In Representing Myself, I Have a Fool for an Artist

No Carey.  The neighbors haven't caught that cat yet, though, so there's still hope it's her.

My thoughts are turning toward OryCon.  I've been invited to be a panelist again (yay!).  I'm just hoping that by then I'll be able to officially announce which issue of a certain magazine a certain story of mine will be appearing in.  It's a very, very nice magazine, and I'm excited to be in it, but I haven't gotten the contract yet, so it's best that I muffle my enthusiasm for now.

I will have some sort of card or bookmark or something to hand out, though, which I have to design.  It's funny how I can get a job to do a book cover or a promotional poster and I just sit down and do it, but I freeze up when it's my own stuff.  Human brains can be really dumb sometimes.

I don't think it has very much to do with looking foolish, though it feels that way.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that when I'm doing something for someone else, I'm aware that if they don't like it or need changes, I just do them and I feel that I've satisfied their requirements.  When I'm working for myself, I have no one to really provide outside opinions or judgements that has a stake in the result.  I can ask opinions of friends, but other than their kind enthusiasm and hopes for my success, they don't have a dog in the fight, per se.  They can't really look at it in terms of whether it represents my work well, if that makes sense.  I also fear that they must measure their response in such a way that they can be helpful without bruising my feelings, and each one of them estimates my skin thickness and aptness to bruise differently.

Or maybe all this mental contortionist silliness is just another form of self-sabotage.

Anyway, that's my latest struggle.  The good news is that I have deadlines now, and I do really well with deadlines.

The first board

The Sea of Unconditional Love (aka the barbarians, our outside dogs) had dug out a corner post for our porch at one point, so that the front porch sank about a foot on one side.  Normally this would cause blue flames to shoot out of my eyes, etc. but as the porch had been in iffy shape when we bought the house eight years ago and time hasn't improved on it, I expected we'd just take the thing apart, salvage what we could for various projects, and eventually build a new, smaller one on whatever bones remained (after jacking and resetting that corner, or possibly building from stone, our original plan waaaay back when we first saw it would need to be replaced sooner rather than later.)

Procrastination being what it is, I've been working on other things.  I cringed every time I stepped out to water my plants, because this set my weight on some particularly soft boards, and I knew eventually I would just fall right through.  

Well, never fear no more, because about 12:45 am today, Beast decided to get stuck under there.  I'm not sure how he managed it.  I suspect, judging by the hair, he got stuck by an exposed nail (this porch was never put together particularly well in the first place) and couldn't get out.  So I grabbed a crowbar and rescued him.  The first board I lifted did the trick and he escaped.

So now the first board has been moved.  I'm not replacing it.  Nope, we'll just keep on a'goin'.  

We may end up building this SOB from stone anyway.  We can gather stone for free.  Wood is expensive.  We'll still need to buy mortar, but hopefully that won't be as bad as decking materials.

If it's not one thing it's another.  I don't know why.  As we all know, there's never anything to do around here!

Procrastination Bites

I'm hitting the final stages of the office tiling.  This is where I expected to hit a few snags, and I did.  

One really bad thing about procrastinating on finishing a job like, for example, knitting a sweater, is that if you pick that project back up and find you don't have enough yarn--good luck finding the same dye lot.  And so it is with tiling.  I had to match grout and tile.  The grout, eh, linen is a common color and even if it's a tiny bit off, as the floor ages a minor color difference will not show.  And if it's really annoying, I can probably find something that will stain or otherwise color it.  Tile ... that's more difficult.

They'd just put the bullnose in the size and color I needed (3x10, almond romance) on clearance.  In July.  All gone.  All of it.  But, they had some lovely 10x12, in the same color, with a pretty emblem in the center, still available (also on clearance.)  Clearance doesn't mean savings, alas.  It was pretty expensive compared to the 3x10.  Not only that, but I have to bevel a bullnose onto the tile and then paint the bevel the correct color.  I'm hoping to find some enamel that will work on ceramic and be pretty durable.  The only bonus to this is that I'll have twenty really neat 6x10 tile with emblems that I plan to use on an outdoor project in concert with the remaining twelve whole floor tiles I have left over and some tile we inherited from a family member downsizing into a new house.  

The floor tile I bought plenty of when I initially measured the office project.  Why I didn't buy another box of bullnose, I'll never know.  Oh wait, I remember now.  I thought they were kind of expensive and I wanted to wait until the next paycheck, and besides, I wanted to re-measure the remaining wall to get a close estimate of how many I'd need.  

I'm reminding myself not to do that sort of foolish thinking ever again.  I saved zilcho dollars and cost myself probably $20 over what I would have paid for the right tile.  Ugh!

I've never seen a zucchini like this before.  Ooo la la, baby!  It's probably a pretty common mutation, but it's my first one so I think it's neat.

I fed both of these to the goats.  They're oversized.  My zucchini plants are producing big fruit this year--10-12" still has tiny, immature seeds--but these are just a little too big to be really yummy.

The goats liked them, though.