At Home On Piety Hill

Yes, it’s back to the drawing board one more time. My beginning drawing class is ending. This is an 18″X 24″ graphite drawing of Sam from a photograph of him, when he was about two years old. I’ll finish it up today and work on my sketchbook. Our instructor is also the head of the Grass Valley Downtown association and our class is on Saturday, so two times when they were having special events, we took our sketchbooks downtown to draw buildings, people, wine bottles and, this last Saturday, classic cars. I have a drawing of the tailfin on a ‘61 Cadillac going now. I still remember the day I took this photo, as a novice following Sam and our dog, Jet, around the yard, photographing anything and everything. By the time I shot this one, he had just about enough and wanted dad to play with him. Denise and I decided to work opposing shifts, so our kids would not have to go to daycare — I did when I was a little older than Sam’s age and look how that turned out! Anyway, it was challenging and fun, because Denise and I were both constantly tired, working lots of overtime and rarely saw one another. On the other hand, I had an experience most fathers didn’t back in the ’70s, going everywhere together — buddies. Sam and I had a ten-speed bicycle with a child seat on the back. In those days, helmets were not in vogue, but Denise and I were fairly progressive. Not only did Sam eat smashed up fresh vegetables and wear sun-dried cloth diapers, but he had a bicycle helmet! I didn’t wear a helmet, so it’s a wonder I didn’t end up with a brain injury, eating smashed up fresh vegetables and wearing sun-dried cloth diapers. Anyway, each day we would go peddaling through the orange groves and pastures in the hills above El Toro. We would finish our ride by flying down El Toro Blvd at about 35 mph. I would get down like a racer and Sam would put a hand on each hip, with his head down on my rear end and we looked like a racing team. Uh-oh, I’m getting misty… I’ll stop here.

Sam’s on a sabbatical in St. Barths and enjoying his time in the sun. So far, highlights include seeing David Letterman driving around a couple of times, in a beat up jeep, and finding an excellent hamburger. He’s painting a bit and relaxing at the residence/artist retreat . Images of Sam’s latest works are up at the Me•di•um site.

I really enjoyed this television movie starring Don Rickles, Keke Palmer, Catherine O’Hara and one of my all-time favorites, William Macy. I believe he won a Golden Globe award for this film. It’s based on Jackie Gleason’s classic, Gigot, and it is a real upbeat PG-13 with some rough language and themes. On the other hand, we trudged through the Monkee’s highly-recommended psychedelic art film, Head. It was dreadful.

Today I checked out the statistics on my sites for the first time since moving to GoDaddy ten months ago. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my Overcoming Necrotizing Fasciitis site had over 1.5 million server requests and 213,000 page hits in less than a year. When the flesh-eating bacteria is in the news, traffic picks up and we average a couple prayer requests a week for someone in the hospital suffering from the disease. Students of all ages contact me for interviews or permission to use the materials on the site for assignments, papers and other class projects at least a couple of times a month.

PietyHill Design had 150,000 page hits, but I wasn’t really able to tell how many unique visitors I had. I host a number of sites on that domain, including this blog, and the top site is The Quotable Christian, with about half as many people visiting the Richard Baxter biography. The Quotable Christian was fun to put together, because it is almost pure CSS. The Baxter site was the final project for my HTML class, so it has a little of everything — frames, tables, CSS, JavaScript, image maps, sliced images, rollovers… you name it.

All the sites I’ve created are now listed in the sidebar. I added some more quotes to The Quotable Christian and I’m in the middle of a redesign of the Necrotizing Fasciitis site. It should load faster, navigate easier, be more readable and much richer in content. I’ll let you know when it’s finished.