Welcome to the Skook Works in Progress newsletter issue number 22. I’ll be chatting about personal events upfront with pictures and discussion thereof to follow.
Thank you for dropping by!
These Days …
This week has been my scheduled vacation. At the USPS we put in for vacation time during the first weeks of January. Whether or not we get it depends on the seniority of the people vying for each available week. I’ve generally avoided bidding on weeks in “prime time” – June, July, August and December – so I’ve always gotten the time I’ve asked for.
Saturday was my last day at work. I did my best to clean up the route for whoever fills in during my absence. I pulled the mail from a couple of boxes of customers that I’m pretty sure have moved. They didn’t put in change of address notices but, given that they hadn’t collected their mail in at least six weeks, it seemed safe to remove it. The general procedure for pulling mail is to leave a note saying that we’ll be holding it at the post office for ten days. I don’t do this. I figure that if someone hasn’t picked up their mail in 45 days keeping it around for another ten is just cluttering things up in an already cramped space. I forward all the first class mail and periodicals and send the rest for processing.
Other than that bit of tidying the day was same-old, same-old. Overcast but not cold. Lots of large parcels that I couldn’t carry in my satchel so I had to park at the actual delivery address and lug them to the door individually. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories about the pandemic. The one I invented says that Jeff Bezos spread covid to create lockdowns so people had to shop online. Mail volumes may have dropped in the last year but the parcel volumes (and sizes) continue to be high. Now that a lot of folks have gotten used to shopping for things online I don’t expect the volumes to go down. Why spend an hour going to store when you can order something in five minutes and then do something fun?
Sunday was my birthday. I would honestly forget that it was my birthday if my friends and family didn’t remind me. I stopped giving the date attention after I turned 25. I prefer to just be over 25. My exact age is always nebulous to me. I have to do math every time someone requires me to tell them my age. In the morning Sarah and I went out for coffee and breakfast sandwiches at Starbucks. The drive-thru was backed up into the street. Sarah checked her phone and discovered that one of our old regular breakfast places was open. We had our first in-restaurant meal in over a year. The food was as good as ever. The staff remembered us and asked after the friends who had regularly joined us before the plague descended.
Once we got back home I spent most of the day working on art.
Monday – more art with breaks to cook meals and a long phone conversation with my brother.
Tuesday – art and errands. The new housemate had a load of her stuff brought in from her old apartment. Sarah and one of our neighbors have been working to rearrange our stuff to get rid of that which does not spark joy and make room for … more sfuff.
Wednesday – art and making meals for me. More organizing for Sarah.
Thursday – the new housemate and I went down to her old place in Tacoma so she could do a walk-through with her property managers. I emptied her fridge, tossed out some trash and packed up the last of her stuff that’s coming north.
Today – more art for me, hopefully.
Indistinguishable from Magic
Stardust the Superwizard is, ultimately, a librarian. He lives in a technological/informational archive located on Venus’ moon.
The archive is one of many scattered across the universe. They are all connected via multi/interdimensional gateways and platforms in such a way that, to the casual visitor, they appear to be one vast, nearly infinite collection. The archives were established by an intelligent species that has mastered time. They are intensely curious and are continually adding to the archives.
Stardust himself is the enhanced clone of the Soviet cosmonaut Major Tomas Zhigalev. Zhigalev and his ship disappeared soon after escaping the Earth’s orbit in 1962. Zhigalev was intercepted by the archive and his mind was transfered to the Stardust clone. His original body is stored in the archive. The USSR covered up all record of Zhigalev’s mission.
Stardust is just one of many beings who maintain and protect the archive. Because it exist outside of consensus space and time he is able to travel through the universe to any point he finds interesting. He has a fierce sense of justice and uses the archives’ resources to twart and punish evil doers.
As a human Zhigalev was reserved, stoic and asocial. As Stardust his personality is much the same. Yet he still feels attachment to the Earth and its inhabitants. He views protecting the solar system as one of his duties.
When he isn’t adventuring, he is investigating the archive, learning, learning, learning.
Shop Talk
As I work on new images I’m continuing to edit and expand the designs I’ve already posted to my Redbubble store. I’ve made more changes to some of the illustrations than I originally intended. This image of the fellow contemplating the stars, for instance …
I like the original but when I tried expand the white starfield along with the rest of the illustration it kept looking wrong. I couldn’t seem to find the right photoshop brush. The white in original is lively. To me, it gives the image the feel of watching fireworks. The revised version is relaxing.
The mutants below went from posing menacingly in a desert landscape …
To posing menacingly in a bigger desert landscape. Not a lot of changes needed to expand this one.
I’d already revised “Red Right Hand” (inspired by the Nick Cave song) before I posted it to Redbubble. My big sister had ordered a greeting card printing of it and showed me the result. The result was dark. Too many details got lost.
I lightened the color palette when I expanded the image. The current version feels drier, more weather beaten.
Until …
I hope that your life is only as chaotic as you can enjoy. I hope you have time to chill out when things get too wild. I appreciate you taking the time to stop by.
See you next week!
