Finishing Things up in Santa Cruz

This is the book I just finished writing and designing. My neighbor Laurie Corn co-produces a KUSP radio show called First Person Singular and had read some of my travel stories and asked me to shorten some of them to 90 seconds. I edited 5 pieces from my collection and after I taped them at the studio with Laurie (below) it made me realize how much more vibrant the stories were when I focused them on a single subject and edited them to be short but sweet. That's how I ended up 43 short stories and 50 photographs about my travels around the world, starting when I lived out in the bush in Australia; camping out on the beach in Malaysia; trekking in the Nepalese Himalayas; bartering with Buddhist monks in India; working in a photo lab in Tehran, Iran; almost blown up in Istanbul; working as an artist in London; living on a kibbutz in Israel; helping a political escapee in Egypt; fracturing my wrist in Morocco and having a family take me in for two months. This book can be seen at www.createspace.co m/33399830




Fran has hired me to paint all her deck furniture, where she does most of her entertaining. So far I've painted a small table, four chairs, and two benches. It's been a lot of fun and has had the side effect of getting me back into painting again. I had started a series of eight paintings, all unfinished, and now I'm finishing them. I will probably put some of them up when I leave in December.

The vegetable table



The Eye Chair



Crow Chair (poem by Fran)



The Hot Seat



The Water Chair



The Bee Bench



The Zebra Bench



I've already given Fran and Patti notice that I'm leaving Santa Cruz at Christmas to spend several months traveling up and down the West Coast. I'm shooting my next documentary on Work Exchanges and Bartering. I've been setting up work exchanges to keep me occupied during my travels. As an artist, I have been able to survive very well by both these methods. For the last year I've lived rent and utility free in my own cabin on a property in the Santa Cruz Mountains that I caretake for Fran and Patti who are very busy and only able to visit infrequently. It's up in the mountains so deer and raccoons abound, below are two of my friends, including the well photographed Rocky the Raccoon, mother of five fuzzy babies.

I was born on a full moon on Halloween Eve 62 years ago, which has made me eligible to receive Social Security - Yahoo. I get my first payment at the end of December, which is why I chose that time to skip town. I'm heading south to spend the rest of the winter in Arizona doing work exchanges, then am (literally) working my way up to Oregon to spend the spring and summer depending on how things work out.