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9-29-02
Sue and I went for a bicycle ride around North Tacoma yesterday. While we were out cruising around we did the 5 mile loop at Point Defiance. When we got off the bikes briefly to check out one of the great views down a short trail, I managed to get bit on the wrist by something. I think it might have been a small bug sitting on or under a leaf on a bush I pushed out of the way. The pain from the bite was immediate and excruciating. I was able to ignore it for the bike ride, but by the time we got home several hours later it had swollen up to an angry red weal five inches long, itchy and hot. I took an Allegra before bed, but woke up from a dream scratching it. By morning it was tightly swollen, itchy and hot all the way up to my elbow.
I called a 24 hour nurse (of course, this had to happen on the weekend) who recommenced having it looked at immediately. The doctor at an urgent care nearby gave me a shot of epinephrine. That was a very strange drug. It felt like a cold refreshing breeze was blowing through my balloon like arm, but only lasted a few hours. Now I am back to the hot, itchy monster that used to be my right arm. The red swollen area reaches to above my elbow now. He gave me an antibiotic and an anti itching drug that makes me sleepy. I can type and write poorly, but my concentration is shot. Over the last few days I reinstalled my operation system on the main computer for the second time since I rebuilt it with a friend from school. This time it is working better, but I still have some bugs to iron out. My big web site project is calming down as people get used to using it. There are around 3000 people at that college and it was quite an honor to be asked to rebuild the site.
9-24-02
Managing a large site is all
about details. Toward launch day I was beginning to overload
and drop the ball on some of the details. Two people were
simply not enough for a 200 page site. It's going better now
that it is up and running with mostly favorable reviews. Yesterday
I taught my first class of the new quarter, drawing. I've
had some of the students before in other classes and know
them to be brilliant and creative people. However, as I stood
there telling them how I could teach them to draw, when all
their lives they had believed they were limited to stick figures...well
the doubt in the room was thick enough to cut with a knife.
The senior instructor in this program
has first hand experience with this particular approach to
teaching drawing. He said the results were amazing and that
people who had never drawn before were drawing within a few
weeks. If I can get through to these people it will be very
cool indeed. Drawing is a skill that I learned early. Dad
used to always point out the discrepancies in my drawing (and
my English!) from as far back as I can remember. He was, and
is, a very kind soul, and I owe him a great debt of gratitude.
Back when I was a wandering soul
during the early seventies, one of my anchors was my drawing
skill, and mom and dad used that lever to get me off the road,
where I had been on a long term walkabout for several years.
They offered to send me to PLU for a semester of Life Drawing.
I couldn't turn it down and even cut my waist length hair.
But I can't really remember when
I first realized I had something special as far as drawing
ability. Now, I am facing a room full of students who are
firmly convinced they can't draw. I love this job!
9-20-02
Launched my web
site today. We'd been making last minute changes all day,
well, really we've been making them since the day after Labor
Day. But today was launch day and the "last minute"
changes were piling up into an unmanageable 'to do' list.
I was reduced to fixing whatever content was easiest to find
amongst the 6 inch stack of unorganized and unlabeled CD and
zips. This project has owned my soul for three weeks and my
attention span was down around 40 seconds.
Seconds before the MIS guy walked in to coordinate the launch
I was doing a 200 page find and replace without an up to date
backup. Scary stuff! He asked if I was ready and I said sure.
We walked over to his office and sat down at the central
server workstation surrounded by towering racks of servers.
To say the room was high tech and spotless was a vast understatement.
When I set my greasy old coffee cup at his keyboard he gently
suggested I put it on the floor. He asked again if I was ready
and I took a last look around the site, spot checking a few
known trouble spots. "Go ahead," I said. 2 minutes
later it was up. I felt sort of like I'd just watched a new
child being born as I surfed around, noticing the many bugs
we still have to sort out. But it's up, and my team and I
did a hell of a job.
Thanks to Nick,
Sandra
and Bruce...without
you guys I could never have done it in three weeks. A big
thanks also to Miss S. Your tireless enthusiasm for the project
saw me through many a long day of bug eyed drooling over the
monitor.
9-15-02
Went for a walk on the spit
today with Sue. It's nice to have a public beach just a few
minutes from the house. I have a lot of history wrapped up
in that mile long stretch of sand. We began taking walks there
when we moved out here in '83. In '86 I caught the windsurfing
bug and sailed there year round for 9 years until I tired
of the sport. When I picked up my paints again in '88 I began
sketching down there and had soon tackled my first painting
of the bridge.
One of the attractions of the beach is the 30 mile fetch
down toward Olympia. It's a wide open kind of place that brings
the city people out from all over to enjoy the sun and sea
breezes. Some of the old driftwood logs are like old friends.
The kids grew up climbing on them. I had planned on going
rock climbing today, and was actually 5 minutes from the house
driving when Dave called up to bail. He was supposed to have
the day off but got called in to work at the last minute.
