1. no more coffee. yerba mate instead
2. no more beer
3. no more carbs
4. no more working on sinking ship projects on time off
5. lots more learning
6. lots more art
7. work on anxiety issues
8. be a better dad
9. be a better husband
10. save more money

simple enough, right? why do I feel like I’ve been here before?

People my age are supposed to be excited for the new year. I recall being quite happy to say goodbye to 2008. I’m happy to say hello to 2012. Especially curious to see how all this Mayan prophecy junk works out.

Okay, then, 2011 in review:

1. my baby boy was born in march. he’s amazing. such a happy little guy and very easy going. I just wish he’d stop trying to bite my nose.
2. I built a patio in the summer. I dug out six inches of dirt and moved it with a wheelbarrow to the back yard, then filled it with sand and finished it off with flagstones. It was meaningful work, let me tell you.
3. Since baby boy was number three, I got neutered in August. Ouch. Since I tend to bumble through life I never thought about the impact this would have on cycling. If I had thought about it, I may have chosen to remain intact.
4. we went to disney world in september/october (2011 was blurry. I can’t remember completely.) I was surprised at how much fun the trip was. Sure, there were times when I was annoyed, but I had a great time with the kids.
5. One saturday in November, I went to REI and bought O a new bike. She loves it. It was a stretch money wise because we were very focused on paying off a bill, but it was worth it.
6. I quit drinking for about two months, hoping to inspire others around me to quit. Didn’t work.
7. I quit coffee for about two months to see if it had an impact on GERD. It helped. Then it got dark and rainy in October/November and I folded.
8. I tried to lose weight all year. apparently I didn’t try hard enough! except that time I had stomach flu and lost 8 pounds overnight.
9. Between the snip snip, the boy being born, stomach flu and general laziness, I’m 300 miles behind my cycling goal. But I’m okay with that. Sort of… I’ll hit 10,000 miles in January. Good enough.
10. Work was challenging and stressful. I’ve been coding since the middle of summer. I find it very gratifying but also frustrating since we don’t have any full time developers on staff. Not much chance for mentorship…

Sleep has been crap for one reason or another. Diaper rash, nightmares (in neither case am I referring to myelf, but the children…), dogs needing to take a dump at 2:39 am, concerns about people at work f’ing things up on the project management side of things… (some folks should not be project managers…)

I’m exhausted. Straight up bone tired.

But the good thing is I don’t feel particularly frazzled. I’m too tired to be frazzled!

“I think you would benefit from a larger surface to work on,” my drawing teacher told me. I thought she was sexy, so I bought bigger paper. The other students seemed to be able to fit their drawings of Jack the Dripper on a standard 18 by 24 sheet of newsprint. I was guided to modify the flimsy, rickety easel I was using to accommodate sheets of 24 by 36 paper.

At the time, I was obsessed with AbEx and a little bit with action painting. Professor Murchek’s comment about transformations in the Metamorphoses requiring “a certain kind of force or forcefulness” (this was over 15 years ago, I may be mangling the conversation) was still bouncing around in my head. My drawing teacher encouraged me to loosen up when drawing and throw my body into it. I kept ripping the paper. That weekend I bought heavier paper. Art started to get expensive.

After school, I had a large room to work in, so I kept up with the large paintings. Then we moved and I had no place to work. Over the years, I completely neglected my work. After renovating the basement, I set up a small space to work in.

This time I kept everything smaller. I just don’t have the space. Last weekend, I took a modest sized painting and cut out three 5 by 5 inch paintings out of it, mounted them on custom made frames (the original was on hardboard).

I think they rock.

I don’t know if there is any politics here. Whatever!

I’ve enjoyed working with textures and backgrounds on plywood panels, which I consider to have a neo-expressionist bent. Accidents abound when you are applying paint with a knife and scraping it with a squeegee until it dries and begins to peel and tear. It is an additive/subtractive process that I like to think of as “cleaning.” Wax on/wax off. Rinse and repeat. It can be meditative, but where the hell is Mr. Miyagi?

I need some guidance. And I need a subject. I’ve always struggled to find a theme, something to make a series of paintings cohesive.

Here’s an inventory of subjects I’ve explored over the last year:

• bird house/dog house/house structure
• fences/sticks
• wings/references to angels (more in the photoshop work)
• ladders
• trees
• planets
• vaguely scientific symbols like sine waves
• geometric abstractions with sci-fi aspirations
• circles, cut into the wood and circles dripped around objects
• dripped lines that are then buried and excavated

I’m always striving for a backstory or narrative in my work. Everything in the list has a symbolic meaning for me.

The themes I’m most interested in are:

• transformation
• protection
• boundaries
• harsh juxtapositions
• mortality
• networks/nodes/intersections

I also branched out into different color palettes last year, working with whites, tans, greys. I used to make everything brown, which got a little boring. I also did quite a few blue paintings.

