Santa came to the gift store. Unfortunately he was a bit early this year (he had scheduling conflicts), so he wasn’t the big hit he’d been last year. Anyway we still had a fairly decent sales day. Christmas season is in full swing. What life choices did I make such that at age 59 I run a gift store in Alaska that plays Christmas music all day long? I look like a mentally unstable elf.
Last year on this day, I wrote the check that made my purchase of the gift store a fact. It also happened to be my birthday. So today, one year on, on my 59th birthday, I take a moment to reflect on this decision to buy the gift store.
Overall, I have a lot of “buyer’s remorse.” I think it was unwise for me to take on this challenge. I won’t say that I’m failing – I think that actually, I’m doing pretty well. I’m keeping the business above water financially, and running a going concern. I’ve even think that I’ve been successful at restoring some of the community trust in the store as longstanding local institution, that had been a bit eroded by the previous owner’s efforts to gentrify the store – gentrification really isn’t something Craig, Alaska, is ready for.
No, I’m not failing at running the store. But I derive almost zero sense of personal accomplishment or satisfaction. It’s only a source of constant stress and neverending miniature crises that each has to be resolved. Being the manager means I’m the person who ultimately always has to say “no” and “I’m sorry” to each and every unhappy stakeholder (customer, employee, vendor, service provider). This is not a role I enjoy in the least. And unlike with teaching, I don’t feel a sufficient sense of reward in the occasional positive feedback to counterbalance that burden. This is difficult for me to parse – I think I am simply more capable of accepting negativity from children, and also somehow more capable of enjoying limited positive responses. With adults (and especially, elderly adults) I have less patience for shortcomings, frankly. I expect old people (which is at least half the gift store’s customer base) to be more considerate, or something. But it doesn’t really work that way, does it? Perhaps it has to do with my own stage of life, as caretaker for a cantankerous elderly adult. I don’t know.
All I know is that I’m mostly miserable with the day-to-day burden of the store, and I resent that it’s become a more-than-full-time job that robs me of my formerly enjoyable time at my various hobbies – my writing, my geofiction, my eccentric “follies” (e.g. the treehouse).
So happy birthday to me. Buying the store currently ranks in the “Top 5” of “Mistakes I’ve Made In My Life.” Disentangling myself, however… I accept it’s a long-term commitment, and even if buying the store was a mistake, I would be compounding the mistake to try to bail ungracefully. So. I’ll cope.
Today was in fact a rather historic one, here on this remote Southeast Alaskan island. We were visited by our first cruise ship, ever. Although Jan alleges that in the 40’s or 50’s a cruise ship attempted to visit the island and ran into a rock trying to get into one of the harbors, and because of that the cruise companies became afraid to come back. That story has the feel of urban (rural?) myth, but it’s amusing.
The cruise ship that visited was actually surprisingly quirky. It was not one of your standard 3000-passenger behemoths, such as visit Ketchikan or Juneau each summer. Instead it was a “long-distance” cruise. I met passengers who had been on the boat for 3 months, having boarded in Sydney, Australia.
This unusual long-term aspect of the passenger list was very good for our little island – because unlike the coddled and generally pretty lazy passengers of the mass cruises, these passengers were curious and quite adventurous. During their 8 hour stop at Klawock, many boarded the small circulator buses that the tribal groups were running, and so despite the boat being parked in Klawock, our gift shop in Craig (7 miles away) saw over 50 tourists who we’d never have otherwise seen. So it was good for our business, and the passengers we met were all quite interesting to talk to.
It was an international group, too – as could be expected. I met more British, Australians, Germans and even a few Chinese, than Americans. I even met a posh couple from Mexico City, and impressed them with my Mexico-City-accented Spanish, which, though rusty, still serves me quite well, nearly 40 years after my having lived there. ¡El gringo achilangado habla de nuevo!
Driving north to Klawock after work (I went to pick someone up at the Hollis Ferry), I just happened to be driving by the Klawock harbor channel in the moment when the boat was departing. So I pulled over and took a picture.
If this business of hosting cruise ships is successful, it could transform the island. I’m a bit skeptical that the powers-that-be (the businesses undertaking the enterprise is a consortium of tribal corporations) can pull this off. Our island is a bit too chaotically libertarian, in cultural terms, for such projects. But we shall see.
