Resolutions? Or just surviving?
For me, 2007 was a pretty good year, though I’m not overly sorry to see it end.
I published a new book, and used some of the proceeds to spend a month in Europe.
The highlights of that trip were meeting my friend Jeroen in Utrecht, and being able to hold in my hands dozens of J.M.W. Turner watercolors and drawings, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Although the trip was mostly an art pilgrimage, I paid a tribute to the book that underwrote it by putting a portable ham radio station on the air one day, before I inadvertently killed the batteries.
This card is for a contact I made with Latvia from Orrest Head, in Windermere, in the English Lake District.
Readers of my trip blog know I had some problems with my left hip, aggravated by all the walking I was doing. When I got back I decided to lose some weight. To help, I made more trips to local Halpatiokee Regional Park. The almost-daily trips rekindled my interest in birding, bringing some other benefits.
Birding is like trying to contact distant, rare countries on ham radio. You need strategy and tactics, and the skill to make quick identifications. As a beginner, very often you get everything wrong, but that’s how you learn.
Something else that appeals to me is birding’s technical simplicity. All you need is a pair of binoculars and a field guide.
Not that I’ve stopped using the park as a model for drawing and painting. I built the little easel shown in this photo from a piece of Lucite and a lightweight tripod. I use it for watercolor painting. The cups are secured with magnets in their bases that hold onto other magnets sunk in the edge of the Lucite. I’ve replaced the red folding stool with a much-lighter tripod stool. I can attach it to my pack, leaving my hands free for photography or birding.
I took thousands of photographs this year, more than 1500 in Europe, and more than that since I returned. My Olympus digital camera quit, and I now use Canon S5 IS and S400 cameras. The used S400 was an afterthought, but now I use it almost every day.
While my art studies continue, with weekly evening oil-painting classes taught by Carol Kepp at the local high school, my interests have widened. Birding drew me to a greater interest in the environment. I joined the National Audubon Society, which has a local chapter. And next year I’ll be taking courses in the Florida Master Naturalist Program, beginning with the Wetlands course in late January.
So for me, 2007 was a pretty good year, and 2008 looks promising. Unfortunately, for the country as a whole and the world at large, 2007 was a bad year, and 2008 doesn’t look any better. The Democratic Party looks well positioned to win the presidential election, though many people were saying that at this point in 2003. And I don’t have much confidence that a Democrat will make the changes this country needs. The Democrats have utterly failed to counter Bush. You can blame Bush for accreting more power than the Executive should have, but the Democrats have not mobilized the people, though they’ve had many reasons and opportunities to do so. I’m still a third-party person.
Throughout the year, this blog has been my steady companion, surviving even my most-idiotic accidental attempts to destroy it. From the move to a new hosting company to year-end clean-up and upgrade operations yesterday, in which only one post got lost, the blog has given me an outlet for my increasing dismay, disbelief and outrage, as well as some of the better moments of the year. Readership grew more than 40 percent this year. While Loose Feathers will never be an opinion powerhouse, it did get linked to once by Thousand Reasons, from a recent post on the failed surge. Much as I’d like to be more entertaining and even personal, I believe silence is complicity, and there are some deeds and events that cannot pass unchallenged.
So if I have one hope for 2008 it is that it presents fewer reasons to rant and more reasons to blog about the more-pleasant aspects of my life and interests. I made some Art Goals for 2008, but beyond that I have no resolutions, except to survive the year with my sanity and conscience intact. I hope everyone reading this has a happy and prosperous New Year. Maybe we’ll get some peace in 2009.