brilliant.

Frank:                                       [00:52:38] All right.

Kevin:                                       [00:52:39] And I’ve… oh, and then I’m going to go tell Mur, uh, next time I see Mur Lafferty, I’m gonna be like, this was amazing, it’s really good. Which, as you know, as I buy season two and season three after I get through next week’s new books.

Frank:                                       [00:52:54] I’m reading two different Melissa Olson vampire series. I’m on book two of both of them. I’m kind of tracking back and forth between, and then I’ve got Kill the Farmboy on my Kindle.

Kevin:                                       [00:53:04] Oh, Kill the Farmboy is wonderful. Both Kevin and Delilah did an amazing job with Kill the Farmboy. And I loved it and I can’t wait for the next book in the series.

Frank:                                       [00:53:16] Well, I’ve got it because of you guys, you know.

Kevin:                                       [00:53:22] Yeah, I’ll tell that to Kevin and Delilah next time I have a chance to talk to them. But, hey, at least one listener bought this book because of us, so…

                                                     [00:53:34] So, all right. Do you want the potentially happy question first, or the potentially sad question first?

Frank:                                       [00:53:42] Well, the happy question is harder so let’s do the sad question first, because I have so much more experience with it.

Kevin:                                       [00:53:49] Yeah, um… so how do you deal with failure when you miss a goal.

Frank:                                       [00:53:52] You know, stomp, swear, cry, get depressed, feel worthless for about a day.

Kevin:                                       [00:53:59] Yeah.

Frank:                                       [00:53:59] I’ve found that if I can sleep on it, I can deal with it a lot better the next day. I’ve got a couple of recent examples. I did a sculpture this last spring for Ceramics Showcase. It’s actually based on Harriet the Invincible. And Mumfrey was done in two pieces. There was a cobblestone street with legs and the belly, and sort of a section that the rest of the body and saddle would rest on, and then Harriet was made separately and was glued into the saddle afterwards. And, in the bisque firing, I blew Mumfrey’s tail off.

Kevin:                                       [00:54:38] Oh. Yeah.

Frank:                                       [00:54:41] Yeah, and it was sort of short-term nearly the end of that, making stuff for that particular firing cycle and so I had to decide whether I was going to have a sculpture at all. I slept on it and the next morning I realized because the belly section was not flat, I’d made it sort of conical so that the top would sort of slide down and seat itself, I could figure—reverse figure the shrinkage, add the extra inch around the bottom edge of the cone in just cardboard, and build a replacement right on the base.

Kevin:                                       [00:55:16] Oh, nice. Yeah.

Frank:                                       [00:55:18] Yeah. And so I did—I rebuilt Mumfrey in two days flat.

Kevin:                                       [00:55:24] Nice.

Frank:                                       [00:55:23] And had him thoroughly dried, you know, had a fan on him so he dried thoroughly, and because I hadn’t added extra tail pieces and extra thickness this time, I built it correct all the way up, the less clay involved, easier drying. I used slab clay, so I build hollow from the start. Also, the face was way better when I did it the second time. The proportions were wrong the first time. And so I was able to fix that and the end result was really, really nice.

Kevin:                                       [00:55:58] So, sometimes that mistake or that mishap is not necessarily a bad thing.

Frank:                                       [00:56:03] Exactly. If you have the time and the wherewithal and the brain power to figure out how to redo it better, you do it better. The other kind of—I had a special order, I still have a special order because it’s still hanging fire for—I make a wide, low, pasta bowl and I had somebody who wants one with a lid. And making a huge wide lid is tricky and I had a nice one going into the firing, two fires ago, except as I pushing the car in, a hanging brick in the arch caught the knob and broke it off.

Kevin:                                       [00:56:36] Oh.

Frank:                                       [00:56:38] Yeah, so the first thing I did was phone them and say, “I’m sorry, it’s not going to be in this firing.” I made another one for this last time and it shifted and the lid’s stuck on with glaze. So I’m on versions three and four for the next firing. So, I keep doing it, but uh… yeah. I emailed him this time and said. “I’m having bad luck, but I’m willing to keep trying if you are.” You just keep doing it.

Kevin:                                       [00:57:05] Yeah. So, how about the flip side, which is now—which a lot of people is the harder question. Do you celebrate your success, and if so, how do you do it?