This tree has a fashionable address on C Street in suburban Klawock, Alaska.
I took the car to the mechanic today, while Jan watched the store. That went okay – the car needed a seal replaced on the transfer case, and I wanted to check the front wheel bearings and ball joints and such (weird noises sometimes on cornering, and it’s been a problem before). Plus oil change, and switch out winter to summer rims.
But overall it was a horrible day, with the trip to the mechanic being the only pleasant part. The store is stressing me out – ambushed by invoices, bookkeeping problems and overwhelmed by what feels like an impossible “more money out than in” scenario. I’m experiencing “buyer’s remorse” over this project to run the store.
[daily log: walking, 6km; retailing, 7hr]
This tree was towering over my cowering, ill-used Jeep.
Elmer comes in the store. We are talking about who is native, who is not, among locals on the island, here. You can’t always tell who is “native” – there’s been a lot of mixing over the generations, so it mostly has to do with enrollment in a tribal group, appearance doesn’t always tell you a lot about a person’s status as a native. Anyway, somewhat out of the blue, Elmer says, “You know, Richard Nixon was Tlingit.” I said, “Oh really, how’s that?” Elmer, not missing a beat, says, holds his two hands up in the “double peace sign” and says, “I am NOT a crook.” This, somehow, proves that Nixon was a Tlingit.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 9hr]
This tree was frosty, just like all the others.
A woman came into the gift store this morning, looking for a Valantine’s Day card. Unfortunately, we had some issues with our card supplier, and we don’t have any Valentine’s Day cards this year. She was disappointed, of course. She moped about the store looking at some of the other stuff we have. But then she brightened. “I suppose I could use a sympathy card, instead,” she announced.
She did not, in fact, buy a sympathy card for her Valentine. I think it was a joke. But it was well executed and I was laughing about it all day.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 9hr]
This tree is a guest tree from my past. I like this tree. I took this picture in April, 2014, walking near my place of work in Goyang City, South Korea. I was only 6 months out from the end of my radiation treatment after my previous cancer surgery. I remember feeling quite terrible, but slogging along with job and life.
Today was a long, unprofitable day at the gift store. I had to go buy a new tank of helium at Tyler, for our balloon operation. As a side note, a tank of helium is a very heavy thing – not what you’d expect from helium, to be frank.
I learned that our local competitor in helium retailing, the monopoly grocery store, sells their helium at less than half what we do. If they pay the same for a tank of helium that we do (and I’m confident they do – they’re an obvious customer at Tyler, the only place that sells helium on the island), they’re selling at a steep loss. I pondered the economics of being a monopoly grocery store in a small, remote Alaskan town. Maybe there’s some weird philanthropic helium subsidy from some “Keep Rural Alaska Balloony” foundation. Or maybe they’re just incompetent and forgot to raise their prices over the last decade.
[daily log: walking, 5km; retailing, 9hr; helium-tank-loading-unloading, 10min]
This tree is a guest tree from my past. I do these guest tree pictures when I’m too busy to have taken a picture in a given day.
I took this picture in February, 2010, at 금산사 [Geumsan-sa = Geumsan Temple], in Jeollabuk Province, South Korea. I was doing a “templestay” – where you live for a very short time (a long weekend) at a Buddhist monastery, doing the monk lifestyle thing.
We had a record sales day at the gift store – based on my and Jan’s memories of working with Wayne and Donna when they ran the store, combined with more accurate records over the last few years, our gross sales today were the highest ever. It’s actually typical that it’s December 23rd – that’s the “last minute shopping” day for Christmas. I think we combined that with doing well with stocking good inventory, and the fact that today was the day that Santa visited the store (a tradition at Alaska Gifts for a given Saturday before Christmas).
Here is a picture of Santa with some elves he met at the store (i.e. store staff: Kim, Jan, myself):
We also had one of those typical “gale force” rainstorms in Craig today. So as I went to head home from work, a tree (two trees) had blown down on Port Saint Nicholas Road, meaning that work crews had to get out there and clear the tree – so I was delayed getting home until almost 8. And I got home to darkness, because the power was out. That’s been a quite frequent occurrence this damp Fall.
I learned recently that today is called “Christmas Adam” (meaning, December 23rd). The reasoning: “Christmas Eve” is December 24th. We all know that Adam came before Eve, so… December 23rd is “Christmas Adam.” Call it Patriarchy Remembrance Day.
