Greetings! Salutations! Hello!

Another Friday. Another collection of words and images delivered to your inbox. Or experienced at my regular website. Either way, thank you taking the time to read.

These Days

I had a lucky confluence of scheduling so I ended up with three days “off” in a row. Sundays are days off for regular carriers, Monday was a federal holiday, and Tuesday was my scheduled day off this week. I put off in quotation marks because it was a busy three days. We’re in the process of planning for retirement and preparing to move to a smaller apartment. I’m not elligible for retirement for a few years and we don’t intend to move this year but we’re getting ourselves as ready as we can for both. And both situations probably mean relocating. Seattle is an expensive city. We love our current apartment and we get along great with our landlord so I’m hoping we can manage to stay here until I do actually retire. A move, however, will come. When it does I want it to be simple. That means having a minimum of stuff to move.

Our stuff is mostly my stuff. Books. Magazines. Comics. Artwork. Right now we’re expecting the art to move with us. The books, magazines, and comics? Some of it will come. Most of it is being sorted for other destinations. I’m starting with the books because they’re already out on shelves and therefore easier to sort. The process of sorting the books involves a lot of detachment on my part. I love books. I’ve loved having a big library. I’ve also been expecting to need to rehome most of the library at some point. I’d rather do it myself than leave it for someone else.I took nine boxes to Half Price Books on Monday and another nine on Tuesday. Nine boxes is their limit for a drop in sale.

I’ve worked at both Half Price Books and Powells Books so I have low expectations about what I will be paid for the books. If I wanted to get the “full value” of a book I’d need to set up an ebay shop and sell it directly to a customer. That’s an investment of time that I’m not willing to put in. With the pandemic and booming online sales there’s a better chance that what I bring to HPB will find another home. When I worked at HPB back in the 20th Century they didn’t have a computerized inventory. The only way to know if a book was in the store was to look on the shelf. The only way to know if a book was in another HPB was call that store. Estimating what to pay for book was as much art as science.

Currently HPB has their entire inventory of all their books in all their stores online and searchable. I have friends who still work for the company so I know a bit about how they do things now. When one of their employees buys books their offer is generated by the computer based on inventory and previous sales. They still have to look up weird one off stuff but there’s a lot less art and guesstimating.

The closest HPB to our place is in Southcenter. When I was accepting the buy offer on Tuesday one of the employees asked if I had worked for the company. I admitted that I had – twenty years ago. He said that they still get mail with my name on. My legacy. Heh.

Besides planning for the future I’m still dealing with health issues. On Tuesday, I had an MRI done on my right knee. I’ve got an appointment this morning with my orthopedist to go over the results, talk about treatment and, hopefully, get paperwork sorted with Workman’s Comp.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is sort of fan art of the Yellow Submarine. The recent release fo the new Beatles documentary reminded me of how much I enjoyed their music in general and that movie in particular. At first I planned to draw a yellow submarine but I decided it would be more fun (and less likely to trigger copyright infringement takedown notices) to design a new suhmarine of a different color.

This design can be found on mugs in my Zazzle shop and all sorts of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

The Color of Space

The illustration below was originally done for the sixth issue of Midnight Echo, an Australian horror fiction magazine. It was published in 2011. It was a science fiction special. David Conyers, the editor of that issue, had asked me to do three illustrations to be used as placeholders throughtout the magazine. None of the images were attached to any of the selected stories. They seem to have been used to in lieu of commissioning specific illustrations for individual stories.

In my quest to make all of my art available on schtuff I’m coloring all of the Midnight Echo illustration and putting the colorized versions in my shops.

I will post the before and after versions of the other two illustrations in the next couple of weeks.

May today be a good day for you. May the days following be even better.

See you next week!