Old Family Photos

In my last post, I talked about having my sister and niece visit us for a few days. Among the many things we talked about was our collection of old family photos. I have a lot of them, including several hundred slides. I told Robin that I'd scan some of the more significant photos and send them to her. She's going to get them all eventually so they can be passed down to her kids, but the electronic scans will do for now.

I've completed scans of maybe four dozen or so photos. Some of 'em were of our family back in the mid-60's, when I was roughly 11-12 years old. I was quite the little geek and you won't see those pictures. But I thought I'd share a few of the older ones.

These are my mother's parents. The picture must've been taken around 1925 when they were married. I remember them both as very gentle and loving people. He looks like quite the rake in this photo, though, doesn't he? Kinda like Jerry Lee Lewis. Trust me: he was nothing like Jerry, and that's a good thing.

This is a good one: my father's grandparents George and Phebe (left) and parents Skipper and Harriet (right). I believe this was taken in 1942, right around George and Phebe's 50th wedding anniversary. Skipper and Harriet also reached their 50th anniversary many years later. My father and mother celebrated their 40th anniversary before my mother passed away. I got my name from Skipper: he was the captain of a tugboat out of New York City, running tows up and down the east coast.

Here's my father, the handsome guy on the right. He was a Navy pilot in World War II in the Pacific. He flew the PB4Y Privateer, which was a modified version of the B-24 used for long-range maritime patrol. After the war ended, he was sent to Peleliu to do air-sea rescue operations. That's where this photo was probably taken.

Here's my mom at about age 15, a young girl in a small town in northern Mississippi. A few years later, she cut her hair short and wore it that way the rest of her life. Many years later, when I was in college, I grew my hair long. It looked remarkably like hers.

And here's my favorite: my parents at their wedding in 1951. They are a very good-looking couple, aren't they? They were married in a church in my mother's home town.

I've got all these old photos because I've been working on our family genealogy for many years. When I started the history, I was mostly interested in how far back I could trace it. But I wasn't too careful about keeping records, and eventually when I started getting conflicting information, I had no way to compare data sources. So I put it away for a while. Years later, I started over, and this time I documented the heck out of it. I also had a different focus. Instead of just trying to see how far back I could go, I wanted to learn more about who my ancestors were and what kind of lives they led. Why, for instance, did a number of them leave Amsterdam in the 1600's and head to what is now New York? At the time, Amsterdam was the wealthiest city in Europe, while the New World was about as developed as Borneo. The answer was that my ancestors were Protestants and Amsterdam was part of the Spanish empire. The Spanish Inquisition was then in full and very brutal force. The choice, for my ancestors, was to stay and possibly be killed, or leave and possibly live.

Don't worry, I'm not going to give you all the details of my family history. My point is that it's a very interesting study. History, as taught in schools, is often dull and boring. But when you're reading about your own ancestors, it's different. I'm a product of my mother and father. My character was developed under their guidance. My parents' characters were developed by their parents and the events of their lives. And so on. So, by studying my family history, I get an insight into who I am. And all the photos I've been scanning just add that much more to the story.

Family Visit

My lovely niece Holly and wonderful sister Robin visited us this past week. I hadn't seen them in over two years, and it had been about seven years since they last visited us here in North Carolina. We had a wonderful time. Janis and I get to play tour guide when friends and family come to visit and this time was no exception. On Wednesday, we took them to my studio and then to Biltmore Village, where the girls shopped and we all ate at the Corner Cafe. This was one of the places that President Obama went when he was on vacation here in April, and it was excellent. The waiter assured us (wink wink) that, yes, we were sitting at the very same table where the President and Michelle sat.

On Thursday, we took them to lunch at the Grove Park Inn. We ate at the Sunset Terrace, their outdoor facility overlooking the golf course and Asheville. It was a perfect day for it, too, and the food (as always) was fabulous. Then we went downtown, where the girls shopped some more (hey, they're girls, they're supposed to shop).

On Friday, I took Robin and Holly up to Sam's Gap, on the NC/Tennessee border, to get a look at our spectacular mountains. Then we went to the Biltmore House. I hadn't been in two or three years and it was quite fun. They're always changing the tour routes through the house as new rooms are restored and old ones closed off for maintenance. After the house tour, we had lunch in the Stable Cafe, then went down to explore the gardens. A pretty perfect day, all in all.

We weren't always going/doing/eating, though, even though that's what my writeup seems to suggest. We spent a good bit of time just chilling here at the house. Robin and Holly are good chillers. They're both into knitting (Holly has an Etsy shop and a knitting blog that are both quite popular). Holly even knit a new shoulder bag for Janis while she was here - quite beautiful and Janis is ecstatic. What amazed me was that she could knit, talk, surf Facebook, and watch TV all at the same time. I have trouble doing one thing at a time; she could do at least four without breaking a sweat.

So it was great to catch up with them again. Family is important, and two years is too long to go between visits.

Since they left on Saturday, we've been getting back to normal. I went back to the studio today to get some work done. I wound up spending a couple of hours cleaning. When visitors are in my studio, they often say things like "oh, I'd love to live and work in a place like this!" Well, fantasy is one thing, reality another. Yes, it's a great studio, but there's one aspect that's annoying:

Bugs.

Spiders, specifically. One of my windows is right under an outside light and it is a magnet for spiders. The window was covered with cobwebs, dead bugs, and dozens of live spiders. Here's what the window sill looked like when I started:


Ugh. When was the last time you had to take a Shop Vac to your walls? And if you did, when was the last time you sucked up a spider big enough to rattle all the way into the bag? So after a couple hours work, the walls and windows were pretty clean and my Shop Vac bag is now a combination Superfund toxic waste site and spider sanctuary.

Tomorrow I'll try to get the creative juices flowing. Well, maybe dripping a little bit. But you gotta start somewhere.

Lotsa This'n'That

The title of this post pretty much sums up my life in the week since the Star Wars mural was completed. I've had to mow the yard (twice), get some plumbing work done, take the car in for minor maintenance (twice), do various clean-up/fix-up projects around the house, take the dogs to the vet, and a variety of other things, some of which I'll talk about here. Most of this is the minor nitnoid stuff of daily life. I've been in the studio for a grand total of about 15 minutes. But that's the way life goes.

One of the things I had to do was a little publicity work. As a self-employed artist, I need to keep putting my name out there and let people know what I'm doing. Tooting my own horn is not my favorite activity, but like mowing the yard, it's gotta get done. So with the mural completed, I had to post notices on Facebook and LinkedIn, then on this blog, then on my web site, and finally (yesterday) in my semi-irregular studio newsletter. All of these forums seem to have very different audiences with only a little overlap. So if you've read about the mural in several places now, sorry; but my monthly publicity blitz is over and you won't have to endure it any more.

Late last week, I learned about a British street artist who's been causing a bit of a stir in the art world for a few years. He's known as Banksy, a nom-de-guerre since much of his work is considered graffiti.I found Banksy to have a sharp sense of social commentary, brilliant wit, and a very well-developed technical style. If you've never seen his work, take a look at his web site or do a Google/Bing search for his images.

