Letters from an Artist

January, 2002

1-30-02
Drove down to Olympia yesterday on business...or, at least I hope it was business. Being unemployed, I am looking at every possible avenue of income. Deb and Hugh at The State of the Arts Gallery have carried my paintings sinceHand set type fonts at the Sherwood Press 1993. Hugh was coincidentally my high school Political Science teacher at Olympia High School back in 1971. As we looked at my new work, she remarked that a couple of her customers had asked about me. She'd told them that I had gone to back to college and was a Web Designer; basically no longer in the gallery. Well, thanks to the recession, I'm back. She picked out 5 for the February show, and with a little luck, I will be able to report some income to the Unemployment office next month. Next I drove up to see my old friend Jocelyn at the Sherwood Press. Jocelyn has been running the one woman print shop for so long (over 50 years) that she is listed on the city's historic register and has had shows at the State Museum. I guess they look at her as a living legend. She is strictly letterpress, still setting type by hand the way it was done before the linotype machine. Her newest Jocelyn's windmill letterpresspress was built in 1930 something, and her oldest press, around the late 1800's. I began working for her in 1967 in the seventh grade and stayed with her until around 1974 when I went to printing college. We've stayed in touch over the years, she sings in the same choir as my father and I drop in whenever I can, which is rarely. She has always joked that she would never retire, and would probably die by falling into her press. Surprisingly, she has a new business partner. A 37 year old wanna be letterpress woman has joined the firm, bringing with her another 100 year old hand fed press and a truck load of valuable old fonts formerly used to print the titles for silent movies.
    I've always been amazed that she can continue making a living doing something that was out of date 20 years ago. Now, there is a renewed interest in letterpress printing and Jocelyn is riding the wave. One of my tasks as a printers devil in the seventh grade was hand feeding napkins through her foot powered letterpress for local weddings. This is still the only way you can have your napkins imprinted with your name. Amazingly, people still search her out for this service. I've painted her press twice. I gave her the first one on her 50th anniversary in business about 10 years ago. The second one, shown here, won second place at the Puyallup fair in the early nineties and was purchased by my other oldest friend, Ted, who was also a printers devil for Jocelyn.

1-28-02
Took the weekend off from Web Design. I sat down at the computer Saturday morning to spend some quality time with Flash, only to realize I had nothing left to give. Looking for work,Home Barn #2 and getting ready to look for work, is a full time job. The creative side of my brain needed a weekend to rest. The weather looked decent for a bicycle ride, but as soon as I got a mile from the house, great big white flakes started pelting down in a rare Puget Sound snow storm. By the time I completed my series of hills, my body was covered with a half inch of snow. Later I went out to the "studio" and finished a painting of a local barn. This is a piece I started 3 years ago, didn't like and forgot about. I usually refuse to work from photos, but I needed to finish this, and the trees will be bare of leaves for another 3 months. I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

1-24-02
Life is finally settling back into a pattern now that we are getting used to the fact that I am unemployed and looking for work as a Web Designer. I get up in the morning, drive Lisa down to the bus stop, have my morning cup of instant coffee, boot up my little home network and get to work. I am considering hanging out my shingle as an independent web designer, and have even talked seriously with several businesses about projects, but so far no money has changed hands. If I do successfully bid on a job, I will need to apply for a business license at the same time.
    My long range plan is to get back on with a web design shop. The bidding process and contract writing procedure is something with which I have zero experience, other than a few short classes in college. I am quite comfortable with the handshake bid, but I've been told that one can get badly burned that way. I've been making great progress on these pages. Yesterday I added a Photoshop page to my Web Design page. Now there are 5 pages of sub navigation in that section detailing my qualifications as a Web Designer. I can toss the pixels and html around as fast as the next guy, but the technical writing takes time, especially when I think of how important it is that it be written well.
    This morning I figured out why the named anchor links were not working on my site index page. The link will not go to the right paragraph on a page when it calls to a named anchor tag that lives on a layer. In examining the problem this morning, I realized that there was no real need to have the main interface of this design on a layer. The left links navigation does need to be on a layer for pages with minimal content, but not the main interface. I removed the div tags from the main interface and now my named anchor tags work. Hooray! I've always liked having links from the site index page to the more notable stories in this journal. I'll be the first to admit that not every entry in this journal is worth reading. A lot of it is tripe. It's kind of like painting: I do 3 or four bad paintings for every good one. My ratio in the journal is probably worse than that. But when I do write well, I know it. I've tried to keep up with the better entries by alphabetically listing them on the site index page. I need to get back to work. While I enjoy writing here, crafting pretty strings of words, it doesn't pay the bills. I need to update my business cards.