Now I’m struggling for subject matter. New symbols. Does it matter? Do I need to find new subjects or should I continue to explore these images and themes?

Note: comments appreciated!  

On the Road…

Last weekend I attended WordCamp Philly. It was a good excuse to take the kids to Philly and torture them with some history. Sunday also happened to be my birthday, but I love WordPress so much I went anyway.

We packed the kids into our Mazda 5 (the mini minivan with no room for luggage) like sardines on Friday and drove to the Please Touch Museum for 3 hours of fun time. The ride up was uneventful although B cried for most of it. By the time we got to there, I felt like Alice:

Jen argued with me about paying for parking versus parking on the street. I chose to pay because I’d had enough with cars and constant chatter and wanted to jump out the window.

The Please Touch Museum was awesome. The Alice in Wonderland exhibit rocked. They also had that piano from the movie Big with Tom Hanks, but it has seen better days. The museum is housed in the Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, which was the location of the United States Centennial Exposition.

My favorite part was in the basement where they had this photo:

Who doesn’t love a little total abstinence?

When we were finished with that, we attempted to drive to the hotel. It seemed simple enough. Something like three lefts and a couple rights and bam we’d be there. Unfortunately, we left the museum right at rush hour and took a slight detour by accident and ended up in Camden, NJ. This didn’t go over well with O, who was feeling carsick and had a headache.

The WordCamp Philly folks recommended the Penn’s Landing Comfort Inn, which was about 200 feet from the Ben Franklin Bridge, which made for a noisy night. A train runs over the bridge 24 hours a day. When we got checked in, the girls decided that they were too exhausted to go back out for dinner, so we ended up ordering cheesesteaks from some random delivery joint.

The girls fell asleep despite the racket. I woke up every two hours, but I’m not sure if that was the train or because N was sharing my bed and constantly edging me out…

WordCamp

On Saturday, I went to Wordcamp. Read my other post about that. It’s pretty dry… I don’t know what the kids did, but it probably involved history.

City Tavern

Saturday night we went to City Tavern. We didn’t have a reservation and they had a large party upstairs, so we were lucky to get a table by the bar. I got the ale sampler, which included a nice pale ale with sprucy goodness. The meal was rushed because B was fussing and the girls were exhausted after a day of touring historic Philly. The food was pretty yummy and we had a nice walk back to the hotel. Well, not really, the girls were complaining most of the time, but we made it.

Sunday

Sunday was my birthday and we got up pretty early even with the daylight savings time change. The girls gave me a Domo notebook and some crazy keychains from Atomic Books along with a gift card to Atomic. We had breakfast and checked out of the hotel. I was happy to bid that insanely noisy room goodbye. Then off to The Franklin Institute for almost five hours of science kookiness. Here’s a pic of the hall where they have the giant statue of Franklin with a crazy video/laser/light/I-don’t-know-how-they-do-it show.

Lot’s of interactive exhibits, including a real train engine inside the building that goes back and forth. Sucker must’ve been a hundred feet long!

On the way out of the city (or on the way to the FI, can’t remember), we saw this mural of Noam Chomsky, inventor of the cheesesteak:

The first two sessions of the conference that I attended were a little disappointing. I should have opted for something in the design track. The third session was by Mike Toppa and was about clean code, something I’ve been struggling with at work. Since I’m not new to coding, the concepts were are all too familiar. What I think happens for me is that when I get something working, I’m afraid to go back and clean it up. Refactoring ends up being a pipe dream since everything is measured in terms of time to completion. The implicit mantra is “if it works, it’s done”. I consider this an ill that is fostered by software development driven purely for profit. Or, maybe a better way to phrase it is rushing a product to market. “Release early and often” mutates into “release and hope it doesn’t break.” The only way to improve is to study in my free time and work on writing better, cleaner code then. As my confidence improves, I can bring these practices into the work world.

In the afternoon, Sam Napolitano gave an awesome talk on HTML5. I used HTML5 on this blog when I re-skinned it. At the time I was worried that I was using asides incorrectly. Sam’s talk assured me that I used them reasonably well. Sam was an energetic and funny speaker. Chris Cochran gave a great talk on responsive design. Brian Richards gave a nice demo of StartBox.

The only session that I thought would be really informative turned out to be a disappointment. Andrew Nacin is a lead WordPress developer. He talked about meta capabilities and went too fast through his material. First he warned the group in the classroom that the topic was very developer-oriented. Then he informed us that if we weren’t ready for the topic he’d “carry us” through. Frankly, I found his initial tone to be insulting. Maybe that shut me down. I tried to follow him, but I was mostly lost. The main talk was over in 15 minutes then he took questions on the future of wordpress.

Overall, I thought the conference was light on developer topics. I’ve been doing a lot of work with custom post types, extending wordpress to consume web services, and theme options. Maybe these topics are too simplistic for conferences (?) I was hoping for more sessions like Toppa’s about best practices when writing a plugin.