The local Art center had a new exhibition open last night called ‘Take Your Best Shot’. There were a number of categories, and Dazzle and I each had a total of 12 entries.

Abbey feeling down

‘Abbey feeling down’ won 2nd prize in the ‘People and Portraits’ category.

Orchid

‘Orchid’ won 3rd prize in the ‘Abstract and Macro’ category.

My first prizes! Cool.

Yesterday, my better half posted one of my newer paintings on our Etsy store. She then mentioned it in a couple of her Yahoo groups and tweeted about it on Twitter. So, in less than 24 hours it’s had 141 views and been marked twice as a favourite. That’s almost 30% more views than my next most view painting which has been on Etsy for months!

It’s been a busy night so far. We’re dealing the the end of a riser installation, which has necessitated changing from Tandem tensioners to lower tensioner only, to upper tensioner only, back to lower tensioner only and then on to the abandonment and recovery winch.  Keeps people on their toes with the multiple procedures that have to be gone through with each change over.

I started the trip on night-shift, then changed to day shift for what would have been the ‘second’ half of my trip. Then, with my trip being extended, I had to change back on to nights, where I thought I’d be for the remainder of the trip. However, my colleague is crew changing a week early, so now, I’m going to have to change back on to day shift again. My body-clock is seriously messed up!

While we’ve been operational with our ‘day job’ we’ve also had to do a lot of preparation and paper-work regarding the de-mobilization of all our equipment from the Toisa Perseus, an event that seems to be approaching with increasing rapidity. I guess it’s a sign of the times when I compare the preparation and documentation that we now have to have in place, to when we last de-mobilized the equipment from a vessel (that WAS 11 years ago!) In them days, we just got up in the morning and did it using a big slice of common sense for safety matters. So far, for this impending de-mob, we’ve probably accumulated 10 times the man hours in planning than we expended on the entire de-mob last time. Along with all that of course, we’re still having to deal with questions and queries for the replacement ship, Seven Pacific.

On a much lighter note, Dazzle listed a ‘Fiber Grab Bag‘ (a small selection of different fibers for people to try) on our etsy store yesterday. She posted about it in her ‘twitter’ account (as did I) and mentioned it on a couple of her Yahoo groups. Within 24 hours it had accumulated over 170 views, making it our most viewed item ever… She’s tried a new listing with the same technique so we’ll see if it will generate the same number of views!

Today we listed some of our photographs for sale on Alba Ranch’s Etsy Store.

Well, it was either that or do our US tax return!

I guess tomorrow we will be doing the tax return unless we can think of anything else to do.

I did a new painting yeserday. It was of a similar composition to a painting that I had done previously (one of my favourite paintings in fact)

I’ve done this one primarily in the hopes that I can enter it in a local exhibition/competion that is part of the ‘Blossom Festival’ tha is held in May of each year. I may manage to do a second one quickly enough that I can expect them to be dry in time for the event!

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Step 6

Okay, I seemed to spend most of this afternoon designing new business cards for the Better Half and myself. I did it online at officedepot.com, and all seemed to be fairly straight forward though a little time consuming. I say “seemed” as the problem didn’t really manifest itself until the order confirmation stage. It appears that, as we wanted cards that had printing on the back as well as the front, our order had to be in multiples of 500 rather than 250. Of course, it didn’t adjust the number of units when it automatically changed our order and price without telling us. So our order ended up as 4 boxes of 500, instead of the 4 boxes of 250 that we thought we had ordered. When we eventually (after three phone calls to customer support) got to the root of the problem, it became apparent that if we reduced our order to 2 boxes of 500, the unit cost of each box was so much higher we were as well leaving it at the 4 boxes.

I hope we like these business cards, as we’re going to be using them for decades!

While I’ve been cruising the Atlantic (aye, right! – this is a strange Scottish phenomena, a literal conundrum, where two positives make a negative!) my better half has been a busy bee.

She’s been busy on the Ranch

She’s been busy with her crafts

and She’s been busy ‘on-line’ too.

She has now set up an on-line store with the Etsy.com site:

albaranch.etsy.com

Having had a little look around, I found a way that a selection of items can be displayed on other sites, hence the appearance of a new section in the menu on the right of this blog. I’ve also peppered variants of the code on a number of our ‘static’ web-pages too!

Anyway, back to my Busy Bee Better Half, she’s now sold a number of items in a very short time (much more successfully than she achieved on ebay) so she is now rightfully feeling very pleased with herself!