1-21-02
Climbing up the last wind swept cornice, I stared with dismay out over the vast open space below me. Nothing looked familiar. It was snowing hard, the 30 knot wind driving the ice pellets into my exposed cheeks with a painful ferocity while the temperature hovered in the low teens. We were, in short, in the middle of an arctic blizzard right here at Paradise, Mt. Rainier. The wind driven snow and racing banks of fog below made the distant treelines vague shadows in a howling nightmare.
     I'd been navigating by instinct since we left the snow cave an hour earlier, but my instinct had led me, and the 3 beginners I was guiding horribly wrong. I was lost, in a backcountry ski area IWaiting for breakfast know like my back yard. The realization that I didn't have a clue where I was hit me hard. I had a hollow sinking sensation and wondered if I might have just killed 4 people. As the rest of my party snowshoed up onto the corniced ridge top and peered into the swirling snow, I wondered how I was going to explain the fact that the guy they had trusted with their lives was lost in a blizzard, scared silly and about ready to dig a cave and hole up until spring.
     Digging another cave to spend a second night was an unattractive option. A lot of our gear had gotten damp digging the two caves the night before (one had collapsed). My down coat was saturated and slowly freezing into a brick in my pack. Approximately 40 percent of our clothing was in the same condition, much of it on our bodies. There was very little chance we could navigate back to our cave Out in the coldof the previous night because the blizzard was filling our tracks within minutes of passing, and I had not been following a compass course.
    Compass! That's what I needed. Looking into the ice encrusted faces of my friends, my summer climbing partner, his wife and 14 year old son, I remembered that I had all the gear I needed in my pack. I dug out the compass and altimeter and discovered that the direction we had been traveling, which I assumed was South, had actually been East. Also, we were 500 feet higher than we should have been.

"Hey Mark", my buddy said, "If we're too high, why don't we just drop over this edge and go down to those trees?"

"Not a good idea", I said. "The two feet of snow we got last night came down with a lot of wind. The avalanche danger is extreme. There are steep slopes all around us, and without being able to see them, and not knowing where I am, we could wander into slab avalanche terrain."

"Oh, it's that bad, huh?" he said.

"Yeah. We need to backtrack, perhaps almost back to the valley where the cave was. Once I get back to terrain I recognize, we can set a compass course due South and navigate through the white out until we reach the parking lot. "

    Once I realized I had some tools, and was not simply a city boy over his head, my confidence began to return and I skied back down our rapidly fading track with purpose. After twenty minutesme, looking out to the storm of traversing around a hill, staying reasonably close to our drifted over back trail, I saw a heavily laden mountaineer snowshoeing due South on what looked like vaguely familiar terrain. Four more mountaineers appeared out of the swirling blizzard, all traveling the same direction across our path. I considered hollering for them to stop and tell me where the hell I was, but decided they might not hear me over the wind, and besides, we were close enough to simply follow their tracks, until I looked behind me.
     Their teenage son was able to keep up beautifully, but my buddy was loaded down with 60 pounds of wet frozen gear, and his wife had never been on snow shoes before. They were about a hundred yards behind me in a tangle of limbs, ski poles and snowshoes. Apparently they had fallen coming down a short hill while I was racing to catch up with the mountaineers before their tracks filled in. As I waited anxiously through the long minutes for them to get back on their feet, the party of five climbers disappeared into the swirling snow and my toes turned to ice.
     OnceSkyline Ridge, Mt. Rainier they were moving again, I headed downhill searching for tracks. Although I had the compass in my shirt, I was still navigating visually, scanning the trees and slopes, searching for familiar landmarks. Off in the distance, barely visible in the fog and snow, I saw a repeating pattern of squares. It looked out of place amongst the trees and I stared at it in puzzlement until it dawned on me, I was looking at the windows of the lodge, we were down. I let out a war whoop of shear joy and relief. Twenty minutes later the parking lot came into view, strangely deserted. There wasn't a single car in the normally crowded lot.

