Back at Muscatatuck

I'm back at Muscatatuck Urban Training Center, helping to train a group of mostly military guys who are heading to Afghanistan.  We've been at it a couple of days now.  I'm in a different role than last time.  Now I'm a mentor to one of the student teams, trying to guide them along the training process.  This is a fun role: I'm directly involved with the same students every day, helping them gel as a team, and preparing them for both the upcoming events this week and for what they'll encounter downrange.  These guys are sharp, too, which makes my role easier in some respects and harder in others.  A good thing, all around.  America, you should still be proud of the people you're sending in harm's way.

When I came up here last month, I flew from Asheville to Indianapolis, and then hooked up with a couple of other trainers for the drive down to Muscatatuck.  This time, I rented a car in Asheville and drove up.  I figured that the total travel time would be about the same, driving is more fun (to me, anyway), and this would ensure that I had wheels for the entire week.  Good call.  The drive was, indeed, fun, especially the first half, which wound through the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky.  It's a beautiful area, really spectacular.  Once past the mountains, I-75 rolled along through Kentucky horse country, which was beautiful in different way.  Great drive. 

I wound up with a Nissan Altima for a rental car.  It's a pretty good machine.  The styling is kinda generic, the seats are comfortable, the interior controls easy to learn, and the sound system is strong.  The best feature is the handling, by far.  It's really impressive, with great response and great grip.  The first leg of my trip was on two-lane roads through the mountains and the Altima was a hoot to drive on those twisty roads.  On the negative side, the sound isolation could be better as there was a bit of rumbling coming out of the rear end over different road surfaces.  The steering and brakes are both way too light - Nissan should dial some of the power assistance out.  And I'm not a fan of the continuously-variable transmission (CVT).  It works fine, but I felt like it made too many choices for me, isolating me from much of the driving experience.  If Nissan would give the car a manual transmission, tweak the suspension to get some of that rumble out, tweak the exhaust to put a little rumble in, and make a few other minor changes, they'd have a killer sports sedan.

So now it's back to work.  Gotta do a few things to get ready for tomorrow.  

Life Drawing Again!

Last night, I went to my first life drawing session in two years.  Two years!  Yes, I was rusty, but that was to be expected.  We had a lovely model who provided some unexpected drama when she fainted dead away in her first long pose.  Fortunately, she was sitting on the platform when she passed out, so she didn't have far to go, but it was a little frightening for her and for us.  She rallied back and was perfectly okay the rest of the session.  So here are a couple of the sketches:

This one was done with a pen.  Drawing a soft female figure with a harsh black pen is a challenge, which is why I did it - the whole point being to loosen myself up.

This later one was done with a really crappy plastic mechanical pencil.  I like a good mechanical pencil, but this must've come from K-Mart or something.  But you run what ya brung, so there 'tis.

This 'n' That

Spring has sprung

The grass has riz

I wonder where

the flowers is?

They're buried under the snow!

So here we are, a week or so into spring, and we're getting walloped with snow.  It's almost 6" deep on the deck and still coming down.  Good day to stay home and catch up on admin and related work.

I went out and shoveled the driveway a little bit ago.  The snow wasn't too deep, but I needed some exercise, and past experience showed that driving over the snow just packs it down and makes it stay longer, usually right where you don't want it.  While I was out there, I discovered that our bear is back. Yesterday, he destroyed our bird feeders and knocked over a candle lantern on our deck.  Last night, he apparently went looking for food under the fiberglass covering for our well pump.  At least he didn't destroy the cover, he just knocked it over.  I'd rather he didn't look for food around here (besides the bird feeder, there's nothing outside, not even trash), but having bears in the vicinity is just part of living in the North Carolina countryside.

The studio is coming along well.  We've painted the walls, trim, doors, and the framework for the ceiling tiles.  The next step is the landlord's: I've asked them to replace the ceiling tiles, since the tiles are all painted yellow.  We'll see if they do; if not, I'll have to pull them down and paint them.  NOT looking forward to that task!  After that, we're going to repaint the floor.  The landlord had it painted right before I moved in, but even though we used drop cloths, the floor is still covered with drips and splats.  Anyway, I want to change the color from medium gray to a medium brown, just to warm things up a bit.  Once that's done, I'll move the remainder of my stuff from storage.  And then I get to start painting!

Meanwhile, back at home, I've done some fiddling with my computers.  I installed the newest version of iPhoto on my Mac, adjusted the settings, and now am able to use this thing called "the cloud" to some basic degree.  I can take a picture with my iPhone and, miraculously, it also appears on my Mac.  I can make an entry on my Mac's calendar and it shows up on my iPhone.  Very cool.  

One thing that was not cool about iPhoto was that, when it imported all my pictures from the old version, it deleted all the associated comments.  That really pissed me off.  It's also slower and hangs up more often.  I won't say it crashes, it just shows the "spinning wheel of death" for a while before suddenly completing the action.  Good thing I have Solitaire installed to keep me busy while I wait.  My guess is that the new software has much more code to chunk through and it just takes longer, especially on my 5-year-old laptop.  Later, I looked at the comments about iPhoto on Apple's own web site and they're horrendous.  People are complaining that their upgrades wiped out all their photos, that iPhoto crashes and burns on a regular basis, and many other complaints.  Janis has asked about upgrading her computer so that she can use the cloud, too, but I'm a bit leery of doing it now.  Just because it worked (more or less) on my computer doesn't mean it'll work on hers, too.