Frank:                                       [00:57:14] This was a lot easier back when we were broke, oddly enough. Because I would be putting aside stuff and then we’d have a really good show, and I’d come home with money in my pocket and we’d go to the bookstore and load up on used paperbacks. Or we’d go down to the music store and I’d get a bunch of CDs. Both to listen to in the studio and to play on the radio. But we have actually gotten successful enough that I don’t have to wait for those things anymore. You know, I—I can buy books the week that they’re released and I’m not buying that much music now that I’m not playing on the radio. In fact, I’m kind of going through my collection, thinning it down and giving away the things that I only had for radio. But… yeah. We can afford to do this, and so that’s kind of less celebratory. Mostly what I do, if I have a really good firing and something turned out wonderful, is I walk around the studio cuddling it in my arms and making everybody admire it.

Kevin:                                       [00:58:17] And yeah, and there’s something to say for that sort of, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, peer validation. Right? One of the things I think that excites—like Ursula more than finding out that she’s like—so she’s been nominated for many awards and many times the nomination is much more valuable than if she wins or not. Because in things like the Nebulas where you’re nominated by your peers, that’s validation from your peers versus the Hugos… the Hugos is, obviously the fans love the people who are nominated and we love the fans for that, but there’s a different dynamic when it’s a peer-based award like the Nebulas or, I’m trying to think what else. Or you know when the librarians make one of her books a pick. You know, that’s… these are the people who I guess, it’s a different kind of validation than the person who comes up and says I love this piece and let me give you the $300 for it. You know what I mean?

Frank:                                       [00:59:33] It’s an opinion you value.

Kevin:                                       [00:59:36] Not that we don’t value fans or buyers opinions…

Frank:                                       [00:59:41] true.

Kevin:                                       [00:59:41] I want to make that clear.

Frank:                                       [00:59:43] Well, it’s like… the difference between a professional opinion and a friends? Oh, I think I have a story that will explain this better than my phrasing does.

Kevin:                                       [00:59:55] Okay. Than either of us are doing, yeah.

Frank:                                       [00:59:58] I just sold a sculpture. This is a wonderful thing. It’s nice to have the money, it’s nice to know that it’s out in the world. The person who bought it is locally famous as one of our best local artists. His is Dan Chen, he’s classically trained in Chinese art. When he first came over here, he was doing cast ceramics from originals that were so good that the standards committee and Saturday Market investigated him because they thought he was buying them. He does brilliant pastel art drawing. I’ve got a 40 inch peacock rooster drawing over my fireplace now that we bought as a present to ourselves when we bought the house. He’s gotten into bronze over the last few years and just did an enormous commission for Chumash Casino in northern California.

Kevin:                                       [01:00:48] Okay, yeah.

Frank:                                       [01:00:50] And he came down to my booth because we know each other from our craft center days. He had friends in town so he stopped in at Saturday Market, asked how things were going, and asked if I had any new, what I’d been doing lately. And so I showed him a picture on my tablet of Harriet and Mumfrey, and he said, “How big is it?” And I said, “Nyeeeh,” and he said, “How much?” And I said “Nyeeeeh.” And he said, “I need it.” So, you know, it’s like the Nebulas for Ursula. Suddenly I’m getting validation from somebody who, well, it’s kind of like I sold one of my sketches to Picasso.

Kevin:                                       [01:01:24] Or, in my case, when someone who… I’m trying to think of the right thing in code terms and I cannot come—it’s like…

Frank:                                       [01:01:37] I’m thinking, the woman who created Habitica solicited you for an idea for a bit of code.

Kevin:                                       [01:01:45] Actually, I submitted the code in to them, and when that code was accepted and it was all deployment and back end stuff, and when Habitica said, you know what, we do want to incorporate. We want to accept your code into our project, so now you’re an actual Contributor contributor. Yeah, that… there’s some valid—there’s that sort of peer validation. There’s a, “Oh, okay, I am, I guess good enough, or I have provided value to the project and they see that, and accept that.” Right?

Frank:                                       [01:02:13] Right.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:15] And, I mean, doing the dance around this to not downplay any of the other bits and things like that is so difficult.

