June 23, 2009 - Due to the death of her husband, Marilynn will be unable to fill any orders for prints or jewelry until further notice.

April 16, 2009 - Went to a presentation today about upcoming business opportunities at Spaceport America, given by one of the major contractors. Got some interesting info about the plans for the terminal hangar and the vertical launch site. Also a few funny insider tidbits.

April 14, 2009 - Added new section of reviews to my biography page. Working on a painting of Martian homesteaders, and a secret project involving a subject that has fascinated me since I was a kid. More on that as it evolves! The hedgehog or claret cup cacti are about to bloom. The ocotillo had a setback when we had a late frost that blighted the buds they'd sent out. But they are coming back now. The news story today about the passenger who took over the controls of a King Air 200 when the pilot died reminded me of the fun I had on a few occasions when I got a chance to fly a King Air E90. Those King Airs fly beautifully (unlike some of the Cessnas I flew) there was no yanking and banking or hauling them around the sky, a King Air is a plane that really 'loves to fly'.

March 26, 2009 - Three new bookmarks are now for sale on the Shopping page in the Jewelry section.
March is flying by and we are averaging one dust storm a week. Had a beautiful long-lived dustdevil whip through the yard a few days ago. I'll have to try to catch them on video one of these days.

March 16, 2009 - New prints are now available on the Shopping page! Paper prints of "Jupiter's Stormy Sunset" and a very limited edition of 20 prints of my painting "The Search For Intelligent Life" are now available for purchase. I am still working on the new Canvas versions of my prints, so the canvas style won't be available for a few more weeks.

March 6, 2009 - Spring has arrived in the desert, and along with it the seasonal dust storms. This is the time of year when I most feel like I'm living on Mars. The day starts out clear, but by 11 am we start to see dust devils and plumes rising up from the desert floor below us. These coelesce into a nearly solid wall of dust that obscures the mountain range behind it. Then the wind starts to shriek as this blanket of dust moves up into the hills closer and closer to our little 'outpost'. Finally we are surrounded by a pearly haze that partly obscures all of the mountains and hills in all directions. However, if you look straight up you can still see some blue sky. The dust gets through every little crack and seems to be electrostatically charged so it sticks like crazy to everything. This is a very fine dust, not like the dust from the shamals we experienced in Arabia. That was a much larger grained "grittier" sort of dust, which I guess should more rightly be called sand. Even if you were indoors, you could find yourself crunching it between your teeth during a really bad storm. (And it gave a whole new meaning to the word "sandwich"!) In both locations these storms always seemed to last about 3 days dying down a bit at night after the sun set, but whipping up again the next day. In Arabia the storms were often followed by some rain, but out here in our desert, that doesn't seem to be the case.

February 14, 2009 - Here is my newest painting, a Jupiter Cloudscape. It was inspired by a monsoon thunderhead that mushroomed up over the cliff behind my house last summer as the sun was setting. The clouds were so colorful I immediately knew I would have to paint them as a Jupiter cloudscape - I thought these clouds looked just like what you would see if you were floating in Jupiter's upper atmosphere.