    I was standing there on the bank pondering the ominous consequences, and the likelihood of another night on the mountain,when I saw headlights driving toward me through the swirling snow. It was a park service Jeep Cherokee, and the ranger rolled down his window as he pulled up to the snow bank.

"Is the road closed?" I asked.

"Yes, the snow's coming down too fast for our plows to keep up, and the visibility makes the driving and skiing conditions too dangerous to allow the public up here."

"Boy, I'll say, I haven't had to use my compass here in 15 years, it was scary up there," I said.

"We aren't letting any traffic up or down the road," he said.

"Well, it's a good thing that I don't have to go to work tomorrow," I said.

"We'll caravan you down to Narada Falls," he said, "then we'll see from there."

"What, do you mean leave our truck here and ride with you?"

"No, no, we will lead you and the other 2 overnight vehicles in an escorted caravan down to Narada Falls where there are 2 more cars waiting. Then we will lead you all down together to Longmire with a plow in front to clear any avalanches. How long do you think you will be?"

"I don't know, I haven't yet seen how snowed in my buddies truck is, but we might be ready in as little as 15 minutes."

"Ok, I'll drive over and check out your truck," he said and headed off into the storm.

It took us twenty minutes to dig the truck out of the 3 foot snow drift, and as we followed the plow down the five miles to the gate, my buddies wife turned to me and said,
"Gee Mark, I guess we should thank you for the adventure, now I have something to talk about with the people at the office."

"I think this was more than an adventure," I laughed, "this one will go down as an epic."

1-17-02
I've been making great progress taming the unruly beast this site had become over the last 4 years. I have my navigation, both the left and bottom, set up as library items. Now, when a navigation link changes, I simply edit the library item, click save and all 46 pages are automatically updated. I also went through this journal and added the calendar navigation as a library item. Now the same calendar navigation is always on every month in the journal and one can navigate easily throughout the three year period. I used to try to update the early pages in the journal each time I changed the interface but, on reflection, I've decided to leave them as is. The contrast between the early pages and today are illustrative of how far I've come in my writing and design skills.
     Now that I'm happy with the html, I'll begin work on the Flash intro. I have a couple pretty cool ideas in progress already. I've been out looking for work, and things look a little thin out there with 400,000 Americans out of work. Still, having been laid off before, I sincerely believe there is always a job for a bright hardworking guy or gal. When times are hard, we simply have to try harder. Making this site as good as it can be is my best ticket back to work.
     Sue is taking this little period between jobs (2 weeks now) pretty hard. She has had the same job with the school district her entire working career, except for the 9 year period she stayed home with the kids doing home day care. Since 1975 I've had 9 jobs, eight of which were printing jobs. I've been laid off 3 times but have never been fired. With the exception of the lay offs, every move I've made has been a step up, either to more pay or a more challenging position. And unlike many of my fellow blue collar workers, I have never burned the bridges behind me. Still, I can see it from Sue's perspective. I know she wants security and likes to have her life planned out. She is the ultimate nest builder. I, on the other hand am an adventurer at heart. I like new challenges and problems to solve. If they call on my creative thinking ability, so much the better. We are sort of mismatched in that regard, and sadly, I know from experience that she will keep me in the dog house until I once again begin bringing home a regular paycheck. Woof woof.