I was actually relieved as I turned the car around. I've been
feeling run down from all the hours I've been putting into
my web site project and when I got home I pulled an old Louis
Lamour book out of the bookshelf and zoned out for a few hours,
falling asleep on the couch after the last page.
9-13-02
The web site I am building is
consuming me. I and my team of 3 people are doing a major
facelift on a 200 page site. It is due to go live on the 23rd
which is 10 days away. We have about 150 pages done, but the
last 50 pages don't even have content written by the owners
of those sections. Like many large government organizations,
decisions are made by committees of bureaucrats...not known
for their speedy work.
I suppose I shouldn't feel responsible
since my team and I have clearly held up our end of the deal.
These 3 people, whom I hand picked, have done outstanding
work and I feel incredibly fortunate to have them working
for me. I point them at a task and they tackle it with enthusiasm.
I spot check their work and it's almost without exception
perfect.
On a darker note, I've been so wrapped
up in this project I have been neglecting other important
tasks, such as preparing for next quarters teaching. I am
simply spread too thin, like a quarter teaspoon of tomato
sauce on a pizza....I'm so thin on the dough as to be transparent.
I have great intentions and do superb work, but no time. I
woke up at 4 am tonight with heartburn and a racing mind.
Racing to nowhere I might add.
My 4x5 transparencies of my two latest landscape
paintings turned out great. It's so cool how a 50 year old
camera can function flawlessly. It's a testament to human
integrity and craftsmanship. I saw my allergy doctor today
for my yearly exam. He gave me a long lecture about how I
needed to manage my allergies and tendency towards occasional
asthma symptoms better.
His solution is a combination of stronger monthly
shots and a new inhaler. He is a very different kind of doctor,
full of ideosyncrasies and nervous twitches and aware of them
all. As he lectured me on how my breathing tests showed a
trend in the wrong directions over the last 12 years, his
great rolls of blubber jiggled and rolled like a walrus covorting
with his consorts. He's a great doctor, and I don't mean to
speak harshly of him...but people that big make an impression
on me.
9-8-02
Took pictures of my two summer
landscapes today with my 50 year old 4x5 Speedgraphic camera.
This camera is a marvel of 1950's era technology. It has no
batteries, no power, no light meter, no film winder and nowhere
to set the ASA. It is basically a bellows with a lens on one
end and a flat sheet of glass on the other. To take a picture,
I have to go into the closet, turn off the lights and load
the film, one sheet at a time from the film box into the film
holders. These sheets of film are 4x5 inches each and come
in a box of 10 sheets for 22 dollars. Developing costs another
3 to 4 dollars a sheet for a total cost of under 6 dollars
an exposure. To take a picture I open up the aperture and
focus on the image by looking at the light coming through
the lens on the ground glass at the back of the camera. You
may have seen pictures of people focusing a camera under a
hood? That is this camera....or one similar. It actually has
a rangefinder, but it is badly out of adjustment and the people
who could fix it are all dead. Besides, focusing on the ground
glass is much more accurate. I use a magnifying glass to examine
the sharpness of the focus all over the 4x5 inch image area.
Once I get it right, I put the film holders (which hold two
sheets of film at a time) into the camera and take pictures.
The reason these large format cameras
are still used today is quality of the image. This camera
produces an image in the...don't quote me on this....230 megapixel
range. That's digital camera speak for the geeks out there.
I think it's safe to say that a 35 millimeter print can be
blown up to 11x14 and still look good. This camera's prints
can be blown up to around 24 inches by 36 inches. It's also
fun to use. I plan to produce and sell prints of my paintings
someday and recording them on high quality large format transparency
film is an essential step.
If I had to pay someone to take these
transparencies it would run me around $40 dollars apiece.
I woke up tonight at 3 in the morning worrying about everything
under the sun. There are far too many things going on in my
life right now. I have the large web design project, over
200 pages well under way. But it has a deadline looming at
the end of the month. I am quite sure I will make it, but
that doesn't make the sleeping any easier.
I am also scheduled to teach next
quarter, but the web site has been interfering with my preparation
time. My painting is taking a back seat to everything else,
though I still dream about doing beautiful work. When I do
paint, I am painting well, there simply isn't enough time.
My son Clint has been hurting himself on
his BMX bicycle lately. To bad cuts on his chin in the last
3 weeks with the second one landing him in the ER room for
12 stitches. When Sue brought him back from the hospital at
midnight, I told him he couldn't drive my car to the skate
park any more until he agreed to wear a full face helmet.
We had a vicious argument about whether I could or could not
force him to wear the helmet, something no one else there
wears. The fact that he had proven he needed it was irrelevant
to his mind. No one else wears them, so he wasn't going to
either. Never mind that at least one of his friends has already
knocked out his front teeth there.
I bought him one, but it didn't fit.