On Saturday, I took a workshop on building stretcher frames and stretching canvas. Sounds exciting, huh? It's the kind of thing that only a small minority of painters would love. But I enjoyed it. I am always trying to improve my professional skills, and while my stretchers and canvases fall into the "pretty good" category, I wanted to get them to the "full professional" level. The instructor was Frank Lombardo, a painter who works out of the Marshall High studios near here. Frank is a talented and skilled artist who graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art and subsequently studied in Florence and also with the painter Odd Nerdrum. Frank knows his stuff and I came away from the workshop with a whole new approach to building my canvases.

Janis and I have watched a few movies this week. One was Green Zone, in which Matt Damon plays an Army warrant officer in Baghdad in 2003. Think of it as Jason Bourne in Baghdad - it's about as exciting (very) and about as realistic (NOT!) as the Bourne series of movies. However, some of the settings were extremely well done, particularly the scenes in and around the Republican Palace. It was almost as if they filmed it right there. We also watched Men In Black again; it was just as funny this time as it was so many years ago. And we tried to watch Whip It, a young girl's coming-of-age-with-a-Roller-Derby-team story, but it was pretty boring and we bailed out about halfway through.

Today we're doing the final preparations for a family visit. My sister and niece will be here for a few days. I haven't seen them in over two years and it's been even longer since Janis has. We're very excited about their visit. We've got a couple of things in mind for them and will be busy for the next few days. One of the fun things about family visits is that we get to play tour guide and see a lot of the sights that we don't normally see. You know how it is: when you live near something really neat, like the Biltmore House, you think "oh, I can see that any time" and consequently you never go. So we'll be tourists for a few days and then it'll be back to normal. I gotta hit the studio sometime!

The "Star Wars" Mural

After almost a month of work, the "Star Wars" mural is finished. I spent almost three weeks researching, doing layouts, making the full-size drawings, and gathering all the necessary stuff. Last week I spent five days in Annapolis, painting the mural on the wall. Here are some pictures of the result.

This is the entire wall, all 13'x14' of it.

This is the left side, with Chewbacca, Yoda, and Han Solo.

Here's the right side, with Luke, Obi-Wan Kenobi, R2D2, and C3PO.

A detail shot of the Millennium Falcon.

And my favorite part, the light-saber duel between Darth Vader and Luke.

The visit to Annapolis wasn't all work. Tim and Caprice are old friends and fabulous hosts and we spent a lot of time just having fun together. We also got to see Konrad and Mary Beth and their boys. All of us lived on the same cul-de-sac in Maryland about 15 years ago and have seen each other only sporadically since then. So we had a lot of catching up to do.

And there was the end of an era. I sold our Land Rover to my cousin Logan. We've had the Rover for ten years and 157,000 miles. It's a great car and is in great shape, but it needed an owner ... how shall I put this ... who has a full-time paying job. A Land Rover is not the car you need if you're a self-employed artist. So it's goodbye to the Land Rover. It'll do Logan very well.

Now it's time to get back to normal. As if I have any idea what that is ...

Annapolis Trip

I'm in Annapolis right now, working on a 13' x 14' mural for an old friend of mine. Tim asked me if I'd do a Star Wars-themed mural in his son's bedroom. It sounded like a fun project - very different from what I normally paint and technically challenging, so I agreed. I put together a rough proposal, he bought off on it, and I got to work.

After doing all the preparations in my studio, I drove up to Baltimore on Monday. It was a beautiful drive: clear skies and light traffic, so I rolled along pretty quickly. I got to visit with my cousin Monday night and then meet up with some old friends from Asheville on Tuesday. We were all art students at UNCA. They went on to graduate school at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, then stayed on as teachers. It was really good to see them again. That afternoon, I drove down to Annapolis and on Wednesday morning went right to work. As you can see in the picture, I'm about halfway through it. I have the drawings done and several key elements painted: Chewbacca, Yoda, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the Star Wars logo. Today I need to do R2D2, C3PO, the spaceships, and the light-saber fight. Tomorrow I'll finish up the Millennium Falcon and start work on the background.

So now I've got to get to work. There's lots to do and not much time to do it.

Hot Town, Summer in the (Little) City

The incredible Heat Wave of 2010 continues in North Carolina, not to mention the entire eastern half of the country. We've been above 90 almost every day for over a month, with very little rain. Surprisingly, we have had no "hottest day" records set this year. Nearly every day has been 5-10 degrees above normal and the April-June period is the hottest on record, but we haven't set a single "hottest day" milestone. Not yet, at any rate.

This weekend is the Bele Chere festival in Asheville. This is billed as the largest street fair in the southeast, with 300,000 people attending over the 3-day run. Janis and I got with our neighbors, Daryl and Jennifer, last night and went out for dinner at Curras, a very un-typical Mexican restaurant. No burritos here, it's more like what you might find in Mexico City. I had their swordfish special that was probably the best I've ever had. Janis had their carne asada and it was to die for.

Afterwards, we went down to Bele Chere. We wandered the streets a bit, looking at the street vendors and mostly people-watching. When you get that many people crammed into a small area in hot weather, you're going to see some really strange things. Sometimes you just gotta wonder, where do these people come from? I saw one guy in typical festival garb: ratty shorts and T-shirt, dirty ball cap, a beer in one hand and a corn dog in the other ... and the front of his T-shirt said "GOT CULTURE?" Ummm, depends on how you define "culture" ...

The reason we went last night, as opposed to our usual plan of waiting until Sunday (no beer sales on Sunday, so it's a quieter crowd) is that the Fabulous Thunderbirds were playing. We weren't about to miss them. Actually, though, I thought they were more like the Pretty Good Thunderbirds. They were good, but I've heard bands equally as good from around here. What really surprised me, though, was that the crowd was much older than I expected. I mean, most of them were older than me, and I'm in my upper 50's. Never thought of the Thunderbirds as "geezer rock", but that's what I was seeing. There was one group of people right in front of us that was whooping it up, dancing in the street, slinging beer all over the place, and they were all in their mid to late 60's, fer chrissakes. And they looked like, if they were wearing suits, they'd be defending you in court. But when I got to thinking about it, the Thunderbirds have been cranking out music since about 1980, and that was thirty freakin' years ago, so I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised to see an older crowd.

I guess that's something about aging. On one hand, 1980 doesn't seem that long ago to me. I still remember what I was doing and listening to pretty clearly. I still like Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust", Blondie's "Call Me", and Pink Floyd's "The Wall". On the other hand, thirty years is a pretty good period of time. Somehow, my brain has a problem connecting the two.

Geezer rock, here I come!

Shirley Sherrod

Way to go, Tea Partiers and Fox News. Boy, you pulled a fast one on the nation, didn't you? You found a video of a speech by Shirley Sherrod, an official in the Agriculture Department, in which she talked about her personal prejudices against whites. Then you raised holy hell about it, both on Fox and heavily in the right-wing blogs. Which caused the Administration and the NAACP to fire Ms. Sherrod, end her career with the government, and denounce her as racist.

