Halves, jam, conserves, preserves, and sweet and sour sauce, not to mention a couple of pies. And there are at least a few bags worth of usable plums on that tree if I desire (and I do, somewhat). With this burst of domestic activity, forcing me to take over my man’s kitchen, something had to give. This journal, basically.

It wasn’t going to be the writing and prep for Chapter 2 for Dicebox. Actually, standing at the sink, peeling many pounds of plums gave me a good amount of time to ruminate over story and dialogue. Not with a peeler, God no! Brooks plums are small affairs. Throw them in boiling water for 45 seconds and while the skins don’t exactly slide off, they are still fairly easy to remove.

And obviously it wasn’t the new index page for Dicebox—where I basically got my symbolic yayas out (since I will never do that tarot deck). And, delightfully, creating and composing the art for that page was absolutely enjoyable for me beginning to end.

I am not a subscriber to the “don’t do what’s not fun” philosophy. I expect that at some point, I will have to tackle something I don’t enjoy at all in order to get the effect I want or need.

For example, figuring out the perspective and logic of the large building at the beginning of Scene 4, Chapter 1. I did that the old-fashioned way, with the aid of David Chelsea’s superb Perspective! for Comic Book Artists, which allowed me to understand the whys and wherefores of convincing perspective enough to both do it precisely and how to cheat effectively.

So I was surprised when doing the Dicebox redesign, with all the finicky composing and color experiments, I didn’t hit a spot that I felt I had to soldier through. The only hiccup was that I felt I had to redraw the cat, as my first one looked like an evil chiropractor had gotten its hands on her.

Okay, some CSS coding issues arose in the test phase. and fixing that til it worked universally in Opera, Explorer, Mozilla and Netscape on the Mac and PC was a bear. And color adjustments—I’d just like to quote some artist’s site that I stumbled across a bit ago: “This website is best viewed on my monitor.” Now, PCs do by and large have darker video display than Macs, but I go that one brighter by having a gorgeous, crisp Trinitron monitor which shows much subtlety in detail and color variation.

Still, I felt very justified in my monitor choice when I observed a product shoot at the esteemed Marcus Swanson’s studio when I saw that the three monitor set-up (!) that they had was composed entirely of Trinitron monitors. And, oh, digital photography has come a long way, my friends.

I do hope to become a little more regular with my journal entries.

But, if you want a real blog, then might I suggest Dean Allen’s Textism for the snarky observation of an ex-patrioy Canadian designer in France—please, look at his “Annotated Maunifesto” and “Twenty Faces” essays if you are a designer with any pretensions of knowing type and current design culture. Both are inspirational in entirely different
ways.

For another choice, for comments, essays and debates on feminism, lefty Green politics and cartooning, try Barry Deutsch’s Alas,
a Blog. And his weekly political cartoon, of course.

I sign off now, at 11pm, exhausted from spending the morning finally achieving a clean and organized basement ( only took four attempts over a year and a half), relaxed from socializing with my next door neighbors over wine and strawberry ice cream, my husband in bed, a big yellow school bus, devoid of passengers, between me and my across-the-street neighbor’s house (blasting girl-sung dance music) and relieved that Becca and I have decided to first try to make wine out of pears—as I am very tired of plums.

( I also hear motocycles, a train and happy crowds at the Mt. Tabor Theater)

Happy equinox one and all.