It’s been a little quiet around here on the Journal lately since I’ve been keeping really busy. In addition to keeping up with the comic, I’ve also been working ardently on the something-a-day drawings. I’ve been at it for nearly 80 days now, and have accumulated a fairly substantial pile of images. I’ve just added dozens more to the gallery here on the website, so check ‘em out!
The other big project of late has been that Lorie and I are embarking on another big life-change, after a year of being married, and nearly a year of living the vagabond life on the road. We’re planning a move to Seattle, to settle down for a while and establish some roots for a couple years. As one might expect, it’s something of an extended process. We’re working on getting day-jobs so we can re-establish our secret identities (well, maybe not-so-secret), and looking forward to exploring an entirely new area. For my part, I’m looking forward to being closer to the mossy temperate rainforests. And I’ve never seen the redwoods, so we’ll be closer to visit those too. And, of course, there’s a variety of other factors in play too– we have friends and relatives in the area, so it’s not as though we’re planning on moving into a social desert.
As to why we’re heading to Puget Sound, rather than re-rooting in Montana, it’s kind of complicated. On the surface, it seems like good economics. As artists, we’ll have more career opportunities in locations with more art buyers. The population of the incorporated city of Seattle is over 620,000 people, with the area being home to some two-and-a-half million or so. The entire state of Montana has only just recently crossed the one million people mark, so it seems like we’ll mathematically have more eyes on our work. Will that translate into more art buyers, though? I guess we’ll find out.
The less quantitative version, though, is that we’ve had a good life in Montana, but we don’t want it to be the only life we live, at least right now. Montana is great, and we’re both intending to go back someday– maybe even sooner than we think. There’s a lot of things I’d love to do every year living in Montana: get to Glacier for a camping trip annually, go fishing on summer evenings, hike to the top of the local mountains, head to a hot springs on cold winter nights, and so on, but I don’t want to spend my life trying to live “the perfect year” over and over again. It’s a nice idea, but sooner or later I’d have too much to do: my time is finite, and there’s a lot more world out there to explore than just what’s within an eight hour range of Bozeman.
In fact, thinking about it now in those terms, I don’t want my life to become an “oldies” radio station, where I only listen to a bookended range of music from a delineated time period that corresponds to the years I spent as an 18-25 year old. I like time capsules as an exercise and artifact, but I don’t want to live in one. So, why not take a few years to take up sea-kayaking, go to some Mariners games, and hike on Mount Rainer? When we return to Montana, it will no doubt be different– but change would come whether we were there or not. Mostly, though, I think we’re going to live somewhere else for a few years to prove to ourselves that we weren’t too scared to leave what was known and comfortable.