Except, of course, it wasn't true. Once people viewed the entire video, not just the clips that the bloggers and Fox News broadcast, it turned out that she was a redemption story. Her speech was about her personal journey to overcoming her own racist prejudices, not a denunciation of whites. And, as it turns out, she was very successful in helping whites as well as blacks. Her story should be a example to all of what is possible.

Instead, you guys have successfully ruined the career of an inspirational and successful black administration official and thrown the Administration into a tizzy. Yes, you've certainly shown everybody that the Obama gang is racist and not to be trusted, haven't you? Who cares that you ruined somebody's reputation?

Well, the Administration does, if belatedly, as well as the NAACP. Both have offered their apologies to Sherrod. As they damn well should. When will the Tea Party and Fox News offer their apologies? So far, they haven't. Which says a helluva lot about both, doesn't it? Not just about the accuracy of their statements, but about their moral character.

Follow-up (Saturday, 24 July): Bill O'Reilly has apologized for his part in the Sherrod case. Good for him. Andrew Breitbart, the clown who first posted the video, is now saying that he's being unfairly vilified by liberal media. He has not apologized.

Life Lessons in a Talent Show

It's been a busy week in Lake Woebegone, my home town ... oh, sorry, that's somebody else's line. It's been busy here, too. I've been working on a commission for a mural. A friend asked me to paint a Star Wars-based mural in his son's bedroom. This is an interesting and fun project - the subject matter is much lighter than the usual stuff I paint and a mural is technically complex. My only gripe is that the boy is at that particular age where all girls have cooties, so there are no females in this mural. Rats. I was looking forward to doing Princess Leia in that sexy slave-harem outfit.

Janis and I have been watching "America's Got Talent" for a few weeks now. I didn't want to at first, figuring it was just lightweight, over-hyped mental floss, but I've actually found that it’s fun and can be a very interesting metaphor for the art world in particular, if not almost any field of professional endeavor. The start of the season was very democratic: anybody could enter, and just about anybody did. But that's where the democracy ends. An article revealed that, because there are thousands of applicants in each city, AGT staffers pre-screen and select only a small percentage for the judges. Which is pretty much like applying for a real job, isn't it? Lots apply, then some faceless/nameless bureaucrats whittle them down to a manageable number for the real decision-makers. Except that, in real life, the faceless ones generally screen out all but the top candidates; for this show, they leave in a lot of walking train wrecks for entertainment purposes.

So thousands of hopefuls think they have talent, or that they are stars waiting to be discovered, or both. Of these, only a few hundred make it to the judges. We saw quite a variety: some with amazing talent but little or no confidence in themselves, some with amazing egos but little or no talent to back it up, some with a bit of talent but all the drive in the world, and all the variations in between. Then the reality check begins. Assuming they made it through the initial screening, they face a gradual elimination process. The performers have to step up their game at each level and do the best they can. How they respond is so enlightening. Some have done variations on their original performance: a different song, some different tricks, but essentially the same type of thing. One stunt guy tried to do more of everything and wound up running around looking like a maniac. Another guy completely changed the substance of his act to where it had no relation to what he'd been selected for. Some got fancier outfits. My insight was that the ones who’ve made it this far do it by getting better. Not fancier, more complicated, or doing something that they think might have more appeal. They just do what they do, only better, with more heart, skill, and practice.

I’ve found that is also true in the art world. When the pressure is on, I’ve certainly felt that maybe I had to get fancier, or adopt the trend of the moment, or try to create something that appeals to the judges or public or whatever. And when I’ve done that, invariably I’ve failed miserably. I was trying to apply somebody else’s rules to my own way of doing business. When I followed my own instincts, I always did much better work. (Maybe it didn’t sell any better, but at least the work was better!)

Further, the same general rules applied to my Navy career. Every couple of years, somebody comes out with a trendy new management technique, and the military is just as susceptible to that kind of crap as the corporate world. Sometimes I could use one of the new techniques, but often they just got in the way. I knew of some people who were chameleons - they could adopt the latest fad with lots of enthusiasm and plenty of showboating but they really weren’t any better for it. They just got the spotlight on them for a while.

On “America’s Got Talent”, it is already clear that a few people will get to the finals for two reasons. Number one: they have the heart and drive for it, and are willing to put everything on the line. Everything. Number two: they have a reasonable amount of talent. Of these, heart and drive is most important. These rules apply to much more than just AGT. They apply to the art world that I’m in, they applied to the military world that I was in, and they probably apply to whatever profession you’re in.

Who’d have expected life lessons in a “piece of fluff” television show?

I’ve thought about these issues as they apply to my own life. Lots of artists have dreams of making it big in the art world. I don’t. I have noticed a change in my attitude since I came back from Iraq. My art is not the most important thing in my life. After being away from my wife for months at a stretch, losing two friends to a bomb in Iraq, having a couple more pass away in the States from illnesses, and almost losing one of my beloved dogs to Addison’s disease, my priorities are now different. Family and friends are much more important than my so-called art career. If I’m working at the computer or at the easel and one of my dogs comes up and wants to play, I’ll play. If my wife or a friend wants to talk, I’ll talk. The painting will still be there tomorrow; my friend or my dog may not.

This attitude will never win “America’s Got Talent”. Fine with me. I can, and will, make some good paintings anyway. But it’s the relationships that are most important in my life.

How about yours?

New Tenants

We have some new tenants at our house. A couple of small birds - wrens? - built a nest in a corner of our garage, and a few days ago, two little eggs appeared. Momma and children are apparently doing fine, thank you very much.

Actually, this is the second nest they've built. A couple of weeks ago, when I cleaned out our garage, I found and dumped a nest, thinking it was an old one. The next day, two very pissed-off little birds were seen flapping around our garage. Ooops. They started building another nest next to the TV that Janis watches when she's on the treadmill, but that didn't last long since J cranks up the volume so she can hear it over the treadmill. They settled, instead, in another corner.

We think it's funny that wild birds would want to build inside the garage. For one thing, we close the garage door at night and when we're not home, so momma and poppa bird are locked away from the kids for many hours at a time. First thing in the morning, though, minutes after the garage door is opened, they're back.

We check in on them every day and have provided them with a water bowl, but try to leave them alone. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

These aren't our only tenants, by the way. We have another nest under the top of our propane tank!

New Small Paintings

I've been working in the studio for the past couple of days. Here are the two small (12"x16") paintings that resulted.

The Rug Merchant

Three Iraqi Girls

Projects in Iraq

I'm normally a fan of the New York Times, particularly when it comes to reporting in Iraq. They are one of only a couple of major international news organizations that maintain a full-time presence in the country. (The only other one I know of is Al Jazeera). Usually, Times reporting is very accurate and insightful.

