Stuff for the upcoming UFO Festival in Roswell

4th of July weekend is Alien Time in Roswell. We shall see if anyone shows up this year, what with the gas prices & all, Roswell being 200 miles away from everything in all directions.

This is the new shirt for the Alien Chase the Roswell Runners' Club does every year. It's a sequel to the Flash Gordonesque design I did last year that everyone seemed to like. Son of Alien Chase '07.

The Roswell Museum and Art Center does the Alien Costume Contest every year as part of the festival. This year they had me do a poster for it. I sort of tied it into a similar theme as with the Alien Chase shirt (that everyone seemed to like), but not exactly. And I was going for the look of an old scifi movie poster, whereas the Alien Chase shirt is a comic book cover. The RMAC liked it so much that they're doing T shirts of it, too. We'll see how those come out.

Up, Up & Away

May 3, 2008
(not really, but that's when it happened. I was unable to document it in real time.)

Our First Balloon Ride(s)

12 years in New Mexico & we finally go up in a hot air balloon. We're a little slow, perhaps, but/& we're savoring every moment as we always have been, haven't we? I forget. But I savored it at the time. I tried to, anyway. I think. Therefore I uhhhh....

The Old-Timers' Balloon Rally in Roswell, New Mexico. It was the I-have-no-idea-how-many annual one of those.
Now that we're part of the Doyal Family by dint of our son Zerek having married Caryn nee Doyal; we're inlaws with the inlaws, & they've been participating with this Albuquerque balloon crew for years & Caryn's been telling us about it for years & this year, we got to become part of it.
It'll do.
The name of the balloon is A Touchie Subject. Its pilot is Fergie. We got to know & love the rest of the crew even though we don't know all of their names yet.
Which will do for now.
Okay, this was followed by a Friday at the 'new' location of our shop like we never had at any of the various locations we have operated our little sign shop out of in this stinking little town over the years. Big Weekend in Roswell: Speed Channel doing a thing out at the Roswell Dragway, which has stupidly chosen to call itself Area 51 Dragway, Cable One needed some banners to put out there, Krumland Auto Group, which is the outfit that owns the Toyota/Scion store, the Honda store & the Hyundai store here, wanted to put some stuff on their racecar trailer, okay, it's this guy that works at Toyota & he's got 3 racers, one of which is him, & Krumland is sponsoring him, or they own his ass or something, at any rate they wanted to have their logo on both sides & the rear of the trailer, Joe wanted his logo, which didn't even exist: Reiser Racing & the numbers of the 3 cars, each in a different gaudy flourescent color of vinyl, which is real expensive & we don't keep that shit in stock so we would have to order it from a place in Albuquerque, on the 3 sides as well, I had to design it all in order to be able to figure out how much vinyl it was gonna take & how much it was gonna cost. I told Joe & Staci the Marketing Director about how there was good, fast & cheap & you get to pick 2. So it was gonna come to $3,800 bucks & that didn't include the racecar he also wanted me to do. We were gonna try & do one side of the trailer for the weekend when Speed Channel was gonna be there & do the rest of it the next week. Half hour later Staci calls me back. They bailed.
There's also55 Alive, a golf tournament at the Spring River Golfcourse being put on by the Roswell Chamber of Commerce, We did a mess of coro plast signs for the Hole Sponsors.
And other stuff, too.

So we got up real early Saturday morning & managed to show up at the old soccer field right across the street from the Wool Bowl all on the grounds of the New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI, locals call it "Nimmy") at 7 o'clock, which is like a really unusual kind of thing for us to do. We're helping kind of helplessly here & there, spreading the envelope out on the grass, holding open the opening as the blower blows air into it & makes it big. Fergie lights up the burner & heats up the air in there, the envelope gets up off the grass, the gondola/basket is turned upright & there it is, it's a big ol' hot air balloon ready to fly up through the air that is heavier than it is. Their sponsor is the Roswell Lodgers Tax so there's nobody from the sponsor there, having to be allowed the first ride. Zerek had already been established as being first on the list (there is no list). So he was in there & then Kevin was getting Heather in there & then somebody asked me if I would like to go. I didn't have to be asked twice. I climbed on in & then we were off the ground, rising at a good rate, which Fergie announced after checking the guage, I forget what it was. It didn't feel like we were moving all that fast, but the people down there on the grass got really small very quickly & there we were, floating above Roswell, 4,800 feet Above Ground Level.

