Still Kickin'

Not sure what we've been so busy doing that neither of us have managed to post anything for a week. This is going to be another one of those trash can posts, so hang on.

First, sorry for the Google spam to everyone associated with this blog. Google seems to have tightened up their password requirements since my last log in. I was still logged in from the last time I did something here or on Google Docs or whatever and had not logged out. To make a long story short, I couldn't log in, couldn't even log out. I was stuck in this eternal hell of typing my password over and over and getting nowhere. A password reset (which for some stupid reason sends an e-mail to all contributors to this blog) and a reboot seems to have fixed everything. I guess that will teach me to say anything nice about Google again....

Debbie made it back from Hawaii and the photos are all here.

We also spent last Saturday wandering around Jerome, an old mining town a bit north of here that has become a artist colony and tourist trap of sorts. It is built on the side of a mountain, so it would be more appropriate to say that we walked up and down rather than around Jerome. Every first Saturday of the month, they have what they call an "Art Walk" which is just some of the local galleries staying open until 8pm with snacks and drinks and a shuttle service to haul people around. As you can probably guess from the pictures, there isn't a lot of parking in Jerome, but of course it was far worse than normal Saturday due to some sort of biker convention in Cottonwood. The place was completely overrun with with Harley's. Naturally. So we parked at the old high school, which was turned into art spaces when the school system was consolidated with one of the neighboring towns. We walked up to town, which was only a quarter mile or so, but involved several hundred feet of vertical climb and several crossings of a very narrow, twisty road overrun with bikers driving just slightly over the posted 15 mph speed limit. (This is a picture of the high school about 2/3 the way up.) So after about five seconds of discussion, we decided that we were not walking back down in the dark and grabbed a shuttle. We got in and started chatting with the driver and other passenger. The third passenger not only knew about Arcosanti, but had worked on a film crew here that shot the worst movie ever made. (Seriously; it's so bad you can't even MST3K it.) So the ride back down to the high school was like old home week.

I'm still hacking away at making bells in the foundry. I haven't done any new bells in a while, just replays of the same ones I've done before. I keep experimenting with new tools and designs, so I'm still melting more bells than I should be, but at least I'm learning something along the way. Debbie is still building up a client list at AAA. She thought that she would get some bonus commission this month, but because her twelve-month rolling average was a few hundred bucks short, she got nothing. Disappointing to say the least.

Well, Debbie is home with the laundry and dinner is done, so I gotta go.