Not this time. Yesterday, they ran an article entitled "U.S. Fails to Complete, or Cuts Back, Iraqi Projects". The gist of it is that, through incompetence and inefficiency, American reconstruction managers are failing to do their jobs, wasting taxpayer money and leaving Iraqis in the lurch. As a former reconstruction project manager in Iraq, I am familiar with the projects that they cite in the article. I can state unequivocally that this article is highly slanted and is based on extremely selective use of facts. It is certainly not up to the Times' normally high standards.

The article focuses on the sewage treatment plant being built in Falluja. This is a city that saw two major battles and some of the worst fighting of the war. It is still dangerous, although much improved. According to the Times' article, in 2004 American authorities decided, on their own and with no input from the Iraqis, to build a massive sewage treatment plant. After spending six years and over $100M, we're now walking away from an unfinished plant, leaving Falluja residents in the lurch. Additionally, Americans are leaving many of the rest of our projects unfinished, or finished to such low standards that they are unusable. Essentially, we are wasting American taxpayer money and leaving Iraqis with nothing useful.

The facts that the Times cites are fairly true, as far as they go. But they ignore many important facts, and their conclusions are certainly far from the real situation. Now for the rest of the story.

In 2004, as the article states, raw sewage ran in the streets of Falluja, a result of overflowing septic systems. The reason the septic systems were overflowing is that the trucks that normally would have pumped out all the septic tanks could not function in a city that was being torn apart by warfare. The operators could hardly have said "Umm, excuse me, but could you Americans stop shooting for an hour so I can pump out the septic tanks on this street? And you guys over there, would you remove those bombs, please? I'll only be there a little while and then you can go back to killing each other. Thank you very much."

In 2004, we were just starting to use money as a weapon. The goal was to start the repair and rebuilding process in Iraq and to provide essential services (clean water, electricity, sewage, roads, education, and so on). We would hire Iraqis to do the work: if they were employed and earning a living, they would be less inclined to pick up an AK-47. So even though the real cause of the sewage in the streets of Falluja was the inability of the septic trucks to operate, American and Iraqi authorities decided to put a lot of Falluja residents to work on a city-wide sewer system.

The Americans proposed a system that would collect sewage from the city and route it to a lagoon processing system. This is a very simple system that is cheap to build, requires very little maintenance, and can be operated by people with little training. It's a common system throughout the world and the United States. Iraqi officials, however, would have none of that. They believed that lagoon systems were for "third-world" countries (their words, not mine). They wanted a state-of-the-art, high-tech system. After a long period of going round and round, American military and civilian leaders capitulated and agreed to build the high-tech version, even though it would cost many times more than a lagoon system, would require a small army of highly-educated and highly-trained operators as well as additional fuel, chemicals, and maintenance, and wouldn't accomplish anything that the lagoon system couldn't. Virtually all of us who were involved in any way with the Falluja sewer project during my time in-country (Aug 2008 - Apr 2010) realized that this was a major mistake, but had to live with it.

So for the past six years, we've been trying to build this monstrosity. A project like this is difficult to do in the best of times; in a place like Iraq, it's amazing we've gotten as far as we have. Violence has been only part of the problem. There have been constant issues with contractors: incompetence, inefficiency, and fraud, to name some. We've had to terminate many contractors for poor performance, then re-award the contracts, only to terminate the next one as well. City officials have played their own roles in obstructing progress by delaying or refusing permits. Most importantly, Iraq is a very tribal country, and if you do not have the right tribal connections, you cannot work in a particular area. So even the most highly-qualified construction company in the world could not build this system in Falluja if it didn't have Falluja people on the payroll.

(The best analogy I can think of is that Iraq is a country of Tony Sopranos. National government officials, provincial government officials, city government officials, heads of corporations, local bigwigs - almost all are a "Tony Soprano" to varying extents. If you want to build a project in any city, town or province, you pay off the right people, you hire their buddies (regardless of whether they work or not; usually they don't), you pay through the nose for permits and approvals, you grease palms, you buy supplies and materials from certain "approved" companies, and so on. While I worked at the Embassy, the Anti-Corruption Coordinator estimated that 70 cents on every American dollar was skimmed off in such fashion, and I believe it.)

After all these years, though, the project in Falluja is winding down. The Times article didn't mention it, but the high-tech sewage treatment plant is being successfully completed. It's a showcase. The problem is the collection system: the pipes that run through the city, all the way to each house and business. This is what has caused roads to be ripped up for years and caused major inconveniences for Falluja residents. The major problems with the collection area construction projects were with the contractors. I am not saying that the Corps of Engineers didn't make mistakes, but it certainly wasn't the one-sided "Americans are incompetent" pitch that the Times is making. At the end of April, when I left Iraq, the plan for Falluja was to connect just enough houses to the system to allow operation of the plant. This was about all that could be done with American funding within the remaining time available. Don't forget: we have a deadline coming up, and our military forces (including the Corps of Engineers) have to be out of the country. However, most of the major construction for the sewage collection system will have been completed. It will be up to the Iraqis to make the final connections. And it will be up to the Iraqis to maintain and operate their brand-new, state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant. As the Times article noted, they have not yet stepped up to the plate.

I was personally offended by one paragraph. It stated that four Iraqis have died during construction of the sewage plant. This is true. One of them was a young boy whose father sent him down in a hole to pull the plug that prevented him from dumping his septic waste into the collection system. I believe that this boy was the one mentioned in the article who was overcome by fumes. What the article did not state was that three Americans have died as well. Two of them, Terry Barnich and Dr. Maged Hussein, were co-workers and friends of mine at the Embassy; the third was CDR Duane Wolfe, who was in charge of the sewage system construction. The three were killed by a roadside bomb on May 25, 2009, while on a visit to the Falluja sewage project. These men - smart, dedicated beyond belief, and committed to success - were killed by the very people they were trying to help.

I had to laugh at some parts of the Times article, particularly at the idea that Iraqis are complaining about American engineering and safety standards. I've seen the results of Iraqi standards. I also had to laugh at the idea that the Iraqis are complaining about poor quality of construction and that the Americans are ignoring them. Somebody's blowing smoke ... or not doing all their research.

As for the claims that we're walking away from partly completed police stations, schools, etc with no explanation, that is just not the case. We probably are walking away from some, but we're working closely (through the Embassy and the Provincial Reconstruction Teams) with the affected Iraqis. The ones we're leaving would be the problem projects, the ones in which the contractors are dragging their feet, or who are screwing up construction, or whatever, and the projects are in such a state that they simply cannot be completed with the time and money remaining. Unlike the past, in which we could terminate one contractor and try again with a different one, we no longer have that option. We're leaving the country. We will not be able to finish them. We're eliminating the projects that can't be completed and putting the remaining (limited) resources into those that can. Sounds like responsible management to me, not incompetence.