[daily log: walking, 6km; retailing, 11hr]
This tree is an artificial Christmas tree installed at the gift shop.
[daily log: walking, 4.5km; retailing, 9hr]
This tree was across the street from where I stood in front of the gift shop. A late October morning in Craig.
Some kids came by the store, trick-or-treating for Halloween. We were prepared, having candy on hand.
[daily log: walking, 5.5km; retailing, 9km]
Over the years, but mostly many years ago when I was younger, I used to enjoy the genre of computer game known as “simulation games”. The king of these games, in my opinion, is the SimCity series – I have enjoyed all of them, from way back in the early 90’s. Also, there’s SimCity’s knockoff, the Cities: Skylines games. There are many other entries in the genre, though. I’ve enjoyed Civilization, of course, and all sorts of minor titles like SimTower, SimEarth, Railroad Tycoon, Capitalism, Shopping Center Tycoon, Theme Park, and many others. The genre, and my experience with it, goes back even further than the PC era, though. I remember playing a game which I know now was called “The Sumerian Game” while tagging along with Arthur up to the computer lab at Humboldt State in the early 1970’s. Arthur was a student at Humboldt, and I was a 7 or 8 year old kid but I spent many hours on the pre-PC mainframe (more likely a “minicomputer” but still a bunch of networked green-screen terminals) playing that Sumerian Game, pretending to be a Sumerian King who had problems with starving peasants and such things, alongside teaching myself BASIC.
All of which is to say, I have long history playing these types of simulation games.
Well, recently, I seem to have started a new game. Without going into too much detail, I was made an offer I found difficult to refuse, and I bought the gift store where I’ve been working for the last 3 1/2 years. This only happened about 3 weeks ago, and the transfer of ownership was last weekend, on the first of the month. The whole thing happened very fast because the previous owners, my former bosses, ended up confronting major life changes and moved back to Michigan somewhat unexpectedly, and were seeking of offload their business commitment here in Alaska.
It’s been a huge amount of work, getting things set up. Setting up accounts, vendors, payroll, making sure all the paperwork is in order. I already more or less know the business – the “customer-facing” side of the business doesn’t feel challenging or overwhelming to me. But the “back end” is hard, and I’m not very good at bureaucracy or paperwork anyway. But as I sit navigating spreadsheets and lists of vendors and charts of accounts in a bookkeeping application, I can’t help but feel I’ve started playing a new type of simulation game – just one with quite real-world consequences, because it’s with real money.
I’ll try to give more updates as things progress, but right now I’m mostly “heads down” and working about 3x more than before trying to get the whole thing working. I’m grateful to my coworker Jan, who knows the business even better than I do and who has stuck around as a continuing employee, and to Arthur, who gave me a “family loan” (against my well-funded but illiquid IRA account) to make it happen.
The gift store owner, Chad, is aware of my background as a former resident of Korea. He and his wife apparently have membership in some kind of international junk food subscription service. It’s kinda of eccentric and cool.
So they bring in to me, the other day, this box full of Korean junk food – the kind you’d see at any 7-11 in South Korea. There were these one snacks in that box that I remember buying quite regularly in the store in the first floor of my apartment building: 쌀떡볶이 [ssaltteokbokki]. It was quite amazing, to get a package of these in Craig, Alaska.
So I got them and ate them, and it made me nostalgic.
Chad and Kristin are very cool bosses.
This tree has an eagle looking down at me.
I went in to work today, not a normally scheduled work day. But Santa was scheduled to appear. The store was quite busy, and children came through. We sold stuff at the gift shop.
Here is a picture of the gift shop “family” with the visiting Santa (known as Earnie).
Jan and I are wearing our uniform “elf hats”. The children are the owners’ kids – the owner Chad is kneeling at right.
[daily log: walking, 4.5km; retailing, 6hr]
This tree is growing next to a big ol’ rock.
The store is beginning its move into the new location (across the shopping plaza, about 40 meters). I spent a lot of time carrying very heavy and awkward boxes of our stock of spare picture glass. I became tired.
[daily log: walking, 8km; retailing, 6hr; c117064061084s]
Here is a miscellany of my recent work at the matting and framing shop, without much commentary. Included is a work of my own, a bit of throwaway art that I had crafted in a spare moment and given to my coworker Jan, and she insisted that I frame it.