Ah, well, yet again I appear to be ‘guilty as charged’ when it comes to failing to keep my blog up to date. Now, thats not to say that I’ve had nothing to write about, quite the reverse in fact.

As usual at this sort of times the main questions are “where do I start?” and “what do I put in?”, or even “what do I leave out?”

So if I went for the answers I’d like they be, “the last blog entry”, “everything” and “nothing”, but the reality will have to be “from the last blog entry”, “what I can remember”, and “what I’ve forgotten”!

So since my last entry, I’ve been on leave and come back to the boat. I was on leave for just under three weeks and, though generally quite busy, the biggest achievement was probably getting the plumbing installed in the well pump-house and that was finished on the last day of my leave! So now instead of having to run out over 100 feet of garden hose and plugging the electric lead for the pump into a socket, there is now a stand pipe with a faucet at the corner of the barn and all you have to do is open it. A bladder forces the water out, and when the pressure in the bladder drops, a switch turns on the pump automatically.

We had some livestock movements, exchanged a couple of goats, bought four more angora goats, two doe’s, a doe kid and a buck kid. We had someone come and shear four of the sheep and five of the goats. (That was followed with the ‘fun’ task of trying to get coats on them all!) We also sold a number of our older chickens. One aspect of that was, after we had cut the numbers down, egg production went up! Not sure if it was because of fighting between the younger and older chickens or whether we had an older chicken that was breaking and eating eggs. Net result though is that we are down to 14 chickens and re getting an average of 10 eggs a day. (of course, Dazzle wants to know who the slackers are!)

Dazzle had purchased a couple of small looms, so they were assembled for her to start weaving on them. She managed to finish her first scarf on it before I left and it looked really cool.

I did actually get a painting done, however that too, was in the last day of my leave and was done in a relative hurry, in artificial light. So I really have no idea at the moment how it turned out. I suspect I may be slightly disappointed with it when I see it again but, even if I am, it is a painting concept that I like so I’ll probably try another version of it in the future.

We, Dazzle and I, went up to Denver to see an immigration attorney on the subject of applying for my ‘green card’. It was a very informative meeting and I think that its likely that, come the New Year, we will be starting the process. A an aid to that, I went to Colorado Springs to have the medical examination that needs to be submitted with the application.

The only other trip we had was for another herding lesson, and this was the day trip that we picked up the new angoras too.

Well, then, back to the boat. The return to the boat started off badly when I discovered that American Airlines are now charging ‘excess baggage’ charges for ALL checked-in bags. That made me mump a bit, but not nearly as much as finding out, on arrival, that they’d only gone and lost it! I was cheered up slightly when I found out that I wasn’t going straight to the boat as I had thought, but would have a night in the hotel first. Anyway, the next day, I joined the ship and we were about to leave Panama City, FL for the transit to Nigeria. I did get word that the airline had found my bag, but it wouldn’t make it to the boat before we sailed. At least I had some clothes on the boat, so it would be a big deal for the transit, only when I need to travel home!

Now we have been in transit since the 24th November, and at the moment, we’re expected to arrive in Nigerian waters around the 17th December, and it looks likely that I will be traveling back to Europe on a charter flight thats tentatively penciled in for overnight on the 19th/20th December.

The big news of the trip so far, is the fact that 3 (of the 19) regular crew have just handed in their notice for various reasons. Two of them are off to work for a new competitor and were due to be joining the ship on arrival in Nigeria. If they don’t do a last trip then the big boss has decided that we will have to manage without them, as he is not going to ask any of the guys that are supposed to be home to give up their Christmas (all the guys who are at home worked Christmas last year)

So, there we are, a bit of a catch up. I’m sure I’ll manage another entry before the end of the year…

Okay, so I managed to do a quick painting before I packed up all my paints to take over to Colorado. Of course, I wont be able to take the painting, it’ll probably have to wait here in the UK for 6 months to dry properly. In the mean time, here is a photo of it. Similar composition to the one that I did last year (‘Sunset Pines’) but this time the sun is well gone and the moon is coming up! hahah

One of my hobbies is painting, and with a couple of posts I want to show two of my more recent paintings. This one was done in May 2006 when I was visting my parents while on leave.

Canvas painted completely with black gesso

A sponge used to put White gesso where highlights will be

Grey Gesso added for the mid tones

More White and Grey Gesso tones added, path blocked in with Black Gesso

Main tree truck blocked in with Black Gesso

Final highlights added in Gesso and tha underpainting is left to dry

‘Forest Walk’ painting completed