That does not mean that these projects can't be completed at all. Iraq is now in a very different condition than it was even two years ago. On virtually all the construction projects that were ongoing when I left, Iraqis could have executed them if they wanted to. That's a key shift from the past, when they did not have the organization, abilities, or resources to handle these projects on their own. Now they do. So if we can't complete a school or courthouse or sewer connections in the year remaining, Iraqis can. It's their country, so they should step up to the plate.

The Times article is accurate in that there are, indeed, problems with some (not all, not even the majority) of our remaining projects in Iraq. It is not, however, just an issue of American competence or judgement. It's much more complicated than that. The Times should present a more complete and nuanced view in future reports if it is to maintain its position as a respected news source. Hatchet jobs like this are unprofessional.

A Real Weekend

We just had a real, honest-to-gosh weekend. Yeah, I know, you're probably thinking "What's so special about that? They come around every week." Well, yes and no. Yes, they come around, but I'm usually working my butt off on some project or another and am a walking zombie by evening. Which is what happened on Friday: I did a major clean-up on our garage for the first time in two-plus years, tossed out a ton of stuff, reorganized everything, swept, vacuumed, and wiped, until it was actually a useable place again. Didn't stop until it was 9 p.m. and I could barely move.

Yesterday, we slept in a bit. After walking the dogs, having breakfast, and bathing the dogs, it was almost noon and rapidly getting hot again. I decided that I wasn't going to do anything else the rest of the weekend. For once, I was just going to relax for two days. This was actually hard for me to do. Our work schedule in Iraq was 10-12 hours a day, 6 1/2 days a week, with only half of Friday off. If you do that long enough, it gets to be a natural rhythm. Now that I'm a self-employed artist again, I was back into a similar rhythm, only now it's made up of home projects and studio projects, not Iraqi projects. So it was time to break up the rhythm and give myself a meritorious two days off. Hey, that's my rationale, and I'm sticking with it.

So yesterday, I made a lot of progress on a novel (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - a really good book). Last night, we watched Robert Downey, Jr, and Jude Law in Sherlock Holmes - an okay movie, kinda fun, certainly not one of the better ones we've ever seen. Today, I walked the dogs, we watched CBS Sunday Morning, and then this afternoon went to wander around the Biltmore Park area. We had a great lunch at P.F. Chang's, visited with our friend Genie Maples, who was manning the desk at Echo Gallery, and browsed through Barnes and Noble. Then we came home and I watched the NASCAR race (it was a pretty dull one, but who cares).

All in all, a nice, quiet, lazy weekend. Two days off. Unheard of.

Tomorrow: back to work.

Another Revision

I reworked another old painting today. This one was a sunrise at Cape Hatteras. Here's how it looked a few hours ago:

Since it's been sitting in the Rack of Unloved Paintings for years, it was a prime candidate to become something else. I turned it into a storm over the Iraqi desert. Here's how it looks now:

I don't know yet if it's done. That's pretty common: often I won't know if something is done for several days. As a painting dries, the colors change a bit, and I need to see it with fresh eyes.

More Revisions

I mucked around with another painting in the studio today. I originally did it in Baghdad - it's of the wall to the north of my barracks. It was pretty bland, I thought: mostly sky that didn't have anything interesting going on. Here's the original:

So today I slapped it up on my easel and went to work. I decided it needed a thundercloud, so here's how the painting is right now:

Much more interesting, no?

Still Playing with Paint

I'm still playing with the old abstracts. Today I worked on the red-one-that-became-a-purple-one. This is an interesting process, very different from my normal one. There's a dialogue between the painting and me. It seems to have a mind of its own: it wants to develop in its own way, and I cannot direct it. Jackson Pollack talked about this same experience, saying that when he gets into a painting, "there's an easy give and take". Same with me: I have to listen to what the painting wants, and help it along. Today, it wanted to become a landscape. It already was, kinda, but today it said "forget being abstract, I wanna be a straight-up landscape". Okay. So together, we pushed some things back, lightened other areas, simplified, and painted over a lot of the purples. Here's how it looks right at this moment:

It's still pretty dark. I don't know if it wants to be lighter or not ... will have to sit and stare at it and "listen" to what it thinks it wants. Once the painting decided to switch from being abstract to being a landscape, all I could think of was J.M.W. Turner, the English painter known for his abstracted, highly textured landscape paintings. This one is developing along those lines.

Here's a close-up of an area in the center to show you what the surface looks like.

What's next? I dunno. This one is bugging me because it's not done yet. But I'm enjoying the process.

Slapping Paint

I've been painting in the studio for the past couple of days. It feels so good to finally be back doing what I was meant to do. I've been reworking a couple of old paintings, mostly just to get the feel of working with paint again, and since these were pretty bad paintings to begin with, there's nowhere to go but up. Here they are:

Response 1 (BEFORE)

Response 1 (AFTER)

This new version is not really in black-and-white, it's more like muted dark purple and cream.

Response 2 (BEFORE)

Response 2 (AFTER)

This one, I think, is a big improvement already.

Those of you who are familiar with my regular work are probably wondering where in the hell these come from. They were done right after 9/11 while I was in the painting program at UNCA. Abstraction is not what I do - my work almost always needs to be representational - but I'm having fun experimenting and loosening up right now. Don't have a clue what kind of paintings I'll work on next.

In the meantime, I've got my etching and printmaking equipment out and will start working on new prints in the next few days. Prints are a very technical drawing medium and it'll be fun to work on those for a while.

Actually, it's fun to be doing anything in the studio!

After the Studio Stroll

We finished getting the studio spruced up in time for the Studio Stroll. Here's how it looked on Saturday ... now go back and look at the "tornado hit a flea market" photo from last week. Quite a difference, huh? Notice the shiny wood floors. Notice the carefully arranged furniture and the freshly painted walls. Notice the crowds of visitors.

Okay, so there weren't hordes of people jammed into the studio all the time. We had a good number of visitors overall. They tended to come in waves: no visitors at all for a while, then 20 would show up. I had some good conversations with new visitors on both days. Some artists sell lots of work (some make thousands of dollars during a Stroll), but I rarely sell anything. My work just isn't oriented that way. Instead, I treat the Stroll as an advertising session, to show people what art can be and what I can do.

The Stroll brought in some old friends, which was really cool. Some were local artists: Margaret Nodine, Julyan Davis, Claire Simpson Jones, and Cindy Walton. I got to meet a friend of a friend from high school, and then an old friend of mine from college showed up. I hadn't seen him in 37 years! It was really cool

Warrior

Oil on canvas, 60"x60"

While sitting in the studio over the weekend, a couple of things became very clear to me. The most important is that I need to have all new work on display at the Stroll in November. While Lament and Warrior are very powerful pieces, they've been in too many Strolls now. When I go into the studio tomorrow, I'm going to wrap them up and put them away for a while. Another thing is that my new works need to be as good as, or better than, Warrior - technically, compositionally, and conceptually. And since Warrior is probably the best painting I've ever done, I just set myself a pretty high bar: to do a bunch of new paintings within the next 5 months that are as good as, or better than, my best work so far.

