November 3, 2010 – I thought it was odd to see all four of our dogs gathered around and on the picnic table yesterday, hanging out. Can’t quite imagine what might have been going on, perhaps Rose was calling a meeting to give everybody their work assignments; Lenore, food, Frieda, security, Izzy, media relations, Rose, farm management.

Everyone is invited to kick off the holiday season with Maria and I at the Redux Art Gallery on Saturday, November 13, 1 to 4 p.m., in Dorset, Vt., storybook Vermont town and a good place to start the holiday season. There are galleries, outlets, hiking trails and restaurants all over the place. We are offering inexpensive art as gifts – signed photographs and notecards, quilts, fiberbags, potholders, paintings, all affordable art for the holidays. You don’t have to buy anything, but if you do, there will be something you can afford. I will debut two new notecard sets at the show – “Doors and Windows,” and “The Bedlam Farm Barn Fairy.”Also the Family Farm series and the dogs and donkeys, etc.  All the cards – each one – purchased at the gallery will be signed.

We believe in creating good art that people can buy. Everybody who wants to should be able to take something home.

Also, some notes on the website, an ever-evolving record of my life on the farm. We are adding “forward” and “back” buttons to the site to make scrolling backwards easier. Adding a notecards page that links to Redux and shows the photographs. Adding a photography page on flickr, that will show the photographs I upload onto the website. Discussing a page in which photographers who come to the site can share their work with one another and show the rest of us what they are doing. I am considering a non-fiction book “The Dogs Who Changed My Life” focusing on how Orson, Rose, Lenore, Izzy and Frieda entered my life and different points and changed it. How each shaped a different experience for me, and brought me to the farm, to Maria, to self-awareness and then back to fiction and photography as well. It is a memoir, really, although not the conventional kind. And I will be trying to add an interactive element.