After four days of working on getting my car fixed, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel. I have not gotten it into the shop yet. I still have to climb over the middle divider from the passenger door because neither door on the left side of my car can be opened. Both are bent and jammed.
But the gaggle of insurance agents squabbling over who pays for it all is beginning to sound like I might not have to shoulder the entire burden myself. There is a consensus that the accident was not my fault. (Probably due to the fact that the police officer making the accident report clearly stated it was the other goofball’s fault in his written report.) So, Geico, the perpetrator’s insurance, has generously agreed to pay 85 percent of the cost of repair and rental car. (85 percent??? Why not a hundred??? Apparently, because I couldn’t testify with 100 percent certainty with my hand on a Bible that I had my lights on at a quarter to noon in the rain, even though I am in the habit of having my lights turned on even if it is just cloudy and would’ve automatically turned them off when I got out of the car to prevent the warning dinger from dinging. That should cost me $300, right?) My insurance agent from Progressive is willing to argue all the way to arbitration that I deserve 100% coverage, especially since Geico is paying for it, and Uber also stands ready to be coerced to pay if need be because I was on my way to pick up a meal delivery at the time of the accident.
So, I am hopeful in a pessimistic sort of way that I am not going to be socked with another bill that is higher than my emergency fund (which I maintain on the orders of my bankruptcy lawyer).
But it is not only good news about car repair that I am finding questionable today. I have also made progress on a stubborn printer/scanner that has been failing to work properly since I bought it new. I discovered I needed to go online to download an HP printer driver, not once, but twice. Apparently, it had been rendered useless because just after I downloaded and made it work the day I bought the thing, HP decided to update that software with critical patches that I did not have. So, the second download allowed me to discover…
…That the scanner bed was still too small to scan the size of art needed to scan my graphic novel and get that usefully re-created through scans on the internet. You can see the cover is too large to scan the whole thing in one go. I am, however, tricksy enough to scan it in parts and paste the whole together with the paint and art editing tools I already have on the computer. I intend to start doing that to get Hidden Kingdom up and running on my Dungeons and Dragons Saturday posts.
Here’s an adjusted scan to increase my ability to copy and paste a whole together from parts…
It should be easy to quilt together the artwork over time and provide a view not grayed out by having to reproduce the black and white pen and ink art in shades of gray, the way I must if I try to do the thing photographically.
And I can definitely say that scanned art is better than photographed art.
I have included a couple more scans to prove the point.
Sunday Silly Artistical Posts
I like to dig through old piles of artwork I have done to re-purpose things and mash things together to make weird art salad.
I used to play a Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game called Talislanta with groups of adolescent boys, most of whom had previously been my students in middle school. It was a weird world where weird things made artistical challenges for me that taught me to be a better and more imaginative artist.
Xeribeth was a member of an almost-human race that had yellow skin and wore colorful face tattoos. She also had to be somewhat alluring to trick adolescent boys into undertaking dangerous and possibly suicidal adventures (meaning characters who only lived on paper might die and have to be re-rolled with dungeon dice.)
Zoric, being a green Cymrillian wizard, gave me numerous opportunities to creative Kermit-the-frog-colored portraits. And he was a player character, so his greed and penchant for unwise actions decided on in the heat of battle (like turning himself into a fish-man while adventuring in the waterless desert) didn’t come from me.
Playing those games gave me training as a story-teller as well.
My efforts to see color with gradually worsening color-blindness led me to create eye-bashing color compositions that attempt to portray realistically things and feelings that can’t possibly be physically real. Thus I gradually became, over time, a surrealist (a juxtaposer of unlike and jarring things to deliver a visionary picture of reality) (How’s that for surrealistic gobbeldegook in definition form.)
I often solve the problems of my life by drawing something and making cartoonish comments with serious consequences.
Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that the world on the inside of me is decidedly different than the world on the outside of me. But I have to live in both. And I can do that by drawing my colored-pencil Paffooney stuff, and posting it, and writing about it on a silly Sunday.
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