Not only did I "upgrade" my iPhoto, but I also upgraded to the newest version of Photoshop Elements. My old one was, like my laptop, five years old.  It worked fine, but didn't have all the newest bells and whistles.  It's going to take me a while to get moderately capable with this new version.  

That'll do for now.  My dogs are telling me that it's time to go for their ride.  It's funny: part of their daily routine is to ride along on the regular rounds to the dump, post office, grocery store, and whatever else we have to do.  If we don't get on the road by noon, they come looking for us, saying "Hey, get on the stick, time to go do your errands!"  Which is exactly what they're doing now.  So, excuse me, but I have to obey my dogs.

Studio Developments

We're still working on getting the new studio ready.  I yanked out almost all the computer cabling that lined the walls so there wouldn't be any interruptions.  Meanwhile, Janis and I (mostly Janis) have been busy painting.  If you compare this picture to the one in the last post, you'll see that the yellow walls are gone (yay!), replaced by a neutral light gray.  We're also painting the doors and trim a bright white.  The ceiling tiles, though, still have that nasty yellow on them.  I've asked the building manager for new ceiling tiles.  If that he doesn't come through, then I'll have to paint them white.  The yellow affects all the colors in the room - in fact, you can see it in the photo, as the door, walls, and other areas have a yellow tinge to them.  Imagine what that might do to a painting!  We're going to have to repaint the floor, too, even though the landlord did it right before I moved in.  We put down drop cloths but still managed to get drips, splats, and light gray footprints all over the floor.  Besides, with the gray walls, there's just too much "gray" in there.

Still, it's coming along, and I'm very happy with it.  Next month, I'll be a working artist again!

New Studio

My big news this week: I have a new studio.  It's about a 650 square-ft studio in the Riverside Business Park, which is about 3 miles NW of UNC Asheville, right on the French Broad River.  I'll have one large room for painting, drawing, stretching canvas, and life drawing sessions, and one small room that I'll use for storage.  To say I'm excited is an understatement!

The Business Park is an interesting place.  It was built as a textile mill, but closed down around 1990.  In 1995, new owners began converting it into a bunch of small offices, warehouses, industrial spaces, and artist studios.  There are a few of my artist friends out here, including Brian Mashburn and Julyan Davis.  The studio next door is used by the NC Stage Company for rehearsals.  There's a green-earth company around the corner, a kayak company downstairs, larger firms like Mountain Mobility and the Metropolitan Sewerage District, and a whole host of others.  I like the vibe of the place: it feels purposeful and friendly.  It's a place where people come to get work done.

Here are a couple of "before" pictures of my new studio space.  The previous tenant (a telemarketer) painted it a hideous yellow and ran phone and computer lines throughout.  There were ten cubicles stuffed in here.  Ack!  I can't imagine having to sit jammed in a tiny cubicle for eight hours a day, calling people who don't want to be called, having to meet a quota specified by some goon at the end of the room.  Talk about a sweatshop!  I'd rather go work in a war zone.  Oh, wait, I already did that ...

So the telemarketer environment has to go.  Janis and I are repainting the walls to a light neutral gray with white trim.  We even have to repaint the ceiling tiles, for chrissakes!  I'm yanking the phone and computer lines.  This afternoon, I hooked up my stereo system so we'll have some tunes to keep us entertained.  It'll probably take a week to get all that done, and then I can move everything over from the storage unit.  I'm thinking of having a grand opening sometime in April.

Not much longer, and I'll be able to say that I'm a working artist again.  Damn, that feels good!

A Week of Training

The training that we did last week at Muscatatuck is over.  All of our students are now in Kabul, getting the last bit of training, going through lots of boring briefings, getting issued more gear, and waking up at 2 am and not being able to get back to sleep.  Ahh, yes, do I miss those days?

The training that we did last week was immersive.  We set up scenarios where they had to meet with Afghan "governors", "line ministers", and other officials, and carry out their duties.  The roles of the Afghans were played by Afghans who, quite often, had actually been officials.  Two "judges" had actually been judges; a "public health minister" had been a high-level official doctor, and so on.  Most have been doing these training scenarios for several years, so they know the ropes.  My job was to ensure that the scenarios went off more or less as they were supposed to.  In effect, I was the director of a series of plays in which only half the actors had the script.  Which meant that the plays could, and did, go off in unintended directions.  Nothing like sitting there, seeing the scenario getting hijacked into a subject that we hadn't considered, and thinking "I wonder how this is going to turn out ..."  But as I mentioned, our Afghan role-players were experienced, and they handled the curve balls with ease.  I was quite impressed with their ability to quickly adjust to an unexpected plot twist, deal with it realistically, and smoothly manage to get the train back on track.

I must have done my job fairly well because I've been invited back for the next round.  This time I'll have a different role: I'll be a mentor for one of the student teams.  That means I'll be with them from early morning to evening, providing some advice and assistance, answering questions, and prodding them along in their decision-making.  I'm really looking forward to it.  

Muscatatuck

I'm at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in southeast Indiana.  I'm here for a week to help provide training to the next group of State Department and USAID people heading downrange to Afghanistan. This is the same training that I went through 18 months ago, just before deploying, and it is really cool to be able to give back my experiences (or pay them forward?) to those who are on watch next.

