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Fiddling With The Site

I used to make a habit of it back in the day—restless tinkering, never quite being satisfied. In the last decade, although this site has been through a number of changes, I’ve been less inclined and not even sure what purpose the site served. For a long time the Portfolio section attempted to be an all-encompassing summary of everything I supposedly do, for example, and it never quite worked. So this time out I have focused it just on my artwork.

LOL, look—some people think my artwork is crap! But I have as much right as anyone to improve. I believe my portrait work has improved significantly in the last six years. Overall my stuff has enjoyed a more modest improvement. No doubt I have weak areas. But it makes sense to me to focus the Website on something in particular. It gets messy otherwise.
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The Blog Is Back

Oh, no, really?!

Worse than that, I am slowly reviving all the old archives going back to December 2000. It will take a while, updating & adding categories & tags, checking old links, adding or upgrading images where possible, etc. But yeah. I wanted the history back in place.
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Blog Offline: Coming Back Soon?

Well, seeing as how I haven’t posted since October 2024 (backdated posts notwithstanding)! I’m deciding what to do with it. It occurred to me that as of December, it’ll be TWENTY-FIVE YEARS since I started doing this “blogging” thing… obviously, I’ve had a number of extended breaks and a handful of reboots (and the complete archive of posts hasn’t been online for a number of years), but it’s been on the same URL since the spring of 2003!!
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Something Really Old

This is the first new posting after switching to a new provider/server. We now have SSL. Isn’t that cool & modern. So just a quickie…

I thought I’d share a pic of a fossil Trilobite I’ve owned for a long time now—I picked it up at a dinosaur exhibit in Dudley, of all places, during the Jurassic Park craze in the summer of 1993. Happy 30th Anniversary, prehistoric bug.

Trilobite
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What Happened Since June…

For a while, we’d been letting Tikki go on ‘dates’ with other Westies. Finally, early in May this year she met a lad named Ollie and there was a successful pairing. We just wanted Tikki to have the experience of motherhood the one time, and intended to keep at least two of the litter so she’d have a couple of companions.

Tikki Ollie May 22
Tikki & Ollie, May 2022.
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I’m Back (Again)

It’s true… I struggle to update this blog regularly and have for the last decade, really. (I have a large archive of “legacy blog” postings, not currently online, which was a mixture of personal and work—going back to the year 2000!) Partly it’s because social media put a real dent in blogs—regrettably, for me, as I have always disliked so-called social media… and only real popular blogs have weathered the storm somewhat unscathed. So it’s a major disincentive to bother with a blog when you know no one bothers looking at it unless you personally prod them into doing so!

And life itself—the complications, the distractions, the tragedies, the endless quest for income and stability… it’s heavy. Who needs to blog about that or prioritise blogging to a silent or non-existent audience instead of focusing on important stuff?!
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Renewal

As I type this specific sentence we’re at roughly 1:10am on the 27th. Of May. Not the friendliest of dates for me. Today, four years ago, my mother passed away. I’d be lying if I said it had been the greatest four years ever. It’s had its good points. Just not enough of them. And since moving back here in Dec ’07, I’d say the good points have receded quite dramatically.
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