FOURTEEN Things Learned in the first 1/2 of June

Last month I had my head in the sand or something. This month I did so much learning that I’m publishing this post 1/2-way through the month, with the (always reckless) assumption that there will be more to learn in the second half of the month.

TECH

  1. My iphone is too old for a new battery because of planned obsolescence. It still worked but only charged intermittently, and although it is an inferior camera because of pixelation, it was able to capture colors and light better than my PHD (Press Here, Dummy) Canon Elph. Thus, I bought a “pre-owned” (remember when we used to say “used”?) iPhone 14 (the latest version that will work with all the portable charging equipment I just spent too much money for) to use both as a phone and as a camera (like normal people do). There is much to learn, since it has no home button, and things just work differently. Good grief, life is So Very Complicated.

2. The new solve-all-your-problems iphone goes straight to voicemail without ringing. When I asked the Duck, the first answer is that it can take up to 72 hours for it to be ready to ring (to “finish porting”.) To quote my Dad, “Humph”. (It fixed itself, so the Learning here was to just wait.)

3. When I told a friend about my tech decision and the need to find a used iphone 14 for photography, she told me about a site called Swappa. Have you heard of this? BestBuy in Visalia had the phone for $399; Swappa has them for $200-$400. Even in this decision, there are many more decisions to be made—14, 14 Pro, 14 Plus, 14 Pro Max.two lenses or three lenses? Locked or unlocked? JUST STOP ALREADY! (Is this why I frequently escape into fiction?) Forget it. I bought mine in person at Best Buy where 2 different very nice helpful and mostly knowledgeable people helped me. (and I read a library book while I waited for all the transferring to finish.)

4. I learned to transfer all the stuff from the old phone to the new one, along with how to set up email in the new phone (by carefully copying all the weird nonsensical answers used on the email account on my laptop, including everything that said “optional” because no, it’s not optional; you MUST fill in all the blanks.)

5. When emails arrive and say “This email has no content”, I can drag the message out of email onto the desktop and the text will appear. No one understands why, so I’m just glad I found this workaround instead of automatically deleting those emails.

Neighbor cat sometimes walks with us.
Pippin, GET OFF THE ROAD!
Tucker loves his grass.

6. Buy It Now is a way to put an easy button on my blog that takes people to Paypal to buy things. That’s great if the item is available. However, I learned (the hard way) that people can search out an item on my blog and the Buy It Now button still works in spite of no longer having the item. This meant that I also had to learn how to go through my PayPal account and delete every Buy It Now button.

7. Because of this Buy It Now button situation, someone ordered copies of Trail of Promises, which was out of publication. I learned that because I have the computer files for both the text and the cover of the book, it can be reprinted one book at a time (AKA Print-On-Demand) on Lulu.com. So, now Trail of Promises is once again available!

BOOKS

8. I learned about a book by some people called America’s Cheapest Family. If it is interesting enough (and if I remember), I’ll tell you about it next month.

9. Trail of Promises is available again after a several year hiatus, thanks to the marvelous print-on-demand services of Lulu.com. This book is a well-written true adventure story, my favorite of Louise Jackson.

10. The Visalia Electric Railroad also now available on Lulu.com. Even if Tulare County history doesn’t float your boat, I think the book is worth it for the photos. Here is my favorite one:

11. Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, finally has a new book out: The Calamity Club. It is based during the depression and is a depressing story with a good ending. Hard to put it down, gave it 5 stars on GoodReads, but I don’t want to read it again.

MORE INTERESTING & MORE IMPORTANT

12. Davidson’s fritillari is a brand new-to-me flower in Mineral King. My new friend TC discovered it, marked the trail so I could find it, and then it still took me forever to spot it. What color would it be under in a wildflower book??

13. Restaurants, especially fast food types, have been closing because so many people are taking those appetite suppressant drugs. People are changing clothing sizes so quickly that stores are raising their prices to compensate for all the lost revenue that results from all the exchanges and restocking.

14. My friend Bill, William R. Winn, M.D., died. We spent 10 years working together on his two books, Tales of TB and Springville’s Hospital. When we met, he told me it was “hard to get through one’s eighties”. He missed age 90 by 3 months. I will miss him for a very long time. Such a fine gentleman, humble, kind, eager to learn, determined to not be beaten by tech or health troubles, persistent, focused.