House of Cards

Here's a guy who has a trick way of stacking cards so he can build really big structures with them. And he does so. link

The Buzzards' Jamboree

We know it's spring in Roswell when the buzzards come back and have their party right in the middle of town. They're turkey vultures. They migrate. I don't know where they go in the winter, but in the spring, they come to Roswell. Well, not all of them. This is just one of those places where a bunch of them, wait, what's the group name? Okay, it's a colony of vultures.
When it gets warm enough to make some nice updrafts off of the pavement of the city, they come gliding in from all over, I guess; in the course of a week or so, maybe two, more and more of them show up and gather until there are hundreds of them, wheeling around each other, swooping & dodging; clearly enjoying each other's company. It's not about food, there's no feasting, nothing dead down there, no battlefield or anything like that.

You know how they find leaks in the natural gas pipelines that run across the prairie? They pump the smell of a dead rabbit through it & watch for the vultures to start circling.

But these guys here are partying. They like the historic district a few blocks off Main Street right in the center of town. When it gets dark they'll roost in the tall old trees that don't have leaves yet, on a nice street with really nice old houses, & crap all over the sidewalks & the street. Big nasty green shit. Lots of it. Then one day they'll just be gone.

Happy Pi Day

It's 3-14.
Pi Day
link

Oh, stop, yer breakin' my heart

Where I come from, LOL means Little Old Lady.

Just a Bunch of Links?

I guess that's where it's at these days, but what???
WTF
I mean I guess that's what the whole thing with Digg & others where it's what? You post a list of your favorites, your bookmarks?
Why?
Why would I post individual items from these blogs that I like to go to?
Why not just send you to those blogs?
Oh, I guess that's what Digg & stuff are about, right?
Those blogs are all run & maintained by people (punk kids) that are all way cooler & hipper than I'll ever be. Right?
Most if not all of what I know about anything that's cool on the Web, I got from http://www.boingboing.net/
I found it from http://growabrain.typepad.com/
which is a goddam real estate blog out of Riverside, California.

Captain's Blog; Stardate Whatever

This is how I thought of a Blog:
like a daily diary kind of thing of where you were at; as if anybody else gave a shit about such things.
No, wait.... My thought(s) was (were) that I would use this as a place to stick stuff like pictures & declarations & revelations & invocations(?) & whatevers to friends & family & weird stalkers & such.
But I seem to be so sluggish at doing so that nobody would ever bother to keep coming back to check up on where I was/am at.

As Long As It's Backwards

Then it's a Blog!
Right?

I Think, Therefore I Blog

So I looked it up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
Interesting.
Apparently....

To Blog, Or Not To Blog...

I am so not in the Moment. Apparently.
I caught this one thing on, I'm pretty sure it was on http://www.wired.com/
an interview with this guy who was supposedly (allegedly) the original blogger, the guy who invented the idea, or the first one to ever do it, or something, & he was this longhaired freak from somewhere near Mountainaire, New Mexico (there was a picture of him), & he was saying something to the effect of: a blog is like a record of where you have been on the Internet, so it is a series of links of where you have been, & he said "if you have more original content than links on your blog, then you need to learn some humility" or something like that. I can't seem to find that post so I can't post a link to the sonofabitch...I tried, I swear tagod.
That made me feel even more uncomfortable than I already did about being on the Internet already. There was a picture of him, he was (is) a longhaired freak wearing a funny cap looking like someone I would totally get along with, but.....