Frank:                                       [01:02:27] Well, I mean, I’m equally proud when—I’ve got a 14 year old collector up in Washington who’s come to my booth several times now, and gets a piece every time. And I am just as proud of that, but I can tell people down here about the Dan Chen, and they’ll, if they’re artists, they’ll go, [gasps]. And… you know… you get to feel a little smug about it.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:51] Yeah, exactly. Exactly, yes. I think I know. I think we have adequately explained this, so. All right. That is everything, so… Frank, do you have anything you want to add or talk about before we get to the tell us where we can see your stuff and buy your stuff?

Frank:                                       [01:03:16] Uh, why don’t we just go to there and I have a business website. It is OffCenter.biz. I got in on the ground floor on the .biz. it’s like a catalogue. It’s got all my different forms, all my different patterns. It’s got a contact link. It’s got a find us page that tells the next half dozen shows I’m doing. It is not—it does not permit direct ordering. My inventory is so wildly variable and I don’t want to set stuff aside. I gave up my Etsy store because I didn’t want to be boxing up pots that I could be selling. But you see something, you want, or you have an idea of something you want, you can email me throught the contact page there and I’ll either say, “Oh yeah, I got that.” Or I’ll say, “You know, it’ll be four weeks because that’s my next firing.”

Kevin:                                       [01:04:08] Okay.

Frank:                                       [01:04:10] I also have a blog on Dreamwidth. It’s called Slightly Off-center: Random Ruminations of a Working Potter and it’s got works in progress. It’s got recipes, it’s got show reports. It’s got a fun tag called things I’m not gonna make. Things that people have suggested over the years that I think I’m gonna have to add a new one for this next one, for triangular plates.

Kevin:                                       [01:04:33] Triangular… yeah. Um. If you can do them, it’s something, but I can see that as… yeah. Not…

Frank:                                       [01:04:41] Well, if you could do them efficiently, which would probably mean making a mold and casting. Triangle wastes a lot of space. Those little points don’t hold much. I mean I could see trochoidal, you know, three points and then curving sides. That would be a lovely shape for a plate. I would totally be into that. But the customer specified triangular, and I thought… nah. No.

Kevin:                                       [01:05:06] And there are companies who make those in mass production for restaurant supply and party supply and things like that, so… it’s not like it’s difficult to get unless you want something very very specific that only you make, and then, you know, it is up to you.

Frank:                                       [01:05:25] It’s a 39th birthday present and he wanted three sets of three from three different local potters and he had already gotten two and he’ll find a third. There are no shortage of potters in Oregon.

Kevin:                                       [01:05:35] No. That’s very true. So.

Frank:                                       [01:05:45] This is a state that has four different pottery-only shows, run by four different pottery organizations.

Kevin:                                       [01:05:54] Is there just a surplus of clay in Oregon that none of us know about? Or…

Frank:                                       [01:06:00] There is just a wonderful networking system for potters. I think Clay Folk and Southern Oregon and OPA—Oregon Potter’s Association—Portland started more or less contemporaneously 40 years ago as places to run workshops and do group buys and trade recipes and hang out. And they each do a show a year. OPA’s is in April. Clay Folk’s is just before Thanksgiving, so it’s like peak Christmas shopping time. And then Local Clay in Eugene spun off, God, this is our 20th anniversary, the show is in two weeks here in Eugene. And then Wildfire up in Bend is 10 years old, now. So they’re all working on the same model of potters getting together, hanging out, cooperating, and then putting on a show because, you know, it’s a good way to cooperate and make a little money on the side.

Kevin:                                       [01:07:00] Yeah. No, that’s fair. I mean, we have the Artist’s Studio tour every year. And there are—I didn’t realize—there are a lot of potters on the tour. And people doing work in clay. Which, I was very surprised by and then I realized that there is actually a big tradition at least in this part of the Atlantic coast, this part of the south of people, of basically pottery and I think this is where the ugly jugs or ugly bottles came from.

Frank:                                       [01:07:40] A lot of those—there’s a really good Smithsonian book called Raised in Clay: the Southern Pottery Tradition. And it talks about, the thing is that most of the clay used in America comes from Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky. Ball clay in Kentucky and Tennessee. Kaolin in Georgia and into Florida. The only other kind of clay, basically I think stoneware clay, or fire clay is mined more in California. But there was this opportunity, all this material close at hand. You’ve got wood for firing, you’ve got clay that you just dig, and before Tupperware, pottery was the thing.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:23] Oh yeah, oh yeah. And…

Frank:                                       [01:08:25] [crosstalk] to be.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:25] And of course, here we have the red clay which isn’t much for making pots out of but bricks. It is like… that is why the red bricks are red often is because I think it’s Sandford bricks, yeah.

