Sleepless in (the) Seattle (metro area)

I took an excellent little trip to Washington state at the beginning of the month. It's been 7 years since the last time I've been. I love the area and wanted to go back sooner, but Covid made stuff a little more difficult and then life got in the way. But I finally got around to doing it!

The primary purpose of my visit was to attend Sketcherfest, a convention for urban/travel sketchers. I will talk about Sketcherfest in its own post because there's a lot I have to say about it. I spent the rest of the time exploring and drawing the Seattle area. And I got to hang out with Curi in meatspace!

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Fude for thought (2)

Last year I managed to get the Sailor Profit Fude de Mannen pen secondhand, and it's my new favorite sketching pen by a large margin.

Drawing of a cat sleeping on a Vespa scooter (from an actual photo my dad took in Italy!)

The pen is actually navy blue, but I screwed the nib section onto the Sailor Compass because I am a shallow person.

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Only somewhat dead

I had originally started writing this draft entitled "Not Dead" in... August 2025. As it happens, I am dead! Hopefully less so now.

Some context: I moved (again) to start a new job (again) last summer. Starting a new job in education is famously annoying and difficult. I was doing a lot of work for free, and I was tired of looking at screens so much.

I also bought a computer last year, a tower, because I wanted to be able to replace parts as needed instead of dealing with the cycle of constant machine replacement. This worked out for a while until the computer started suffering from frequent forced logouts or OS crashes, which was the product of some kind of poor interaction between the on-board graphics and the OS because Linux is fun. I didn't have the time or money to spend on the computer for most of the year so I put that on the back burner, but I finally got an extremely basic GPU and presumably everything is fine now.

All the life and tech issues (not to mention All That Shit in the world at large) have meant that I've been spending all my free time doing non-internet stuff. It's been really freeing, and I haven't had to think about doing write-ups for anything in a long time! I do want to find a more sustainable way to keep the website afloat without going ghost for a full year, though. I don't know what that looks like yet, but there will be a fairly significant reduction in scope just so there's less stuff to deal with.

If you're still hooked up to this RSS or still browse this website occasionally, I'm glad it's still serving a purpose for you. Thanks for bearing with me :-)

Spring colors

The vegetation is finally turning green here, which means it's jorts season! And update crayon tin season!

Sketchbook spread with materials on the right (detailed description in next figure)
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