Should we wear our hair up or down?

From the self congratulation dept:

I just found out today that Britton and I are going to get to be photo subjects in a new coffeetable book that a photographer from here in the Northwest is putting out. It’s called “Rose City Fixed” and it’s a book of photographs of people who ride fixed gear bikes posing with their bikes and giving their stories about what their bikes mean to them. The same photographer has already done a book called Rain City Fixed about Seattle fixed gear riders which was well received, so this is kind of a neat opportunity. I found out that he was looking for subjects from another cycling blog that I read and sent him an email explaining how we met because of our bikes and he thought that our story would be a good addition to his book. We are kinda nerds like that, so we are pretty excited about the whole deal.

Best cat photo ever.

Let me clear my throat . . .

In the more disgusting realm of personal updates, I have been horking (is that a word?) up truly impressive amounts of mucus on a regular basis for about a week now. While I am pretty much over this current bout of illness, I’m still a bit resperitorally impaired which has made getting around to run errands a bit of an annoyance, since I am far too cheap to pay for bus fare. It’s actually been a bit cold around here, low to mid 30’s for a few weeks now. Which by Portland standards is some serious Arctic action.
Anyway, I’ve pretty much got the SB site back into full operation. There is still the gallery issue to deal with, but other than that, things are proceeding swimmingly. I’ve got a systematic promotional campaign outlined to drive traffic to the site and hopefully separate the public from some of it’s cash. I’ve got a box of about 4000 little promo cards that I had printed up waaaaaaaayyyyy back in the day that I never wound up using and I plan to dust those off and start leaving them in various locations with the hope of drumming up some business. In addition, I plan to start doing link exchanges with other artists and bloggers to create a higher profile for the site by getting them to promote ME by promoting themselves.
Otherwise, things have been pretty quiet on the homefront, January being the dog days for restaurant workers (my tips have been WAY down). I’ve been living as cheap as possible to scrape together the money to get myself a Wacom tablet, as I have grown increasingly tired of the slow pace of my workflow using a mouse to make graphics.

mmmmm . . . . Wacom . . . .

Just watch.

Back at last.

Well, I’ve finally sorted out the issues with the SB site and it is up and running again, albeit with a couple of minor technical issues that still need to be sorted out. At this point however, having a couple of broken plugins is not something that I’m going to get upset over, since I’ve been treading water on most of my projects for the last two weeks as a result of this thing. Do keep in mind that I don’t censor myself on my other blog as this one is for friends and family and the SB blog is for the public.

During my hiatus, I took a little time to set up an Etsy store to work on selling off some of my backstock of SB merchandise. Stop by and take a look or just click on one of the thumbnails on the right side of the page.

In actual art related news, I have a show coming up at the Red & Black Cafe here in Portland during the month of April. Naturally I’m pretty excited about that, but it does mean putting my nose to the grindstone and cranking out some new pieces. I’ve decided to do a tribute series to cycling heroes from the 50’s through 70’s featuring such old skool badasses as Eddy Merckx, Felice Gimondi, Jacques Anquetil and Fausto Coppi. Below you’ll find a WIP of the first piece, an homage of sorts to Shephard Fairey’s Obama poster featuring a shot of Merckx from ‘71.

Nice eyebrows Eddy.

Maybe tomorrow?

Well, the new hosting account has been obtained and it’s just a matter of waiting for the SB address to update and point to the new server. Hopefully this will happen within the next 24 hours. Until then, I’ve been tinkering around with various odds and ends such as getting my Etsy store up and running. So if you aren’t completely burned out on materialism from the holidays, feel free to stop by and I will be happy to help liberate you from some of your hard earned cash.
It’ll be nice to get the new WordPress version of the site fully tuned, but that just means that I have to put my nose to the grindstone on new projects, I’ve got a bunch more stuff I need to list to the store as well as getting ready for a new show coming up in April and a couple of promotional schemes that I want to put into effect before the whole thing is ready to go. So little time, so little time . . .

In the meantime . . .

So the server that hosts the SB site blew up about a week ago and the extremely lazy admin has yet to fix it, so the site has been down. The guy that I rent my space from is moving to a new host next week, so it should be back up pretty soon. Unfortunately, until then, I’m unable to do any work on the site, which has been a real annoyance.

However, since I’ve got a minute, I’ll post some older stuff that I’ve been meaning to put up here for a while now.

A couple of blocks down from where Britton and I live is an excellent asian restaurant called Bayleaf. It’s pretty much our default restaurant when we want to eat out. The menu is all vegetarian and most of the dishes are vegan as well. Not only is the food always fresh and delicious, but well presented too.

The food at Bayleaf makes even ME happy.

Yep. That’s where I live.

Blizzards of Wizzards!!!

Ooh! Presents!

Britton’s Mom got her a flip camera for xmas. Here’s the results: