Today I actually attended my pottery class on time... last Monday, the day of my return to Seattle, I was so jetlagged that I slept through the hour of class and showed up in time only to make an appearance and look at some things that recently came out of the kiln, all of which I had been working on last quarter.

I still haven't decided what I should do this quarter... on Sunday I came in and glazed some of the pieces that I had done last quarter, but today I was just playing around with different shapes and deforming them. I should probably come up with some kind of objective.

A friend of mine is having a housewarming party today, although she actually moved in to her place about 4 months ago. Earlier this week I had planned to bring some little dish to the party, so this morning I went over to Whole Foods in the Roosevelt area and picked up some maroumi sheep’s milk cheese from Greece, as well as some spinach, onions, and shallots, and a few other things. I made a thick béchamel sauce mixed with eggs, nutmeg, allspice, and the maroumi cheese, sort of like the topping you’d expect on moussaka. I lightly caramelized the onions and shallots, then briefly sautéed the spinach. I also made a simple yeast dough, fairly moist but with relatively low yeast content.

After that I put the spinach filling and the cooked béchamel sauce in low containers to cool in the refrigerator for a few hours.

I wanted to go to the pottery lab to do a little bit of glazing of some work from last quarter. As usual with things pottery, I didn’t quite finish everything I had hoped by the time I needed to leave. I set a couple of things aside and went back home to finish cooking…

Basically I just rolled out a dozen or so small discs of dough and filled them with a little bit of the spinach-onion mixture mixed with some egg, topped with the béchamel sauce, and I closed them up sort of like Chinese buns. I baked them on a stone in my oven until they were brown and smelled nice, and packed them up for the party.

Attending a party as the owner of a small business is a different experience than attending a party as an “engineer” at a tremendously large software company. Meeting someone at a party has, up until now, been a pleasant diversion, a mild form of entertainment. But as a small business owner, every new face is an opportunity… people with job descriptions or educations or backgrounds that were merely interesting in my old life suddenly seem like potential partners, customers, people I can learn something from, or people who can introduce me to someone that might be useful for developing my business. It’s also kind of an opportunity to refine the story of my work. Hopefully I avoided sounding like too much of a salesperson… anyway, my spinach and béchamel buns disappeared, and I met some interesting people, and I don’t think I annoyed anyone too much.

My jetlag seemed to affect me in the opposite way today… I had fallen asleep well before 10pm last night and I first awoke at 3:30 am; I was able to get back to sleep but didn’t return to consciousness until almost 9am. I was a bit surprised when I looked at my clock the second time.

I spent the next hour or so trying to finalize a bank transfer that had complications. This is all money intended to pay for the ceramics I bought in Japan on this trip.

Unlike the other days so far, I didn't end up at work until 10:30 or so... Usually I had been arriving sometime around 9 or so, since I've been getting out of bed at what I would normally consider unpleasantly early.