Muscatatuck (pronounced mus-CAT-a-tuck) is an interesting place.  It was originally built in the 1920's as "a home for the feeble-minded" (their words, not ours).  It consists of a lot of old yellow brick buildings arranged in a campus-like settings.  Some were dorms, others were offices, classes, work areas, a cafeteria, a hospital, and so on.  In the 70's, the hospital was closed down and eventually it was turned over to the National Guard and revamped into a training center.  Now it is a national asset.  It provides realistic training environments to all kinds of classes.  Federal civilians (like myself) go through training for Afghanistan.  SEALS and other elite military forces practice operating in an urban environment.  FEMA, various local agencies, and NGOs learn about disaster response.  There's a permanent school for troubled teens here.

This looks like a ruined parking garage.  It's not, really.  It's specially built to give students the experience of operating in a devastated area.  SEALS, for example, might practice combat operations, or emergency workers can practice getting injured people out of a collapsing structure.  This "garage" has floors that can go up and down to simulate building collapse.  The first time I saw it, though, it looked exactly like parking garages I saw in Sarajevo after the war.

This is a specially-built area to provide training for emergency workers in flood rescue.  All those flooded houses were deliberately built to look like flooded houses.

Here's one of the old 1920's-vintage buildings, along with a section that looks like a street in some third-world country.  It looks like it's in bad shape, right?  Actually, the buildings are all structurally strong.  Many of the old buildings are desolate-looking inside, with crumbling concrete steps, broken furniture, and dirt and dust everywhere.  But it provides a pretty realistic introduction for what Afghan hands will find downrange.  The debris field?  It was specially created, along with demolished cars all over the place.

My job this week is to run some of the training scenarios for the students.  They're going to be put into situations where they have to meet with Afghan officials, talk with private citizens, respond to requests for assistance, have TV cameras shoved in their faces, and get "attacked".  All these are realistic situations.  The role-players are all Afghan citizens who now live in the United States.  They're a great bunch of people.  Many are very educated and had very responsible roles in Afghanistan.  Like me, they really want to help prepare these students for life in Kabul or wherever they're going.  Most of the role-players have been doing this for a long time and are very experienced at the different scenarios.

The other trainers are a great bunch as well.  All have been downrange for anywhere from one to four years.  There are ex-military, ex-cops, a lawyer, a European, former USAID and State Department workers, a former Assistant Secretary in three agencies, graybeards, and young folk.  What really distinguishes them is that all are mission-focused.  They're committed to providing the best and most effective training possible.  Clock-watching and nit-picking is NOT a part of their vocabulary.  Whatever it takes, it will get done, without theatrics and usually without asking.

So that's my business this week.  It's been a lot of fun since I arrived here Friday.  The rest of this week looks like it'll be even more fun.  Our first real scenario is in a couple of hours.  Time to get to work!

"Ten Years" Exhibit Wrapup

I took down my retrospective exhibit "Ten Years" today from the UNCA Highsmith Gallery.  Taking a show down is quicker and easier than hanging one.  Two weeks ago, it took me about 6 hours to get everything placed, hung, lighted, and labelled, and today it took about 3 hours to get everything down, packed, and loaded into the trailer.  Still, it's hard manual labor and I'm stiff and sore.  Good thing that I'll be planted on the couch watching the Daytona 500 tomorrow.

We had a closing reception for this exhibit last night.  Between the location, time, and other activities, there wasn't a big turnout, but we had a number of people there and all had a good time.

The university staff had a new way for visitors to leave their comments.  They could write them on a small piece of paper (like a large Post-It note) and stick it on the wall by the door.  Here's what some of the visitors said:

I laughed out loud at "Pleasantville", which I imagined with the subtitle: "A Vision for America, brought to you by the NRA".  Spot on!

Rarely does an exhibit capture the complexities of war without being trite.  This one does.  Accurate, bright, and moving.

These paintings are very honest in their message; their impact was nevertheless very powerful.  Thank you.

I loved the emotions captured in the eyes of the people ... Since his pieces revolve around the people, this is a crucial thing to be able to deliver and I believe it was done well!

"You Don't Understand" filled my heart and soul with sorrow - familiar sorrow.  Is that the tragedy of the human condition?

I've always believed realistic art to be more powerful than abstract.  This exhibit proves it.  Brilliant!  Beautiful & inspiring.  Tragic & thought provoking.  Thank you!

Yeah!  Vet to Vet - you said it!

Thanks for keeping your eyes on military families.

"Lament" brought tears to my eyes.

Reality captured.  Very moving, Skip.

I think it is Buydouffl.  (Note: this came from a 5-year-old pre-schooler who was spelling "beautiful" phonetically).

I share these, not to build myself up, but to say that one of the reasons I paint is to say things that are important and can't be said any other way.  I want to connect with people.  Selling artworks is nice when it happens, but that is not why I do what I do.  And from these and other comments, both written and verbal, I know that these works have connected.  I'm a happy man.

Graffitti in the River Arts District

Yesterday, I went to meet a friend and fellow artist, Jeremy Russell, in his studio in a part of Asheville's River Arts District that I'd never been to.  It's in a rough-looking industrial section, away from the trendy and chic areas, and you pretty much have to know it's there.  I found some amazing graffitti covering the walls of the old industrial buildings.  This is really good work, beautifully done.  These buildings are most definitely not abandoned, either - they're home to artists, the Terpsicorps dance group, and some other small businesses.

Two Photographers

Two photographers have caught my eye.  They are both women, and the work they do could not be more different.  But both of them make stunning images.

