The Daily Delaney

This morning was a good news/bad news kind of morning. The good news was that it was a sunny day, my housemate Coop was in the kitchen making his daughters laugh, I was excited to write a speech for Rik and Piper's 20th anniversary party tonight, I was looking forward to a trip to see my sister this weekend, and down in Texas, Lindsey was getting ready to show off to a book editor. To top it all off, the first "Chronicles of Narnia" movie was playing in the background... and somehow that segued right into the bad news... As I sat at the table next to young Domina (who was, as usual, coloring very carefully within the lines) and started my morning news-surf on my computer, I ran right into the weird discovery that the man pictured here, one of the executive producers of the Narnia films, had died yesterday in New York City. His name was Perry Moore and aside from nurturing the Chronicles into their onscreen  lives, he wrote a very good book a couple of years back. It...

  "Teacher of the Year "  Here's to anybody who's got the guts  and the heart to stand up in front of a room full of kids  and teach them something... anything at all. 

One of the questions that comes up when I try to sell my work online is just how big my pins actually are.  You can give a measurement... but that really doesn't give any sense of the scale of a piece. So from now on, I'll try to put something else in one of the shots to give folks a better idea of how large or small things are... The pin in question is called "Scene of the Crime" .  It's smaller than Batman. But what isn't? "Jazz Hands" "Building A Mystery" "Simply Baffled" This one's not for sale... it belongs to one of my Texas regulars. She dropped it off for repair and I thought I'd get a shot of it while I had it. I haven't done work in this style for quite a while. It's fun to look back on the phases I go through.

Soooo.... Last weekend, I attended a weekend's worth of workshops hosted by the Northwest Art Alliance , the fine folks who bring us the Best of the Northwest art fairs several times a year. We talked about jurying (that thing where you send in pictures of what you hope the people who run shows really want to see and then you never know why they must hate you specifically), and thing like booth design, selling techniques, wholesaling, photoshop techniques and photography. I want to thank everyone who volunteered their time and energy to make the weekend happen. Not just the organizers... while I know it was a huge amount of work to get it up and running, and watching Karen Seymour work the registration desk Saturday morning was a tutorial in multitasking and good humor, I want to thank all the other artists who showed up to learn but wound up accidentally teaching, either by speaking up when a presenter got stuck on a question or just by allowing an image of their work to be p...

Here is the interview I did on the  KVUE Morning News in Austin on opening day of the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. If it seems like I'm driving the interview, that's all to the credit of Melissa, the interviewer. When I arrived that morning, I was presented with a prepared script covering what I would be talking about. It was hokey and contrived, not to mention inaccurate. The staff brought me out to the studio to sit off-camera one segment early and when I mentioned that they were acting on the wrong information, the quick-thinking anchors, Melissa Gale and Olga Campos  actually heard me and then just asked a few questions and let me talk. What you're going to see here is Melissa then recalling all the points I brought up and feeding me the right questions to get the all the info out that we had just covered off-camera. She was able to completely change her game plan two hours  into a two and a half hour broadcast that had started at 4:30 am.  God only knows what t...

Sun's up in Seattle... just barely. Last night there was a windstorm so strong it folded up the patio furniture and threw it all over the yard. I slept on and off and was up before 6. I must still be on Texas Time. Maybe with this guy... This is Bear Cub. Once upon a time, he was a lost and scared dog and a sweet family took him in and gave him a home, sort of filling a place that was left when a scrappy, adventurous little terrier was lost. You can never quite replace a beloved animal. No two are alike in the ways that they get into your heart and your life. You think you know how an animal is supposed to work and then another one comes along and turns everything you know about them upside down. And it's all good... it's just a different good. Bear Cub defied expectations. In his prime, he was a substantial piece of dog, kind of a lean Rottweillery kind of guy with a nice deep bark, intimidating if you didn't know him. When I first met him, I was down for Christma...

  a great grandmother - 2008 This week finds me thinking a lot about parents and children and family and the bonds we form. How fragile they are, how easy they are to take for granted, how devastating it can be when that bond is broken, whether from death or separation or something worse. Yet it all starts with a moment like this one here.  A big surprise...Look at you! Where did you come from? Aren't you perfect? I'm gonna love you forever and ever!    And we do the best we can, don't we? It's the biggest job in the world, being a parent. Being a child has its challenges, too. This week, something awful happened in Arizona. A madman went off and blew half a dozen people out of the world. Somebody's grandfather, somebody's  husband, somebody's wife, somebody's children, somebody's child. And while important people stand around and try to pin blame, or dodge it, the fact remains that there are now six holes in the world that will never be filled. I ...