A single bullet and photo-recognition software...

The key tool of terrorists is terror, controlling thought and behavior through fear.  It is interesting in our modern age how terrorist governments have made use of technology.  Today I am thinking of Lybia, Syria and Iran but any country can do this and the list keeps growing.  Without technology and terror crowd control has always been achieved through by more crowds, well armed and armored police and military.  In civil societies they might use water cannons, rubber bullets or maybe teargas with the objective of sending the crowd home and dealing with the issue another way.
     Now they are using real bullets, armored vehicles and tanks and the objective is to squash the rebellion, kill the opponents and rule through fear.  Iran has mastered this ability and exports its technology throughout the Middle East.  At a sign of initial protest the police might only show up with cameras in hand or a single sniper perched on top of a building safely a half mile away.  Suddenly and without a sound a single well place bullet can penetrate a speaker's head!  No one knows where the bullet came from, where the enemy is or who is next in his sites.
    Meanwhile the photos are being examined not even by humans in a back room of a government building
but by computers and through photo-recognition software, they are supplying a name and address to the photograph.  In the middle of the night an armed security detail will knock the door down and remove the subject in the photograph eliminating that protester.
   This is the modern era and every civilized society should have fear of it.   Our own "Patriot Act" allows almost unlimited government access to our every keystroke, our every telephone conversation, our personal mail and entry to our homes without court order.  This sounds better than it is when we can agree on who the
"bad guys" are but it is always a bit frightening to relinquish hard won freedoms in the name of security.
    It took us hundreds of years to develop a government of laws, rights and responsibilities to replace tribal
supremacy and the power of the majority.  I don't want to see us lose a single step that we have gained and I will have no belief  in the uprisings around the world until I hear a cry for the rule of law and a protection for those who disagree.
My Art is Always HERE

Can we go back now?

I have left this alone for almost a week but you know I can't be quiet forever!  I am glad Osama bin Laden is dead and we took him out like the mad dog he was.  I am glad we have a strong fearless President who does what he says he would do and had the courage to take on such a dangerous mission.  I am glad it was a personal thing, "mano a mano" and not a bomb dropped in the middle of the night.  I am glad photos are not being posted because in this digital age they are pretty meaningless.  They are goading and unkind and unnecessary.
   I think bin Laden was a mad man but incredibly clever and knew how to hurt us the most.  His single act of terrorism, the September 11th that we will never forget, has cost us over two Trillion Dollars and that is a conservative estimate.  There are more fees coming.  He has made us cautious when we would rather dance.
He drew us into Afghanistan when he knew the Russians were there for ten years and it drove them to bankruptcy and that was his goal for us.
   He has caused us to threaten our own Constitution and create laws that curtail our freedom.  We have given much for the sake of safety.  I hate bin Laden and the power he will hold onto even in death.  I remember as a youngster off on my first adventure, travelling across Canada on the trans-Canadian Railway from Vancouver to Montreal, seeing unimaginably beautiful scenery all along the way and meeting all sorts of interesting people.  Now there would be fear.  Fear is often worse than the assault itself.  It is persuasive and lingering and controls our behavior.  It is hugely expensive.
   I don't think we will ever "get back to normal," but I think we should try or bin Laden will have won.  It can only be done in small steps like a recovery from a serious illness.  Today look at someone without suspicion.
It is necessary to get back to the business of living gracefully, in search of beauty and the wonderful gifts that life affords us.
   I am mostly a nice guy but I think it was necessary to kill the m#@*ther f*(#er and now it is equally necessary to forget him.  As for Pakistan!  They are either in compliance or incompetent and neither way are they worth giving 20 Billion Dollars in aid to!!!  I think we need that money for the tornado strewn regions of our own country.  OMG! I am becoming so conservative in my old age!!!
It is more peaceful HERE

Let me tell you about Oregon!