A friend of mine let me know about Elizabeth D. Herman.  Elizabeth makes very powerful images of people.  Some series are portraits, some are life in the streets, some are a mixture.  She captures the soul of her subjects in a way that very, very few photographers can.  Elizabeth isn't concerned about making her subject look good, but rather, she brings out something much deeper than just a surface appearance.  

Photograph copyright Elizabeth D. Herman

I find that I respond to these images because she's doing with photography what I try to do with my drawings and paintings.  Her series "A Woman's War" focused on the impact of war on women who have fought in various ways around the world.  This is a similar theme to my "Meditation on War" series and my Iraq and Afghanistan works.  So, to me, it's wonderful to find somebody else who's concerned with the same ideas, but pursuing them in their own way. 

I've swapped a few emails with this young lady and she's doing some great things.  She won a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Bangladesh. This year, she won the Tim Hetherington Award for photojournalism (this is a Very Big Deal in the photojournalism world).  She recently returned from Bosnia, a place where I worked as part of the peacekeeping forces in 1996.  And she's only been out of college for not even three years.  So this is somebody who's going places.  Go look at her website.

The other photographer is Christy Lee Rogers.  Her work is very different: it's sensual.  It's more about color and the shapes of figures, almost as if the painter Rubens was an abstract expressionist photographer.  The figures are anonymous, bathed in light against deep black, swathed in saturated blues and reds and whites, and floating weightlessly in watery space.  Paintings and photographs that are about beauty, color, shape, and light usually bore me to tears.  These fascinate me.  Go look and see for yourself.

Photograph copyright Christy Lee Rogers

Art Exhibit at UNC Asheville

I have an exhibit of my artworks up at UNC Asheville.  "Ten Years" is a retrospective of works done in the decade since I graduated from there in 2003.  I have several paintings from the "Meditation on War" series, a couple from my political satire series, drawings and paintings from Iraq, a few of the "Faces of Afghanistan" drawings, and a couple of "model in the studio" paintings.

These walls have (left to right) Pleasantville, Portraits from Iraq, a group of drawings from Iraq and Afghanistan, and Red Dress, one of the "model in the studio" paintings.

Here's a better view of the drawings.

The other main wall has a number of paintings from the "Meditation on War" series, including Grand Re-Opening, Lament, You Don't Understand, Warrior, and Welcome to Sarajevo.  On the far wall is A Pachydermian Portrait of King George II, Pope Karl, and Lord Cheney.

The show is in the Highsmith Student Center gallery.  It'll be up for two weeks, until Feb 23rd.  There will be a closing reception on Friday evening, Feb 22nd, from 6-8 pm.  If you're in the Asheville area, it would be great to see you there.

Macs and PCs

So you know that I'm now an independent consultant/contractor and working with a larger defense contracting firm.  I work from home.  And I've had a Mac for over four years now.  As much as I love my Mac, though, it just wasn't cutting the mustard for work.  So I bought a Dell laptop with Windows 8.  Which is a bitch.  But everything will work out in the end.  And now, the rest of the story.

I've been a Mac proponent ever since I got my little Macbook.  They're high-quality items: the hardware is sturdy, the software (mostly) just works without drama, and once you get used to the Apple way of doing things, they're intuitive.  I thought my Mac would perform well for work.  After all, it can read Word documents and save in Word format, and read Excel documents and save in Excel format, and email is email, right?

No.  Yes, the Mac will read Word documents, but then it saves in Apple's own Pages format.  You have to tell it to "export" a document into Word or PDF format if you're going to send it on to your cohorts on PC's.  That leaves you with at least two versions of the same document on your computer.  And the conversion process is not entirely error-proof, as I discovered when a client complained about some hammered files.  It's the same with Excel spreadsheets, which are opened in Apple's Numbers program, and Powerpoint presentations, which are opened in Keynote.  Now Apple's programs are not bad.  Pages is a really good word processor, and Keynote is as good as Powerpoint, but Numbers is only a basic spreadsheet that is nowhere near as powerful as Excel.  And there's nothing in the Apple world to compare to Microsoft's Access database (at least, not without spending lots and lots of $$$).

The Mac's Mail system had its own issues.  My computer monitors several email accounts, and it seemed to occasionally pick an email account at random to send from.  So instead of sending from my official work email address, it would sometimes send from, say, our joint personal address.  Very embarrassing and unprofessional.

So it was clear to me that I needed a separate computer specifically for work, and that the computer had to be a PC of some sort.  We've had two Dell computers in the past, and I worked on Dells in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I went with what I knew.  I ordered a 17" Dell Inspiron laptop with Microsoft Office Professional.  It came with Windows 8 installed, rather than the older (safer?) Windows 7.  The UPS guy delivered it this past week and I've been playing with it since then.

The reviews are mixed so far.  On the positive side, I've had no more embarrassing faux pas with my email addresses.  Outlook works well - it's much more capable than the Mac's Mail, anyway, and to my eyes, it's much easier to find, sort, file, and store emails.  It's a relief to be able to work with ONE version of a Word or Excel document rather at least two.  Excel can do so much more with spreadsheets than Numbers can.  And I've got some Access database files that I can finally open up and fiddle with.