This picture includes a huge project of 32 separate posters, mounted on mat board but not framed or matted. It took me 4 working days to complete this.
This job earned me a $20 cash tip from a pleased customer.
This was an ancient and damaged jigsaw puzzle bound on the back with duct tape. I tried to make it look nice.
From the above, one of these pictures for the City of Craig is more notable: the city celebrates its 100th birthday this year.
I last posted one of these “Frame shop journal” entries about 3 months ago.
Certainly it’s not the case that I haven’t been making frames. Perhaps I got so busy that I simply stopped consistently recording my work. The month of December probably saw me assembling on the order of 50-75 frames – I don’t know the exact number. This was the Christmas rush, combined with the community panic over the possibility that the Gift Shop (and therefore the framing and matting shop it includes) would be shutting down permanently.
But then with January 1st rolling around, the Gift Shop was rescued by new owners, Chad and Kristin. They are slowly implementing lots of changes to the business, but fully intend to retain the matting and framing aspect, and thus, for now, I continue with job security in my relatively low-stress, very part-time position.
As I said, I’ve stopped recording every single frame I’ve done. But setting aside the Christmas insanity, here are a bunch of shots of recent work, from January and the first half of February. In no particular order and with minimal commentary.
This last framing is much more significant to me personally than any other I’ve done. Can anyone guess why?
Maybe if I start posting more regularly, I’ll manage to include more examples of my work.
My coworker Jan, at the gift shop, likes to order various exotic herbal medicines and supplements, often from Asia. She ordered something from Korea not that long ago – I don’t know what it was (some kind of mushroom extract?). But when she got her product delivered, it included this note from the vendor.
To Buyer, Thank you so much for your purchase!!!!! I hope you had a pleasant transaction as much as I enjoyed:-) You are such a beautiful, gorgeous, perfect, incredible, fabulous, fantastic, the one-of-a-kind, mind-boggling, and Excellent buyer!!! Even though we are oceans apart, I feel it's my honour to have a chance to get to know you through Amazon.com. That's why I love having transactions on Amazon.com I will try to meet your needs by providing better service and products. I will pray for your lucky,if you leave a good feedback on Amazon.com. I wish that you are in good health and fortune with your family. Hope to deal with you again. Thank you. Have a wonderful day!!! Have a great day!!!! Many thanks and Kind regards, Kevin Kim
This made me nostalgic for my Korean students’ inimitable English style. This could have been written by one of them, easily. So much hyperbole!!!! So many exclamation points!!!!!!!!!
This tree failed to express gratitude.
I went to Wayne and Donna’s (the gift shop owners) for an unconventional thanksgiving dinner of ribs and potatoes. They are in a stressful time – they are leaving for Seattle in the next few days, where Donna is scheduled for tumor-removing surgery. Which is something I can sympathize with.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Yesterday at work, I got an email notification announcing the delivery of a package to the store (as one does). The thing is, no package had been delivered, and one wasn’t delivered later that day, either. Actually, this isn’t uncommon – when UPS “delivers” a package to our store, they are actually delivering it to a third-party company that covers the last 30 miles from Ketchikan to the island, because UPS doesn’t actually deliver to the island. They let the floatplane company, Taquan Air, handle those last miles. All well and good.
What was disturbing (or interesting?) about the email announcement in this case was, rather, the fact that although the email was delivered at 10:16 AM, the package was allegedly delivered (past tense, was) at 3:42 PM. That means that somehow, the notification had arrived via email from the future! “Wow, if UPS has solved that one, they can’t be stopped,” I mused.
This tree was there as the rain turned to snow turned to rain turned to snow ↻ ↻ ↻ …
This morning I watched Art board a plane on his way to Portland for Thanksgiving. “Bye, Art.”
Then I worked at the giftshop all day. “Buy art.”
[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 8hr]
I don’t post these frame shop journals very often. There has been a slackening of demand for framing projects, but I still have done quite a few since my last entry in this series, two and a half months ago. I have been somewhat negligent in taking pictures of all these, however. Here are a few from the last 9 weeks, in no particular order.
This last frame is “kinda weird.” I had the framed picture (part of the store’s stock of prints and artworks) but a customer wanted the frame. Wanting to keep the customer happy, I cannibalized the frame from this picture. But now I had a picture, with matting and glass, but no frame. I decided to improvise a temporary frame using cardboard – this was because something was needed to hold the glass in place. If the work gets bought, the customer can order a nicer frame, or just take the artwork and leave the glass and matting.
