A few nights ago, kids brought Mommy Bear, Daddy Bear, and Adventure for my bedtime. They also gave me an old sweater to dress Daddy Bear. I put it on him this morning, brought in Bear Bear and took a family portrait.
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This post is an example of why I am such a huge proponent of sharing your work online, again and again over time.
Can you see it? (Clue: I’ll keep original formatting on the previous alphabet.)
As I was setting this post up for this next round of images, I accidentally hit a comma instead of a period.
Of course! I always wanted an non-intrusive spacer, and what’s smaller than a period? But a period is a touch too insubstantial and carries weight as an ending. A comma is a tad bigger and actually means “pause”.
It took me six posts to figure this out….or sixty-one posts including my OPM letters, which used a ~ tilde. I could have never thought this up in the abstract.
A digital space of your own gives you the space to grow. It lets you experiment one step at a time. Just start! With something imperfect! Now!
And one day, the gods may grant you a flash of insight, possibly the perfect typo at the right time. But you gotta show up, again and again.
Holiday Soul, Bobby Timmons — This instrumental album holds its own beyond Christmas. Bobby Timmons is an amazing pianist, obscured due to his early death. For non-Christmas fare check out Chicken & Dumplin’s and Chun-King on youtube.
A Charlie Brown Christmas, Vince Guaraldi Trio — This album kicked off our jazz kick at home and is still great. Actually, I wonder if this album is why my current personal jazz preferences leans towards trios.
She balanced the spoon on the edge of her bowl and had me record it for posterity. In the meanwhile he snuck away from the table, most likely to google Pokémon while she read her ebook.
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In the theme of “E”, shout out to Everyday Magic thread on Notes. Every Saturday Charlene Story starts a thread for people to share their beautiful mundane worlds. Here’s the one from last week.
Every few weeks, I collect my recent contributions for this blog series. While there, I wander through all the entries. It’s a great mental reset to walk the world through others’ eyes (and be jealous of everyone else’s luscious green landscapes!)
Starting a thread once a week might not seem like a big effort. But having blogged on a schedule, I know how hard it is to act consistently without fail over months, which is why I don’t blog on a schedule now!
So thanks again Charlene, for being our wonderful Everyday Magic host!
Let’s start with the biggest and most important numbers: 1,501 posts and 5,663 days.
Everything starts with the work. Do it. Do it again. And again.
But that’s boring, and let’s be real — I’m not banging out an analysis of “5663”.
Like many writers, I check the dashboard every few days and was pleasantly surprised to see that I had finally crossed the 100 subscriber mark on Substack!
Whoohoo! But this screenshot only tells the last 3.8% of the story. Here’s the rest of it.
I started Grizzlypear.com in June of 2008 with two readers — me and my dad. (My girlfriend, now wife, never reads my ramblings cause she gets plenty in real time.)
Thirteen years later, I still had two readers. I would occasionally try to increase visibility to no avail, aside from Facebook spamming me to pay for a boost to the most recent post.
In mid-2021, I started an industry related newsletter. Even though the effort fizzled out in a few months, the effort got me onto Mailchimp with ten more ten readers, including my mom and sister, friends and three folks I’ve never met IRL!
About a year ago, I joined Post where I met a great crowd but after they slow-walked critical features, I jumped to Notes this April along with seven fellow travelers.
For the first few months I posted daily and grew steadily. Then September got crazy so I dropped down to a weekly schedule and growth slowed. So here is how I got to 113 readers:
What do I make of it all?
I’m an early 21st century anachronism with a personal blog. I entered that scene as it was being strangled by Social Media™, but I kept my site because I loved having my own home on the internet.
However, if you wanna grow, you gotta do what Zig Ziglar advises “You can get anything you want if you help enough people get what they want.” Or if you forgo the self help business, then be “so good that they can’t ignore you” (as quipped by Steve Martin).
These fifteen years of blogging taught me that it’s OK to just enjoy a hobby. I have a great job. I don’t need an audience to serve. I’m allowed to be a dilettante, exploring the arts without the discipline or patience to become great at anything.
I might be a disappointment to Zig and Steve, but I’ve had fun archiving these meanderings (board games, business books, sourdough bread, sketches, poetry, calligraphy) for future reference.
And then Substack swooped in to distribute this work and connect into a network of creatives. Notes is a great place to keep me inspired and challenged. So here we are, with this email slamming into a hundred inboxes!
Yes, this is just number, but it’s cool — three digits of cool! After more than a decade of silence, it’s gratifying to know people want to see my next letter. And it’s nice to get feedback. (Dopamine!)
Would I be bummed if the count slides back down? Of course, I’m human. But it is just a number. If my interests go weird, I wouldn’t want to force y’all to follow along. I’ll keep writing cause this is my practice.
Blogging is a good practice. The world might not need your input, but you need your input. Writing publicly forces us to look carefully and to process the richness that surrounds us. Write what you see, and your soul comes into focus.
Do it long enough and you’ll find a few folks to accompany the journey.
Jump in! Five thousand days later, you might stumble upon a goldmine of email addresses!