On the negative side, I've got a few things to gripe about.  For starters, this Dell computer is not built at all to the quality standards of our previous ones.  The keyboard is flimsy and the casing doesn't feel sturdy.  It is nowhere near the same class as my 4-year old Macbook.  But all the hardware works and the 17" screen is nice.  If you're looking for a sturdy computer, though, go with the more expensive Dell Latitude or a Lenovo (previously known as IBM).

Although Microsoft Office works fine, this new Windows 8 system is a kluge.  Microsoft took two good operating systems, one for the tablet and one for desktops and laptops, and jammed them together.  It's like taking a football lineman and a tennis player and making them play each other's games while tied together for a 3-legged race.  They're built to do different things and they just don't play well as one.  I had to go over to Barnes and Noble to pick up a "Windows 8 for Dummies" book (the large one, over 1,000 pages) just to get started.  Good thing I did, too, or I'd never have figured it out.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, is intuitive.

One of the annoyances of Windows 8 is that a lot of things are "apps" and open only in full-screen mode.  Things like the Reader program that opens PDF files.  Whose bright idea was that?  I want to be able to open PDF files in windows that I can resize as necessary, so that I can look at the PDF file in one window while making notes or writing emails about it in another.  Win 8 doesn't give you that option.

Another annoyance is that some programs open up as both "apps" and "programs".  Internet Explorer is one.  If you open it as an app, it's full-screen; open as a program, it's in a window.  That in itself is not a problem, except that they are really two entirely separate things.  If you save a bookmark in the app version, it doesn't save in the program version.  Dumb.

But most of this is minor.  Microsoft is betting the farm on Windows 8, so I think they'll make major improvements in Windows 8.1 and 8.2.  Meanwhile, what I've got is now taking care of business, so I'll keep it.

Lessons learned:
- If you work from home, you need separate computers for your work and personal worlds.
- Macs are great, but they don't play very well in a primarily PC business network.
- If you want a sturdy computer, don't get a Dell Inspiron.
- If you get Windows 8, get one of the many books to tell you how to use it.

Busy Times

Things have been happenin' here at our household.  As noted in my last post, I've been working in a new job.  I'm still on the steep side of the learning curve regarding what, exactly, it is that I'm supposed to be doing.  I want to do what they want me to do, better than they expect me to do it.  And I'm not quite there yet, of course, but things are going well overall.  At the same time, I don't want to do more than what they want, because I'm a part-time help, and piling up billable hours when it's not necessary is a sure way to land on their wrong side.  So, as an independent contractor, the idea is to stay aware of what's necessary, do a great job of what you're supposed to do, but don't go looking for additional work.  How would you like it if you had a plumber who was great at what he did, but he kept going around your house reworking your pipes without you asking him to do it?  I'm the plumber.

At the same time, we've been really busy around the house.  Last week, we put new carpet in the living room.  The old one was original, laid down 14 years ago, and it was the cheapest possible carpet even then.  It was long past its shelf life.  So on Sunday, we started moving stuff out of the living room and into wherever we could put it.  By the time the carpet guys got here, we looked like something on an episode of "Hoarders" ... except in the living room, which was barren.  Shameless plug: we used Pearlman Carpets from Asheville.  They had done our bedroom last year and we knew they would do a  great job.  They did.  So that afternoon, we started putting everything back in.  Took three more days to get it all done.

Guys, you'll relate to this.  The big issue for us was the electronics.  A TV, DVD player, satellite receiver, and sound system can be confusing to connect, especially when they range in age from 16 years (sound system) to 2 years (DVD).  When we disconnected everything, the resulting spaghetti pile of cables looked like we'd never get it figured out.  But we took our time, and labeled everything before it was disconnected, and it all went back together easily.  Bullet dodged.

Another challenge was moving the couch and bookcases.  We're talking heavy stuff, and J and I aren't spring chickens anymore.  Ever used those sliding pads you can get from Lowe's or Home Despot?  We got a set and what a difference it made!  Even Janis could move the couch around the living room on the old and new carpet all by herself.

Immediately after the living room, we reworked our office.  We had a desk that was just too small for two of us to work on, particularly when one of us (me) was trying to do a real job.  So we bought a new component system at Office Max that is essentially two 55" desks in an L-shaped arrangement.  J's got her side and I have mine.  It's so much better than sitting in a chair with my Macbook on my lap, using the arm of the chair as a desk to hold a notebook.

Speaking of the Macbook .... no, I'll save that for my next post ...

New Year, New Employment

Yes, it's been quite a while since I last posted.  Holiday activities don't really make for interesting blog posts since everybody is doing something more or less similar.  I'm staying away from political rants as much as possible, so all the excitement over the fiscal cliff debacle was just background noise.  Annoying noise, but very predictable these days.  I was also getting over a bad sinus infection, and that really makes for a boring blog post.  So what could I write about?  Movies?  Eh.  Not many rate a post. Weather?  You must be kidding.  The dogs?  They're my life, but you don't really care.  No, I had nothing much to write about, so rather than launch lots of random words into the blogosphere, I decided to just shut up.

But now I have something to write about.  I am employed again.  I'm working as a program and project manager with a defense contractor on a really interesting project.  We're going to help build a security installation overseas.  I've been spending my time reading lots and lots of background material, emails, documentation, websites, and so on, trying to get as smart as possible as fast as possible.  Basically, I'm going thru the same routine here that I did in Afghanistan and Iraq, and repeatedly during my Navy career: I'm thrown into a new situation where I need to be an expert on pretty much everything by sometime yesterday.  And that's a kinda fun place to be.