1-13-02
Took a trip to Eastern Washington over the last few days to talk to an old friend about a possible contract job. My old buddy AH is the monster who introduced me to the evil world of computers 5 years ago  :-). At the time, we were both working swing shift for Southgate Press in Seattle. It was quite a good job as printing jobs go, but we hungered for a day job. Unlike many printers whose hobbies are primarily beer and television, AH was heavily involved with computers, while I was learning to paint landscapes.
    During the long hours of the night we would talk or argue about a wide variety of subjects to relieve the boredom of tending our printing presses, and the usefulness of computers was a favorite topic. I was adamant that they were far too hard for ordinary people to learn, and as big a waste of time as TV. He was equally convinced that I could learn to build a resume within an hour of sitting down at my first computer, and besides, my kids needed one for school. On a bet, he offered to let me borrow an old 486 for a month, just to convince me that I was wrong about computers. I was hooked of course, as was my family. We've stayed in touch over the years as life lead us in different directions. In addition to being my computer guru he is a talented natural rock climber, able to enjoy the sport without the cloud of fear that hampers many beginning climbers.
    According to an ancient Chinese legend, if you save someone's life, you have to support them for the rest of their life. On a climbing trip to Leavenworth several years ago AH suffered a heat stroke attack at the walk off ledge on a small cliff. He was untied from the rope and his limp, unconscious body began rolling toward the 60 foot drop off. I was coiling the rope as his lights went out and leaped on top of him right at the edge, stopping what would likely have been a fatal drop. His eyes blinked open as I pinned his body to the rock. His skin color was an unnatural white, and I was afraid he was having a heart attack. He was able to crawl back up the sloping ledge to lean against the cliff where he fainted again. But by then I had him safely tied into the anchors. I hollered for help and several climbers climbed to our location, bringing water and a first aid kit. The water revived him and he was able to walk off with a belay as a back up. I insisted on driving him to the emergency room where the doctors gave him a clean bill of health and some pointed advice about drinking more water in hot weather.
   Legends aside, AH won't need me to support him anytime soon. I've made some decent money in my time, but he is making twice what I ever made in his job as a programmer for a large asset management business. Best of all, his daily commute is the length of the hallway between kitchen and den where he sits at a bank of three 21 inch monitors, in constant communication with his four team members who also work from home.
   Over the course of the last few days I built an interface in Photoshop and sliced it into HTML. Despite sleeping poorly in the strange bed, I was pleased to get a chance to exercise my web design muscle. I may not get a penny out of the effort, since I was designing on speculation. That is, if the client liked the design, I would get paid for my time. If the client doesn't like the design...well at least I got to spend some time with an old friend. Some of his friends dropped in while I was there and took a kindly interest in the geeky new artistic guy pushing pixels around. It was fun sharing my paintings with them and watching the kids experiment with my Wacom tablet. I'd brought along some of my artwork, as I always do when I visit friends but was surprised at some of the pieces in my portfolio. There was a lovely almost finished painting of a barn that I had totally forgotten about. As we all looked at it under the bright lights over the dining room table, I remembered giving up on it as a lost cause a couple years ago. I am truly the worst judge of my own work. With the distance of time I can see now that it is a very nice landscape and only needs a few minor touches to be complete. AH has an earlier painting of the same barn on his wall, and his wife was funny, saying "Hey, that's...that's our barn! I think I like the new one better."
    AH made short work of my laptops woes. The freshly installed operating system was extremely touchy, throwing up error messages on a cleanly reformatted hard drive. He ran some diagnostic tests in DOS that pinned the problem on faulty memory. He swapped in a good memory card from his laptop, ran the test and got a clean bill of health. Then, as a final test he put the bad memory card in his laptop, ran the diagnostic test and got identical memory error results. I was very impressed, as was Dell who is sending me 128 megabytes of memory.

