North Olmsted Juried Arts & Crafts Show

Today I learned I was accepted into another summer show. It’s a small, first-year show, so I’m not quite sure what to expect, but I hope it will be a good one. If you’re out and about that day, I’d love it if you would stop by and say hello.

North Olmsted Juried Arts & Crafts Show
Sunday, August 12
10-6
Frostville Museum
24101 Cedar Point Rd.
Rocky River Reservation in the Cleveland Metroparks
map

Here’s hoping they’ll get some kind of publicity going for it soon; I wasn’t able to dig up anything on the web.

blogging without obligation

Today I have had the luxury of following artistic breadcrumbs across the web for much of the afternoon, discovering new inspirations and connections and filling my creative reservoir. On my journey, I found a succinct and sane little piece about blogging without obligation at tartx.com, which in part says:

Because its okay to just say what you have to say. If that makes for a long post, fine. Short post, fine. Frequent post, fine. Infrequent post, fine.

I, too, have stuggled with feeling the obligation to post without really having anything to say and have been guilty of starting many dozens of posts over the years with an apology for not posting and a promise to “do better.” No more. I have enough other stuff to stress about, so I’m happy to add the little bwo link down at the bottom of the sidebar.

the joys of catching up

I wrapped up a slew of work projects right before the wedding, and I’m not expecting the next to arrive until next week. This lull has allowed me time to catch up on other projects, a few of which have been lingering too long.

(Of course, the minute I typed that, I got a lead on a rush work project and put aside this entry to send off an inquiry about it. Funny how these things work.)

I am almost never “between projects,” even when I have no actual paying work on my desk. I always have some kind of personal project or volunteer project on my plate, and oftentimes more than a few. This week I made progress on a lot of them, along with knocking out a ton of manini to-dos that make up the project I call “life in general.”

The alumni club is looking for an automated way to handle memberships to take the load off of volunteers and streamline the process. I did a lot of research earlier in the spring and found what seems to be a viable — and free — solution. After much back-and-forth, we decided to give it a try with a small test group, and I spent most of today setting up the community website and inviting our testers to sign up.

Yesterday I spent the day completely revamping my professional website and doing the first draft of a new prospecting letter. I’m still not happy with either, but it’s more progress than I’ve made on either in the past six months. I hope to attack them again on Monday, after they’ve had the chance to stew a while.

I’m about halfway done with creating the “just the highlights” wedding photo page for those who want a taste but don’t want to slog through all three hundred professional photos and umpteen amateur photos. With luck, I’ll finish that tomorrow before I take off for the weekend.

Earlier in the week I spent a few hours at the old house sorting and packing more stuff. Those who know me from the olden days might be shocked to learn that I ended up with more books in the giveaway pile than in the save-me boxes. While nowhere near as hoardalicious as some people I know who shall remain unnamed, I was at one time known for my vast accumulation of books. I have (mostly) gotten over that compulsion to acquire and hold everything remotely interesting that crosses my path, and I now try to limit myself to those books that are truly indispensible or that I truly love. What a concept!

2007 Avon Lake Summer Market

I will post about this again when the date gets closer, but several people have asked whether or not I was doing this show again and to give them more details, so here you go:

Avon Lake Summer Market
Saturday, 28 July 2007
10-6
32770 Lake Road (at Route 83; map)

The Summer Market is a benefit for preservation and restoration of the Thomas Folger Home (note: the Folger Home website is all bells & whistles [including sound] with even less [and well-buried, at that] information about the show than I’m giving you here, but it does give a little history of the Folger Home, if you’re interested).

This is a fun, well-organized show at the lakeshore with about fifty vendors selling all kinds of great stuff: home decor, flowers and plants, baked goods, quality arts & crafts, antiques, and so on. This isn’t the same stuff you see everywhere else, and the scenery can’t be beat. I was so impressed with this show last year that I expressed my desire to be included this year less than halfway through the day last year. Hope to see you there.

sneak peek

Our photographer’s blog has a sneak peek of a few of the wedding photos: Tom Forrest.

Tom was an absolute joy to work with, a true professional who listened carefully to what we did and did not want and did a great job making everyone feel comfortable, even those who hate having their picture taken. Besides that, he’s an incredibly talented nice guy. I whole-heartedly recommend him to anyone who needs an event photographer.

rested

What a truly wonderful week and a half! All the planning and stressing about detail and choosing and running around all came together beautifully. I won’t bore everyone with the details; suffice it to say that we couldn’t have nicer, more supportive family and friends, or a better crew of wedding professionals (more about each of the latter to come when I have some photos to share that will illustrate what I mean about these talented, creative, generous, wonderful people).

Our honeymoon to Niagara Falls, Toronto, and Windsor was fun and relaxing — everything a honeymoon should be, but with miniature golf. And dinosaurs. All together.

A great way to start the summer…

wedding madness

We’re four days away. I was feeling the crunch earlier, but just now it really smacked me in the forehead: just four days. I’m excited, and happy, and probably not nearly as stressed as I should be. There’s still a huge to-do list to get done, and guests start arriving tomorrow. Tonight I’m working on finishing up the last bits of the freelance projects I need to turn in, then tomorrow I can focus on roping my visitors into helping me finish the picky stuff.

I’ll be away from here for the next ten days or so, but I look forward to sharing some stories and photos on my return.

this crazy business

Today’s New York Times has an excellent article about the unpredictability of the book business. The most interesting thing I take away from it is the complete lack of customer research in mainstream publishing, which is in part justified by the nature of the product, how no two books are the same, as much as Joe Schmoe Publishing might want to convince me that their latest offering is “just like Harry Potter.”

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep is used as an example throughout the article. I read the book and can appreciate that she is a good writer, but I really didn’t enjoy the story or the characters and found the ending depressing and unsatisfying. The article touched on the offbeat promotional campaign used to sell this book, but noted that no one is certain what exactly it was that rocketed this book to the success that it enjoyed. It then reported on the disappointing sales of Sittenfeld’s sophomore effort, The Man of My Dreams, which, for the record, I also read and found it to be ultimately disappointing, although better than Prep, in my opinion. I have to wonder how many other Prep readers, like me, were drawn in by the hype, stuck with the book hoping it would get better, and were ultimately disappointed, and, unlike me, skipped the next one.

whew. again.

It took all morning, but I think I have made the hosting switcheroo work, finally. My old host was charging too much, and their customer service was going downhill fast, so when I learned that the Dreamhost account we got for the wedding website could also host my other domains at no extra charge, and that what Dreamhost charges for hosting all of my sites, with tons of extra features, is less than the charge for just one of my other bare-bones websites at the other place, well, that’s what they call a no-brainer.

The only real downside is that I was unaware that my old hosting account was up for renewal and had very little notice, so I jumped in completely unprepared. Word to the wise: If you need to move a WordPress installation, take advantage of the Export function on your existing WP installation before updating the DNS servers and setting up the new installation. I thought simply copying the files would be enough, but it wasn’t.

I am told that there may be some “issues” (and I hate that word being used instead of “problems”) with lost e-mail until the DNS change finishes propagating, so if you send me a message and don’t get a response, you might want to resend in a day or two.

I’ve always wondered . . .

. . . and now I know: How a bobbin works. Simple but effective animation.