working alone..

after bitching about not having a clay posse to call my own...i must say that for regular work...i prefer to be alone and at this point, cannot imagine sharing my studio space with another potter.

i spend the majority of my time by myself, with the dogs. leif is gone for most of july and august at his fire lookout (speaking of alone time..) and the rest of the year is a carpenter with a serious addiction to hockey playing. we live in the boonies and i usually go to town once or twice a week.

i see neighborhood friends here and there and go to post office to get the mail and maybe to the glacier mercantile for a tootsie roll but there is usually not much 'people time' in my day. i also do the occasional customer visit or "show and tell" for the neighbors' relatives.

i've functioned this way for quite a long time now. i work at the bookstore in whitefish 4 days a month which is where i lease retail space for my pots and conduct a good portion of my business. it is also where i talk endlessly and meet up with my mom and friends who drop in.

i am a very outgoing and social person in general but fell in love with being alone at 19 when i was a nanny in boston with 2 small children. i am so thankful to have learned to appreciate being by myself at that age...i feel it has served me well. i definitely think that spending so much time alone has fostered some rusting of my social skills..which actually can be funny to me and leif later. (i.e....'i can't believe you said that'...or 'you got all red when they started talking to you'...')

my intention with addressing 'aloneness' stemmed from my creation of a heidi haugen pottery facebook page and how odd it is...along with this blog....to keep in touch with people regularly about my daily goings on. it makes me think about my life differently when i am allowing others a glimpse into my dysfuntional functioning.

i don't talk with too many people about the details of my work...it's just too much information most of the time and requires too much explaining. i don't even talk with leif very much about it..funny. that's why i need to hang out with my distant claybuds a couple of times a year and now that i've discovered lots of other clay artists blogs, i'm feeling a touch more connected.

i'm acually heading to town now...taking grandma to her 'lunch bunch'....she's 93!