There's something inherently entertaining about creating real-life things out of digital stuff. Alice did this recently by turning her weekly notes into a printed and bound book, back in the day Ben took a bunch of tweets and turned them into a newspaper, and I took an online friendship group and turned it into an IRL conference LARP.

I've spent a lot of time lately digging through my own digital photographs - I was on the lookout for photos with interesting glitches or degredations - and I ended up getting sucked in to the sheer amount of photos I have of things that aren't actually worth keeping. They were blurry, had my thumb in them, were literally of just nothing (maybe the inside of a pocket?), pictures of product codes to remember for 1 minute while it was typed into an input box somewhere, or a reference to an item to track down in the IKEA warehouse. They're not good and they're not useful, and they're not pictures of things I care about. And yet, I didn't want to delete them, which I thought was a curious feeling to have about pictures of nothing.

I gathered a bunch of them up in an album and ordered physical prints and put them in a tradtional photo album, just like the ones we have at my parents' house in Cornwall, full of family past and present that I only see on special occasions and don't exist digitally.

I like it? A friend commented that each one is a bit like looking at a mystery puzzle, with a time, place and motive to solve: how did this photo come to exist.

Hitting the end of the year and have entirely failed with interesting updates. So, a quick sitrep:

• Finished the year with paintings in 3 shows over 6-ish weeks. Very uneven annual spread which I will attempt to rectify next year. Should be re-showing the coyote show at a cool place TBA around March.

• Finished the last taught module of my MFA. Mid-January starts a roughly 6-month period where I come up with a thesis, research it and eventually create a public-facing outcome. Wish me luck. I might actually try and record some of that, because planning an actual event is kind of interesting?

• I just took possession of keys to get me into an artist studio building for a dedicated oil-painting space - even though I don't use white spirit, I was concerned the paint fumes in general might lead to a brain tumor. I specifically wanted to move into one for a couple reasons that aren't hypochondria related, though: 1. Find more folks to just know and learn from (and this building is in an area with a bunch of other art studio groups, too), and 2. Be able to do Open Studios events. I figure I'll commit to having a space for a year and re-evaluate if it was worth it.

• Secondary benefits to the studio is it's about a 25 minute walk from my house, which feels like an ideal little commute / getting out of the house ritual.

• I've found myself on TWO committees now.

• Committee 1 I was somewhat voluntold into by way of being the one person in the room who knows how to use Canva and Wordpress. Yes, it's the Ikebana International Northern California board for graphics and web.

• Committee 2 is a bit more fun. Coyote Town is a small group of artist ladies (now including me) facilitating a monthly First Fridays and art gallery in Bernal Heights. We just took down our third show, featuring almost entirely hyper-local artists!

• On various trips and visits with the not-Americans this year, we've been floating the idea of moving back home (or somewhere else not in the USA). Still very TBD on that front. As much as I dislike the USA, the actual business of picking up your life and starding over (again) just isn't a lot of fun. I like my friends, I like my house, I like my routine. I constantly worry that we're just boiling frogs who won't know to leave until it's too late, though, but I'm ever aware of the good fortune I have to even have the option to consider. Currently it's "we'll see how the midterms go", but there's always another "we'll see".

• I always read everyone elses weeknotes, still. I did myself a favour a couple months ago, and cleaned up my feedreader so it's almost only humans with blogs that I have to catch up on. I highly recommend a spring-clean of the RSS if you want to rekindle a small-internet vibe in your life, now that you can't just follow everyone you've ever met on a single social network feed.

• Tom: I also am a bran flake lover and I had totally forgotten that fact about myself until you brought it up, but I have to suffer raisin bran because it's hard to get it plain here. I did discover I can buy weetabix locally recently, and that has been very welcome. It's the small things.