I still don't know what my subject matter will be. I've got some ideas, but I need to just do some exercises first and get used to the act of painting. The subject matter will come when I'm ready. I've been thinking that I have a few paintings to do about Iraq, but really not that many. That stage of my life is behind me now and I don't want to live in the past. So I'm thinking that I'll wrap up the unfinished business from Iraq and then move on to something new. Whatever that is.

So. Tomorrow I'll be back in the studio. I need to convert it from a showroom to a working studio again, and I need to start slingin' paint. Some poor defenseless canvas is gonna die a messy death tomorrow. I can't wait!

Hard Labor

I've been working my butt off this week. Most of my time has been in the studio: cleaning, vacuuming, mopping, and painting (the walls, not art). You know it's bad when you have to vacuum your artwork before you can even wipe it down! Ugh! The place was nasty. But it's clean now, re-arranged so that it's more open - my studio partner had set the place up to suit herself, since I wasn't around for a year and a half, but now I'm back and need open space.

Janis came down and worked in the studio a couple of times this week, too. Together, we got the wall repainted and it looks pretty good. She "advised" me on which artworks to put on display ... her eye is a bit better at public-relations aspects than mine is, and I remember some sage advice given to me by one of her lifelong friends many years ago ("just do what you're told and everything will be all right"), so I did what she suggested.

I also threw out a lot of old work. Old drawings, paintings, and prints - things that were really mediocre at best and pretty bad at worst. Stacks of old drawings and drawing pads. I mean, why keep 'em? For my future biographers? (It is to laugh ...) No, there's something about throwing out old crap that helps make way for new crap. I had planned on ordering a lot of new canvas and panels, but now I have a bunch of old artwork that I can just paint over. So next week, after the Stroll, I can get to work, gesso over a bunch of paintings, and get to work on ruining them for the second time. (If that sounds defeatist, it isn't, really; it's realistic, for two reasons. One, it's going to take me a while to get back into the flow of things in the studio. It's like an athlete: they don't go from off-season straight into a game, they have to hit the gym, do their practices, and work themselves back into shape. Same with artists. So I'm using these canvases as practice sessions, not as a regular-season game. Second, it seems to me that once a canvas has been deemed to be a flop, then any later painting done over the top of it is going to be a flop, too. Don't know why, it just happens, so now I can plan on it and put it to some good use anyway).

So tomorrow we open our doors to the Great Unwashed. Looks like it'll be a pretty hot and muggy day with a chance of thundershowers. Pretty much like this whole week has been. I expect to see a moderate crowd that'll come in waves. Some will ask interesting questions, too many will rhapsodize about how wonderful my studio is (they have some idyllic fantasy about how "relaxing" it is to be an artist ... ha!!), and most will wander back out without saying a word. Hey, that's just the way it is.

So if you're in the Asheville area this weekend, stop in and say hello!

Slavin' in the Studio

I've been working in the studio this past week. I need to get it ready for this weekend's Studio Stroll, which means a major cleanup/fixup. As you can see, right now it looks like a tornado hit a flea market. This place is really filthy. Old industrial buildings like this one are dirty, anyway: they're relatively open to the elements, there are bugs and dust and dirt that you cannot block, no central A/C with filters, no screens, and no weatherstripping. The last time this studio was thoroughly cleaned was two years ago. So it's the pits. I've been vacuuming the walls, for crissakes! There are probably several thousand spiders and other bugs inside my Shop-Vac now, along with many pounds of dust and cobwebs and who-knows-what. But it's getting there, and we'll be ready for this weekend's Studio Stroll.

So what, exactly, is a Studio Stroll? Well, there are a lot of artists working in Asheville's River Arts District. We're in all the old industrial buildings, most of which were built in the late 1800's or early 1900's, along the river and railroad tracks. Most of the artists, 120 of us, open our doors to the public twice a year, in June and again in November. People can come into working artists studios, see how we work (and, in some cases, live), talk to the artists themselves, and buy some art in the place where it was born. We have all kinds of artists here: painters, printmakers, photographers, fabric artists, quilters, potters, woodworkers, sculptors, glass blowers, musicians, dancers, performance artists, mixed-media, multi-media, and more. Some are very traditional and others are, well, maybe not fully connected with this planet. Some of our artists have been professional for many decades, while others are still getting their feet wet. I've found it to be an exceptionally stimulating place to work: with all the different types of art down here, there's always something new to look at, ideas to throw around, and people to compare notes with.

My particular building is a good example of what's down here. It's the Cotton Mill Studios, located at 122 Riverside Drive. It is the small remaining part of what was once a huge cotton mill. We're not really sure when it was first constructed, but some of it is well over 100 years old. My studio is on the left on the top floor. The building is owned by Marty and Eileen Black who run the Potter's Mark functional pottery studio on the ground floor, left side. Next to them is Lenny Lopatin, a musician who was trained at Juilliard and now makes unique flutes and piccolos with square holes. On the ground floor, right side, is Barbara Zaretsky, a fiber artist. Upstairs, I share my studio with Christine Dougherty, a traditional painter. Next to us is Heather Maloy, a choreographer who runs the Terpsicorps Dance Company. Then there's Genie Maples, an abstract painter. On the far end of the building is the studio and John Mac Kah and Ruthanne Kah, two traditional landscape and still life painters.

In addition to the artists, we have some good eating and drinking down here. The 12 Bones Restaurant was recognized by Good Morning America as the best barbecue place in the nation. (It's just a quarter mile down the road from my studio). Clingman Cafe is a great little restaurant/cafe - it's where I often head for lunch. The newest addition is the Wedge Brewing Company, an excellent micro-brewery.

So if you're in the Asheville area this weekend, come down to the River Arts District and take a look at what's here. Come up to my studio and we can chat. I'll have some of my drawings and paintings from Iraq on view. I hope to see you this weekend!

Memorial Day Weekend

Janis and I finished up our stay in Mt. Dora in style. We went back to the Goblin Market Restaurant for another fabulous dinner. We had lobster quesadillas with fruit chutney and tempura stuffed artichoke hearts for appetizers. Janis had the cedar plank salmon encrusted with pistachios and blue cheese and a roasted pablano creme sauce. I had Filet Napolean - two 4 oz filets with portobello mushrooms and mashed potatoes, all washed down with a wonderful Columbia Crest merlot. Sound pretty perfect? You had to be there. It was!

We left a bit earlier than planned on Thursday morning. We were going to stop in Savannah again, but we hit town early, about 2 pm, and decided to push on through. That decision proved to be very hard on Indy. She got very stressed out after being in the car over six hours, and since she has Addison's, which upsets her body chemistry, she suffered. We stopped several times and she had to barf and had the squirts each time. Then she settled down and went to sleep. We arrived home about 8:30 pm. The next day, Indy was back to normal, happily taking me and her sister Soozee on our twice-daily walk. Vacations are great, but it's also great to be back in your own home, isn't it?

