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We'll be pausing the midweek bake when the current bread subscription ends in two weeks. I need time to work on the bakery build--equipment sourcing, project management, financing, planning operations--and to think. I miss how clear and sharp my mind is in the winter when the work slows down and I have the time to move unhurried on foot, bicycle, and ski. I miss the way complex ideas simmer beneath the surface of my mind while I spend my days moving across the landscape and then bubble over, fully formed. The busyness of the market season drains my imagination dry. I'm going to take a little time next month to move, to leave the city, to find magic again. We'll still be at the market every Saturday.
Sophie Owner | Baker A good bake yesterday and this morning I woke up knowing how to build the new market display case. Between the Health Department's ever tightening rules and the physical limitations of transporting the entire market stand and product by bicycle, I'd been mulling over how to build a sturdy, collapsible case all week. As usual, I'm working right up until the deadline. They won't be fully sanded or finished, but hopefully these frames I'm slapping together will fold up and stand up when asked. Sophie Owner | Baker  I hadn’t realized how much of my days are performed by rote until I broke the pattern by moving last week. I packed my sourdough somewhere and only remembered it days later, suddenly and in a panic. I forgot routine tasks—updating the webstore, sending out invoices—because every Monday morning I sit, or I sat, at the kitchen table by the window and work my way down a list of administrative chores, and without the table, the window, the notebook at my elbow next to the cup of coffee, the majority of them never crossed my mind. Even my days in the bakery were set askew, interrupted by errands and phone calls to the utility company. I managed to both underferment the wheat and overferment the vollkornbrot. On Friday nights the bread is packed and ready to load onto the market trailer, the kitchen sparkling, by 8pm; last night I stumbled out of the kitchen at midnight into a crowd of drunken revelers, with no memory of how I’d spent all those extra hours. All that to say, some of the bread today is imperfect, and some of it is lovely. Next week I’ll do better. The Wednesday Birchwood pickup has moved the mile west with us, though I don’t think I’ve updated the webstore with the new address. Maybe I have? I can’t remember. Sophie Owner | Baker  My favorite of the old fruit trees at the new house. I'm discovering in myself a near bottomless capacity for indecision: shape, pattern, color, font, each a new agony. But slowly and slowly, the new logo is coming together. Perhaps by next week this email will have a different header. By the time market starts in April, there could be t-shirts, or, at the very least, a raven flag flying behind the bicycle trailer. Sophie Owner | Baker
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