     I have been in all 50 States, travelled to Europe as far North as Lapland and the Southern most part of Spain and everywhere in between, but Oregon is home.  There are three States on the West Coast and Oregon is in the middle.  No one in Europe has heard of it.  I tell them it is the State North of California and they always say, "Oh, Northern California"!
  We have over 300 miles of open, public beaches.  It is against the law to control access to the beach in Oregon.  You can watch migrating wales from the beach and catch Salmon from the shoreline. We have beaches that are miles long with nothing but sand and other areas full of basalt rocks right into the ocean.
The Pacific Ocean is one hour away from my house.
   An hour in the other direction, heading East will take you into the mountains, the Cascade Range with its mountain peaks high enough they are snow covered all year long.  Everywhere are deer and except for me it appears as though we all own rifes.  Oregonians are hunters and fishermen!  We still have pleanty of Beaver and a twenty minute drive in any direction will take you to nowhere, the boondocks and you can discover places where people have never walked.  Oregon is the size of France but has less than a million and a half people living here.
   Most of the population is centered in the Willammette Valley, running most of the length of the State from Portland to Oakridge and nestled between the Coastal mountians and the Cascade Mountains and less than seventy miles wide.  I am in Springfield, next to Eugene, home to Nike Shoes and the University of Oregon.
   I live on a city lot, close to downtown, my little 1/3rd acre hideaway.  I have a 2,200 square foot house that I built using 400 square feet of the original in 1978.  We bought this property with its 900 sq. ft. "fixer" house in 1972 and paid $8,375 dollars for it.  No typo there, that is what we paid.  $1,500 deposit and
$78. per month!!!  It is paid for now and that is good because I couldn't afford to leave!
   Over the years I have done lots of improvements to this property.  Making the house bigger but also building my greenhouse, a sturdy structure in itself, and then creating my studio/shop in my backyard.  It is 20' x 40' and has a walkable attic for storage.  It has seven big windows, about 3' x 6' with a view of my garden and the little pool I built with my daughters.
    I am a sedentary creature although in my youth I travelled at the slightest whim.  The world is becoming so complex and busy.  I am happy here on my island and I can do anything I want to do.
Visit me HERE

What to Charge?

One of the most difficult things for an artist is to sell their work. What to charge is always a predicament.
I learned from my years owning a construction company that nothing is simple and there are hundreds of hidden costs.  What, for instance, does Ten dollars an hour really cost?  For an employer taxes alone will add 40% to whatever wage so now we are at $14 an hour! But it doesn't stop there by a long shot. Next insurance companies want their cut, accountants always charge a fee and there is wear and tear on tools, and a cost involved in having a place to do business!  Most businesses would need to charge out, for a ten dollar an hour employee at least 25 dollars an hour and even then we still haven't talked about profit!
   Artists have a tendency to short change themselves and not take any of these things into consideration.  We forget about "research and development", what it cost to learn our trade, all of the mistakes we have made along the way and the fact that these errors also cost money.  So often I am asked how long it takes me to do something?  "Almost 65 years" is my standard answer and next year it will take a year longer!
   Even in retirement I can't work for free.  I still have all the expenses and it is always necessary to replenish an inventory and allow money necessary to maintain my tools.  Some of what I do any decent welder could do and there are sort of set acceptable fees for welding but a lot of what I do is of my own invention, my art if you will.  These projects you get them from me or you just don't get them.  That is the art to what I do and I charge an "artist's tax" for this.  It is not a consistent amount of money nor any type of percentage, but it is always there even if I have to pay it myself!
   Once in awhile I will run across a job that is just screaming to be done.  A challenge maybe or an opportunity for perfection in place, something that just has to be done.  Something I just can't resist.  When that happens my first desire is for my client to foot the bill of course.  It will after all be his when it is done, but if that is impossible I have been known to subsidize the job myself.  If truth be told the art is always mine even if the location isn't.
You can always find me HERE

Stonepost

 My Original Stone Post

It was just about exactly fifteen years ago that I created "Stonepost Company"
and my life changed forever and it was all pretty much an accident.  I was a remodeling contractor at the time with a crew of seven employees and always had at least two jobs going on at the same time and one waiting in the wings.
   One day I was in Home Depot just ambling down the isles like a guy might do in that kind of fantasy store for guys when I happened upon the lighting section and stopped at a display of Post Lights.  They had, of course, a lot of styles, colors, sizes and shapes but it was the Victorian Reproductions that caught my eye.
   I had only seen Post Lights displayed either on a black three inch pipe or on a massive brick or stone monolith where everything is out of proportion and the light fixture looks little and an afterthought.  I wondered why no one made a column for these fixtures?
   For the next six months I experimented in my backyard on weekends and after work, trying to discover how to build such a column and what it might look like.
I built a lot of failures, some models too heavy to move and many that weren't just quite right.  My goal was to create something complete in my studio that I could deliver and easily install.
   Most of my stone posts are the traditional five feet tall and have a double, tiered base, a column and what is known as a "capital" or heavier top. They are made of concrete reinforced with rebar and contain an electrical conduit. At the bottom are three 1/2" coupling nuts allowing the installation of foundation bolts during installation.  You dig a hole with a post hole digger as if setting a fence post. Fill the hole with fresh concrete, thread through the electrical wire into the conduit, screw in the foundation bolts and upright the post! It all takes about 30 minutes!
My Stone Posts have a veneer of slate over the concrete and each edge is mitred, no butt joints anywhere.
   To me these were just light posts but my customers
saw the potential that I missed. They wanted my posts