Another Someone Else’s Book | Visalia Electric Railroad

In 2018, Louise Jackson and I worked together on a second edition of her book, The Visalia Electric Railroad: Stories of the Early Years. We published it with a printer that may or may not still be in business.

You can read about it on this old blog post: The Visalia Electric Railroad Book.

Very occasionally, folks have contacted me for a copy of this sold out book. Since learning how Lulu.com works, Louise and I decided to make the book available again, this time through their bookstore so that she and I aren’t shuffling inventory and dollars.

Here you go: Lulu Bookstore, The Visalia Electric Railroad

In case you were wondering, the book contains three of my pencil drawings. (Louise made me, because you know I am just so shy and hate promoting my own work… fall down laughing)

And in case you were wondering, this photo is my mom, whose dad worked for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, which was also known simply as “the Santa Fe”.

Honestly, I believe the book is worth it just for the photos!

Notice I said the photos, not the drawings. Just want to be clear that I came here today to sell books for Louise.

It is also now listed here on my website page OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS, also with the link to the Lulu.com bookstore.

Trail Guy Went to White Chief

Look at the fancy road! (For my far-away readers, that’s Sawtooth in the distance.)

Trail Guy, being retired, spends more time in The Land of No Electricity, Internet, or Phones (unless one has StarLink, which your Central Calif. Artist does not—surprised by this?) than I do. He actually had time to hike, working around all his obligations/helpfulness to neighbors.

You can tell he took these photos by the spots in the upper right of many of them.

White Chief peak has a flat top.
There is a pond, if you know how to find it. (It’s there even if you don’t know how to find it.)
Everyone’s favorite juniper tree.

When I made it up the hill, I spent some time contemplating wildflowers. A plan is beginning to formulate, but it isn’t ready for public consumption just yet.

Thus we conclude another photo tour of Mineral King.

Drawing Jeff’s Garden With a Paintbrush

I thought this would be very difficult and take “forever”. Instead, I am thoroughly enjoying the process because now that the sizes and locations and base coat are down, I can simply begin drawing with my paintbrush.

Step by Step by Step. . .or Way Leads on to Way

Let’s just have a series of photos without excessive jibber-jabber.

Yes, I painted the hummingbird with both the canvas and the photo upsidedown.

Remaining Details

The bench (with a branding iron atop and the hint of a plaque), poppies, the foliage on the upper right, and a few of the transitional areas between the different images need to be finished. Oh, and the edges. This will all be easier when all of this day’s work has dried. Then it will need to just rest while I decide if I can make it better.

Final Steps

Jeff will need to see his garden in oil paint before I declare it finished. It will be signed, photographed, varnished, and then delivered.

This is Fun

I started detailing Jeff’s Garden, the commissioned oil painting, and it is fun!

We left it looking like this:

Then it began evolving. . . (oops, finger partially over the lens in the first photo)

About Other People’s Books

Reading Rabbit, an oil painting by your Central Calif. artist

A decade or so ago, I began pursuing a “side hustle” in editing. This came to fruition in a conversation with my dear friend Louise, a historian and writer.

We began with the second edition of The Visalia Electric Railroad, then moved into Trail of Promises. Since then we have worked together on two novels.

The experience with Louise prepared me to work with other authors, primarily folks who had a story to tell but no idea how to get it from their computers (in one person’s case, a manual typewriter) into print.

Not wanting to keep inventory of all these books, I’ve been working on how to make some of them available to the public. (I don’t deal with Amazon because they demand too much, although some of the authors may have listed their books there.) The best method I could figure out was to make a page on my website with links to the assisted self-publishing sites that I have used: Bookbaby and Lulu. They each have online bookstores. You pay them directly, and they send a percentage of the moola to the author.

This is the link to that page: OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS.

I’m writing about this today because something weird happened. Someone ordered 3 copies of Trail of Promises from my website, AND THE BOOK IS NOT LISTED ON MY WEBSITE! Excuse me for shouting; this is profoundly mysterious. I refunded her money via Paypal (who, of course, charged me), and told her I would try to figure out how to make the book available again, since it was a very short run and has been out of print for several years.

Because Lulu is very easy to deal with, and I can put the books which I have designed onto their site for sale through them, I have added Trail of Promises to OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS.

