Mural Day Six

Finding more time to do the mural lately - this picture is actually from last week. More in progress pictures to come.

Mural Day Five

Was able to get some "edging" done today. After that, I'll do some detail in the sunflowers themselves, and then start on the cancerous flora at their feet in earnest.

Will be leaving tomorrow for Madison, so I don't know if I'll get much done on the mural, but will post if I do.

Mural Day Four

I took two days off because I had a bunch of other stuff going on - writing deadlines, child care, school shopping trip - so I was finally able to do a bit of work today. Some of the "filler" crap is starting to take shape...

Mural Day Three

Yeah, it's looking a bit like the wall of a pre-school, but I promise it'll get better...

Mural Day Two

Time got away from me yesterday and I didn't have a lot of time to work on the mural. Looks like rain today, and that's not so good - but I'm going to try and get "other" stuff done this morning so perhaps I can attack the wall more this after.

Mural Day One

Recently I noticed that our storage garage was looking rather... well, too garage-y. In order to spruce it up, I thought I'd take advantage of the long summer days and paint a mural on it.

Here's the progress after Day One. I'll post pics as I go so that you can see how I'm doing.

SHOT-SKI PROJECT

I spent the last week or so putting together and painting a "Shot-Ski." It was a gift for my brother and sister-in-law who just purchased a new house. They have a bar in their basement, and their last name is Borgen, hence the "Borgen's Basement" logo.

Shot-Ski's are designed so that multiple persons can drink shots at once. My friend Aric Anonich is a co-owner of the Shot-Ski company, and you can find out more about Shot-Ski's at http://www.shot-ski.com/.





















Above is me with the finished Shot-Ski...

Above is a shot of the whole ski...

This is detail of the shot mounting, (complete with Shot-Ski logo glass shots - which I designed btw)...

Above is a ski-length shot - no pun intended...

Above is some detail of the painting....

More painting detail...

Painting detail of the tail...

The Shot-Ski website offers completes skis (snow or water, and other off the wall designs) as well as mounting gear to design your own like I did. Check 'em out, and let me know what you think of the one I made.

New Jazma Online Interview

An interview I did with JazmaOnline.com in June is now available to view. Since Jazma is running some backlogs (due to illness) the editors were nice enough to throw up a preview HERE. Click on over for the longest (and most informative) interview I've done yet.

Road Warrior

A few days ago I returned to Madison, Wisconsin, a city I lived in for over a decade. There's an armful of topics I could write about after being there, and after a day or so of sobering thought, I've declined to write about any of it. The emotional part of the trip is all mine, and not something I'm inclined to share with others I don't know.

What I would like to write about, however, is the traffic in Madison. Now, Madison is by no means a gargantuan city. It is not Chicago. It is not New York. It is not San Francisco. Hell, at under 225,000 people, it's not even Milwaukee. However, living there for eleven years, I guess I just got used to the hustle and bustle of the traffic. I got used to it taking me 20-40 minutes to go to and get back from wherever it was I wanted to go. I got used to thinking in terms of "consolidation" trips - ie. "I'm going to be on that side of town anyway, so what else could I pick up?" I got used to the fact that once I took the Madison exit off of the interstate, I still had a twenty-five minute drive to my house.

I got used to all of it over eleven years and never realized it.

Okay, so we leave last September and move to a new location in Northern Wisconsin - population >10K. Where I live now, it takes LITERARLLY three minutes to drive from one end of the town to the other. The amount of stoplights in my town is probably the amount of stoplights that are on State Street in Madison.

Anyway, I hadn't thought about this much since I left last Fall - your reality is relative and all that - but visiting Madison a few days ago I was SHOCKED at how ANNOYED I as with the traffic. Talk about becoming a country bumpkin. And when I speak of traffic, I'm not being annoyed with the other drivers - I'm being annoyed with the sheer number of stoplights. I'm being annoyed with the sheer distance one has to drive to get from point A to point B. I'm being annoyed with things that are not "incident" relavent, I'm dealing with things that are "size" relevant. Madison has a great road system, and they're always improving it. I'm saying that it wouldn't matter what city I went to - after returning and living in my little burg for a while, I can't believe I put up with it, and I have no urge to return to it whatsoever.

Now if I can just persuade my wife to let me buy that compound in the hills....