Monthly Archives: March 2022

Skook WiP #65

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Sarah and I usually watch movies and series together while we eat dinner (after work) or as hangout time (on my days off). For those viewings we try to find something that engages us both. When I’m working on art she will watch something that primarily interests her. Since we’re in the same room I end up listening to the show. She was recently rewatching Downton Abby and I caught a bit of dialogue between a couple of the upper class women. They were discussing the suitability of a suitor, a man who worked(!) as a lawyer(!). He said something about having weekends to do things around the estate. One of the women asked the other, “What’s a weekend?”

It’s amazing what can be said about a culture and about a character’s place in the culture with just a few words.

Given that you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve got a weekend coming up. Hopefully you’ll be able to spend some of it doing things that give you joy and satisfaction.

These Days

Today is the fifth day of my six day Long Week. Mail and, especially, the parcels have/has been lighter than in recent months. Recent years actually. That’s given me time to think about and start cleanin up my route. I’m emptying out the mailboxes that haven’t been collected in weeks and putting VACANT cards in them. Ideally this means that whoever fills in for me on my days off will not deliver any more mail to that box. Sometimes it works. Much of the time mail gets delivered anyway and I have to pull out it the next time I’m working.

I’m also updating names in the cluster box units so a substitute carrier can know which box to deliver to if the address on the letter doesn’t have the unit number. I haven’t done that in far too long.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a Horned King design. At least, that’s what I think it is. You may have your own story about it.

Available on a mug in my Zazzle store.
Available on all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

And Also …

I’ve added another design to the collection of blank greeting cards in my Zazzle store. I sometimes wonder if these cards would be more salable if they had words in them and were tied to specific occasions. I like blank greeting cards myself but i can understand how having something already written in a card can make it more appealing to a lot of folks. A few printed words can act as a writing prompt for a more personal message. I’ll have to try that with some of the cards and see if that makes a difference.

That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading. I hope life in your part of the universe is going well.

See you next week!

Skook WiP #64

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Good morning! Have you had your coffee yet? Perhaps you prefer tea? Either is good.

Drink up and read on!

These Days

Before I started writing this morning I cleaned 302 spam comments out of my comment queue. Most of them were attempts to get injected onto the Morgo the Mighty page. I glance at every comment before I mark it for deletion. I’m willing to consider the possibility that a comment is actually attempt to communicate rather than just another toxic bot infestation. No luck today.

At the day job I got to drive my truck, that is, the truck assigned to my route all week. After weeks of needing to borrow trucks from other routes and having to hunt for the keys for said trucks because the carriers don’t put the keys in the slots by the timeclock where they belong, it was relaxing to be able to just grab my key and start up a familiar truck. I’m also a little surprised to find out that I’m kind of a neat freak compared to many of my fellow carriers. I don’t leave personal items, rubber bands, trash or much of anything in the truck at the end of the day. While I do consider the vehicle to be “my truck” I want it to be clean and ready if someone else needs to use it.

There’s a layer of grime on the dashboard that came with truck when I took over the route six years ago. I made a cursory attempt to clean it then. I only made a slight dent. I’m now considering applying soap and water to it next week. There’s nothing like having to deal with other folks’ messes to inspire me to make my environment even neater.

At home, I’m sorting books. I work at it until I reach the nine box limit that Half Price Books will accept. I shift books around on the shelves for later consideration. The books I’m currently thinking I’ll be keeping for the long term I move to the set of free standing bookshelves that I expect will accompany us to wherever we go whenever we go. There are stacks of magazines and comics on the top of the built in bookshelves. I’ve begun moving those down to lower shelves.

I have one copy of Misspent Youths #1. I have many copies of issues 2-5. What do I do with them? Many copies of Last Dangerous Christmas. A couple of copies of GLYPH #1. Multiple copies of later issues of both the magazine and the tabloid version. What do I do with them?

Once I’ve gotten the books managed I’ve got comics to sort. Half Price Books sells back issues of comics but I doubt if it’s the best place to take them. HPB has a computerized inventory of their books and they have a computerized set up for making offers on books brought for sale. Comics? Nope. I’ve checked their website. They do offer back issues but finding what they have available is tricky. I know someone who works for the company and he tells me that, while they do buy comics, it’s best to bring them in when there’s a buyer available who knows comics.

Mugshots

Today’s process GIF is of a cat who knows where it’s at. All the its.

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

The happy fellow above is the latest addition to my collection of greeting card designs in my Zazzle store.

That’s it for this week. Thank you so much reading. I hope you didn’t spill that drink on anything important.

See you next time!

Skook WiP #63

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Huzzah!

You’re back! I’m back! Let’s get started.

These Days …

My postal truck broke down back at the beginning of November. It sat in the station’s parking lot for about a month before vehicle maintenance took it away. I got injured in early December and spent most of the month at home so I didn’t really notice that the truck didn’t come back. Once I was working again I noticed. And noticed. Every day I’d come in to work, check the board to see which routes were being broken up that day and then go looking for the keys to the truck assigned to one of those routes. I’d ask the supervisors if they could check on my vehicle’s status. They’d promise to do so. And maybe they would try. More likely the many other things that would immediately demand their attention would push my request out of their mind.

