November 20, 2002
Time has really flown by since I've married and moved to Wilmington NC. Although I've been here for eight months, I'm still fishing around for just how to make my living in the area. My main focus is to find a very low stress job that pays the bills, and still allows me the freedom to finish up and, hopefully, promote my first novel. Meanwhile, the bills have gotten paid one way or another, and I'm greatly enjoying both Married life, and living in the relative cultural oasis of a Southern University town.
As I write this, the biggest current news is the opening of my Ojos-de-Dios web site, with, finally, some offerings for sale. I started work on the web site over a year ago, but only now, in time for the 2002 Holiday season, have I put up currently available ojos. As a special to those who read this update, and receive my *OPENING THE SITE* e-mail, I'm offering a 15% discount to my first three customers (starting Nov. 20, 2002). Always free delivery to the Wilmington/Myrtle Beach area.
Another major, for me at least, accomplishment recently, is another web site project, this one for the environmental group Swamp Watch Action Team (SWAT). I spent a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of my time as an environmental activist while living in the Mojave Desert of California, and found many of my closest friends, and people with great heart, within the environmental movement. So it was only natural when, I read about the horrible destruction of the Southern forests, and saw a Newsletter from SWAT, that I got involved. Serendipitously, the SWAT people had purchased a domain name, swampwatch.org, and had an old web-site, but had not updated, or moved the web-site to the new domain. As you might guess, I rather enjoy making web-pages, so I found my role, as SWAT webmaster, right off. Also, there is a local Sierra club group, and a Campus Greens group, both meeting within walking distance of where I live, namely, right on the very nearby University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW) campus. I have yet to get seriously involved with either of these two groups, but the opportunity is certainly there, as well as many other activities usually associated with a major University.
And speaking of the love of making web-sites ~ if you or anyone you know might be interested in making a web-site for selling arts or crafts on the web, similiar to my Ojos-de-Dios.com website, I would be thrilled to help out. For $400 I could set someone up for a year, with a site of similiar simplicity to mine. Obviously prices could go up from there, but $400 would not only buy my design services, but would pay for a years hosting, and my help with maintaining the site. I really think the internet has enormous potentioal for small, niche artists, and I'm very glad to be in a position to help poeple get on-line, and promoting their skills and art.
In following updates I plan to include a portfolio of Wilmington area photographs. Wilmington is a city of beautiful mansions from days-gone-by, amazing flowering gardens in early Springtime, and many ponds and forested areas scattered throughout the city. For this update, I'm including only a photo of a pond which is only fifty feet from our front door, although we have to scoot behind our street's dumpster, and duck through a fence to get there.
Although this pond is sandwiched between a
huge shopping complex and a sprawling apartment complex, its a
delightful little urban wetlands habitat. There is a series of
similiar ponds all within a short walking disstance.
A major focus of our lives remains the Meher
Baba Spiritual Center at Myrtle Beach SC, a 90 minute drive
to the south. We have reservations to stay there both this coming
Thanksgiving, and at New Years. We plan on driving down for the
day on Christmas.
OH yes, I almost forgot. In these days of great patriotism and flag waving, as we follow the drumbeat of sacrificing such frivolities as advancing education and preserving the environment, help for the homeless and mentally ill (we all must sacrifice for our country!) in order to spend upwards of $200 billion to put a bullet throgh the head of the thug of Baghdad, who, is a BAD BAD MAN, and, although his thugish BAD BAD ways do somehow hold together the long torn fractions of the different ethic and religious groups that reside within the strange and artificially drawn boundries of Iraq (thanks to the British after WWI), he also SITS, on the kind of oil reserves to make ANY good lets-make-quick-millions-in-oil Texan sit up and drool ~YES, I'm talking about our great leader who will lead us further and further into war to STOP DEAD twenty-something year olds armed with 79¢ boxcutters and the most amazing adacity............drum rolls..........flag waving..........PRESENTING...........my favorite picture of George W. Bush.
cheers and best wishes to all,
Jay, and Anna