Today I struggled with a poor-quality frame received from our increasingly-poor-quality supplier. The wooden slots cut at the supplier to place the wedges to hold the frame together were in several cases partly broken, or broke immediately upon attempting to connect things. The wood was too soft and the frame was too large to work with so few and such small slots.
I had to improvise, using metal fasteners and glue. I can’t say it was a super high-quality frame as an outcome. Anyway at least the outcome was better than the last time I tried to improvise a solution to a badly-wrought frame from our suppliers.
At the store today things were moving very, very slow. Wayne (the owner) came in and we stood around talking for almost 30 minutes. He said something memorable, which he attributed to an old logger he used to know down in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. “Anybody can get old, but you have to be tough to stay old.”
Albert (an old Native American guy) came in at a different time and told some of his never-ending and entirely implausible stories about Sasquatches, the “Waterfall Mafia” (Waterfall is a major resort down the island a way), and the Murkoswki family’s criminal empire.
This is not really a frame shop journal – it’s just a thing that happened at work today.
We got this frame that we’d ordered, so I set to put it together. The company that provides us with the pre-cut frames, Larson-Juhl (incidentally owned by Berkshire Hathaway AKA bazillionaire Warren Buffet) always cuts these nice little slots into the corners of the wooden frames, which are a standardized size to receive these little plastic wedge thingies. You just pound them in, and everything is so precisely cut that the corner has a nice, neat, ideal join.
But this time, the wedge shapes were different than the standard. The standard plastic wedge thingies wouldn’t fit. And they hadn’t sent us any alternate wedge thingies to slip into the slots at the corners.
I was stymied. Then, being far too clever for my own good, I decided I could make my own. I carved them out of bits of scrap wood I had lying around. And in fact, they fit in very nicely, and did a good job.
In this picture, you can see a frame corner, with my custom wooden wedge thingy making the join, and a standard plastic wedge thingy standing nearby for comparison – it looks like a little brown plastic Star Wars TIE Fighter.
Unfortunately, this ended in disaster. As soon as I inserted the picture and glass, and began applying the special staples to hold everything in, the corner wood bits cracked. I tried to salvage my clever connectors with a bit of super glue, but the super glue seeped onto the front side of the frame and corroded the fine, smooth finish of the frame. Result: frame ruined, and 4 hours wasted, and we have to re-order the frame (hopefully this time they’ll either use the standard cut, or send us new, correctly-sized wedge thingies).
While Jan was cleaning a small corner of the store yesterday, I looked down and said, “Oh, look, a penny!”
There had been a penny lying on the floor there, under a merchandise display. I picked it up and looked at the penny. I was surprised.
“I think we need to clean the store more often,” I said to Jan.
“What do you mean?” She asked.
I showed her the penny. The mint date on the penny was “1925.”
“That penny’s been lying there for a long time, maybe.” We laughed about it.
I mean, the store’s building is at most 40 years old. I think younger than that, even. And the gift store has only occupied the space for about 10 years, I think. Maybe 12. So someone must have dropped the penny there more recently than 1925. It was just amusing to imagine it lying there for 96 years.
I took a very long time between posts. And I think I missed taking some pictures of frames I made. But here, just for completeness, is a disordered list of some things I did in the frame shop over the past month and half or so.
I took almost a month to post this, since the last one. There was a very slow period, when I wasn’t making many frames, in mid-June. But since then I’ve been making a lot of frames.
During the slow period, I did an “inventory” of our filing cabinet where we store vendor information and catalogs. As part of that, I made new labels for the chaotic folders.
Before.
After.
Here are bunch of frames, in no particular order.
I had one new frame that was a bit bittersweet. A customer bought a picture on our wall, that I’d framed last November. She said, “But that frame is ugly, I want a different one.” So I had to take apart a frame I’d made last fall, and make a new one.
Before.
After.
One time, we got in a frame from our supplier that was clearly a horrible mistake. We had to re-order it.
I also spent some time teaching myself how to cut curves in glass. It’s not easy, even though Arthur claims it’s easy – although I’ll observe that Arthur didn’t bother to demonstrate this for me. I did borrow his fancy diamond-tipped glass-cutting tool, which is better than the hand-held glass cutter at the store.
