The Oft Asked Questions

are: how is your painting going? what are you painting now? what are you doing now? Obviously, the answer to the first two questions is, not well and nothing, respectively. It's another reminder that even though I write a blog there may be no one reading it; or those first questions wouldn't be getting asked. I reference this post more than any other, http://jeanives.blogspot.com/2010/10/retired-again.html and here it is again if you haven't already read it.
Question 3 often comes from people who are still on the career and family track and can't imagine the concept of free or unpaid time or from those wondering how I am channeling my creative energy. They look quite quizzically at me when they ask, especially those who know how busy my art business was. Filling my days isn't a problem and most of the time the filling is satisfying or even rich and tasty.

One of the tasty bits has been discovering digital book publishing. When we were east last summer,  http://jeanives.blogspot.com/2010/09/kith-and-kin.html my sister-in-law, Betty, introduced us to www.blurb.com a publisher that she had used to create a photo book of one of their trips to Europe. Wow! I had seen people's wedding books but the idea of recording a trip was fantastic. In my innocence I didn't realize there are hundreds of similar publishers and went with Blurb which, in my opinion, was a brilliant choice. Now that I am wiser about these things I would still choose Blurb: you can back up your book, the program tells you as you go if your images are too small to publish well and resizes them, it's less expensive than many publishers, and the books are delivered within a week of ordering them. How could you not love it? Inspired, I decided to create a book for Joan & Rob Tweedie  and for us us) because they are such good friends and because they gave us the opportunity to travel with them to South Africa to experience their world. I have to say the book turned out beautifully, even for a first effort. I had already made a DVD of the trip so had done hours of photo editing which made the book part go pretty quickly.

hard cover, 'image wrap' 8x10

When we returned from Iceland I was inspired again and created a book for my sister who had traveled with us and again it's gorgeous. This one took longer as I had to sort through all the photos the 3 of us had taken, and since we were there in November many of the photos had to be lightened to reproduce well. As I was working on that one my hard drive self-destructed so I barely made the Christmas present deadline.

I have now embarked on a REALLY challenging project; family photos. When my mother died almost 9 years ago we were left with old documents and photos, some dating back 120 years. I have scanned everything to electronic storage, cropped retouched, and generally enhanced hundreds of items and am almost finished putting together a photo journal of my family of origin. It's been fascinating putting the pieces together and figuring out who is who. When the book is finished we'll have a coffee table style memoir as well as the electronic files and them we can dispose of the unwieldy and never-looked-at originals.

my computer screen on the 'edit' page

preview view of the family book

Jim used Groupon to try a different company, Picaboo, for a BC travelogue. It's more of a photo album than a photo journal, and was quite a bit more expensive than Blurb. It has the advantage of a stitched binding rather than glued, which might matter to some people and only comes with a linen peak-a-boo cover style.

Picaboo cover style

fun layout but not much narrative potential

My shoulder is still a big problem and as the layers of scar tissue get thinned out it is emerging as a neck and nerve constriction with tendons and muscles compensating like mad to alleviate the difficulty that I insisted on ignoring. So even though I haven't lifted a paintbrush since last May, except to paint walls, the shoulder has not recovered. More physio, massage and chiro...

Computer Addendum

You need to have an external hard drive for your computer, no matter how dedicated a Luddite you might be. I 'lost' two hard drives within six months last year, and Jim's laptop died. I was still working at being an artist, and having to keep records and all that other stuff I was talking about yesterday, so it was a big deal each time. And Jim has lots of files for his volunteer activities which affect a lot of people. Even if you aren't working from your computer you've got photos and research and files about your kids and business stuff of some kind. You know you do.

Thanks to an insurance-minded up bringing and a reminder from my cousin Barb I got external drives for both of us a couple of years ago. And we have 4 computers for the 2 of us so I wasn't completely stuck. It took a couple of hours for the recovery to load on my new PC's, but it was mostly all there. Mostly, because my automatic back-up is set for Sundays and the last hard drive literally exploded on a Friday, naturally, so there were 5 missing days. Not that bad a deal.

So get yourself to Staples, Costco, London Drugs, Future Shop, Walmart, and buy a 300-500GB external storage device. Plug it into your computer, set the back-up to run automatically, and exhale. It'll cost you about $60.00 and a few minutes of time. About once a year check the storage and delete the oldest couple of full images of your computer. (How it works is that it takes a full picture of your hard drive every once in a while and in between times it updates only what you've been working with. If you need to find something specific that you've deleted but you haven't had to restore your whole system you sort of have to remember when it was.)