This new job fits me to a T.  Besides giving me the opportunity to work on a very interesting and worthwhile project, it is (for the most part) virtual.  I don't have to deploy anywhere - I can do the vast majority of work from right here.  So my commute is from my kitchen to the office down the hall.  Cool.  There will be travel occasionally, but nothing that will last very long.  I can be (and am) interrupted by my wife and dogs regularly.  The job is also part-time, or at least it will be once I'm up to speed.  That means that I'll be able to set up a studio and start painting again.  About time, too: it's been going on two years since I've had a real studio and been able to paint, and I'm going through withdrawals.  (Well, not really, but whenever I walk into an artist studio now and smell the linseed oil and solvents, I go weak in the knees).  So I'm a pretty happy man.

Speaking of studio stuff, I learned the other day that two of my paintings will hang in the Pentagon for about a year.  The Veteran Artist Program (run by a group of veterans who are artists in the DC and Baltimore area) has organized an exhibition by veteran artists.  They selected these two works:

Lament

Oil on canvas, 60"x60" 

Warrior

Oil on canvas, 60"x60"

I will have to deliver these paintings to DC personally.  They're large (5 feet by 5 feet each, meaning the figures are life-size) so they'd be really expensive to ship.  And I just don't trust shippers.  Besides, I want to see where these are going to hang.  If they're buried in the basement or something, forget it, I'll bring 'em home.

One final note on art stuff.  Next month, I will have an exhibition at UNC Asheville.  Yes, I know, I just had a show of my Afghan drawings there.  This one will be different.  In the past, they've had a group show of work by various alumni.  This year, the school decided to focus on one alumnus at a time, and the Fickle Finger of Fate pointed to me.  So I'm going to show a broad selection of paintings, prints, and drawings done since I graduated from there almost ten years ago.  (Holy crap, it doesn't seem like that long ... but it is).

So.  Things are moving along.  Feels good to be getting active again!

New Web Site

I have a new website.  I posted it last weekend and then spent five days getting the email working again.  Now it appears that everything is fully up and running and I'm pretty excited about it.

I started working on the new site months ago while I was still in Afghanistan.  The old site looked okay but was a pain in the keister to update.  The reason was that it was all done in basic html code, which required me to write every bit of coding by hand.  My friend Genie Maples told me about Weebly.com, which is a web hosting site that has a lot of pre-built templates and drag-and-drop features.  I tried messing with it and it was much easier to put pages together, change them around, add pictures, and delete stuff.  So after returning home from Afghanistan, I got serious about building a new site.  It was finished and launched last weekend.

But then came troubles with email.  When I moved the site from my previous location (WestHost) to Weebly, the associated email died.  I was on the online chat every day with the WestHost support techs trying to get everything straightened out.  The problem was that I got the domain name (skiprohde.com) through WestHost, and that meant that the email needed to stay there as well.  But the actual site was hosted at Weebly.  So some of the settings needed to point to Weebly and some to WestHost.  And to say they were very particular is an understatement.

Have you ever dealt with tech support guys?  I've always found them to be friendly, smart, over-worked, and generally dismissive of every other tech support guy's approach.  Every one of 'em knows a better way of doing things, and when you tell him what the last guy told you to do, he'll just smirk and go off in a different direction.  WestHost's tech support was pretty good, but I talked with six guys over six days and each one of them took a slightly different approach.  But, finally, one of them took the bull by the horns, went into my site, and changed the settings himself.  And got the email working.

So now everything is fully operational.  I'd appreciate it if you would take a look, bang on buttons, test the email, Facebook, and LinkedIn connections, and let me know what you think.

Ruby Sparks

We watched the movie Ruby Sparks last night and today.  That sounds a bit odd, like we watched it twice, but no.  It came in from Netflix and we slapped it into the player last night.  I watched it for a while, but it looked like a romantic comedy, so I bailed out and left Janis to watch it.  I was in our office and could hear a bit of it, and as it developed, it was clearly not a romantic comedy.  So I cheated: I googled it.  And what I found made me want to go back and see it from the beginning.

So that's what I did this afternoon.  And it was really good.

Ruby Sparks is a modern update of the ancient Greek tale of Pygmalion.  This is the tale of the artist who created a sculpture so beautiful that he fell in love with it.  The gods interceded and brought her to life.  In this film, the artist is Calvin (played by Paul Dano), who is a writer.  He creates his ideal girlfriend, Ruby Sparks (played by Zoe Kazan).  I'm not going to say more as I don't want to give the plot away, but you can go to Wikipedia or a number of other sites and get a detailed blow-by-blow description.

What I will talk about, though, are the themes.  The main one is the difference between the ideal of love and its actuality.  Ruby, being a creation of Calvin's imagination, is his ideal of what a girlfriend would be like.  This does not, however, result an ideal relationship.  Another theme is that of control.  Since Ruby is Calvin's creation, he can control what she feels, thinks, and does.  This gets into some chilling situations as he deliberately changes her behavior in order to prove his control.

I related to this second theme in an unexpected way.  It reminded me very much of the process in creating a painting.  I often start out a painting with an idea of what it should eventually be.  This is the ideal that I'm striving for.  However, as the painting develops, it takes on a life of its own.  I can direct it to some extent, but it gradually starts to exert its own demands.  The best results come when I work with the painting and let it tell me what it needs.  Jackson Pollack described this best:
When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

That's when it is working best.  When I try to direct it, to exert my will on the painting, it turns into a fight.  If the fight goes on too long, then I lose the painting.  And this same theme was explored in Ruby Sparks.