This tree is outside the back door to the gift shop. You can see that the Alaska State Troopers like to park back there.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km; carwashing, 2hr]
I haven’t posted one of these in quite a while. Actually the frame shop hasn’t been that busy, but I have done a few in the past month.
Mostly I’ve been working on a “vendor inventory list” – transferring knowledge in an old, somewhat broken-down filing cabinet into an excel spreadsheet.
Here are some frames. Some of these frames are being handmade here on Prince of Wales Island. That’s kind of cool.
This was a repair.
I like this bird.
A teacher was retiring.
The next five are locally-made frames.
The mat cutting in this one was the most challenging I’ve done, so far.
There were also three large frames that I forgot to take pictures of, because they got picked up right as I finished them. They were large frames for very nice, professional paintings, for the hotel that the Shaan-Seet (local Haida Tribe’s corporation) run.
Over the last two weeks I made some frames at the frame shop.
These anime or manga characters (including baby Yoda at the bottom) were drawn by a local resident’s teenage son, and he had them framed.
This fingerprint consists of biblical quotes.
This print is by Southeast Alaska’s most famous artist (possibly), Rie Muñoz of Juneau. This artwork was for sale in our store, hanging on the wall since the early 2000’s. I had actually considered it my favorite of all the Muñoz prints in the store, so I’m slightly sad to see it go – though I doubt I’d have bought it myself, at $190.
This is the frame that caused me so much grief last week. I broke the glass, and damaged the artwork (slightly). You can see the damage in the lower right – it’s a crease across the artist’s signature. I actually used an iron to try to work out the crease – but it’s still there. We gave a discount to the customer, who apparently said he appreciated our honesty with respect to the issue. I like the picture, though. It’s a bar in New Orleans, apparently where the famous poet Charles Bukowski used to hang out in the 50’s when he was in New Orleans. The painting is by a friend of the local resident here who had this frame made.
This frame is for my boss Jan. In fact, that man in the 1800’s-era photo is an ancestor of her husband, Richard’s.
This last one is a sale announcement for the month of May, made with “spare parts” lying around the frame shop and utilizing some “practice” mats I did. We’ve placed it in the front window of the store.
Over the last two weeks, I did a few picture frames at the gift shop.
If that last one looks familiar, well… I did the exact same image for another person, before. It’s the original 1922 Craig City townsite plan and survey. I guess there’s a nice, high-quality image available online, and people are getting poster-sized prints and having them framed. It’s the sort thing I could see doing myself. But I guess there’s no need, since others are doing it.
Beside making frames, I was also fairly busy at the gift shop working on making an “inventory of vendors.” It started out with realizing that the filing cabinet used to store vendor information was broken, so… I spent time repairing the filing cabinet first, so I could use it to organize the folders of the vendor information. I’m going to make a spreadsheet, I hope.
I only completed two frames for customers this week. I ended up busy with some other stuff.
I spent most of Wednesday helping the store’s owner, Wayne, repair the ancient and broken safe in the back office. That was pretty interesting. I learned a new skill.
We installed an electronic keypad opener for the safe to replace the old tumbler.
I’m going to keep the old, broken tumbler as a souvenir. Maybe install it on a hapless tree as a bit of conceptual art.
It was a slow week at the frame shop. I actually only made one frame for a paying customer – it was a repair job, at that, and not a new frame at all. The customer was very pleased, though, because in taking apart the frame, I found a bunch of “long lost” family baby pics stashed behind the picture shown and sealed into the frame.
Sometimes the frame shop is slow not due to lack of customers, but because we rely on our supplier to send us the pre-cut frames ready to assemble for orders we’ve requested, and sometimes those deliveries are slow – that’s life on an Alaskan island for you.
To use up some time during my frame shop hours, I focused on improving my mat-cutting skills. I got adventurous, and tried some circles (using a special, very finicky tool) and some “lines” in box shape around the cut area of the mat (I’m not sure what these lines are formally called, but they’re popular on high-end matting styles).
So I did a bunch of mat cuts and then dropped random objects – a company brochure, a cartoon cat I quickly sketched – into them to give them focus.
Here are two weeks’ worth of frames – I missed last week because I felt horribly sick due to my second Covid vaccination.