On Tuesday, mostly as a joke, I filled out a repair ticket for my vehicle. In the box asking for a description of the problem I wrote “Vehicle missing for four months.” Perhaps the incantation created by properly filled out paperwork had an effect because I got a call from the supervisor later in the day. He’d found my truck. Vehicle maintenance had farmed out replacing the engine to the Pep Boys. And then … forgot about it. The vehicle had been sitting at a Pep Boys somewhere for weeks.

It was sitting in the station parking lot when I finished my route.

Yay!

Except.

On Wednesday, when I went to check the vehicle and make sure all its systems worked, I discovered that the cargo bay was half filled with a huge plastic shipping container. A huge, very heavy, shipping container. Whoever had returned the truck had failed to remove the old engine from the back of the truck. They might not even have noticed it was there.

Fortunately our parcel volumes have been light of late so I was able to get all my deliveries into the truck. Unfortunately, halfway through the day the right front tire started losing air. Standard procedure would be for me to call a supervisor and have another truck brought out to me. That sort of thing usually meant a half an hour wait when we were properly staffed. These days? I just drove the truck back to the station, filled out a new repair ticket, and switched out the mail into one of the currently unused vehicles sitting in the lot. By the time I was done the tire was completely flat.

I had Thursday off.

Today I’ll go into work and maybe I’ll have a vehicle that works with a cargo bay that isn’t being used to store an engine block.

Maybe.

Mugshots

This week’s mug design process GIF is a sort of Balinese demon mask as interpretted by Jack Kirby while channelling Phillipe Druillet. Kinda.

You can find this happy face on a mug in my Zazzle store and all sorts of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Also

My plan is to do a new mug design a weekfor the year – 52 for 2022. That won’t take up all my time. I’m also doing a variety of more general and more specific designs. The one bellow is one of my Happy Monster blank greeting cards.

It’s currently available only in my Zazzle store.

I hope your week goes well. If you have a weekend, I hope it is as relazing or as exciting as you need it to be. If weekends are not part of your schedule, I hope you find joy in whatever you’re spending your time.

Thank you for letting me visit. See you next week!

Skook WiP #62

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Greetings!

Today is not the Apocalypse. It might feel like it but it’s not. At least, it’s not the one pop culture keeps insisting that it is.

From Wikipedia:
Apocalypse has come to be used popularly as a synonym for catastrophe, but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation.[7] It has been defined by John J Collins as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, in that it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”[15] Collins later refined his definition by adding that apocalypse “is intended to interpret present, earthly circumstances in light of the supernatural world and of the future, and to influence both the understanding and the behaviour of the audience by means of divine authority.”[15]

The divine sends messages. Whether we get them depends on whether we’re tuned to listen.

These Days ...

Wake up around 3 am. Drink two cups of coffee while internet scrolling/uploading designs/completing designs in Photoshop/doing marketing stuff. Wake up the house. Make and eat breakfast. Get into the uniform. Drive to work. Sort mail. Deliver mail. Have lunch. Go back to delivering mail. Return to the station and sort the undeliverable mail. Shop on the way home. Have dinner while watching something entertaining. Work on art. Get ready for bed. Sleep.

Repeat.

There are variations each day. I work on different designs. We have different meals. On days off I cook or spend more time on art or we run errands together. There are doctor visits and trips to Costco and. lately, trips to sell books at Half Price Books.

The routine could be comforting. It could be boring. It’s both. Of course. Life is rarely just one thing or another.

I think about Apocalypses regularly because our culture seems to be obsessed with them. Mostly it seems to be obsessed with the end of the world version. Pop culture has been feeding us different varieties of doom for decades. At least one of our dominant religions thrives on reminding us that we are in the End Times. The pandemic continues. Russia invades Ukraine. The song says, “No one can convince me we aren’t gluttons for our doom”.

But …

People still have children. People still make plans. Start businesses. Go out in the sun. Fall in love. Engage in life as if life will go on. That’s one of the harder things for me pay attention to when I’m feeling/thinking like I’m stuck. Life is not black and white, either/or, good/bad. It’s a mix. It’s a continuum. Once upon a time, realizing this was an epiphany. Now it’s something of which I have to remind myself.

Stories of doom and hubris and failure and survival are valuable. They’re also easy. A story, we are told, requires conflict. It’s not a story unless someone is disagreeing with someone else. Nonsense. I do think we need more stories of cooperation and caring and carrying on. We model ourselves on what we can see. We follow the examples we are shown. Or we resist them. Or, most often, we do a little of both.

What am I talking about?

Mostly I’m reminding myself, again, that life is complicated. The thoughts that my brain feeds my consciousness are only as good as the inputs my brain is getting. If most of what l I’m seeing is tedious doom then most of my thoughts will circle around that doom. Different perspectives are needed. It might be time to see the world as a cat does. Or a bird. Or a tree. Or as another human does. Preferable a human who isn’t stuck in the same spiral I am.

The divine sends messages. “We are complicated. Our lessons are complicated. Be at peace with complication. Remember to dance.”

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features two things everyone loves – pirates and pandas. I’d like to think that I was the first person to think of combining these two flavors but, after I’d finished this design I took a look online and, wow, there are a lot of other versions of the idea. I do like my version the best.

This design is available on mugs in my Zazzle store and all sort of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Colors Out of Space

Below are the second and third illustrations I did as page fillers for Midnight Echo #6. The black and white version is what appeared in the magazine. The color version are new and can found on schtuff in my stores.

That’s it for this week.

May your apocalypse be epiphany.

May you find joy in complexity.

Remember to dance.