Now I sure do hope that the customer returns, sees the availability of the book, and reorders.

Here, I’ll make it easy so that you don’t have to click through to my page: Trail of Promises on Lulu.com

Louise and I thank you for your interest in this eye-popping story, a 312 page book about a true adventure with lots of photos.

Planting an Oil Garden

What’s an “oil garden”?

Glad you asked!

Remember this colored pencil sketch for a commissioned oil painting of someone’s garden? (Let’s call him Jeff, because that is his name.)

Jeff approved of the design for his painting and chose 12×24” for the canvas size. Having realized the benefits of starting with a sketch on an earlier commissioned oil painting,I began a larger sketch in pencil on the canvas.

Then, with paint thinned not quite to dripping, I started filling in all the white, figuring out shapes and sizes of the various items.

That’ll do. I tried to begin some detailing, but it was too wet.

Thinking back to the last oil commission of the blueberry/avocado farm, I remember being very unsure of my abilities and nervous about a successful outcome. As is always the case, it was needless to fret. The success (happy customer) has given me confidence on this one and I am proceeding with an eagerness to get to the details.

Trail Guy has said to me for years, “Success leads to success”. Mike Rowe quotes Robert Frost thus: “Way leads on to way.”

I say “Let’s git ‘er dun!”

Clear and Cold in Mineral King

When the fog cleared off, the sun began its work of melting snow. It was a time of much wood-splitting, wood burning, friendship, marveling at the clarity and brilliance, puttering, walks, and for Trail Guy and the Farmer, a time of making sure none of our immediate neighboring cabins had broken pipes from the cold. (A friend one mile down the road didn’t have water from when the snow first fell earlier in the week until he left on Sunday, but nothing was broken, only frozen.)

Okay, enough chitchat. Have a look, first at the changing light on the Crowley Family cabin and Farewell Gap, and then photos in no particular order.

This is Empire, not Sawtooth, in case you only somewhat familiar with Mineral King.

(That last photo is Sawtooth.)

Snow in Mineral King

As we left Silver City, the snow along the road made it apparent that it was going to be a bit dicey at the cabin, another 1000 feet or so above Silver City’s elevation.

There was a bit of a sunny window as we got near the valley, allowing a view of Sawtooth.

Oh-oh. Where is the snow shovel? Yeppers, I shoveled snow at the end of May!

The sun disappeared, and it got cold and foggy. Here are a couple of neighboring cabins.

I flipped over a bench on the porch so I could shovel better and was amused to see icicles hanging off the side.

Our neighbors had us over for dinner (no, they didn’t HAVE us for dinner—we all HAD pizza), and it remained foggy and very cold all evening. They have a top-notch wood stove, so we were very cozy inside.

Fog and cold continued the following day, when I went to another neighbor’s cabin to give a drawing lesson. That’s work that I love doing, and although we struggled a bit with being able to see via propane lamp, we made progress.

The following afternoon was sunny, so we continued our lessons on their deck. We opted for being a bit chilly in order to see.

The clouds came and went, and at one point while my student was trying out techniques, I was suddenly overcome by a need to photograph this window to draw sometime down the road. Literally down the road, because I might be drawing it at my studio, which has that magnificent drafting table and magnifying light.

Tomorrow I will show you how beautiful it all was when the sun came out for the rest of the cold weekend.

Business in the Mountains

The Silver City Store sold two Mineral King oil paintings on opening weekend; a few days later they sold a sequoia tree painted on a wood panel.

Luckily for a future customer, I had one more ready to go. So, on the way up the hill last week, we stopped by to deliver it. While there, I took a few more interior photos. The store is good to me*, and I happily advertise for them.

This year I have brought a few pencil reproduction prints of appropriate subjects. It’s been awhile since those were on public view.
Sawtooth on the sawblade is not for sale.
I designed this logo several decades ago and they are still using it. One of the original mugs (doesn’t say “Mountain Resort”) is on my drawing table with colored pencils in it.
Terrible light, but I wanted to show you the no-longer-functional gas pump and the snow outside.

There was quite a bit of snow in Mineral King when we arrived. Tomorrow’s post will be about that, accelerated to Thursday, because there are too many photos of Mineral King to just confine the topic to Friday’s post.

*Not the actual store, but you know what I mean.