This picture was a 1980’s attempt to copy the skin tones in the works of Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. I have always admired their ability to create luminous tanned skin and vibrant character colors. I also intended to turn this into an oil painting of young David the shepherd playing and singing for King Saul. My skills were not up to the task at the time, but I find this goofy composition interesting never the less. 
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KidZart
Here’s a piece of pottery created by the Princess. Ceramic cuteness fired and glazed.
June 19, 2014 · 5:40 pm
Collectible Dolls… err, Action Figures
These two 12″ ACTION FIGURES are Luke Skywalker and Princess Leiah. They are rare 1978 dolls that are hard to find because they are in a size much larger than other Star Wars figures, and they are from a toy company that no longer exists. When I bought Luke on E-Bay, he only had the pants and the boots. I had to buy Leiah stark naked. The doll didn’t have any clothes on either. I was able to cobble together some clothing with the help of Barbie and G.I. Joe. I had to re-braid Leiah’s hair, and, of course, I had no idea how to re-create the Cinnabun ear-muffs Leiah is supposed to wear, so I left it looking as you see it. I am proud of my ability to find and acquire two such rare dolls, but I am well aware that they are not presently worth diddly-squoot compared to a mint conditioned pair.
And, Dang it! I didn’t edit the words “doll” and “dolls” in favor of “action figures”, but I am much too lazy to go back and fix that.
June 18, 2014 · 6:42 pm
The Centaur
I will post more words another day. Today, let this picture be worth a thousand words.
June 16, 2014 · 9:50 pm
My Children’s Art
My own three kids have taken up the artist’s p
encil tracks. It is probably true that no one ever had a bad habit that didn’t get passed on to their children. Drawing too much is my back-clinging monkey. I ignore other things I am supposed to do, have to do, even will die if I don’t do in order to keep on drawing. My two arthritic claw hands have been worked into pretzel knots by the incessant urge to draw. But not everything they got from me in the drawing habit is totally bad.
The Princess actually uses colored pencil to do her art.
Oldest son Dorin (his name in my fiction) has caught the dungeon and dragony bug from me and likes to conjure imaginary monsters.
I was not able to secure a Henry picture for this post, but he does it too. He has won school art class awards for his work and one of his pieces still hangs in his former middle school.
So, there you have it. I have passed on the gene that causes this craziness. And there is no cure but to draw endlessly.
June 15, 2014 · 3:59 pm
One More Day…
So, I have three more classes on a day that ends at 1:00 tomorrow… Then no more being a teacher for the rest of my life. Am I happy? Ah, no… I have been a teacher for 31 of the last 33 years. I was a substitute teacher for the two years in between job two and job three. I do not know how to regulate the rhythms of my life without a daily bell schedule, without hallway duty, without discipline referrals, without restroom passes and library privileges. What will I do come Monday? I guess I will remember how much it is in my blood… in my genes… in my very soul. And I will never actually stop being a teacher. I just will have no more class. Ee-hee-hee-hee-hee (snort! Snort!)
June 6, 2014 · 12:19 am
Mr. B Gets Weepy
They were going to make me cry sooner or later. I told you that. Today was the day. In the midst of trying to get everything done without actually teaching, they surprised me with a multi-level “We Will Miss You… And We Love You” poster. Current students and former students all signed it and lied to me in prose about how wonderful a teacher I have been. Drat their evil plots! Getting through the week without tears is now a lost cause. We took a lot of pictures, but teachers can’t post pictures of students on the web without violating FERPA guidelines and federal privacy laws. So I cut them out of this Photo Paffooney. Besides, the gentleman in blue to my right flipped the bird in one of the photos. I photo-shopped that finger off his hand. Ha-hah! If only teachers could do that in real life! Oh, and I avoided photos of me crying.
June 4, 2014 · 2:08 am
Being A Teacher
I now only have four days left in my teaching career. I am swiftly reaching the end. I need to savor just a little bit. I will soon be retired and a classroom will never be the place where I do my best work again. I can reach and teach still, but my health holds me back. I can barely present for ten minutes any more. I end up gasping for breath and needing to sit. I have never been a teacher who sits behind the desk. I am always stalking the entire classroom and working over the shoulder of the kid with the question. Okay, I can’t do the work any more… so it is the right thing to retire and let others in better shape take over. I’m dreading the end, but soon I will have to embrace it whole.
June 3, 2014 · 12:54 am
Norwall
The little Iowa town where all my hometown novels are set is based on the little town where I grew up and spent all of my school years from Kindergarten to Senior Year of High School. I call it Norwall. It has all the same letters in it as the town of Rowan, the real town behind all my farm-boy fantasies. I also added an “L” for love and an “L” for laughter. All these stories, whether written already or still percolating in my demented bean, are set in this little town.
The school building where I went to learn through the sixth grade was gone after the 1980’s. But the gymnasium with its theater built in still stands and is used as a community center to this day. It was here where I had my first crush, where I first saw a girl naked who was not my relative, where I was deeply embarrassed during the square-dancing lessons in Miss Molton’s Music Class, and where I told such big black hoo-haw lies that I truly got the proper training I needed to be a story-teller.
This isn’t what Main Street really looked like to me. I saw it in the 1960’s and 70’s. This is the 1950’s, when the artist who created this blanket was in high school. But It contains the world I knew. The water tower is missing, but the fire station and post office are there at the far end of the street on your left. The grocery store, the cafeteria with its George’s Malt Shop sign, the Brenton Bank building, and the hardware store are there on the left. The town hall and V.F.W. is on the right hidden by the trees. You can just see the steeple of the old Congregational Church that was torn down and moved to a new location during some of my earliest memories of the street.
This is what it looks like now that the hardware store is gone. The bank and the cafeteria have been updated and changed. The water tower has changed from silver to blue.
The Methodist Church, built in the thirties and torn down in the eighties, was an important part of my boyhood. It was a place where my faith in God was nurtured and reinforced to the point that my highly active and existential mind could never truly turn to atheism and doubt. It was also the place where a Methodist minister took the time to explain the facts of life to me and helped me overcome the terrible secret I kept inside me about being molested when I was ten. In more than one way, my life was saved in this building. I miss the place terribly.
So, here it is, the town that made me who I am and provides the background for the most important thinking and writing that I will ever be able to do.
June 1, 2014 · 9:05 pm
Catch a Falling Star 