Frank:                                       [01:08:41] Yeah, it’s a high iron earthenware clay. We’ve got one deposit out here in Oregon. Most of Oregon is geologically too recent. The volcanoes covered all the clay.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:48] Right.

Frank:                                       [01:08:49] But there’s a red clay deposit up north of us in Monroe that made bricks for many years and there was stoneware down in Jacksonville, but it’s long gone. It’s been dug up. Used up.

Kevin:                                       [01:09:01] Yeah, we’ve got a red clay I can’t… red clay is like the bane of our existence. And then we’ve got the yellow clay which is the much. You don’t think of the red clay as clay so much as mud, but the yellow clay feels much more clay-like, and that one holds water just laying in its deposit in the ground. So, you know, you can always tell where you’ve got yellow clay in your yard because that’s where water isn’t draining.

Frank:                                       [01:09:28] We have a little bit of bentonite, which is volcanic clay that swells up like jello, and it’s the same effect. If you’ve got some, that spot stays wet forever.

Kevin:                                       [01:09:38] Yeah. Oh wow. Swells up like jello?

Frank:                                       [01:09:41] You use about two percent in glazes to keep them suspended in the bucket, but more than that, it’s not useful.

Kevin:                                       [01:09:49] Interesting. Man, there’s so much science and art in pottery that I don’t know about other than somebody put a lot of work into that and it’s amazing. Right?

Frank:                                       [01:10:02] We will accept that.

Kevin:                                       [01:10:04] All right. That’s all I’ve got, Frank. Thank you very much.

Frank:                                       [01:10:10] It has been delightful and now I can listen to future episodes without thinking, now how would I answer that question?

Kevin:                                       [01:10:17] Because now you know.

Frank:                                       [01:10:19] Exactly.

Kevin:                                       [01:10:19] All right. Thanks a lot, and for the people at home, we’ll be right back.

[01:10:25] [Productivity Alchemy segment change music plays. Jaunty, pleasant jazzy piano with accompanying bass.]

Kevin:                                       [01:11:04] And we are back.

Ursula:                                     [01:11:04] Woo!

Kevin:                                       [01:11:07] So, it was great talking to Frank. It was great talking to—basically it’s been great talking to everybody. Make sure you check out Frank’s stuff. I will leave it linked in the show notes for this episode. This week we will offer a badge code, too. Because we always offer badge codes, don’t we?

Ursula:                                     [01:11:26] As far as I know.

Kevin:                                       [01:11:27] Our badge code this week is POTTER. P-O-T-T-E-R, because it just makes sense.

Ursula:                                     [01:11:32] Absolutely.

Kevin:                                       [01:11:34] Now, I don’t know what I’m going to use for the icon at this point. I will go to noun project and get an icon as I always do.

Ursula:                                     [01:11:39] You could use like a mug or something.

Kevin:                                       [01:11:42] I might find a cracked mug, or a cracked pot if I can. So. I… yeah, so, if you don’t know about the badges we issue, we issue Open Badges. You can go to the website, and there’s a little form. You can just type in the word POTTER and it will take you—or it will help you through the process of claiming one of the Productivity Alchemy badges. That’s a little image with some metadata to say how and when you got it. And who gave it to you. And they’re used by all sorts of people. Mozilla helped design this standard. Fedora project uses them. There’s some museums and educational institutions that use them. And I think they’re fun, and I think at least one person—oh, it was last week’s interview. It was Damien, who, I’m like—you know you get a special badge code for being interviewed, and he’s like, “I know. I’m a completionist. That’s why I did it.” And I’m like, “Well, all right then. All right then.”

Ursula:                                     [01:12:42] Gotta catch ‘em all!

Kevin:                                       [01:12:42] I hope I’m doing that the right—yeah, I’m doing that the right way. I’m pretty, yeah. It wasn’t Chris…

Ursula:                                     [01:12:48] Kevin is flipping papers to try to remember.

