belated birthday

My blog birthday was a week ago last Sunday. Had it marked on my calendar and everything. This is my sixth year. Early on, I read somewhere that most blogs last only about 3 years. I'm still here but looking over the archive I see I have posted less and less as the years have gone by.

A sincere thanks to those regular readers, the not so regular readers, the once in a blue moon readers, and for all the comments that let me know I'm not just whistling into the wind.

I started this is 2009 before I realized just how much I was going to be affected by the stock market crash, the investment ponzi schemes, and the resultant recession.

Things still looked bright and rosy. Life was exciting, full of adventure, and I had lots of stories to tell about our hopeful rise in the gallery world, the transition from city life to country life, family life past and present.

The previous year we had had our first solo show at our local gallery, our third year at SOFA Chicago, and a year of commission work ahead of us. We had bought the country house in 2007, spending long weekends while we made changes...took down all the heavy drapes, pulled up the carpet, had the wood floors refinished, put up wainscoting, painted. We had plans for building a new shop and even got the slab poured. We were spending more and more time at the country house and getting ready to start moving some of the furniture.

By early 2010, with all the commission work completed, no new gallery work even started, the move complete (or, as it turned out, as complete as it would get for the foreseeable future), the landscape around me had changed considerably.

We had little to no work for the next two years while we depleted our meager reserves, the gallery world was no longer welcoming as it struggled to survive, all work on the new shop after getting it framed and clad halted, and still no new gallery work was being done.

All that changed again mid 2012. Suddenly we went from no work to lots of work, I had started working on new gallery work again, and the land the city house sits on is getting ridiculously valuable. close to being the offer you can't refuse perhaps and if that is so, then some big changes might be coming.

And I wrote about all of it.

The reason I started this blog was because I wanted to leave a record for future generations. My sister does genealogy work and for most of the people stretching back, even the nearer generations like our great grandparents, we really know nothing about them, their daily lives, beyond when and where they were born and died, military service, legal documents, that sort of thing. So, since I have never been able to keep a journal beyond about a half a dozen entries, I thought I would create a blog to chronicle my life.

Why I find it doable on-line instead of writing in a book, I don't know.

I get each year in electronic form and eventually, I'm going to get them in book form. Who knows how far or even if they will get passed down but it's fun to think about it. Regardless, if what they say is true, that nothing on the internet is ever really deleted, the record of my life will be here for some future genealogist to find.

Maybe this will be my immortality. Or maybe my work will be my immortality even though I don't sign the architectural work, just the 'gallery' work. Glass is a very strong material and unless it gets broken somehow, it will remain. Lots of ancient glass has been dug up. If any of my work survives for thousands or even hundreds of years, it will say, by it's very existence, that I also existed even if they don't know my name.

So, while my blog has never been wildly popular and it has struggled to get over 200 'members' in 5 years, I guess I'm going to bore you hanger's on faithful for another year at least with my activities, and my work, and my environment, and my opinions, and whatever else catches my attention.

I mean, I have the whole selfie project to complete for one thing.