"Summer Sprite"

"Summer Sprite"

I finished my print for the Mesa Contemporary Arts  2011 Print Calendar project.  It is a two-color reduction linocut.  Forty-eight artists are invited to create 50 prints and the calendar (with 12 original prints!) will sell for $200.  Such a bargain, my friends.  The calendars will be available at the MCA reception Friday December 10th from 6 to 8 pm and thereafter.  Save your pennies, they will make wonderful gifts! 

Getting Hacked Sucks

I haven't posted much lately.  Last month my yahoo and gmail email accounts were hacked and my friends were asked by someone pretending to be me, to send money to London where I had been mugged.  The bad news was that for a week I struggled to regain my email and contacts and to get my Facebook page back.  I lost everything in my inboxes.  Yahoo, who was wonderful to work with and provided a human to talk to, restored my 339 contacts.  Gmail, with no human to contact, only restored my email address.  All mail and contacts were gone.  I learned that because I had a lot of contacts and that I was offline occasionally, I was targeted by someone in Nigeria.  There are several countries such as Nigeria, Russia and China where this happens a lot.  They went in and changed my passwords; then they forwarded all mail to my email address with an extra "L" in my name.  I reset my damned passwords before I discovered the keylogger trojans.  Opening email doesn't infect your computer.  Clicking on links will.  Opening attachments will.  Fortunately, this phishing expedition didn't have anything to click or open.  So my friends weren't infected.  Just phished.   I filed a complaint with the IC3, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership with the FBI, National White Collar Crime Center and the Bureau of Justice Assistance.  I wish I could have done more.
The good news is that because so many of my friends called to make sure I was okay, I felt very loved.  And moved when I learned that two people had gone so far as to pull $2450 out of their banks to send to me in London before their wise inner voices were heard saying this isn't right.  Thank you for calling even when you knew I wasn't in London.  Thank you for worrying, for making sure your inner voices were right. 

ANGRY WEATHER GODS
Speaking dark clouds, I missed the first hail dropping storm at the studio last Tuesday.  When I got there there was still hail on the ground.  Then another microburst came along and dropped a ton of rain and more hail, denting my poor artmobile but not breaking any windows.  Phew!  Mother Nature had something to say that day!  We had 3 inches of rain at the house.  That's half our annual rainfall in one day.