I Suck, therefore I, uhhhh......suck

I am so bad at this blogging shit. In fact, I seem to be really bad at the whole Internet Thing.
It's so futuristic & all, I love the Future, at least I used to think I did. Am I really getting old & shit; calcifying; moss gathering up under my too-slowly-moving feet up around my ankles over my calves & thighs into my underused crotch rotting, no, fossilizing my gonads......no, wait. Stop. Take a breath. Relax.....
I can remember sitting in a living room in Bakersfield many years ago, must have been early '70s, telling some people I didn't know something about how in the Near Future, not too long from now, everybody is going to have a computer, & it's gonna be great! Blank stares. They had not the faintest idea of why in the world they would ever want to have a computer. Nor did I! But I at least knew that it was gonna be really cool in some way or another! I was so ahead of the curve, the wave, the thing. I was so ready for it......not! I got books on computers, I tried to learn Fortran from paperbacks. I was not the right kind of nerd in the right college at the right time. I was an artist waiting for Adobe Photoshop™ to happen & drop into my lap so I could do all these really cool things. I was an "Underground" Cartoonist, fer chrissake! I was ready to be wielding lightning bolts in really original & constructive ways that would make the world such a better place like you wouldn't believe!
And the whole thing went right on by me.
I never ever, in my wildest dreams, & I guess I did have some wild ones, expected to live past the age of 30. Really. I think I thought I was just going to go up in a puff of smoke at some point or something, I don't know. At any rate, I am now in what is for me totally uncharted territory, so I am of course having to make all of this shit up as I go along, & I don't seem to be doing a very good job of it, because I seem to have made some really dumbass decisions about how the World works, or should work, & now, having already committed myself to not spending every waking minute trying to do nothing but make more money & then some more money & then more more more more money.....I blew it. I'm a lousy provider. I'm just a dreamer. That & $4.00 will get you a latté. (Back in the '50s & before even that, they used to like to say: "...that & 10 cents will get you a cup of coffee.") So it's funny, see?
Oh, man, listen to this Old Fart whining. Or not.
Which brings me back to this blogging thing. I have a hard time believing anybody could possibly give a shit about the things that I happen to be thinking about, let alone the things I've been looking at on the Internet.

Signs Of Life in Roswell

Here's what it looks like up on the wall of the building that used to be entirely but (for) now is only partially Kokopelli Real Estate.

It's on black Dibond™, oh, wait, it wasn't actually Dibond™, it was a knockoff brand, Signabond™, (same thing, way cheaper) which is a sandwich of aluminum & PVC (polyvinylchloride) that's only 1/8" thick & way stiffer than just aluminum so it doesn't get all rumply; & it's got trim (normally used for channel letters) around the outside edge, so it pops out an inch from the wall. I siliconed it onto a piece of 3/4" plywood, so the trim would have something to stick to, after cutting a big chunk out of the middle of said piece of ply so it wouldn't be so heavy. The letters are done in vinyl faux goldleaf, which is not really like the real thing, but pretty flashy nonetheless (especially for Roswell, where the signage standards are, well, low). It's 4 feet high by 6 feet wide.

A Sign Of Life

Here's the first sign done in our new improved shop.

Got To Keep Moving

We have moved Signs Of Life out of the ass end of the Roswell Space Center & into a building nearby where we have lots of space all to ourselves to do lots of signs &/or crazy art stuff.

Nothing will ever be the same again.


Not much to look at, no windows to look out of. It's been unoccupied for 5 years.

Sharon did that sign when she was running SignPro years ago.



Here's the big room, runs the whole length of the building on one side. There used to be a beauty school in here.

Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again

We've done it. Well, not completely, not even, not yet, but we're more here than we aren't.
What the fuck is he talking about?
Oh, we're moving. Gotta keep movin' doncha know....
We are moving our shop - Signs Of Life [In Roswell] from out of the ass end of the Roswell Space Center, which we, Sharon & myself, managed to make famous through the Associated Press news network this last summer, into a whole 'nother venue; another building about a hundred yards away from where we were, but now everything is going to be ever so much better thsn it ever dreamed of being before simply because we have way more space 7 It's all ours.

Happy Pagan Midwinter Holiday

We had a Welz family gathering in Kittery, Maine during parts of the holidays.
It was all my children & all my grandchildren. I'm the patriarch! That's something I never imagined imagining. It's all right. The kids are all right. None of them are screwups. I'm so proud. Jesse's in Santa Cruz with Sheyenne, who is 10 now. Selena's living in the Mission in San Francisco. The 3 of them took the same flight from SFO. Sharon & I flew out of ABQ at 11:30pm Christmas night.
We ate. We played games. We played Wii. We did karaoke. We had lobster & clam chowder. We went to the ocean. It was good.