1-9-02
Called Dell this morning for the second time about the registry errors I've been getting on my 16 month old laptop. It's been bombproof up until the last week when it started booting into windows with a corrupted registry warning. After letting it restart once or twice it looked like a normal desktop, but acted as if it had a death wish. When I went to check my email, my inbox was empty. All my old e-mails were gone (OK, so I'm sentimental) and I had a pleasant "welcome to outlook express" message from Bill. I did some exploring and found my old 16 megabyte inbox file still existed but had been renamed, so outlook couldn't find it. I was able to restore my inbox to normal but my problems didn't end there. Cute FTP refused to open, saying it had a corrupted registry, likely caused by a virus. Dell's friendly CSR said there was no point in reformatting since the Virus could hide in my CMOS (motherboard?) and re-infect the reinstalled operating system. I needed to call Norton Antivirus and eliminate the virus before they could help me.
    Does this sound like passing the buck to you? After a 30 minute session of redialing, a recorded voice at Norton told me it was going to cost $30 and they no longer service Norton 2000 Antivirus. An hour later and $70 poorer I walked in the door with Norton 2002 system works. Oh boy, now all I have to do is pop this CD in and life will get back to normal. Hmmm, what's this on the first page of the manual.....if you duck party are having problems, do not install this program. Load your Windows 98 recovery floppy...my eyes began to glaze over.
     Hey, I can do this, I thought. DOS, safe mode, whatever, I will wade through this and get my computer back. 30 minutes later, I was still wading though the floppy based DOS mode instructions and getting nowhere.

On the brighter side, I went to a meeting last night of one of my old art clubs. I had to drop out of all three art clubs back when I was working my way through web design college and money was tight. I was just about ready to sign back on with my three old clubs duck and lemon, progressive when I got laid off last week. Thankfully, one doesn't have to be a paying member to attend the meetings. I'd forgotten how old the people who attend these clubs are. Not that they aren't talented artists, but there simply aren't any young men. I am 47, and I was the youngest guy there by a decade. There were 3 other older guys and about 50 grandmothers. What does this tell me about how hard it is to make it as an artist I wondered. There were two women artists in their late twenties, as well as many female boomers. Still, they duck and lemonwere funny and it was nice to be surrounded by other creative souls for a couple hours.
     Most serious artists have a well developed sense of humor. I once took 13 paintings to a gallery for a two man show. It was a crowded reception, with wine and cheese, classical music on the sound system and lots of friendly collectors milling around. Two months later, I picked up all 13 unsold paintings and brought them home. You can cry, or you can laugh, which is why many artists have a day job. When it gets right down to it, I would create these paintings regardless of whether I felt they would ever sell. I can no more stop painting than a bird can stop singing.

 Norton's phone tech advised me to go to sarc.com and let their online active-x program check my system for 40,000 viruses. He said it was 99.99 percent effective and would certainly find what sounded very much like a virus. Then it would simply be a matter of following plain English instructions. An hour later it told me I had a clean system. Following instructions I uninstalled the old Norton Antivirus and tried to install the 2002 Norton System works. Hey, look at that, it's installing....but wait, what's this? Norton found a previous version already installed, we were unable to install the Antivirus utility. That's interesting. Uninstall, reinstall ad infinititum.
    Several months ago Norton intercepted an unsolicited email attachment, warning me that it was infected and placing it in quarantine. The computer didn't seem damaged by the episode until last week. The Norton tech said that my system may have suffered such irreparable harm that I might be better off to "nuke and pave". I asked him to repeat it a couple times before I got it. Nuke and Pave is a charming term for what I would like to do to this laptop right now. 45 minutes on hold, I am getting a crick in my neck. When a human voice finally appeared out of the ether, I had practically forgotten who I was calling. Was it Dell, or Norton, am I dreaming this? Dell agreed that a nuke and pave was in order, but the damn computer won't boot into bios. I am waiting for a call back now. It could be a long night.
      Success, I got through to Dell, found my original Windows 98 recovery floppy made the day I opened the box and reformatted the drive. Now I am reinstalling the operating system. I am sure it will be a long haul getting all the drivers right, but things are looking up.

