The Mountain Gives More Than I Expect

I built my first website in 2006—and have been building them ever since—but this week I started building a new one and I thought, holy moly. How much has changed in this gig over the past 20 years.

I need a new site where I can sell my artwork, and even expand (eventually) to prints as well as originals. Maybe other things, too. I officially have an opening in Greensboro (deets coming soon) on June 21st.

But meanwhile, setting up commerce-related content is a lot of work, and it took me eleventy-billion tries to get this website going in the right direction. I broke everything that can be broken, tried and cleaned out all kinds of code patches, cussed and hollered and started over, decided to quit and hire someone, slept on it, worked some more.

It was like tryna locate and herd 72 wild goats into my kitchen and get them to sit down and enjoy a civilized dinner using the good china and grandma’s silver.

Which resulted in a lot of “this ain’t working” and even more “irreparable breakage” over a series of several days.

My brain felt hacked, cracked, and shellacked.

Then finally (finally!) I started making Teensy Smidgeons of Progress.

On the day BEFORE the Teensy Smidgeons, I went out with Lance on the mountain for a small recovery hike.

As we crossed one of our creeks I told him, “One salamander. I need to see just one salamander and that will be something good in my universe. And I need something good in my universe, really truly I do.”

Ask the mountain and she will come, y’all.

I stooped down in the creek to turn over rocks.

Boom.

Salamander.

It felt pretty good.

I thanked her, returned her to the mud, sighed, and decided maybe we could head up the East Ridge.

Our trail, of course, is blocked at intervals by enormous deadfalls as a result of Hurricane Helene, but we happened to see a new deer track headed in the right general direction, and agreed to follow it.

Amazingly, we saw several snails out making their sloooooow progress forward; I had lots of feelings about that, ha. Then a single earthstar (win!), and lots of wildflowers in bloom, including the trilliums.

Just before we headed down the mountain, Bee turned up a snake—either a garter or a dekay’s brown, not for certain which. We called her off and left the snake in peace.

It was a good, deep breath of fresh forest air, and a lot of reminders to take my time and persist. The mountain always gives more than I expect!

PS: Art site report, as of this posting: I now have 9 paintings loaded into my new website. Now that I’m all streamlined, it only takes me 1 hour (ish) to upload a new piece. It takes a lot of content, options, and images for each one!! But I now have a working home/front page, a Shop page, plus a kind of ugly default shopping cart page and checkout page. But wow. I still have like 30+ paintings to get uploaded, plus I need an event page for the opening, pages of Terms, Conditions, and eleventy-hundred other things.

SO! A lot of work, but now I kinda feel like I just might can get it done before the June 21st opening.