This is a Journalistic Blog. Keep Your Expectations Really Low.

Today I created the Layout for a pop-up Castle wall. I'm proud of it. It's simple and sturdy.

This is a picture of the basic Structural prototype. 

I also shoveled 2 driveways and cleared out some of the emails that I've been avoiding. I'm doing my dream job right now, making fantasy miniatures and terrain, but it turns out that there are still a lot of emails to answer and to send, papers to file and inventories to...um...inventory. This is the sort of stuff that I should probably have taken a class or two in school. The art stuff was easy. It honestly would have taken more effort to stop making art than it took to get a degree in it.

I'm going to try to be honest in this blog. In Junior High and High School, almost every day I came home from school and made fantasy figurines out of craft supplies. Clay and Popsicle sticks, pom-pom balls, seed beads. I sewed and hot-glued and painted dozens of them. I designed a skirmish-battle game based on the heroes I created.

I never told anyone in my high school about this hobby.

The figurines honestly weren't very good. I used them in an application to BYU's art program and was rejected. I applied again the next year after taking a few entry-level art classes and was rejected again. Two and a half years later after serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints I applied again and was rejected a third time. That was the limit. They wouldn't allow potential students to apply more than three times.

I kept taking art classes. I took add-cards directly to the professors on the first day of class and took classes I hadn't completed the prerequisites for. I was putting together a petition to be allowed to apply again to the art program when a misunderstanding between a professor and the department secretary resulted in my being placed in the Bachelor's of Arts program erroneously. That semester I won one of the handful of talent awards given out by the Fine Arts Department.

I'm not sure why I didn't take the rejections seriously. It just never occurred to me to stop trying to be an artist. It wasn't hard to keep making stuff and taking art classes. It would have been harder to stop.

This is the kind of rambling self-aggrandizement you can expect from this blog. Also today, I correctly used the word anachronistic in a sentence for the first time! I was very impressed with myself.