Ever since the got a Pikachu stuffie from the claw machine at the Primm Mural Gallery (formerly an outlet mall), they’ve been into Pokemon. He wanted a Pikachu and she drew an Eevee with a witches hat. Their lights from the jack-o-lanterns left a bold mark on the ceiling.
The unseasonably warm autumn meant that these poor pumpkins went mold in a couple of days. But still, it was a day of carving and a few good photos.
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That Pikachu might have been the most impactful dollar that we’ve spent (for good or ill). It’s turned into a costume, a change in TV habits. Pokemon Go has me walking in circles around the house to hatch eggs and the kids just forced me to try out the Pokemon Sleep tracking app. They’re constantly drawing different Pokemon when they aren’t playing. He’ll walk up and start talking about random creatures and evolutions, without no explanation or context (of course!)
I recently heard on the Cortex podcast that Pokemon may be the most successful IP of all time. It’s hard to argue from this household. Lord help us if we get into the TCG card game, or if we ever get a Nintendo.
11/26 Part of our role as parents is to make the kids uncomfortable. They don’t enjoy it, but we can’t let them settle into a bad local optima. (that afternoon, we took the training wheels off his bike)
11/23 Life is funny, it takes you places. I play a part by going along. But I tend towards the passive. Most likely comes from my mom.
11/20 I write lists. Making tasks visible lets me manipulate them. Maybe even cross shit without doing them (because I realize they’re unimportant). I do love my lists. Be careful about procrastinating by list. Do the work!
I used up the last of the Waterman blue my dad gave me years ago. My guess is that this ink is half a century old. The boy helped me fill the cartridge so there’s three generations in this pen.
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In my recent search for pens, I’ve tried up a bunch of cheap pens. It’s fun to explore each assemblage of plastic and steel.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, if I could only pick two it would be the Pilot Kakuno and Pilot Parallel. The Kakuno with an extra fine nib is a tight writing instrument, and the Parallel is a unique tool that is creates an expressive line and suited for calligraphy.
If I could to create a second pairing, the Sailor Fude Nib Pen is a similarly wide pen that goes great with the Sailor Compass. At $30, its twice as expensive as the other pens, but the build quality is noticeably better than cheaper pens.
After graduating college, I treated myself to a Pelikan M600 which now sells for about half a grand. Even accounting for the piston mechanism (that has survived two decades of neglect) and the butter smooth gold nib, I don’t see how the M600 is $470 better than the Compass.
As with many things in this world, the first few bucks makes a huge difference in quality. After that, the extra dollars only temporarily mollifies the ravenous criticism of a connoisseur.
This time last year, there was a magical moment on Post.news as people escaped the chaos of the recently acquired Twitter.
It was a wonderful holiday season as we enjoyed and explored each others’ art. I rediscovered my drawing hand, which had atrophied from decades of fear. They encouraged me to keep exploring poetry. Post freed me to make bad art, which might not sound special, but it’s eons ahead of doing nothing.
I’m not sure what went wrong (maybe their focus on news and opinion?) but the magic dissipated in the early months of the new year. I miss those folks, but most of them have also moved on, and I don’t have time to be online everywhere.
Fortunately Substack stepped in to fill the void. This community has been generous with encouragement and relentlessly inspiring with the endless publishing of amazing work. It’s a place to stretch and play.
When I joined Post last Thanksgiving, I took a photo of our freshly reinstalled Christmas tree to be the banner image of my user account (it’s still there). This morning, that tree is back up as we enter into another holiday season.
What will the new year bring? Who knows. Maybe I’ll actually bang out some good art. Whatever’s. I’ll settle for sharing more bad art. A second year of making would be an accomplishment in this topsy-turvy world.
In the meantime, thanks for the company; let’s hope this party lasts a bit longer.
We went to hallOVeen at the Magical Forest, a little amusement park that the non-profit Opportunity Village opens up for fundraising during the Halloween and Christmas holidays.
The kids enjoyed the Blizzard. Mama and I only lasted once each. So we let them sit together for another spin around and around and around and around and around…
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The kids are growing up fast. Only yesterday, they needed us to play with them. Now they keep each other amused (when they aren’t arguing!). And she’s got books. The whole world on her Kobo with a Libby account. She’s read through the Harry Potter series at least twice and was Hermione this Halloween (he was Pikachu).
Right now they’re watching Harry Potter #2 downstairs. I can’t do it. I don’t have anything against the series. I was just old enough to miss the excitement over the series as it came out. We watched the first movie and it did nothing for me. And the thought of spending 283 minutes on the second film pains my soul.
I’ve never been good at entertainment if I wasn’t in the mood for it. I wish I could be a little less judgemental when watching TV, but instead I’m up here writing notes about my finicky media habits.
The kids helped Pikachu make a little candy shack, turned off the lights, and lit the room with a red plastic cup over a flashlight.
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As the first letter of the alphabet I have a lot of A’s. There won’t be as many for future letters, and even less when I hit the numbers. But hey, let’s start with a bAng!
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One of the best firm names I’ve come across is “Atelier One”, a British structural engineering company. Why? Cause I still remember it nineteen years after I saw them give a lecture at Rice. Can I remember anything they did? Nope. But what a sticky name to stay in my consciousness after all these years.