Today we returned it and found another one up in Silverdale
that fit much better. As we drove back from the store I tried
to explain to him how 5 years from now the kids who will pitch
him grief about being a pussy and wearing a full face helmet
will all be gone. He won't even know them anymore. They will
have moved on out of his life, but the broken face they hectored
him into receiving will stay with him forever. I talked about
how he had a beautiful smile thanks to the braces he just
had removed, and if he broke them off they would never look
as good, not to mention the facial scarring from massive road
burns.
He seemed to accept some of my concerned
logic...with the friendliness of a cornered tiger being asked
to eat lettuce or die. When we got home he put it on and pedaled
around the yard, jumping off his old dirt jumps to see if
it impeded him in anyway. Later he took my car and went street
riding.
9-6-02
Web design up the yoohoo lately.
I've been supervising a team of people revising a large government
web site. It's fun and challenging work, but very time intensive.
In between working on, and preparing for, this large project
I've been doing a lot of drawing and finished two nice paintings
begun earlier in the summer. I am still debugging my rebuilt
computer. I managed to corrupt the new OS by trying to recover
a file off the old hard drive which had a different operation
system. The old OS corrupted the new OS and now I get to reformat.
The good news is I, and my local guru E, are getting better
at troubleshooting.
9-1-02
When I rebuilt my old Pentium
2 a few days ago, I replaced a bunch of parts, among them
the mother board, processor (AMD 1.6), power supply and a
new 40 gig IBM hard drive. Before the old system died a couple
weeks ago, I had neglected to do a recent back up of my personal
files. I always back up my customer's work, but somehow had
forgotten to save simple things like my money management files.
I had assumed the old computer died
due to a combination of fried circuits in the power supply
and mother board after a monstrous power surge. This line
of reasoning led me to believe the hardrive in the old system
was intact. Today I plugged it in to the new system (which
runs a newer OS) hoping it would appear as an extra drive
and allow me access to the old files. Yowser! Total chaos.
Instead of booting up in the new OS, I got a scary message
about a virus found in the boot sector...didn't specify which
drive. I pondered that for a while and decided to boot anyway.
Windows 98 (the old OS) appeared with an attitude.
Apparently the old OS on the old
drive took precedence over the new OS on the new drive but
was very unhappy about the new motherboard. Working in 8 bit
mode, I waded through a hip deep pool of missing drivers,
ignoring most of them since it couldn't read or find the CD
Drive. Eventually I found the file I was looking for but was
unable to get it off the drive...the network was down, the
Internet was down and it was too big for a floppy. It couldn't
see the new hard disc...probably a good thing since the new
OS would have had a fine time speaking to the old OS. Eventually
I rebooted in an attempt to operate in 256 colors and (big
surprise!) the new OS booted. This time everything was normal
and it found the new/old hard disk. I am scared to re-boot
it now. There's no telling which OS will boot. There are times
when I think I need to break down and hire a pro to sort all
this stuff out. I wouldn't be learning anymore, but it would
sure lower the stress level.
Yesterday we drove down to Olympia
where I finished the Capitol dome painting. This was my third
3 hour session on the lawn in front of the State Law Library
where there is a great view of the dome. About 10 people stopped
to admire the painting. My favorite was the Washington State
Patrolman on the mountain bike. He pedaled by on his rounds,
saw me and crossed the street to approach me from the back.
I had a moment of apprehension, thinking I had broken some
obscure law about standing on the lawns, but he was simply
curious to see the painting.
"Wow, you've done some nice work there"
"Thanks, it's coming along pretty nicely"
"How long have you been working on it"
"This is my third 2 hour session here since I started
it earlier in the summer"
"Well, you must have a natural gift to be able to paint
like that, have you taken lessons?"
"No, I am self taught. I have taken a few classes here
and there, but I don't have an art degree or anything. I've
done a lot of reading about painting."
We continued talking about art and creativity in general
for quite a while. I found myself warming to him, despite
the gun and uniform. He seemed to be a genuinely nice guy,
very interested in exploring his own creative side. In between
on location sessions I'd been working on the painting out
in the garage from a photo but hadn't been able to get very
far. It was very refreshing to work from life again. The granite
and sky colors that had been so elusive in the garage were
as plain as day and I was able to pin them down quickly, despite
the changing light. There is only about a 2 hour window before
the light rotates around the dome and the scene becomes an
entirely different painting.
Clint went to the emergency room tonight
to get stitches on his chin. This is the second, and worst,
chin cut he has gotten in 3 weeks. He has been blowing his
jumps at the concrete skate park. He refuses to wear a mouth
guard or a chin guard style helmet. It's only a matter of
time before the teeth we spent three thousand dollars to straighten
are all broken out. Tonight, when Sue brought him home from
the emergency room, I told him that if he was going to try
to kill himself on his stupid bike, he wasn't going to use
my car anymore, to drive there, until he got a helmet with
a chin guard. He wears a regular helmet, but it's not protecting
him in the right places.
He acts tough, but is extremely susceptible
to peer pressure. For my entire 25 year climbing career, I
have frequently been the only geek wearing a helmet on the
cliff. I still have fun, I just happen to wear a helmet. Tough
beans.
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