Bluebird Singing in the Dead of Night

If all goes well, later today I will have real TV streaming into my office.

Pilar said I needed to wait until the end of the summer to order the $10-a-month addition of a new dedicated DVR receiver. The big thing was that I needed to get moved in and see how things were working.

Honestly, THEY WERE NOT WORKING WELL WITHOUT DISH.

Whether it’s Sirius channels playing or CNN…I just grove better when I have the noise of the TV in the background.

There is a reality I have to face…for me to write at my best, or do art or photography work, I need a TV on stereo blairing in the background.

My biggest problem my entire professional and academic life has been organization. I know where everything is, it’s just not in any rhyme or reason order other than spatial or visual.

If I know where I put something, that’s where it needs to be. And it should be.

So I wrote a crapload of stuff last week. The problem was I, literally, did it on my different devices. Good stuff, too. The problem is that now I am spending most of my week reconciling everything and filling in the gaps. I’m not going to solve the whole book in a week, but there are 60,000+ words just floating around on various pads and computers. I have to stop and think about which part I was thinking of where and then what device I had when I wrote it. Some of it’s just detailed notes. Some of it is brilliant. It doesn’t matter. It’s like going on a writing binge and then playing CSI to piece it all back together.

But I was watching something tonight that made me add a really funny line to something I was writing.

“Can you get poison ivey from dry humping?”

It turned into a funny thing. Trust me.

Mostly…I have to get to a fish or cut bait point on a couple of trips. I have work to do, but I can probably get a lot of it done on either voyage.

Seriously…worth the price of a trip to The Netherlands.

You have to know, first off, I have always wanted to go through the Panama Canal. I’m not kidding around how much that’s in my bucket list.

Why? Reading too many history book, probably. I have no certain aptitude about the core that makes me so curious. I could even make an argument that it’s just because I have never had any reason to do it.

So I was thinking about what thing I wanted to do before I turned 40. And I turned to that. But, seriously, who can justify 14-20 days taking a cruise around North America?

Then I woke up this morning and I had a business plan in my head. If two of us go, I bet I can make money doing it! I can pay for it.

Duh! It was there all along…I just had a late-early morning dream where I woke up and realized it.

Here’s my problem as per, ummmm, ALWAYS. P won’t do a cruise. I would love, love, love to do it with her. Not an option. Her loss. I really, really don’t understand it. I know the ship I want, it leaves from Seattle to Miami and I am kind of zeroed in. Now it’s finding a shipmate.

Last time I got a little bit of flack for just doing an open casting call, but I think Mac would say I was pretty good on the trip. I don’t do the frilly tours and stuff, but I pretty much dive into whatever is happening locally. However, I tend to linger and talk a lot…so don’t stick with me to see much, that’s for sure.

But I am goingto get this figured out today and see if I can make the plan work. It might not. I can’t justify it at all if it’s not a “working” trip. But I also don’t want to do it by myself and I can’t justify that, either.

My thumbs hurt typing this on a broken computer.

…but “Hungry Heart” by Bruce at Giants Stadium is one of the coolest things ever because he doesn’t do the first verse when he starts. The audience completely sings it, and then he goes into “I met her in a Jamestown bar…” I only point this out because Annalaan loves that song (since she was about a year old) and said to me “so you really got to say you sung that in a concert?” The other song she learned about the same time was “You can’t always get what you want…” Which to this day makes me laugh, because Big A will immediately respond with “But if you try sometimes, you get what you need…” I love my kid.

The lazy dazy fazy dayz of summer.We’re going to get the new site designed and up.It’s basically going to have multiple parts. There will be a public blog, that everyone can see. And there will be a private blog that will take some effort and a password to see. This was a hard thing for me to decide to do. The public blog is going to be well thought out essays and actual things that are, ummm, cohesive and such. The private blog might have me rattling off about people that put a dress on their dog.Then there will be a photo studio where you can buy my photos or hire me to shoot an event and buy those photos. And an art studio, where it will be talking about pieces of art and selling them.Bluebirdsinging.com is the umbrella to all of this.But each URL should go directly to that part of the website, if you want to skip my splash page. It will make more sense when you see it. Some people chop wood and mow the lawn during the summer, I think about how to get this all set up correctly.My biggest problem…I have just been really, really busy with crippity crap that I have no control over. And I worry about my concentration levels. I am trying to learn how to use a Mac, for instance. I am bored with Apple people telling me how great it is because it “does the thinking for you” or some other B.S. line.Like, watch how this is going to be one giant block of crap.Drives me nuts.Call this the summer of getting ducks in a row.

This was just fun with Big A and her friend Jordan.

The three of us put two canvases side by side and used syringes to squirt acrylic paint from the top of a ladder. The girls chose the colors. It was a fun and messy sleepover project.

But the cool part is what it looked like and FELT like after it dried. I think the girls were a little amazed how it felt to rub their fingers on it, and they sounded giddy for 20 minutes looking closely to see who had the “coolest” elements in their half of the project.

Secretly, it was also a lesson for me to see how paint mixed and the effects of the method. Cool.

Good times.

I was playing with paint tonight, but I was really doing a head game.

I need to start branding this art and taking it more seriously.

And I figured out one thing…what to call the endeavor…and I bought the domain.

How often does it happen that EXACTLY what you were thinking is there as a dot com? Good vibes.

I am also re-designing my website. Big changes will happen if all goes well.

I am only doing all of this because art will come back. People will want to have things by a certain person that looks a certain way again. I’m getting beyond the “experiment” stage…some of this is good.

Lots of work to do…I still don’t know how to frame it. DOH!

Who cares what it is…I am just trying to move art and photos back and forth. Learning.I’ll try typing on it right now.I hate it. I hate all the Mac keyboards I’ve tried. It’s like the anti-typing machine.Pilar keeps saying, “Just bring it back.” Well, no, I say. I know it can do the right thing and do it fast…I just need to be a grown up about it and buck up. But the “fast” part of me is leaving doubts. It freaking slow. I’ll be honest, it doesn’t seem to be that great of a computer until I deal with colors and color correct. In fact…it kind of sucks.But I need it for what I need it for.I’m going to keep trying. Just like I am teaching myself to learn to paint from scratch. (Er, learn about paint from scratch…hey, wait…I had never dealt with paint before three weeks ago. I am self teaching. And I am kind of proud of it.)This is four tiles that I did the first layer on. Ignore it, most likely, but it shows how I think a little bit.