• Finished the year with paintings in 3 shows over 6-ish weeks. Very uneven annual spread which I will attempt to rectify next year. Should be re-showing the coyote show at a cool place TBA around March.

• Finished the last taught module of my MFA. Mid-January starts a roughly 6-month period where I come up with a thesis, research it and eventually create a public-facing outcome. Wish me luck. I might actually try and record some of that, because planning an actual event is kind of interesting?

• I just took possession of keys to get me into an artist studio building for a dedicated oil-painting space - even though I don't use white spirit, I was concerned the paint fumes in general might lead to a brain tumor. I specifically wanted to move into one for a couple reasons that aren't hypochondria related, though: 1. Find more folks to just know and learn from (and this building is in an area with a bunch of other art studio groups, too), and 2. Be able to do Open Studios events. I figure I'll commit to having a space for a year and re-evaluate if it was worth it.

• Secondary benefits to the studio is it's about a 25 minute walk from my house, which feels like an ideal little commute / getting out of the house ritual.

• I've found myself on TWO committees now.

• Committee 1 I was somewhat voluntold into by way of being the one person in the room who knows how to use Canva and Wordpress. Yes, it's the Ikebana International Northern California board for graphics and web.

• Committee 2 is a bit more fun. Coyote Town is a small group of artist ladies (now including me) facilitating a monthly First Fridays and art gallery in Bernal Heights. We just took down our third show, featuring almost entirely hyper-local artists!

• On various trips and visits with the not-Americans this year, we've been floating the idea of moving back home (or somewhere else not in the USA). Still very TBD on that front. As much as I dislike the USA, the actual business of picking up your life and starding over (again) just isn't a lot of fun. I like my friends, I like my house, I like my routine. I constantly worry that we're just boiling frogs who won't know to leave until it's too late, though, but I'm ever aware of the good fortune I have to even have the option to consider. Currently it's "we'll see how the midterms go", but there's always another "we'll see".

• I always read everyone elses weeknotes, still. I did myself a favour a couple months ago, and cleaned up my feedreader so it's almost only humans with blogs that I have to catch up on. I highly recommend a spring-clean of the RSS if you want to rekindle a small-internet vibe in your life, now that you can't just follow everyone you've ever met on a single social network feed.

• Tom: I also am a bran flake lover and I had totally forgotten that fact about myself until you brought it up, but I have to suffer raisin bran because it's hard to get it plain here. I did discover I can buy weetabix locally recently, and that has been very welcome. It's the small things.

• Earlier this year, I had a somewhat bleeding-edge (and eye-bleedingly-expensive) medical procedure for my arthritic hips (caused by congenital hip dysplasia) that involved taking goop from my abdomincal adipose fat and bone-marrow and spinning out my stem cells and some other useful cells, then reinjecting said goop into the joints of my hips and into the femural heads of the bones, with the goal of regrowing cartilage. This all happens while you're awake and it was a treat to watch and learn about. I'm not totally sure if it's worked, because the differences are subtle, but I have been able to get back to walking a good 10 miles on pavement without having to have a lie-down-day on painkillers the next day again! Unfortunately, the procedure also came with physio recommendations so now I have a gym membership and I have to lift heavy things. A true travesty.

• I watched quite a few films and have been reading a decent number of books (I have a storygraph now - fberriman). I finally ditched amazon and kindle for a kobo, and that's helped reinspire my interest in epubs in general.

• Alex and I are going to New Zealand for Christmas and NYE. Send your recommendations on a postcard.

I ended up reaching out to Tali Caspi, who is an urban ecologist who studies the coyotes that live in San Francisco. So, being completely self-interested, I hoped she would work with me to put something together so that I could learn more about the animals and get to nosey a bit more into her research.

A couple weeks ago, we put on my public event. It was a gallery that consisted of 10 paintings of the coyotes, based on photographs she'd taken of the animals during her field research, and they also incorporated data from her most recent paper, plus she gave a really fantastic educational and myth-busting talk. It was pretty cool, honestly, and I'm incredibly thankful that she was up for the collab.

We might try and show the paintings again and have another educational day this summer, once she's done turning in her PhD. so TBD on that. I'll upload the full gallery soon, and I think I'll sell them for a local wildlife rehab hospital, if anyone wants to give buy one.

We also made some booklets for the show that San Francisco Animal Care will also be distributing soon, and you can email me and ask for one, too. More details about the show and such are over here.

However.

I still need to solve these anxieties for myself:

• Feeling like time slips by too fast.
• Feeling like I'm not getting anything done.

The system that's finally worked for me is one that's private and low-effort, scrappy and ugly.

At the beginning of the year, I started a fresh daily log book. The rules are:

• No rules!
• Actually, rules: just notes, don't plan, don't think.
• No pressure to write something funny, clever or interesting, because only I'll read it^🟉.
• Write anything for every day, no matter how mundane. I existed, therefore something happened.
• Skipping a day isn't the end of the universe, but go back and fill it in anyway.

