Before I became a self described, “Avid Agility Competitor,” I had other walks of life up my skirt. More detail is so gushingly available about that in the Official Team Small Dog FAQ. Two of these were Artist and Former Artist. The Artist one included such art show highlights such as the time I tricked the Graduate School Faculty into Passing my Final Review by Buidling an Earthquake Ride (thanks Karl!), the Holographic Beaver Blue Chip Mirror Trick and Then We Lost All the Money in the Stock Market (thanks Joel Warner!), the Time I Shipped My Favorite Wu-Tang Paintings Instead of the Ones You Asked For to the Art Show in Chicago (sorry curator I forget your name, boy were you mad!), and the Super Fluorescent Pink Wallpaper Room with Fake Christmas Tree Branches Everywhere Almost Didn’t Get Done in Time (thanks mural helpers!). Most of those included a lot of painting with very small brushes. They sort of devolved into the Former Artist Period, which technically is still a work in progress. We’ll just forget about Former Artist Magazine and the shuffling of poor Magnolia, the fortune telling deer booth that only fits in a large u-haul truck, from garage to garage.

As a Former Artist, I like to just draw stuff with pens now and take pictures. I have this real bad luck with cameras though. I am no fancy, real photographer, I know better than to mess with that getting good at something business. No, I enjoy my low res webcam and my little canon digital snapshot camera. Which has been a few, since I tend to break them a lot. So my dad gave me his old camera recently, a kind of nice, older digital canon. With a zoom lens. And actual f-stops and shutter speeds! A flash you can turn off! It was joy. I know just enough of the shutter speeds and f-stops to make a muddle of things that I can fix in photoshop. For 2 weeks. Any pictures the last 2 weeks are from that camera. And it took little videos! You saw them! Wow! I was in LOVE! I LOVE YOU Camera!

And I dropped it the other day. Just dropped it dead on the kitchen floor like it is a turnip and bruised and dead. And it is now dead as this poor roadkill cat with one leg sticking up all bent that I’ve been driving by for 2 days on the freeway. Another camera bit my dust. I am camera poison. I am trying to get it fixed.

So I bring you back to the world of low res webcam. This was instead of training a dog to have better toy drive or stay or weave through my legs or walk standing up or learn the focus game with the One Jump. I am so not worthy Susan Garrett. I am just a generalist no matter what I do.

otterpop

ruby

gustavo

timmy