A surprise to me was Zoe Kazan.  She not only played the female lead, she also developed and wrote the script and served as executive producer.  She's the grand-daughter of Elia Kazan and a graduate of Yale University.  In other words, this young lady has the chops: an intelligent, capable, beautiful young woman who's an excellent actress, writes great scripts, and can bring a complicated Hollywood project to the screen.  Paul Dano also did an excellent job.  In real life, he's Zoe's boyfriend, and he was very believable in this role.  The movie also benefited from some high-powered talent playing supporting roles, namely Antonio Banderas, Annette Bening, and Elliot Gould.  All did an excellent job and obviously had a good time doing it.

So I highly recommend Ruby Sparks.  It's such a pleasure to find an exceptional film that has something intelligent to say, while having fun doing it.  Get it on Netflix and see what you think.

Weekend Update

As noted in my last post, I came down with a cold right at the end of our visit to our friends in Laurel.  Ten days later, I still have it, although it has finally started getting a bit better.  This has been a rough one, too, and I've felt like walking crap all week.  I've been hearing that others have had it for up to three weeks, which is NOT a positive sign.

I've spent this week working on two different projects.  One is setting up a consulting/professional services business.  That one is moving along slowly as I'm doing some research into basic questions of what, how, why, and when.  Not much to report on that one yet.

The other is the art studio business.  No, I don't have a studio, and I'm going through withdrawals because of it.  That's not the issue.  This week, I've been working on revamping my web site.  I built it years ago, writing all my own html code and revising it over the years.  It's a pain in the butt to update, though.  One of my artist friends uses Weebly, which is a web host that's really easy to work with, and I've been building an entirely new web site on it.  As part of that effort, I've been doing a lot of digging through old stuff, writings, blog posts, and more, and it's been both fun and interesting to remember the various twists and turns my art has taken over the past several years.

Now the new site is finally done.  Now I'm trying to get it activated and, unlike everything Weebly and my current web host say, that's not a simple task.  Weebly provides some simple directions that don't seem to apply to my current host.  When I contacted my current host's tech support, I got a really nice guy who obviously knows a lot.  For example, one of the things he said was:
Generally your records that you want set up are * @ and www 
So one record for *, one record for @, and the last for www. That should be a good start, and if you need any more records you add them about the same.
Generally @ can just be the IP address, * and www can be CNAMEs which are basically an alias, and those can just point to skiprohde.com.

I have no idea what that means.

So I changed my settings according to my best guess as to what Weebly and my web host said, hit "save", and am firmly convinced that my web site is going to be down for a week until some genius tech support guy comes to my aid and unscrews everything I've screwed up.

In the meantime, I'm looking for potential exhibition venues for the "Faces of Afghanistan" exhibit.  I've sent several proposals out and am looking for more, particularly in the Washington, DC, area.

For this week, my goals are to (1) get my studio website up and running and (2) move the ball down the field with the consulting business.  Exciting?  No.  But it's grunt work that has to be done.

A Week Away

We were out of town this past week.  My cousin's son got married near Annapolis last weekend.  Janis and I drove up to Annapolis to stay with most of the wedding party at the Westin Hotel.  We had a ton of stuff to take, so we went in the truck (a Nissan Frontier), which was the first time we'd used it on a road trip.  Turned out to be fairly decent on the highway: it loafed along quietly at 70-80, rode pretty well, and gave us lots of room and visibility.  Still, the drive took 10 1/2 hours, which was a couple of hours longer than we really like to be in a car.  The dogs were perfect little angels, though.  Not a complaint out of them at all.

The Westin is a pretty high-end hotel.  When you see the valets parking Ferraris, Mercedes and Porsches outside the front door, you know it'll be tony.  But when you're forking out that kind of money for a room, you'd expect to get free internet and other services, and the Westin fell short on that score.  Seemed like everything was available, but only for a price that was usually exorbitant, like $3 for a can of  Coke.  Getting nickel-and-dimed to death is annoying, particularly when it's really $5'd-to $10'd to death.

On the flip side, it was good to see family again, some of whom we hadn't seen in years.  We met the bride for the first time, and she's a very lovely, intelligent, and accomplished woman.  Logan won the lottery with this young lady.  We wandered around Annapolis a bit during the day to visit old haunts.  In the evening was the rehearsal dinner at O'Brien's and it was really outstanding.  No expense was spared and O'Brien's delivered.

The wedding was on Saturday.  Janis had her hair done during the day, while I had to make a last-minute run to Nordstrom's when I discovered that I'd left my tie at home.  Ooops!  Yes, I'm still hearing about it a week later ... and will probably hear about it for years to come.  But we got to the wedding site early anyway.  The ceremony was well-done and thankfully not too long.  Janis noticed that the bride was wearing a Vera Wang dress, and she looked like a million bucks.  

Then there was the dinner and toasts and speeches and music and dancing.  It was a great time.  Being old farts, J and I left fairly early to let the kids party.  "Kids" ... they're all in their late 20's and early 30's, hardly kids at all!