Kevin:                                       [01:12:50] No, I have all of my interviews now, in order, ready to go in my planner. I just have to move this week’s when I’m done with it to the done pile. Everybody’s happy.

Ursula:                                     [01:13:00] Excellent.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:00] They’re in order and I can look at them. I went ahead, this past week, while I was—or before I started migrating the server. As I’m like, I’m waiting for them to process all this information, I went ahead and sketched out, or basically set up drafts in Wordpress for all of the interviews I have on file so far.

Ursula:                                     [01:13:19] Nice.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:19] We are, at this point, thanks to all the volunteers and the last couple—like the last month of work put in, we now have interviews through pretty much the end of January.

Ursula:                                     [01:13:33] That’s amazing.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:33] And I—yeah, no, I think that’s amazing, too. It wouldn’t be possible without all of you listening. And I’m very grateful. So that’s it for this week.

Ursula:                                     [01:13:41] Yes. I will probably not be here next week because I am having dental surgery on that Wednesday—

Kevin:                                       [01:13:50] Yes.

Ursula:                                     [01:13:50] –and uh… I am taking the good drugs.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:54] Yes.

Ursula:                                     [01:13:56] So, yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:59] I may juggle the recording around. We may do it Tuesday instead, because I also am getting a tattoo on Wednesday.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:06] Maybe we should schedule that for Tuesday.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:06] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:07] Anyway. You can support us at Patreon. UrsulaV, U-R-S-U-L-A-V, which pays for things like our new hosting provider.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:17] Yes.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:17] And… uh, you can buy Kevin a coffee at:

Kevin:                                       [01:14:21] Ko-fi.com/ksonney

Ursula:                                     [01:14:24] That’s K-O-dash-F-I. And that’s about it since apparently Drip has decided it’s not actually going to exist anymore.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:32] Oh, there is something fun to talk about, though.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:34] What, Drip?

Kevin:                                       [01:14:35] No. November 10th. At Windycon. The first ever Productivity Alchemy Live.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:44] Is that the 10th?

Kevin:                                       [01:14:44] That’s the 10th.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:46] Holy crap.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:48] Yeah, no. I leave for Windycon in like a little over a week, and we’re a little over a week away from the first ever—Ursula will not be with me. I just want to make that clear.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:57] No, no. Ursula is staying home and taking care of the chickens,

Kevin:                                       [01:15:00] Yep. But we have a panel space. We have an hour. I’ll have some recording gear, and we’re—I’m just gonna sit down and we’ll see what happens. I need to see who else asked to be on the panel with me, but if you’re gonna be—

Ursula:                                     [01:15:13] And if no one asked, someone ask!

Kevin:                                       [01:15:17] I might just grab someone out of the hallway and say, “Hey, let’s do this thing.” No, really, if you’re gonna be at Windycon, or if you’re in the Chicago area and just want to get a day badge or something for this, I will be there. I will have at least—I don’t know what stickers I’ll have because I’m starting to run a little low and I haven’t found a new sticker provider yet.

Ursula:                                     [01:15:37] But you will be able to get the business card with the coveted code for the I Met Kevin badge.

Kevin:                                       [01:15:41] Yes. And I do have lots of “I met Kevin” stickers left. People are really happy with the little fail with a heart badge sticker but the I met Kevin is not as…

Ursula:                                     [01:15:53] Well.

Kevin:                                       [01:15:54] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [01:15:54] I love you, dear, but you just can’t compare to failure.

Kevin:                                       [01:15:57] I know, I know. So I’ll have at least some of the stickers. I’ll have my business cards with the I met Kevin code. We’re gonna do it live. No… no net. Possibly no editing, but I’m going to take the recording and I’m going to shove it into an episode.

Ursula:                                     [01:16:12] As long as it’s not “No guests.”

Kevin:                                       [01:16:14] No guests. I may walk in and it just turns into a giant Q&A. I don’t know. We will find out what’s happening when I get there.

Ursula:                                     [01:16:22] All righty.

Kevin:                                       [01:16:22] All right.

Ursula:                                     [01:16:24] Well, we will talk to you next week, internet.

Kevin:                                       [01:16:26] And remember folks, stay productive.

Ursula:                                     [01:16:28] Woo!