Goose and Max
Posted: March 12, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 CommentWe added a second dog last weekend. This is ‘Goose.’
She is part lab/part pit bull, 9 months old and currently about 60 lbs. Our other dog, Max (also a new arrival) REALLY seemed to want a friend to rough-house with. ‘Goose’ has about 30lbs on Max, but Max is a bit more agressive, so it balances out… they really love wrestling, chasing each other and play fighting over toys. She came from rough circumstances so she is still getting aclimated to her new home, but aside from some regressive behavior (puppy nipping and occassional toilet training failures), she seems very happy. I’m not sure how I feel about the name Goose but we haven’t come up with anything better, so with each passing day it seems more likely that Goose will be her name, although naming a dog after a bird seems strange. She has the labrador webbed paws; when the lake ice melts, we’ll see if Goose likes to swim. If she does, maybe that will make her name more apt.
Here is an action shot of Goose and Max wrasslin’ over a toy. I think it looks like a Francis Bacon painting. Scattered across the floor you can see the mutilated toys that Max and Goose like to fight over. They sound like a pack of angry jackals when they go at it!
Further notes from the Recovery
Posted: March 4, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
Almost three years ago I had a cataclysmic computer failure in which I lost a great number of my files. I thought I was protected because of my Windows back-up system… but that was not backing up. The only part of the loss that really bothered me was the loss of so many scans of artwork. Most of these images were organized into folders which gave the name of the project, the notes from the work, scans of the pencil sketches, scans of the artwork and then the final scans ready for layout — so there was a lot of info in there. I liked being able to look back over previous projects and being able to see what I did… sometimes using these files as reference to new work. In many cases I no longer own the original, so a good quality scan is all I have left. I tried a few recovery solutions and got some of it back but nothing was really satisfactory, so I set the hard drive aside.
Recently I tried Data Rescue for the second or third time and I was amazed at how much I got back. Perhaps the trick is to run scans several times. My folder system is completely fucked up… I am currently spending a lot of time digging through the folders of recovered materials that the recovery program generated to find my pictures and in most cases I’ll probably never be able to match all images with the publications they appeared in, but it’s a better solution than any of the others I have tried. Currently I am spending an hour or so a night digging through the folder and trying to find all of the files I want to keep. It’s a time consuming process, but it’s not really something I cna figure out how to automate.
I continue to work on my writing as time allows. I’ve always been interested in editorial non fiction in the style of Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Twain, etc. I doubt I have even a drop of the talent or vision it would take to write such work ‘for real,’ but I like to try my hand at writing in order to explore my thoughts on a given subject. I think I do this instead of writing a journal. In any case, I’ve discovered that I need to write one draft, save it and then go through and snip out all the occurances of ‘in my opinion…’ and ‘I assume’ and ‘I thought…’ and other apologetic sounding phrases. What is it about me that makes me want to apologize so much?