Looking Back / Friday Photos

There's somewhat of a danger in "reminiscing." I don't want to come across like the children of Israel--complaining, "we had it better in Egypt!", but every once in a while, I wonder how things might have been. Don't get me wrong, I love my wife and my two boys. I can't imagine life without them...actually I do imagine life without the boys--it's called RETIREMENT, but that's another topic. Anyhoooo...I love my church, my pastors, the people in our Sunday School class, etc. I wouldn't want to change any of that. What I wonder about is: what if I had gone into a different line of work?

Right now, I work for a company that builds refinery equipment. I am "in charge" of writing and reviewing all of the welding procedures used in fabrication. I also track the welding "consumables" (rods, wire, and flux) via a program I wrote and each month I report the amount of welding consumables in total pounds and dollar value used for each job in our shop (pretty exciting stuff, eh?) I began working here in the CAD Department (actually it was called "Drafting" when I started), went back to school and took some programming classes in FORTRAN, taught myself Visual Basic, AutoLISP, and Access databases--and through a chain of events--i.e. our welding engineer died--find myself in the position I currently have.

The irony of all this is that I have a diploma in Commercial Art. I use some, not much, of my training/education/art skills designing forms, applications, etc. I also maintain a very static website for our company, but all-in-all, the "artistic side" is just a hobby, when I have the time. I did own my own sign shop for a while, but that was 19 years ago. Once PC's took off, hand-lettering pretty became a thing of the past--I know there are still some sign-painters out there that do hand lettering, but they seem to be far and few between.

I bring all of this up because I actually had a couple of evenings last week where I didn't have something that just HAD to be done, so I broke out my sketch pad, the colored pencils and such, and sat down at the kitchen table. My inspiration was this photo I'd seen on Flickr a few days earlier. Below is the result.

It was really relaxing just to sit and do something that I really love doing...something that just comes "naturally." People tell me: "man, you should be doing something with that!" or "what's stopping you from doing that again?!" Then I remember why I don't "do art" for a living. It became a "job"...I wasn't doing it for the pleasure it brought me; I couldn't. I had deadlines and gripey customers. It quit being fun and became a chore. SO, I guess that's the answer to answer the question: "what if I'd stayed with the art?" instead of doing what I do now. Looks like I'll stay right where I am...God must have put me here for a reason.

Friday Photos

My oldest son, Ryon, playing at a local coffee shop

This is a sign on the back of an automatic drill in our shop. I liked the colors.

flickr: Friday Photo Group