Living in Missoula has many benefits, however one constant source of frustration is the inversion that happens every winter. Missoula is situated in a valley surrounded by mountains. Every winter, the pollution from neighboring industry, be it paper mills or lumber mills, combined with the exhaust from commuting citizens, creates an inversion of smog that settles over the valley for weeks, blocking the sun.

Maybe we can learn something from a little village in Italy, pop. 185, that installed a mirror on one of the mountains, which tracks the sun and re-directs it into their little hamlet.

The question is, would the smog be cut by this redirected sun?

clicky. BREITBART.COM - Italian village basks in winter sunlight thanks to giant mirror

In Montana, when one has a warm day, one must take advantage of it. For me, a warm day is anything warmer than 32 degrees F.

Yesterday was such a day, and I spent it out in my (unheated) studio, organizing things and cutting mylar and canvas to size for painting later.

I also began experimenting with the old windows I use to frame my art. I may abandon the whole idea of using window frames to frame my art for a variety of reasons, including:

• the windows become the center of focus, not the art
• prepping them takes far too much time

I should not have to spend up to three hours on a frame getting it ready to accept art. That is time that could be better spent making art, working on marketing, being outside enjoying a hike, or any number of other, less tedious, more enjoyable things.

But I want to give the experiments a chance. I’ll write more about them as they progress.

For now, I wanted to give you a glance at my studio. Click each picture for a larger view in a new window.

So, Google’s holiday treat this year is a Google Earth countdown to Christmas. I opened the first clue today, and was dismayed to see this:

That’s right. Comic Sans. Good lord, what’s the world coming to when even Google uses this horrid font? Come on, guys.

The first gift of toys is in Beijing, China:

The toys were made using Google’s Sketch Up application. I have not been able to open any of the other clues, they keep crashing Google Earth. I’m just hoping that the rest of the clues do not use Comic Sans.

I spent the better part of the afternoon today setting up the new blog, powered by Wordpress. I’ve never set up a database before (although I’ve configured plenty), so it was with a great sense of accomplishment that I completed the task.

Please subscribe to the new RSS feed here, if you use an RSS reader.

I won’t be removing any of my other blogs, I’ll leave them hanging around for the sake of posterity. I only ported the LOVENOTFEAR blog anyway. And, as was to be expected, I lost some of the posts in the migration. Not a huge deal.

In the meantime, I went back and tagged all of the posts for 2006. I started blogging around the beginning of 2005, so I’ll have to go back and tag those, too. Then I need to figure out why the sidebar has dropped so low on the page to where one must scroll to find it. (If anyone knows how to fix these, please drop me a line or leave a response in the comments.)
For now, though, I need to step away from the terminal. My ass is falling asleep and I need to get outside for a while, even though it’s cold.

Thanks for dropping by. After you’ve finished exploring the archives (you know you want to), head over to The Happiness Project for your daily dose of happiness and howto goodness.

–Marc