… Including places where you normally find only criminals. Once a month, a cardboard box from Colorado appears at the office of a conservative Christian lawmaker in central Georgia, filled with derivatives of marijuana, to be distributed around the state in the shadows of the law. Operating in ways he hopes will avoid felony charges of drug trafficking, state Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, is taking matters into his own hands. He’s shepherding cannabis oil to hundreds of sick people who are now allowed by the state to possess marijuana, but have no legal way of obtaining it. Nearly all the…
19 CommentsMonth: April 2017
Monday. That’s the day the long-awaited (and long-dreaded) foundation project commences. The Wandering Monk and I had hoped to start in April, but it’s been far too cold and wet. It’s still cold, but we’re headed into a drier period, so here we go. This weekend I’m schlepping the last movable stuff out of the back end of the house. We’re going to be tearing up sections of the floor, then replacing beams and jacking the house up from within, so it all has to go. (There is simply not enough ground clearance for anyone but a masochist or a…
11 CommentsOoooh. Remind me never to try to draw a jowly dog again! Not unless I have a much better reference photo. I was in over my head and struggled with this one, start to finish. It’s my neighbor’s birthday tomorrow and my neighbor is a Rottweiler fan. Fortunately she’s also refreshingly frank. So when I give it to her with the request, “Tell me if it’s complete crap and you don’t want it,” she’ll do me the favor of being honest rather than painfully polite. If she says she likes it and wants it, she’ll mean it. (I like that…
7 CommentsThere was a time — long ago now — when this theoretical situation would have been an interesting dilemma worth holding a long discussion over: You’re in a position where doing a good deed involves breaking a multitude of laws. What do you do? Back in the day, “breaking a multitude of laws” would likely have meant you were breaking laws against doing harm. So you’d have to balance not only possible penalties of lawbreaking but also the chance of doing bad to one party while trying to do good elsewhere. Now? It’s not even worth talking about. Laws are…
21 CommentsI’m pretty excited about taking that icon-painting workshop this summer. I’ve been looking at more icons in the last month or two than I’ve ever gazed upon in my whole life, marveling at how they can be so beautiful and so ugly at the same time. I’ve been doing a little reading, too. But not so much that I’ll go into the class thinking I Know A Lot of Stuff when I actually don’t. I’ve also avoided trying to paint an icon before learning how. But I ran into this beauty the other day and had to study it in…
4 CommentsThis is a lesson I’m trying to learn. So far, without much success. I’m not talking about a life lesson. In life, it’s often “When you don’t know what to do next, fake it till you make it.” Works surprisingly well, that. Maybe not in nuclear physics or brain surgery. But in plenty of other things. Still, when I read that “STOP” advice in a how-to-do-art book, I laughed and knew it was aimed right at me. In art, my pattern when something’s not right and I don’t quite understand what to do about it is to try to fix…
15 CommentsI trust all you good people celebrated Earth Day yesterday by … oh, cooling down the globe, commanding the oceans not to rise, singing hosannas to Al Gore, flinging your body between cute baby seals and ugly baby-seal hunters, or perhaps gleefully beheading litterers or people who leave too many lights on. (Which, BTW, I understand Al Gore has often done. Not going around gleefully beheading. But leaving LOTS of lights on.) On the other hand, if you’re like most Earth Day celebrants, you probably just spent the day being publicly self-righteous and/or performing useless token gestures to show how…
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