1-5-02
Looking at my check book today, I noticed I had $200 left in my account. No problem I thought, I get paid on the 15th....oops, scratch that, I don't have a job anymore. There won't be a payday until I get a new job. Unemployment will help out, and Sue still works, so we will scrape by, barring a car breakdown. I have been tuning up this web site. It's kind of chaotic in places, with links to outside servers for certain pages that can't be hosted on my noncommercial dial up host. I have an old web design site, built in college that I am thinking about discontinuing. It would make more sense to have the web design button call up a resume page with sub navigation, all using this same interface.
    I've been laid off several times before back when I was a printer. A laid off pressman's skills begin to atrophy the longer he is out of work. In contrast, a laid off web designers skills increase the longer he is out of work. I will be able to focus on what I do best, which is interface design and Flash. During the last few months I was asked to develop interfaces during any slack periods in my day. As the economy ground down, and our business dried up I started to have some large blocks of time when there was nothing to do but create interfaces. I would look around the net, find a site that looked really cool and analyze how it was created. Then I would rebuild the site from scratch in Photoshop As I figured out how each little special effect was done, I would alter it, using my own shapes, colors and themes. The first few interfaces were not very original looking. But I kept at it, studying my Photoshop manuals at home, and occasionally at work. Gradually, almost incrementally my interfaces began to improve.
    Six weeks ago I decided that the 14 hour days I was putting in (8 at work and 3 or 4 more at home) were burning me out. I left my computer turned off when I got home and went out to the garage to paint still lifes in my spare time. After a couple weeks, I noticed a distinct improvement in my ability to think creatively at work. The last couple interfaces I did at work were my best ever. My bosses seemed to approve of what I was creating, but I never felt very productive, making pretty things for a future customer who may or may not walk in the door. I built up a nice little interface vault, but all the time I was working, I knew I was earning not a single penny to help pay my wages. Had the economy been better, with customers actively interested in having web sites built, things could have turned out very differently.
     Now, it's almost a relief to know I won't be sitting at the computer every day, creating things for which our company has no need. When I am happy with the look of this reworked site, I can take it to the streets and see if my skills are marketable. I've always enjoyed looking for work. Putting food on the table is good motivation.
    Sue and I walked a beach nearby on Puget Sound this afternoon. I love the smell of the beaches. They never change, unlike many things in my life. Nor are they ever likely to. Those waves and tides have been caressing that stretch of sand for eons and will do so for many more. Some Spanish speaking people were carrying buckets full of barnacled rocks and gravel up from the beach to their pickup. We couldn't figure out why anyone would want beach gravel.

1-2-02
I got laid off today. My bosses couldn't have been nicer about it, making sure I understood it wasn't my fault, there simply aren't enough customers out there needing web design. Businesses are tightening their belts, hunkering down with established customers and waiting for sunnier skies. Right or wrong, I think a lot of potential web design customers are retreating from the internet and putting their limited advertising dollars into mediums that have stood the test of time, like printing. While we were getting slower and slower, my old print shop here in town was booming.
     I'm not sure where to go from here. As I turned onto the last street leading to our housing development off the county highway tonight, the old sign on our access road flashed into view as my headlights passed through the corner: Dead End. Hmmmm, that's an apt statement for my life right now, I thought. But as I drove down the darkened streets toward the warm lights of our little house, I thought of other times when I've been laid off (Twice since I started working in '75). One can sink into despair, cursing the harsh realities of living through a recession, or one can look at the opportunities out there. There is always a job for a hard working smart guy, or gal. Jack Canfield, author of the original "Chicken Soup for the Soul" book also writes motivational books. Several years ago I listened to one of his tapes during some hard times, and one of his sayings has stuck with me: "Pain is natures way of saying you are off course."

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