# September 2022 Windows
### Wins
While the weather has been awesome I have been walking around town, sitting and sketching. I saw this classic rebuilt truck. I did a quick sketch and finished the colors from memory. I saw the truck again a few weeks later. As the owner was parking it and got out I showed him my sketch. He offered me $20 on the spot. Incidental income! There are many people who I think would pay for quick sketches of their classic cars so I plan to hit up the classic car show in town next year (early summer). Practice and cash.
In training for our hill climb (next month's update), I paced my partner on a training run of a local peak. She crushed it and is currently the second lady on Strava. Next summer she hopes to be number 1. I think this is within reach and also think she could set the female fastest known times of a few of the local trail runs. She is a badass and I love her.
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I finished up the workshop tool storage, electronics station, and woodshop area. I have to tidy everything and think more about actual use for tool placement. I have a decent amount of tools I have accumulated over the years, but they are crammed into boxes from living in apartments for so long. With so many projects going on between us, it has become hard to keep track where everything is. Scatterbrained professor style organization works well with one person... less so with two prof brains.
### Improvements
Fire season is effectively over locally with the rain we have been having, but we had to make some quick decisions and get ready to leave with go bags when a building fire moved into a forest in a nearby town. Our van is the bugout vehicle with the MTBs in the back ready to be deployed if roads are impassable. We can further subset the go bag et al. into our backpacking setup.
I found a workbench vice, grinder/sharpener, a bunch of large clamps (need some de-rusting and TLC), hand drill with ~15 bits, and some garden tools all for ~$65 from estate sales this past spring/summer. We have been borrowing a miter saw on occasion, but I am looking on craigslist/ebay to purchase one. I have a number of projects (including van interior finishing) coming up this winter that always having access to one is going to make things way easier to start.
### New Directions
I established a sit spot in my backyard. Now I need to develop a daily habit of sitting and observing nature. Outdoor time is usually for "getting things done". Gardening, chopping wood, leaf and acorn management, etc. Becoming a keen observer is part of becoming a master gardener/naturalist. Putting in the "observation miles" is the way forward.
On my yearly goals I had that I wanted to do artist deep dives. Well I have yet to do that. So I set a schedule for three artists with different art styles but really good story telling. I made a production schedule for my 32 page full issue. This month was going to be drop all other projects and focus on it (Jan 2022 thoughts), but I have too many other things that I need wrap up for that to be feasible. So convert all the thumbnails to page layouts and shapes with quick value studies for each panel. November will be penciling in the details. December for finishing line work and doing a color cover at least. Coloring takes the longest per panel for me. Anyway... we will see how it goes.
### Drawing
I did a commission for some friends. It was fun to practice their faces enough from photo reference that I could come up with a new pose for them that actually looked like them. LOTS of ERASING!
My drawing buddy and I went to Portland Comic Con. $50 for the ticket. The trip was multi-faceted. I have a longer term goal to kickstart an indie graphic novel. I wanted to see how to actually "table" an event to see how indie creators sell books. It was a bit of a mixed bag on this front. I learned alot, mainly that I do not want to do that at all and that you should have an online indie following prior to even considering the expense of a larger show. This is mainly because selling books cold seems to be much harder than if someone already is familiar with your work. The only way I would consider this as a viable option is if I had a few books that were successfully kickstarted. Then you would at least know there were enough folks out there that were interested that might also go to a con.
I also attended a social media marketing panel for indie creators and cosplay folks. Generally informative and once again reaffirming that I do not want to be spending time doing social media marketing for stuff. In case this helps some rando out there... the easy way to be a good cosplayer is to be an attractive female with DIY sexy constume versions of characters (pics, camera feeds etc.). The other way is to be 6 foot 7 inches tall and be REALLY INTO DARTH VADER. So I am sensing cosplay success follows a power law distribution for some reason... There are people that make costumes of their own characters. This could be fun. You make a book, make the costume for your character, then go as your own character to the con.
On the major plus side, my art buddy and I spent the entire weekend sketching around the city. Live drawing classes with models are kind of expensive and are non-existent in our small town. We both filled pages and pages of sketches/poses of all the shapes/sizes/costumes of con goers. We participated in a drawing competition hosted by one of the major comic publishers. There were hundreds of participants sketching for 15-20 minutes following prompts. No wins for mF here, but we did meet some cool costumed folks who let us sketch them across the table. It was generally the most fun I have had in a long time. No pressure of anyone waiting on me for 2 days... coffee... art... coffee... art... beer...books (Powell's books). I managed to spend $0 at Powell's. I just took a 2 hour book bath. Glorious bookstore. Considered getting a comic con tramp stamp as my first ink
. JK.
