dayton is not in ohio

October has been insane. I had my first full day in the studio for a month yesterday… Too much travel. Last week it was New York for a CIVA board meeting, including a half-day of galleries and a studio visit to my friend Wayne Adams’ space. Visit Wayne’s blog to hear what we did together in NYC.

So, I have several projects going, but none are very far along. One is a FEMA trailer project, birthed while daydreaming about the wonderfully baroque architecture of our gorgeous church, the incarnation of Jesus, and the Advent season. The large project is suspended currently because FEMA has stopped the sale of old trailers due to health concerns surrounding the formaldehyde used to preserve the MDF of which the interiors are largely constructed. I am continuing work on a model trailer regardless, although this is not one of the trailers used by FEMA per se.

I also have a baseball related project that involves building a batting machine, ‘corking’ bats with various materials like cork, steel, Vaseline, fluorescent light bulb, felt, other things, and probably a series of paintings based on Bill Buckner.

Also in the pipeline is a swashbuckling, edited short story project, and a currently top-secret project that involves someone else’s artwork, sculpture, painting and a little innocent mail fraud.

In a recent post I mentioned that my parents were on an American Airlines plane whose engine caught fire and almost crashed. When they finally arrived in Chicago the news crews were waiting to interview passengers. Well the ABC affiliate in Chi-Town decided to do a little vignette on my folk’s reunion with their granddaughter.

Now, usually the excitement surrounding being ‘on the news’ amounts to a whopping 1.3 seconds of screen time, and turns the family gathering around the TV into an inevitably anti-climatic moment. There’s a pause for a moment, then someone says something nice about it, but no one says how really disappointing it can be to have minutes of interview time turned into a one word quip. Who’s to complain? It’s better than nothing. I had prepared myself for a flash of screen time for Anna and the folks…

And speaking of disappointingly brief exposure, if you look really closely, there’s a part where I’m on my cell phone and you can briefly see one half of a Rob Matthews drawing on the wall behind me…

I nearly killed my computer. I’ve been wanting to put up a post about my recent show in NJ, my trip to the East coast in general, and a salute to a great year and a tough post-season for the Phillies… This would be happening, but I have inadvertently scrambled my computer’s brain and have very little control over it right now. If you want to read a little on the show you can go here.

What happened? Glad you asked. I changed a setting to not allow my computer to go to sleep when it was unplugged. It was supposed to be temporary but I forgot to change it back. So I closed it, put it away, and then left for 9 hours. The poor computer was just sitting there in NYC, wide awake, suffocating in my backpack. It wasn’t until 16 hours after I put it away that I took it out. I thought it was dead. I plugged it in and it started but everything was messed up; Lack of oxygen to the brain… no email, no calendar, no address book, no bookmarks.

I drove back to Chicago with the thing asleep in the back, not sure if it was gonna make it. I spent about six hours on the phone today with Apple support and finally, thanks to the great technicians Leo and Andrew, have all of my essentials back up. It’s gonna live, but my computer is still very, very confused and it may take some more surgery… I promise to update with pictures and stuff (about real life) when we get rolling again.