My parade was rained out today. I spoke to the woman at the Fund for Folk Culture, the go between agency for the California Arts Council’s Traditional Arts Program, getting an apprentice grant funded this year seems like an up-hill battle. Despite what the written materials imply, they really aren’t giving out any apprentice-type grants…not to mention the fact that during our conversation the grantmaker said, “Well bootmaking is really more of a ‘craft’ or occupation (than it is art)”… ouch.

Oh well, I’m a practical person. I’ve always got a plan “b”.

Sigh…if I keep to my New Year’s resolution (by only working on my web page 5 hours a week) …that means I’ve only got 3 hours left this week. I’ve been working on a field trip to the last Brownwood Round-Up. I could maybe finish it in 3 hours, but then it would sit finished and untouched until next week…maybe even the the after that…until I had time to post up a new front page. Argh, I think I’ve decided to reschedule the field trip until February…sigh (again)…meanwhile, (while I’ve been mulling this whole thing over) I’ve managed to think up a bunch of new things I should do…like don’tcha think I should make a shareware version of a screen saver and have every bootmaker who wants to chip in photos. That would be great……………… help! …somebody turn off my brain!

Well, I think I’ve got my diary archives fixed. I got a little nostalgic for my website’s old color scheme, so I made some changes. Bright orange is the BLOGGER team color…but it seemed a bit hard on the eyes for something this text-based. Anyway, the June archive is still stuck in orange…I think I’m going to have to wait until I get home to do all that ftp-ing and html-ing. All these blogger index files are a little baffling to me.

So the nice folks who provide me with the opportunity to have a “weblog” diary are updating their servers. This has caused all my archives of past boot adventures to go missing. There may be some things I can try on my end to fix ’em…and the blogger folks are doing their best at the other end. I am assured nothing was lost.

Tonight I’m working on some of my Brownwood photos. I’m gonna try out another format for my web page. Ugh…but it makes the photos the main focus….I’m not used to telling stories with photos instead of words. It’s hard.