 Fencing between my Stone Posts!



with ornamental iron work, with gates and fences

and arbors!  In what seems now a short time I

had developed a huge market and I only had one problem.  I didn't know how to weld!  In fact I had never seen a welder, didn't know the first thing about working with metal.

   The first couple jobs I found other people who could weld and they did this for me. I realized that this was just a job for them and they really had no interest in the finished product, no interest in the art of it, no sense of balance or proportion.

   So I bought a little welder and you know the rest of that story!  I fell in love with it.  After a year,

"Stone Post Company", my little hobby company, was self supporting and I could make a living from it.

That is what started the whole thing, my introduction to art!

You can see where this lead HERE.http://www.picturetrail.com/slate



Osama bin Laden

It took ten years to kill a man in a cave who caused so much damage to the United States and the free world.
    For years when I was in construction I used to park my truck in my driveway full of tools because I was too tired to unload them and put them away.  Then, one day when I was about to go to work, just like that, they were gone!  Someone during the night stole them!
   What I resent to this day is not the loss of maybe $5,000 worth of tools, although that certainly hurt.
It is the fact that some low life thief had the power to change my behavior forever.  The theft was over fifteen years ago and every night ever since I have had to unload my truck and put the tools in my shop and make sure it was locked.
   Osama bin Laden did the very same thing to us as a Nation.  Terrorists have added a huge expense to our daily lives and threaten our Constitution, our very freedoms that we cherish.  We have "Homeland Security"
now, Airport screening, police with guns everywhere and you can't go anywhere without a camera focused on you.  It is amazing how "one guy in a cave" did this to us.  I don't think his death will mark the end to anything.  Yemen, a little tiny desolate sand country is rapidly taking over as a terrorist capitol with almost successes at taking down planes and the destruction of the USS Cole, a battleship brought down by a rowboat!
   There will be no cause for celebration until the implements of war are turned into ploughshares and we can get on to the business of living.  I am not sure that will ever happen.  I have often thought that if a thief could not sell the tools from my truck then he wouldn't steal them.  Is there no way out of the trouble we are in?

You can always visit me HERE

Food Dryer



 This is the food dehydrator I built about 25 years ago.

  I have the plans to build this dryer but they are on a pdf file and for some reason I am having difficulty in creating a link for you to find it. That means I can't do it.  But I will send them to you personally if you are interested.
This is a pretty serious tool, costing about $100 in materials but mine is 25 years old and still working perfectly.  The heat source if from 12 60 watt lightbulbs and it requires a small fan and thermostat.  It has five shelves made of window screens and can dry about a five gallon bucket of tomatoes at one time.

 Seven varieties of heirloom tomatoes

You can buy dried tomatoes at the store but not like you can do yourself!

The year before last was a terrific season for tomatoes and I sent dried tomatoes all over the world.  I dry them to the point of potato chips and there are lots of ways to prepare them for eating.  My favorite by far is nothing.  Just as is, on a cracker with a bit of cheese.  It is an explosion of flavor in your mouth
like you wouldn't believe.  The problem with store bought dried tomatoes is they are from store bought tomatoes, picked green and flavorless.

 it takes about 5 days to dry a batch

  You can also rehydrate them with a dash of wine and some olive oil and put them is salads.  You could cook with them and put them in soups but that is such a waste of a perfect product that I never do it.  They are just too good on their own.



 "Cherokee Purple"

     You can buy little kitchen top dryers at your local hardware store for smaller batches and maybe to see beforehand if you would like to make this bigger model.  I seldom can my tomatoes anymore as drying them is so much easier, less work and not so messy.

  I am hoping for a good season this year but the weather is so strange.  We got a dusting of snow only two days ago in the nearby hills and it is still frosting at night!
More pics of my garden HERE and I will try once again to link to the plans for the food dryer HERE.http://courtneymeier.artifex.org/dehydrator/
Cool, that worked this time!!!  These are great plans for a perfect dryer!