Now it's the Memorial Day weekend. I observed it a few days ago, on the 25th. That's the anniversary of the date that two of my friends were killed in Fallujah by a roadside bomb. I had never had any friends lose their lives during my career in the Navy, so Memorial Day was a meaningful but not personal event. Now it's personal, and for me it will always be on May 25th.

So this weekend is a quiet one. I've been working on a major cleaning/polishing of my truck and doing some household projects. Right now, I'm watching the Indianapolis 500. Soozee is sound asleep on her back right next to me, legs splayed, and I can reach down and rub her belly during commercials. Indy is yipping in her sleep back in the bedroom. Life is pretty awesome.

Somebody from Japan has left several comments to blog postings, but they've all been in kanji and I can't read them. If they're in English, I'll be happy to post 'em.

Happy Memorial Day to you all!

Vacation

Vacations are wonderful things. We haven't really had one in many years ... had a few "staycations", trips, and some downtime here and there, but as for packing up and going somewhere just for fun, no. So we're on vacation right now. We rented a car, drove down to Orlando, and have been goofing off down here for most of a week. Now we're wrapping up and getting ready to head back home, refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to get to work.

We decided to rent a car because our main one, the Land Rover, is now 10 years old and has over 150,000 miles on it. Although it still looks and runs great, and would probably have made the trip with no problem, it's getting to the point where we don't want to be far from home if something goes wrong. So we rented a Chevy Malibu from Avis. And to tell the truth, I've been very impressed: Chevrolet has come a long, long way in just a few years. It's nothing like the antique barges that GM used to put out, much more like a Honda or Toyota in ride, handling, and quality. And there are lots of nice little touches that I didn't notice until after living with it a while, like the soft lighting around the interior so you don't have to go groping around for the door handles or loose items. Plus, we got well over 30 mpg running at 75-80. All in all, GM is finally making a decent car again. Good on 'em!

We drove from Asheville to Savannah, Georgia, the first day, then on to our rental house in Mt. Dora (about 20 miles north of Orlando) the second. Yes, we could've done it all in one day, but why? Marathon drives are no fun. We stopped a few times along the way to stretch and let the dogs run. Janis needed her surf fix, so we stopped in Flagler Beach, where we could take Soozee and Indy out on the sand. This was the first time they'd ever seen the beach and they didn't know what to think ... it was kinda cool and fun for them, but scary, too. Eventually the "scary" overtook the "fun", so we didn't stay too long. Then that stinker Indy rolled around in a patch of grass and picked up seemingly every burr in a five-mile radius. I'm not kidding, she was covered. Took me ten minutes of combing to get 'em out.

We found our house in Mt. Dora through Vacation Rentals By Owner. It's on five acres just outside of town. Very quiet area with loads of live oaks. As it turned out, our house is really a mobile home with some very inexpert additions. (I'll just say that my neighbor at home, Darryl, who is a construction contractor, would never approve). Still, this place is comfortable enough, quiet, and is a great place to run the dogs. We can leave them at home without worrying whether they'll be nervous wrecks when we get back (see previous posting on our neurotic dogs).

So what have we done here? Well, we spent one afternoon exploring Mt. Dora. This is a nice little boutique town filled with nice little boutiques. Our great find of the day was the Goblin Market Restaurant. We had a fabulous late lunch there, and I mean fabulous. It alone would be worth the drive up from Orlando. I had something called a Grilled Chicken Fontina. It's a grilled chicken sandwich, but that's like saying a Ferrari is just a car. It was perfection on a plate. Janis had their special of the day, which was salmon wrapped in a crepe on a bed of tossed salad, along with a glass of a perfect pinot noir. And the prices were very reasonable. We're going back. If you're ever in central Florida, you should, too.

The next day, we went over to Daytona. With me being a gearhead, Daytona is a must-see. We took the tour and bought the requisite T-shirts. The highlight for me, though, was the ride-along. I suited up and rode three laps in an honest-to-God race car (modified to take a passenger) with a maniac for a driver. There are only three words to describe the experience:

Ho

Lee

SHIT!

They advertise a 165-mph speed and I believe every frickin' mile an hour of it. We slammed into the turns and rode up next to the wall, bouncing and jerking, pulling over 2 G's sideways, engine screaming, and me hooting as loud as I could with a grin that stuck out both sides of the car. I tell ya what, you get a whole new perspective on both the track and the drivers. Those corners are a lot tighter at 165 mph than they appear from the grandstands or on TV!

Once that was over, and I was completely drained of adrenaline, we went over to the Chart House for dinner. This restaurant chain is one of our favorites - the day we were married, for example, we celebrated with dinner at the one in Annapolis. The one in Daytona is right on the water and was, as usual, outstanding.

So what else did we do here? Well, what does anybody do when on vacation in Orlando? We went to Disneyworld! Epcot, specifically: two days wandering around that 300-acre theme park. We had a good time. While Disney is a dreamworld, "sanitized for your protection", there are still a lot of things that are genuine and enjoyable. The movie in the Chinese pavilion, for example, is a 360-degree theater, beautifully done, showing stunning landscapes, teeming cities, and a bit of (sanitized) history. It included spectacular shots of Tiananmen Square (I automatically remembered the massacre of 1989) and a section on how their multiple and diverse minorities are happily integrated into the Chinese nation (I don't think the Nepalese would agree with that description, however). These two examples point to why I don't really care for theme parks or Carnival cruises or any other fantasy experiences: eliminating the "unpleasant" or not-politically-correct half of the world eliminates the depth, richness, messiness, and vibrancy of real life. So Disneyland was fun, but in a bit of a cotton-candy way.

Still, there were some very real experiences. One is food: there's plenty of outstanding eating to be done. We munched on some excellent nachos at the Mexican pavilion and had a wonderful lunch in the German biergarten. The neat thing there is that they follow the German custom of seating multiple groups together. We wound up paired with a young couple from Lubbock, Texas, who were there on a honeymoon, and had a great time talking with them. The food, by the way, was excellent.

In the Japanese area, there were some taiko drummers. Taiko drumming is a Japanese art form, and is one of the things I most enjoyed about our tour in Japan. They had a trio from Tokyo performing, and they were good.

Two days in Disneyworld was enough, though. We could have gone back today to do Magic Kingdom or one of the other parks, but don't really want to deal with the crowds, heat, or cotton-candy nature of a theme park. So we'll be low-key this afternoon. We'll pack this evening and start the return trip tomorrow morning. We've had a great time on our first vacation in years, but now we just want to get back to our own little house.

Neurotic Dogs

We have two neurotic dogs. I mean, really, they take the cake. You know the term, "separation anxiety"? That's them, two furry little anxieties walking around.

Indy is not too bad. She has always had a rather level head on her tiny shoulders, along with an analytical mind. Way back when they were pups, we got them some rubber balls. Soozee immediately pounced on hers. Indy, though, sat back and watched for a bit. It was like she was thinking, "What's this thing? What do you do with it? Okay, so you throw it and I bring it back? Is this supposed to be fun?" Then she got the idea, jumped in, and has been giving her ball hell ever since. Indy doesn't get too excited about most noises or new situations, but there are a few things that peg her stressometer.