### Outdoor Adventure
Another month of consistent training stats despite 2 smoky weekends. I made up for them doing longer weekday runs with better air quality.
On a training run we visited this really old grove of alpine conifer trees. The ultimate teachers in sufferfesting. Wind, cold, hot, UV, snow, drought, occasional fires... slow steady growth can handle it all. We will see if they handle increasing competition as gradually higher temps push sub-alpine species up. We traveled to our hill climb (will update for October).
### Work
I presented at an AI conference (online). I had some good questions and feedback. My boss's boss was there and really liked my talk. So now I am meeting with him this upcoming week to see about options for extending my contract to continue some of the work I am doing and what other projects we can brainstorm that I would be stoked to work on that fulfill the general direction of the org. This would be ideal if I were to stay employed full time next year. Back-up would be consulting part-time and make comics the other half. Or just make comics full time. Depends on where the interests and stoke is.
I am writing a small grant to National Geographic directly for seed money to support a larger project based on ideas of my mF Nat Geo syle article. Not trout based this time, but essentially the same idea applied to other environmental questions that are more aligned with current projects. The grants there are really competitive, but this has helped me refine some ideas for that type of audience for the article I am writing. This is also showing me that it is a lot more fun to work on these types of general science audience projects with visuals than academic papers. My collaborators and I are nearly done with a draft of a research manuscript. Fortunately, I am second author on this one so it might actually get done in a reasonable amount of time. That would not be the case if I was driving. My stoke is on these more generalist projects. I met up in person with some work colleagues for pizza. I got to meet my close collaborator for the first time IRL. It is strange when you really have no sense of how people take up space and move outside of sitting in front of a screen. Everyone is essentially the same height/size on a screen. There is so much communication that happens through body language that we are generally ignorant of. It is much easier to spot when interacting with people on a screen only prior to IRL.
### Social
Drawing buddy and I organized a monthly drink and draw/sketch crawl. The idea comes from the urban sketching community. Agree to meetup at a place and time, sketch, move onto the next place. There are a number of artists in the general area (surrounding towns included). I got the nearest art store involved and made a flier. I posted a few around town. The art store posted it on their social media along with the 2 bars. I redownloaded social media apps to see how the information spread and used some of the techniques of engagement I learned at the comic con panel. This again reinforced my previous reasons for not wanting much to do with these apps. I am not sure how much my personal actions on social media helped, but there were 22 people that showed up and sketched. So, we are going to continue with once a month and see how it goes. 12 of the people I had never met before then and had seen the flier or heard about it through someone who had. Overall, a great success for a small community. With a few people we met we are going to organize a nature journaling club. This was my original goal and through social coaching from @mooretrees, I am finally here. Thanks @mooretrees!
In rural towns information spreads very quickly through word of mouth. It was fascinating to see this important lever of system intervention work in near real time for the sketch crawl and when there was a nearby fire that temporarily knocked out power. The neighbors exchanged information by just going out onto the street, clustering together, and sharing what they knew. No app necessary and in fact because the cell towers were being hammered from communications all at the same time they were temporarily useless. The immediacy of figuring out potential threats breaks down any perceived barriers in human interaction set up by politicians. In the end we mostly care about others as neighbors regardless of what stupid empty political slogans are represented on various plastic yard signs. (I am not joking on my street that there is the entire political spectrum represented).
My post-doc friend visited. We did a bunch of trail running back in the day. She is now a Prof at an Ivy. I am so glad I did not go that route. She is also questioning it even though she has been really successful.
One of my older renaissance friends in the next town (written about previously many times) is an excellent gardener and used to be an executive chef in Denver. He has given us a few tips already on our garden (few tomatoes, herbs, and young fruit trees), but we are going to lay out a more detailed food production plan for next season. Most importantly he is dialed into the micro-climates caused by the mountain topography. I looked over his house while he was out of town and got to harvest whatever from his garden that was ripe. Quite a trade because everything seems to be ripe in September! He also hosted my partner and I for a 90% garden/foraging dinner. He is good enough at fermentation to make a dry blackberry wine that does not taste terrible (I do not like fruit wines). A lot to learn.