The perfect book for this turned out to be the calendar version of my already-favourite notebook form factor that I've been using for years. The Leuchtturm1917 week planner and notebook in B6+.

On the left-hand side are the days of the week. At the end of the day, I write a few words to describe what happened that day (e.g. finished annoying project. went to movies. did laundry.). The right-hand side is just a piece of lined paper, so that's a place I can either leave totally blank or use freeform. I've used the right-hand side to hold badly-thought-out ideas, unbaked to-dos, lists of things bothering me, sketches, contact info, or as a scrapbook of random bits of paper I've collected that week. The cover gets any stickers I am given.

I have filled it in for every day this year, so far, and flicking back through it is satisfying. It is effective in addressing the aforementioned anxieties in an amount that is worth continuing next year.

That's it. That's the post.

^🟉 Do you ever stop and wonder what will happen to all your stuff when you die? Like, will the person clearing out my shelves for recycling bother to stop and read my notebooks? Probably not.

The auction also includes some other pieces of art from more local artists, as well as a bunch of other fun things from all kinds of other local businesses - I've got my eye on the Craftsman and Wolves set.

BFF is also hosting their annual gala on the 19th, so if you're a local and it sounds like something up your street, check out tickets for that, too.

They’re having an opening party (that I can’t make) on the 13th July, 6pm - 10pm and then all the art will be hanging in their space until mid-September. You can buy a ticket for the party over on their eventbrite.

Recently:

• We just got back from a trip to Australia, for Web Directions Summit. Alex spoke, mostly about the lost decade and the cost of JavaScript on the web eco-system (the market for lemons). The usual.
• I had screen printed him his very own "Anti JavaScript JavaScript Club" t-shirt, to go with his stickers, and it was a hit with at least some of the attendees.
• Screenprinting is messy and laborious, so rather than do that for everyone else, we set up a drop-shipping thing for them, with the proceeds going to OWA. You can get sticker and t-shirt info at this link.
• After that, we popped over to Adelaide to visit some web folks Alex has been working with but never met. Had a very lovely time, and I got to pet wallabies! They're very soft! Also visited the natural history museum, botanical gardens and contemporary art gallery there. Very nice town, incredibly walkable, chill vibes.
• Spent some time (and a bit of Alex's) adding some new bits and bobs to the Deadpan Studio website, including RSS. I need to fiddle with it a little, but I'm glad to have it in even if it's a bit broken right now.
• I just love RSS. I think it's my favourite protocol. Everything should have an RSS feed.
• The last bit of art work I did was a flurry of activity to produce 5 small paintings to submit to an art show.
• The art show accepted them! Some of them are on display right now. I know I've already sold one.
• My paintings came down from the last show. None of them sold. But, I do now have some prints over at Wave's retail shop, and some of those have done.
• I've been testing out how it feels to say some different things to the question "What do you do?". Sometimes I say I'm semi-retired (sort of true) and do "jobs for good causes and paint a bit", sometimes I try "artist who keeps their oar in by contracting for friends" but a lot of the time I redirect with a self-deprecating joke. I'm struggling.
• Apparently /now pages are back in vogue. Just another place to feel guilty about not updating on the regular, imho. I absolutely would read yours, though, because I don't know how to keep up to date with everyone now the bird site finally died. Personal websites! Get one! Tell me about it!
• Wanna start a web ring?
• Did I mention I ❤️ RSS?

I'll have 5 paintings in the show, 4 will be viewable in the gallery itself whilst the final one will be available via their online store.

The opening reception is noon to 6pm on November 5th at 1641 Pacific (between Polk and Van Ness) San Francisco, with a second reception to coincide with their 20th anniversary party on December 3rd. The show will run through until December 23rd.

I'll sadly only be at the first event. I hope to see you there!

• I passed my 10 year anniversary in San Francisco - so I should have done a weeknotes especially for that (522 weeks, or something?).
• I really did start counting because I thought it was going to be more like 3 to 5.
• This month I had my first group art show! The Wave Collective Space has been showing my paintings for the last couple weeks and will do into next month.
• If you've been paying attention, you'll realise that technically wasn't my first show, because I did display some paintings with the Jean Henry School of Art when I was on sabbatical after Code for America broke me, but I don't really think of those paintings as art, so much as things I made to learn to oil paint. The things I put in the Wave show were art I made just to make myself happy.
• I say happy, but I continue to be too embarrased to actually speak to anyone about painting in an IRL situation. I went to a gallery show last weekend (and bought an oil painting) and the artist was there and she was this incredibly articulate and thoughtful speaker about her art (and young!) and it just blew my mind. All my role models are youth.

The exhibition will be open at Wave Collective Space, 440 Haight St, San Francisco, from August 4th to September 16th 2023.

There's an opening reception at the gallery on the 4th August between 6 - 9pm, which I'll be in attendance at. Come say hi!