One of them is thunder. Even if it's way off in the distance, so far that I can't hear it. I'll be doing something and all of a sudden here's this 16-pound wart attached to my leg, panting and drooling. If it's at night, it's worse: I'll wake up to find her standing on my chest, wide-eyed, panting, and spooked. No amount of petting will calm her down. She won't sleep and she'll make damn sure I don't sleep, either. But I can't get mad at her, poor thing. We all have our phobias, and one of hers is thunder.

Where Indy is normally a level-headed dog, Soozee is on a constant emotional roller coaster. Thunder doesn't bother her in the slightest. Instead, she gets completely freaked when Janis starts to do her hair and put makeup on. That means J's going somewhere, and Soozee may or may not be going along. So she gets worried, and I mean worried. Her little head is snapping around as she tries to figure the situation out. Eventually, she'll go out in the garage and sit on the top step. If we go anywhere, we have to go down those steps, and Soozee will be right there to remind us "take me! take me!".

Another of her phobias is the vacuum cleaner. To her, it's a noisy monster that invades her house. She'll go and hide from it. Where? The top step in the garage, of course.

A third phobia shows up whenever we get the suitcases out. She knows that means somebody's going somewhere (she figured that out long before I went to Baghdad) and that she probably will not be going along. Suitcases are Bad News. She'll sit in the middle of the living room with the saddest expression on her face and try to lay a heavy guilt trip on us. She's very good at it, too. Must've been a Catholic mother in a previous life.

But say the magic words, "Do you want to go for a ride?" and both dogs are the most joyful creatures in all God's creation. Whooopeee!! A ride!! There is much jumping about and licking of faces. They don't just wag their tails, they wag their whole bodies. Then it's out to the car and into their car seat. (Yes, we have special car seats for the dogs - it gets them up high enough to see out the windows). A five-minute trip to the dump and post office is a magic event ... as is a 20-minute trip to the studio, or an hour-long collection of errands. They're all the same to Soozee and Indy. They look out the window, they snooze, they look out the window some more. They're the best little travelers ever. Which is a good thing, because over the past few days, they've spent some serious hours in the car. They don't care where we go as long as they can go, too.

I sure did miss that when I was in Iraq. So I'm really enjoying it all now.

Boycott BP

I'm boycotting BP. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt right after the initial explosion, but the more I learned about their irresponsible actions, the more pissed off I got. BP won't notice my little boycott - I almost never buy their gas anyway - but I have to do my tiny part to encourage others to do the same. The only way to get their attention is to hit 'em in the wallet. Here's a listing of why I'm angry:

- In 2000, BP was fined $500,000 for failing to disclose that one of their contractors had been dumping hazardous waste down oil well shafts on the North Slope.

- In March, 2005, the Texas City oil refinery exploded, killing 15 and injuring 180. BP was fined twice for multiple violations related to that incident, once for $50M and then last year for $87M. The one last year resulted from 270 safety violations that had been identified in 2005 and still not fixed, plus 430 new ones.

- Lack of maintenance led to spillage of 5000 barrels of oil in Prudhoe Bay in 2006. In 2007, there was a spillage of 2000 gallons of a methanol/oil mixture at another of their Prudhoe Bay fields.

- The Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20th was a direct result of BP pushing their contractors to work faster and skimp on safety procedures. 60 Minutes had a double-length segment last night that clearly showed how BP over-rode Transocean's established procedures.

- Even worse, there is another BP oil platform in the Gulf that is evidently a disaster waiting to happen. 60 Minutes had a brief bit about it, saying it had no accurate or approved drawings, that operations cannot be safely accomplished without the drawings, and that it will soon be pumping huge amounts of oil from multiple wells. An engineer warned that a disaster there was not only likely, but would make the Deepwater Horizon look like a minor bubble.

- BP has been blaming everybody except themselves. Bullshit. It's BP's well, it's BP's fault, and it's BP's responsibility.

- The CEO of BP, Tony Hayward, is on record minimizing the environmental impact of the blowout, saying that the Gulf is a big body of water and the amount of oil covers only a very small part. This is disingenuous. Further, it appears that much, if not most, of the oil is remaining below the surface of the Gulf. Last night there was a report that there was a subsurface plume of oil that was 10 miles wide and 7 miles long.

I don't do boycotts very often. I've been boycotting Citgo for years, since Citgo is owned by the government of Venezuela, meaning it's propping up Hugo Chavez. But that's about it. This time, it's really serious. BP's arrogance and greed are generating an environmental disaster of epic proportions, with the possibility - no, the probability - of an even worse one at any time.

Boycott BP!

Into the Groove At Home

It's been a week and a half since my arrival at home now. I've had a busy time doing nothing much, and there's a lot to be said for doing nothing much. I've chipped away at the honey-do list, and chipped away at my own to-do list, but if something couldn't get done that day (or even that week), well, so be it. There are other things to do. Sleep in late, for one. Take the dogs for walks ... lots of walks. Visit with friends. Play "throw the ball" with the dogs. Make a run to the post office and grocery store. Visit with more friends. That's about it.

There are some things that I'm avoiding as much as possible. The news, for one. I've watched one evening news show since coming home and have only lightly skimmed the news sites on the net. In a few weeks, I'll probably start following current events again, but for now, there are many things far more important than the news from Iraq. Things like the killer grilled-cheese sandwiches that J made today for lunch (New York sharp cheddar cheese with bacon bits on sourdough grilled in a panini-maker ... they were to die for).

If the TV has to be on, then there are better things to watch than the news. Saturday Night Live with Betty White as the host, for example. Or coverage of some off-the-wall car race. Escapist, yes. Fun, yes. Serious, no. Forget serious, I've had enough of that for a while.

One of my projects was to install a new receiver and speakers in my old truck. It still had the original single-CD player and crappy speakers that were installed ten years ago. I wanted something that sounded great and would let me hook up my iPod. So I ordered new equipment from Crutchfield a few weeks ago while still in Baghdad and it was waiting for me when I arrived. Last week I installed it and it sounds so much better. Very clear and sharp. I needed a bit of time to learn how to use it ... for example, it took me two days to figure out how to get the clock to display. Today, I finished the installation of an iPod interface in our Land Rover, so I'll have tunes no matter which car I'm in. Very cool!

Two days ago, I made the discovery that working out in the gym and jogging every two or three days does not prepare you in the slightest for mowing the lawn. At least not our lawn, which is a full acre and very steep. As is normal, I got into the rhythm with the mower and didn't want to stop until it was all over. By then, I'd wrenched my back somehow and I'm still walking like a robot on Motrin. Ugh!

I have not yet gone back to work in the studio. That'll come in a couple of weeks. Right now, I feel as if I have plenty of time, and I would much rather kick back for now and just enjoy the things I do have: a wonderful wife, the two sweetest dogs in the world, a great house, and all the little joys of day-to-day living.

It is so good to be home!