You’d think that knowing I have a couple of months off every year that I’d be able to make a few plans. Maybe go on a trip somewhere. Maybe bang out a couple more chapters on that never ending novel. Maybe go out and take a few pictures of this or that and tweak them in Photoshop and Lightroom. Maybe do a bit of marketing and see about getting some Clients so I won’t have to bother going back to work.
But no. Like out of work guys throughout the ages I have done nothing productive, well, pretty close to nothing.
My brother the antiques dealer bought an antiques mall, which has always been where the real money in the antiques field has been. But then came eBay and it was not so great a business anymore. The people he bought the mall from were a bit on the clueless side and my brother got the business for a song. He has a few empty spaces and he is letting me fill one of one them with Hawaiian Shirts and Fine Art Prints. Ok, so these are not exactly antiques, but them, few antiques mall deal purely in antiques. I will be doing a bit of photography work for him as well. He wants to sell postcards and calendars and the like-I’ve offered to do product shots, but the people at the mall don’t seem that interested paying for eBay photos.
The Mall has pretty good foot traffic and there is a slight possibility that someone might pick up one of my brochures and hire me to do some paid work. It would be nice to sell a few prints and it’s not too bad for my ego to see them in real photographic form. It would be nice to sell a bunch of Hawaiian Shirts as well, one of my many back burner projects is to open a Hawaiian Shirt Shop on a nice beach somewhere. I also have a few odds and ends from years of buying the occasional item that I planned to sell on eBay one of these days.
As always, once I do get a few things rolling I start to hear from The Company that we will be going back to work soon. It’s not ALL bad on the Assembly Line Portrait front, but it’s not all that good either.
I’ve caught up on a lot of TV and reading. I’ve also watched too many news shows-I think I’ve heard just about enough about Lance Armstrong and Gun Control now.
I haven’t heard any jokes linking Armstrong and gun control yet, but I suppose they must already exist.
I frequent antique malls a lot. I figured eBay might wipe them out. but I’ve seen malls close and new ones open during this period.
Speaking of Armstrong, I’ve also noticed the rise of the trivial vanity cable network. Some celebrity decides to make a network, that no one ever watches other than people watching news on other networks about its business success or lack there of. There’s Al Gore’s Currentjezeera network. Now this Oprah OWN network I had no idea existed until it made news with the Lance Armstrong thing. There’s also something called Access TV that is advertising some sort of anti-Obama movie.
You got time waiting for the Company to call you back? Spend it starting your own vanity cable network.
It’s not a bad idea, except that Oprah has pretty much lost her ass with her Own network. Oprah has a buttload of money to lose- me? not so much.
It is amazing how many ‘networks’ are out there. Who’d have guessed that Wayne and Garth had the right idea?
I would settle for a Syfy network that doesn’t cancel good shows, is wrestling-free, and has no movies about villages fighting CGI monsters or nuclear weather.
Anarchist! Next thing you’ll tell me is that you want to watch music videos on MTV, get rid shows about pawn shops and junk dealers on the History Channel, and maybe have someone explain how Storage Wars is Artful.
I liked the idea of themed networks, and it does seem that there is more than enough sci fi programing to fill at least one full time network, but that stuff doesn’t seem to pay the bills. A show like Stargate Universe costs about $2 million an episode, I’m guessing wrestling and ghost hunting is a lot cheaper.