Added a few photos to the Nature photoblog.

I posted pics of the trip from Continental Divide up to the Navajo Nation Museum parking lot. The next sets of images will be the Navajo Nation Museum exhibits, and then the Navajo Nation Zoo.

I posted the photos from Albuquerque through Continental Divide along I-40. This set includes my first shots of ravens.

The next few photos will cover the scenery from Church Rock through Gallup, and then we head up into the Navajo Nation.

I watched the end of the season for Dr. Who. Is the terrible, universe-ending question something like, "Who is Dr. Who?"

I'm done uploading and tagging the photos from Day 3 of the JttW2 photo blog. That's the end of Albuquerque. Day 4 is the journey to and through Dinetah, which includes a lot of museum photos and zoo pics, so that will take a while to get through.

We covered a LOT of ground and absorbed a lot of information in a very short amount of time during this trip. Going through the photos now and looking up where we were and what we saw online helps me figure out just what we did, exactly, because it's all a blur.

How much of the information that we are exposed to in our daily lives do we actually ever consciously process? Do you understand the classes you're in now? Do you remember things you learned last year? Five years ago? Ten years ago? Do you understand all of it? Any of it? Have you gone back and tried to understand things now that you didn't understand before?

Oh yes, and on the home front, the plumbers seem to have come and filled in the tunnel under the house today while I was at work. Good timing, because it started storming this evening. I planted a few kernels of Indian (ornamental) corn out front to see if they would sprout. I may plant a few more things if the workmen are done stomping on everything, and if it keeps on trying to rain every now and then. No more of this 100 degree plus weather for DAYS on end business, thank you very much!

I've added a few pics from Albuquerque in the Journey to the West 2 blog. Cigar Indians. Who wouldn't want a little red man holding a fistful of Cubans? Wait...

I'm stopping for the night since it started storming outside (electrical storm). I'm going to go back to reading A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

I've been working on the Journey to the West 2 Photoblog (linked above). I have 14 days worth of photos from a photo-research trip last year, and I'm currently in day 3 (Roswell and Albuquerque, NM). I'm doing this photoblog first because all the photos for it are already digital and the most relevant to other things I'm working on (scripts). The other blogs are still only holding pages because a lot of the images I want to add to them need to be scanned. I also have some video I shot years ago of historical reinactors and a cowboy poet who is now deceased. Those should probably be uploaded to YouTube.

I've also been reading a lot of Roan Dahl and L'Engle books.

Well, there we go. I've done it. I moved the blog portion to the index. If you're easily confused, there are still links to the main comic, not to mention other comics and photos and whatnot.

So... thanks to an unprecedented drought here in south Texas, I have now gone through the process of having a foundation repaired (leveled) with helical piers. This explains the process a little: http://allprofr.com/methodsofrepair.php

The crew was huge, and the work was done very quickly (in about a day), though the crew left a mess. The quality of a "construction clean up" is by no means the same as a home owner's interpretation of "clean." My dog benefited by eating a sandwich someone left.

Today I'm having a plumbing leak repaired under the house. The crew for this job was very small, and they took several days to dig the tunnel before they could do the actual plumbing work today. The nice thing about a small crew is that they at least create a minimal disturbance and usually only include people that know what they are doing.

Large work crews tend to include what I presume are day laborers (picked up somewhere, possibly not entirely legally) or at least younger, less professional workers. There's always at least one or two guys who look like teenagers, and those are generally the ones that laugh, goof off, break things, and leave garbage all over the place. They are apparently oblivious to the concept that I am in here listening to them and freaking out a little when they swear or laugh too loudly. My first "real" boyfriend was one of those guys, so I have a special place in my heart to be especially annoyed and disgusted by them.

So anyways, yeah, been kinda busy. I'm looking at the website now, though, and thinking about what I want to do here. I'll tell you straight out that new comics are not going to be posted for a long while yet. The script is still in limbo, and I still need to get my shower area repaired or replaced and do a number of other house related tasks. Not to mention I have, ya know, a day job plus a couple of long term contract jobs. However, I want this site to be useful. You can see above the links to photoblogs, most of which have not been finished or even started. Hopefully I can add content to those, and they will be useful for those of you doing research projects or looking for drawing references.

I noticed this today: http://www.statemuseum.arizona.edu/exhibits/eyes_of_the_eagle/index.shtml

I'd like to incorporate that sort of thing into my site. I was working on a plant reference guide for another site, and so perhaps I will work on that again (Native uses for plants).

I have also been considering taking classes for 2D and 3D drafting and modeling, but that's a big investment in time and money, so I keep putting it off. I took classes in how to do it by hand when I was in college, but at that time AutoCAD was fairly new, and I received minimal instruction in it. I was thinking that might be extraordinarily helpful for the sort of comics and illustrations I'd like to be doing.

I downloaded several 3D programs to play with, but they have proven to be... not very intuitive. DAZ 3D Studio 4 is simply not working right on my computer, or else I have neglected to do something that is not in the instructions. Most of the instructions seem to be for version 3, which is different. So far it would seem that version 4 is junk. I will be going back and giving more attention to Blender and Google Sketch Up.

Feel free to use the forum, which I have been keeping up to date. You can post your thoughts about what you want to see in comics, tell me what you're reading now, or ask questions about Skinwalkers or whatever.

Technically this blog page ought to be the main index for this site, but I haven't adjusted that yet since so many people are still visiting specifically to see the Crowfeathers comic. Some of you are faithfully checking for updates, still, after two years...

Maybe if I can update this blog more often, it will be entertaining enough to be a proper index page.

As an aside, I smell something burning... I think the plumbers are soldering something.

There we go. The site looks a little slicker now. The only problem is that I haven't figured out how to reduce the amount of space between the title and the first post, especially with image posts. Edit: Reduced the spacing somewhat, problem was an invisible gif image. I'm still not sure where the space after that comes from.

Apparently the Crowfeathers comic page breaks in Internet Explorer, but I have no idea why, except that IE is the devil incarnate. T_T Edit: Fixed.

Some of you may have noticed that this site has been somewhat ignored for rather a long while. I had a number of things happen, all around the same time, and so my priorities shifted rather dramatically in 2009, and I no longer had time for webcomics.

I had been having trouble keeping up with the update schedule for the Crowfeathers comic, and I was not pleased at how it had evolved. The art improved over time, but the story was cancerous and bloated and weird... and so I stepped away from it. That comic will not be continued.

However, since such a large amount of time went into making it (five years), the characters have enough life to them that yes, they deserve to live on. I've been working on a different script that will hopefully turn out to be more satisfactory.  I will at some point need beta readers, but not yet. The previous story did not have a finished script, only an outline that kept growing. I do not know when I will be able to start up a new comic or if I will be able to keep any kind of schedule when I do start, considering the time involvment. I do know the script should be completed first.

I miss Lawn Darts as well, but it also had problems that made it difficult to continue. I intend to utilize certain aspects of it that I felt were more successful.

Currently, I am reorganizing this site and uploading reference photos I have taken on various trips and from events and assorted projects. I am also putting up other comics and books I have been involved with, but this site probably won't include everything I've done.

More to come.