Blast from the past (2-19-98)

Posted by on February 9th, 2017  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

February 19, 1998

Today I got a plain manila envelope from the California State Highway Patrol. I panicked and searched my mind desperately for the last illegal thing I did in California. There was that illegal lane change in Joshua Tree, 6 years ago. Could it be a traffic court summons? I gingerly pried open the tape and found a musty old leather wallet inside with paisley patterns on the lining. I realized with a shock it was a wallet I lost in 1972 on a hitchhiking trip near Big Sur. I can just barely remember standing in a long line of hippies on the side of the road. We all had our thumbs out hoping to be interesting enough for a ride up the coast. I was coming home from a month long hitching trip to see a girlfriend in Frisco. I remember looking for my wallet. Talk about a trip down memory lane. There was my moldy original social security card, My drivers license card, look at that haircut! Plus a couple of rolling papers, now what could those have been for? And a lot of old miscellaneous receipts and notes about people who had given me rid es or hospitality on the road. There was even an REI membership refund for 3 dollars. There were a bunch of phone numbers of friends long lost in the mists of time. I couldn’t help wondering what was going through the minds of the clerk at the Highway Patrol who finally decided to go to the trouble of finding my current address and returning my long lost wallet 28 years later. But hey, thank guys!

NOTE: this is an excerpt from an old online journal I’ve had since 1997. You can email me if you’d like to read more from those days. It’s in a hidden directory at the request of one of my old deans.

Shopping Cart is almost done

Posted by on February 5th, 2017  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

I was asked to teach WordPress last summer, and then low enrollment canceled the class. This Winter it was offered again and it ran. I’ve been using WordPress since 2011, but never delved that deeply into it. It’s been fun diving into it and learning all the intricacies of the application.

I learned most of the new stuff about the shopping cart here at Lynda.com. This guy does a great job of explaining it. I haven’t bought the SSL certificate for the store yet, so you can’t use your credit card to make a purchase, however, the paypal function may be live…I’m actually not sure. I just launched on February 4, 2017 and I’ve not done any testing.  I do definitely have the paintings, and those are the prices unframed.

Playing guitar

Posted by on January 19th, 2017  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

I was hard at work today learning ecommerce on wordpress. It’s a new class for me, which is always fun. I don’t get paid for lesson planning, so I try to take lots of breaks to avoid burnout.  Because I have band practice tomorrow, I decided my break would be some quality time with my 1977 Martin guitar. I got my neck brace for the harmonica, loaded in my C harp and started playing Sweet Carolina, by Ryan Adams.

Not sure why, but I got chills all down my body. Like suddenly all my emotions were at the forefront. It was almost as if I’d been out of touch for a while…too much work probably…and the right side of my brain was suddenly seeing the sunshine again. That kept going for the entire time I was playing. I allowed myself half an hour before going back to work.

I’ve been updating my website with the new photoswipe plugin that I taught my students last quarter. It’s a ton of work: about half an hour a page, and I have 8 pages to update, plus stripping out the custom javascript and css I had written for my previous animated gallery page.

My trip to jtree this year was ok, though I’ve had better. I went down with a partner, which meant I wasn’t able to spend the first few days painting. Climbing was awesome as usual, my favorite new route was High Strung, up in the Wonderland. Weather was iffy this year. We had our warm days, but we lost 2 full days to rain. We climbed every day, but it was only a pitch or two on the rainy days. I hear the reservoirs are full in California, for the first time in 6 years. That’s a good thing for the state, but not so good for climbers needing sunny skies. I need to get back to work. Writing in this blog is fun, but my lesson plans won’t write themselves. This painting is my most recent work, done at Thanksgiving.

Turban Squash Thanksgiving 2016

Turban Squash Thanksgiving 2016