Look what I bought with my sales made from the Show!!
Just kidding. Though there are times when both Daddy-O and I get WAP’s like “I know, lets sell the houses, home school the youngest on a boat and cruise around warmer climes. I could make arts & crafts for island tourists and D could give surfing lessons to beautiful socialites and co-eds… -huh?!” WAP’s save us from ourselves. I saw this boat for sale this summer while visiting the folks -wow, did Gus and I both want it and it was a deal. In reality we probably couldn't have afforded even the fuel for it! WAPs allow Derek and I to dream without actually putting us in the poor house by making very bad, impulsive life altering decisions. We first saw WAPs in a Patagonia catalog - the original Wish Book. Wild Ass Plans allow dreamers to dream and allowed me to spend my (though very much inflated) Bad Girl Money in a very Bad Girl way.
We had our first real measurable snowfall yesterday and only 4 days shy of setting a new record for the year’s latest date for the snow to fall in the Anchorage Bowl. With crazy drivers being at an all-time high, my Monday was filled with a list of post-show to-do’s that didn’t all get done. Banking, deliveries, customer follow-ups etc. and today I need to RETURN my NEW credit card machine –arrrgh. With a line of customers
on opening night at the Show, my machine went on the *blink*. I was panicked –thank goodness I had at the last minute decided to throw in my vintage “knuckle buster” credit card slider and ended up manually processing every credit card transaction for the show. The machine (old one on the left, NEW broken one on the right) was still not working even after my sweet husband raced it back to the studio, had merchant services (he swears from somewhere in a third world country) over the telephone, re-program it, download more instructions for it to behave and raced it back to me at the Show. I’m even more frustrated because I was forced to upgrade and pay for this new machine after my bank told me my older machine was going to be non-compliant –huh?! Short story long, I’m going in to talk with merchant services today and grinch a bit for the stress, time and freak-out this NEW machine gave me this weekend during one of my largest Show's of the year.
I wanted to pass on a few links I discovered while researching some 1% For Art Projects. First, is the Café, Call For Entry, an on-line call for entry site managed by the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), which I had no idea existed but registration is mandatory
to bid on certain % for art projects. On the Cafe site there are also links to;
ArtJob.org, an online Arts job bank listing national opportunities for arts administrators and others, internships, grants, public art projects, and residencies; ArtistsRegister.com,
an online gallery that allows visual artists to showcase their work and connects the artists with private collectors, gallery owners, interior designers, corporate art buyers, public art administrators, and general art enthusiasts; ZAPPlication.org™, an online application and adjudication system for art fairs, festivals, and shows; and CultureGrants Online™, a highly adaptive online grants-application system designed to make it easier for state, local, and regional public arts and humanities funding agencies to manage grant-making processes. WESTAF is also the creator and purveyor of a research-based economic development tool, the Cultural Vitality Index, that measures and provides comparable data about the health of an area's creative sectors.
Who knew?!
