Thank God...the new Website is finally up. Late 2007 was the last time I updated it and it has been hanging over me since early 2008 to redo it.

I wanted to give it a new feel and I'm not sure I did that. It does have a new look on the home page and new headers for each of the subsequent pages, but it's mostly the same overall design.

I took off the "non narrative" and "limited edition" pages and added a "New 2010" page. I won't have to update that until next fall when the 2011 festival season is over. I also added a page that has the galleries and frames shops that I am inn now.

October November and the beginning of December are the months when the site gets the most traffic. I suppose that is because of Christmas, so I'm glad to be getting it up right now.

Now, I am going to go do some art

I saw this bumper sticker when I was driving around for work last week and it reminded me to tell you that you should get rid of your TV. I have to admit that I am a hypocrite telling you to do that, but I am in a relationship where I have to compromise..... and having a Television is one of mine.

In 2002-2003 we were revisiting a war in Iraq for the second time and I was upset by what I was seeing on the television. So I called up my cable provider and told them to drop me. Or else, I forgot to pay my bill and just didn't bother to have my TV reconnected when I paid it. Either way I didn't have TV for about 4 years. Instead of coming home from work and watching TV until I went to bed, I started doing things that I enjoyed. I started doing more art and a whole new life opened up to me. I put some of those pieces on Ebay and people started buying them. That gave me the confidence to start doing art festivals, which I have now been doing for the last seven years now. I paid off a bunch of debt with the proceeds from those festivals. and now this past year I have been putting my art in "arty" gift shops. I am in about 30 places in 18 different states.

I view television as paying someone to come into your house to tell you that you are not good enough or that what you own is of no value. That person is teaching your children how to misbehave and the keeping you preoccupied enough that you can't teach your children what is appropriate or giving them the attention that they need and deserve

You should kill your TV.

I always carry a voice recorder around with me wherever I go. When get an idea, I want to capture it as quickly as possible because if I don't, my mind keeps wandering and pretty soon I forget what that great idea was. Sometimes, I can retrace my thought process to get it back, but when I can't It often bothers me for the rest of the day. So, today when I couldn't find my voice recorder, that frustration was multiplied by 50 which represented the amount of ideas that I lost. I remember seeing it this morning, and thought it was the last thing that I grabbed before I walked out the door. I looked in my laptop bag 3 times, checked every inch of my car four times and drove home at lunch to see if it dropped on the floor or ground when I left.

Of the 50 ideas, there were probably only 5 that would have gotten used. That is the ratio: one good idea to every ten that I have. loosing the voice recorder or the 5 usable ideas didn't bother me as much as the thought of someone else finding it, in particular someone that I know finding it and hearing those other 45 ideas that would never have made it on public display. I don't restrict the thoughts that I record. For most of them, I would have just been embarrassed because they were stupid. But, some of them could be raw, obscene, and possibly even offensive.

In truth, those unexpressed ideas are probably some of the ones that are more worthy of being explored, and probably a lot of great art lies within them. Maybe someday I'll be comfortable standing in front of them in a gallery, but, right now, when I am afraid of a neighbor or my child listening to what comes out of my head in my own voice, I'm just going to be glad I found that recorder on the nightstand where I put t last night