Can I Complain About This?

NYC Downtown Skyline Oct. 14, 2006 4pm, originally uploaded by p0psharlow.

Getting back, getting back into the swing of things -- at home, making new panorama photos of our skyline for a new series of paintings; at work, ramping up the promotional apparatus for the shopping season - that disgusting annual retail event which is the life-blood of all American retail companies.

Sad now, giving up my hopes for a return to San Francisco.

Fall is New York at its nicest and I've been trying to feel good about being here. If my job was less hours, I'd feel more settled. My home, my personal life is in my art. I contact it one hour on work day mornings, one hour on those nights. Four to six hours on weekend days. It has been enough to keep it going, but not enough to get it to another level. I'm thankful to have the time. Of course, less hours on the job, I'd be happier.

If not San Francisco, then where?

Ruth's ten years away from being old enough to retire. At 62, I'm at the age many retire. We don't have the savings. The stocks we bought back when everybody was buying them have been next to worthless for five years or more. Showing some signs of life lately, but we can't expect to get much out of them with the disaster all the Born-Agains and Ralph Nadar visited on this country. We can't expect to produce enough art to have a chance for success that way, shoot -- we can't even blog enough for a strong blog presence. Oh woe, oh sorrow!

Such a joke -- really!

I'm sitting here, in good health, at my laptop writing into this the wonderful web word-processing service that used to be "Writely" and now is Google Docs & Spreadsheets, connected wirelessly through the free FON wireless router I share with the world, being a "Fonero", I can hook up to any FON wireless I find in the world.

I have my new (Intel) iMac busy stitching together a few hundred video stills to make a panorama photo of the lovely NYC
Downtown Skyline view I have out the window on this fine, sunny, Fall day. My old G4 Mac is busy with some Photoshop actions, tweaking the saturation, contrast and sharpness on about 700 stills which I gathered out of some video panning I did earlier this morning of the skyline and which will make yet another pano-photo for our painting study. The G4 is also playing a fine batch of old country songs through the "Hank Williams Station" I set up on Pandora.

So, I have real problems. I'm keeping two powerful computers automatically assisting my art, another computer sending these words to a server Google maintains and then to this blog which globally publishes them. The room's filled with music that Pandora selects for me based on my history of hitting "thumbs up" or "thumps down" buttons in reaction to its choices. My cute girlfriend, whom I love so very much, is sitting across the room from me busy with her desk work. A fresh breeze flows through the window.

And I was complaining!

My biggest problem is where to eat lunch -- should we pick a spot ten blocks away so we can walk to it or should we make something here, eat it in the bedroom, watch a DVD and maybe nap? Exercise or nap? Home food or restaurant? Man, life is rough!

Calico panorama FON Pandora NYC Downtown