• Earlier this year, I had a somewhat bleeding-edge (and eye-bleedingly-expensive) medical procedure for my arthritic hips (caused by congenital hip dysplasia) that involved taking goop from my abdomincal adipose fat and bone-marrow and spinning out my stem cells and some other useful cells, then reinjecting said goop into the joints of my hips and into the femural heads of the bones, with the goal of regrowing cartilage. This all happens while you're awake and it was a treat to watch and learn about. I'm not totally sure if it's worked, because the differences are subtle, but I have been able to get back to walking a good 10 miles on pavement without having to have a lie-down-day on painkillers the next day again! Unfortunately, the procedure also came with physio recommendations so now I have a gym membership and I have to lift heavy things. A true travesty.

• I watched quite a few films and have been reading a decent number of books (I have a storygraph now - fberriman). I finally ditched amazon and kindle for a kobo, and that's helped reinspire my interest in epubs in general.

• Alex and I are going to New Zealand for Christmas and NYE. Send your recommendations on a postcard.

I've been working on my MFA, and my most recent project required two things: 1. a collaboration and 2. a public outcome. Oh, and do it all in 10 weeks.

I ended up reaching out to Tali Caspi, who is an urban ecologist who studies the coyotes that live in San Francisco. So, being completely self-interested, I hoped she would work with me to put something together so that I could learn more about the animals and get to nosey a bit more into her research.

A couple weeks ago, we put on my public event. It was a gallery that consisted of 10 paintings of the coyotes, based on photographs she'd taken of the animals during her field research, and they also incorporated data from her most recent paper, plus she gave a really fantastic educational and myth-busting talk. It was pretty cool, honestly, and I'm incredibly thankful that she was up for the collab.

We might try and show the paintings again and have another educational day this summer, once she's done turning in her PhD. so TBD on that. I'll upload the full gallery soon, and I think I'll sell them for a local wildlife rehab hospital, if anyone wants to give buy one.

We also made some booklets for the show that San Francisco Animal Care will also be distributing soon, and you can email me and ask for one, too. More details about the show and such are over here.

I've tried a variety of times to keep month notes, week notes, logs, all sorts. Failure, all of them.

However.

I still need to solve these anxieties for myself:

• Feeling like time slips by too fast.
• Feeling like I'm not getting anything done.

The system that's finally worked for me is one that's private and low-effort, scrappy and ugly.

At the beginning of the year, I started a fresh daily log book. The rules are:

• No rules!
• Actually, rules: just notes, don't plan, don't think.
• No pressure to write something funny, clever or interesting, because only I'll read it^🟉.
• Write anything for every day, no matter how mundane. I existed, therefore something happened.
• Skipping a day isn't the end of the universe, but go back and fill it in anyway.

The perfect book for this turned out to be the calendar version of my already-favourite notebook form factor that I've been using for years. The Leuchtturm1917 week planner and notebook in B6+.

On the left-hand side are the days of the week. At the end of the day, I write a few words to describe what happened that day (e.g. finished annoying project. went to movies. did laundry.). The right-hand side is just a piece of lined paper, so that's a place I can either leave totally blank or use freeform. I've used the right-hand side to hold badly-thought-out ideas, unbaked to-dos, lists of things bothering me, sketches, contact info, or as a scrapbook of random bits of paper I've collected that week. The cover gets any stickers I am given.

I have filled it in for every day this year, so far, and flicking back through it is satisfying. It is effective in addressing the aforementioned anxieties in an amount that is worth continuing next year.

That's it. That's the post.

^🟉 Do you ever stop and wonder what will happen to all your stuff when you die? Like, will the person clearing out my shelves for recycling bother to stop and read my notebooks? Probably not.

From right now, until September 19th 2024, BFF.fm has an auction going, including one of my paintings that I donated to the station. BFF is a non-profit community radio station in San Francisco, and I'm so happy to have the opportunity to suppor them this way.

The auction also includes some other pieces of art from more local artists, as well as a bunch of other fun things from all kinds of other local businesses - I've got my eye on the Craftsman and Wolves set.

BFF is also hosting their annual gala on the 19th, so if you're a local and it sounds like something up your street, check out tickets for that, too.