I can feel you glazing over! Just buy the hard drive, PLUG IT IN, and hope you never need it. It will just sit there and mind its own business while looking after yours. WD, Western Digital, is a decent brand.

Computers

I figure I have average ability with computers. I can use some programs pretty well and I'm not afraid of digging around in the innards looking for an answer when something isn't working. But I have to say I get tired of my electronic life, sometimes spending hours every day at my keyboard. Like now. Twenty years ago I would have been reading a book, something I rarely do any more except for a few minutes before the Sandman slugs me.

It all started with my painting 'career'. Working artists spend a lot of time not making art, unless they are famous enough to make enough money to have staff. The hoi polloi of artists do their own marketing and administration which requires a certain level of computer expertise if you want to present yourself well.

It begins with digital photo references which always need cropping and enhancement and that requires a photo editing program which can cost upwards of $1000.00. I use free ones: PhotoDraw (obsolete now), ACDSee, Office Picture Manager, Picasa. Some artists do virtually all their creative work on the computer and them literally copy that work to a canvas. It feels like cheating to me but it works for them. You have to do digital photo editing for documenting your work as well as for reference, and also for marketing materials.

Marketing means, again unless you've got money, that you learn how to develop a website so you can be 'out there' in cyber world, and 'have a presence'. I learned FrontPage because it was free and then relearned Expression when Microsoft upgraded. Then you find a web host and learn how to maneuver through their system, and in my case, manage your website so you don't have to pay someone else to update it. The web work isn't difficult but it takes hours to learn as well as a Dummies book that was written by a normal person.

Okay, where am I. Right, you have to have a desktop publishing program so you can make posters, show invitations, art cards, etc. Publisher has been my close ally for a lot of years; I don't know how people work with Word for marketing materials. Thankfully I hung up my paintbrushes before I had to get very serious about Facebook, not that it's hard to use but it's something else to remember.

Let's not forget about inventories and tax issues for which I had to learn Excel at a rudimentary level. Then, because we travel quite a bit and our friends and family are all over the world, I thought a blog would be a good idea, another program to learn, and now I am making digital photo journal books. By the time you have all that under your belt it starts to look as though you sort of know what you are doing. Scarier is that you can almost follow a Geek's conversation!

And then it starts to fall apart. You get asked to DO STUFF! I am just 'putting to bed' a 12 page newsletter for our neighbourhood association, after a lot of hours of formatting and creating. It looks like I know what I'm doing, but I don't. It's all smoke and mirrors.

Final Word.

I’m realizing that this will be my 12^th post since we left Victoria on February 2, 2011. Obviously I have too much to say! The posts help me to remember the highlights of our trips, or memorable things at least.

just west of Flagstaff at 7000 feet

We’re home now, as of yesterday, and our storm dodging strategy worked out pretty well. We drove directly west the first day while a strong storm passed north of us. We stopped again in the Napa Valley while another one blew through the northwest, including Victoria, and left a dump of snow in its wake. Then we had one long wet day from Ashland, Oregon to Marysville, Washington but only about 10 minutes of the wet was snow.  

I wish we could have captured the scale of the orchards - miles

The San Joachim Valley is huge and FLAT

beef cattle; ugly conditions and a terrible stench for miles

Mt Shasta revisited, and the end of blue skies

I5 somewhere in Oregon

and traffic

There are stories of course, like having $7.00 between us and suddenly landing at a $5.00 toll plaza. Jim is not-quite-yelling at me to be in the left lanes toward Sacramento, and I am not-quite-yelling at him to find some money. Then there was the wasted 15 minutes because I followed a bus onto a HOV (high occupancy vehicle) exit instead of a HOV lane which landed us in grid lock before we could get back to I5.

Aside from Jim, I have some favourite travelling companions:

My Merrill shoes, Nikon camera (one battery change, AA rechargeable, for thousands of photos) yellow Bolle sunglasses for poor visibility, the Garmin GPS that had a personality transplant in Sedona, and our Gateway netbook.
Today it is wildly windy here on the Island and various ferries have been cancelled, but we are tucked in catching up on exciting things like bills.  So there you have it: a great trip.