The next morning, we had breakfast with many of the wedding guests and then hit the road.  But we didn't go too far: we went to visit some old friends in Maryland for a few days.  Oz and Laura have three young kids and that made for a pretty chaotic time.  But they're great kids and it was loads of fun to see them.  I had two business meetings during the week, but other than that, it was a chaotic/relaxing visit.  Until I started coming down with a cold at the end.  Being around three Mobile Virus Incubators (MVI's, otherwise known as "kids") will do that to you.

We headed home on Thursday, out to I-81 and down through the Shenandoah Valley.  I have long thought that this is one of the most beautiful drives in the world.  Particularly on that day, as it was clear and bright for most of the trip and traffic was light.  My cold, however, hit high gear.  Sore throat, feverish, body aches, the whole bit.  Janis did a lot of the driving.  We got home after a bit less than 9 hours and I hit the rack soon afterward.

So we're home again.  I'm over the worst of the cold, thank God, but not in any kind of mood to be productive.  All I want to do is lie around and read trashy novels and doze off.  There are things that need to be done but, screw it, they'll wait.  It's nice to have that option.

Lincoln: The Movie

As mentioned in my last post, we went to see Lincoln this past weekend.  It blew me away.  I never thought that a movie about political maneuvering would be so engrossing, but it was.  The acting on all counts was superb.  Our local reviewer thought the script was a bit heavy-handed, but I certainly didn't.  Conflicting goals, weighty decisions, and a serious situation don't lend themselves to levity.

The focus of the movie is on a few weeks in early 1865.  Lincoln was just re-elected as President.  He wants to use his new political capital to push the 13th Amendment through the House of Representatives (it had already been approved by the Senate).  The amendment had the general support of most Republicans, who were the liberals of the time, and was staunchly opposed by the Democrats, who were the conservative party.  There were not enough votes safely in hand for the amendment to be approved.  At the same time, Lincoln was trying to end the war with the southern states.  These two goals were in conflict.  If the amendment was approved, Southern states would see it as an assault on their economy and would fight longer/harder.  If the war was ended before the amendment passed, then there would be little or no interest in passing the amendment.  So Lincoln's dilemma was: end the war, or pass the amendment?

Lincoln chose to pass the amendment first.  Apparently, although this was not specifically stated, he believed that the war would end within months anyway, so he had a very small window of opportunity to end slavery in the United States forever.  So he deliberately held off on peace talks with representatives of the southern states while he cajoled, pressured, bought off, and intimidated Republican and Democrat representatives into voting for the amendment.

All of this is history.  What is remarkable about the movie is how well it portrays how messy politics can be while pursuing high goals.  Daniel Day-Lewis is fabulous as Lincoln.  He looks like him, talks the way we've been told Lincoln talked, and acts the way we've been told Lincoln acted.  He is magnificent.  Sally Field is perfect as his wife Mary and gives a stunning performance.  Tommy Lee Jones did a great job as Thaddeus Stevens, and James Spader excelled as one of the President's arm-twisters.  There were no slackers in this movie.  Everybody brought their "A" game.  When you're in a Steven Spielberg movie about the greatest President ever, that's just what you do.

So after the fluff of Skyfall, it was good to see a really strong, deep, meaningful movie.  Kudos to all for creating such a landmark film.

Watching Movies

We went to our favorite movie theater yesterday to watch Skyfall, the new James Bond movie.  Going to the movies is something that I really appreciate after a year in Afghanistan.  This theater is a good multi-plex: big screen, clean and comfortable seats, huge buckets of popcorn with free refills, and a good sound system.  Quite a bit different from the Kandahar Air Field version, which was a projector, a T-wall, and whatever fold-up chair you brought!

Skyfall was a lot of fun.  It's your basic action flick.  Don't go looking for deep meanings in Bond movies.  Daniel Craig is the best Bond by far (my opinion) and he did a thoroughly creditable job.  So did Judy Dench as M.  There were lots of amazing chases, vicious fights, blowing stuff up, beautiful women, and more ammo expended that during the entire Iraq war.  What more could you ask for?

Out in the lobby, we saw a poster for the upcoming Jack Reacher movie.  We've read a bunch of the Reacher novels.  He's a former Army MP officer who is now out of the service.  He has no fixed home and wanders around the country, and wherever he goes, he finds serial killers on the loose, and kills them.  Reacher novels are the guilty pleasures you read at the beach, and they have even fewer redeeming qualities than Bond movies.  The problem with this movie, in my opinion, is the casting.  Reacher is a big guy, dark, brooding, monosyllabic.  A young Robert Mitchum would be the perfect guy for the role.  Maybe Daniel Craig with dark hair.  Instead, they cast Tom Cruise.  I mean, Tom Cruise?  Reacher is not a pretty little boy and I just don't see Cruise doing the role justice.  But what the heck, we'll go see it anyway.

Speaking of Cruise, last night we watched A Few Good Men.  This movie came out a couple of years after I had been stationed in Guantanamo Bay, so I had a special interest in it.  I think the courtroom scene with Jack Nicholson is one of the classic scenes of all moviedom.  Both actors were on the top of their form.  Much of the rest of the movie is just okay, but it's worth it for that one scene.

A couple of nights ago, we watched the new Spiderman.  This one was much better than the previous versions, in my opinion.  It stuck more closely to the original storyline, with Peter Parker as a high school kid, and in this movie, he behaved more like a teenager with serious issues.  So in addition to the great special effects and fight scenes, it had a bit of substance to it.  Good stuff.

Next weekend, we're going to go see Lincoln.  In between, we'll see what Janis has lined up with Netflix.