To the shock and surprise of no one, I am having difficulties with the local art organization. So they approved me for their "fine artisan and farmer's market", but they wanted payment by paper check. Who uses paper checks? They tell me I can drop off cash instead. Sketchy, but okay. I have cash after vending at the little comic con, and I walk over there to drop off an envelope with $100 (addressed and with a note inside). They still have doors locked for covid, but someone sees me, comes out and takes my envelope and says she'll give it to the coordinator no problem, looks forward to seeing me at the market, seems confident and trustworthy, all good. You see where this is going, right?

Ya, so I wait a couple days and email the coordinator to make sure she got payment. And the email bounces. She's still listed as staff on the website, so I assume it's a server issue. Wait a bit, email, bounces. So I comb their website (classic "design by committee" feel), find a generic info@ address, send an email. Now I'm in touch with some other lady, I think the first lady has been fired but they are vague (first lady still on the website), and my payment has not been confirmed.

I should have known when they didn't have an online payment option that this would be a shitshow. You know how after you've worked for some crappy businesses you get a spidey sense for organizations that don't have their act together? This organization reeks. And when I dropped off the envelope I had a fleeting thought to get the name of the woman who took it, but she knew the coordinator and seemed very informed and professional. You're paranoid, it'll be fine, I told myself. Ugh, idiot!

So my $100 may have been embezzled by the first lady, or outright lost, who knows. I've explained everything to the second lady and included the email conversation with the first lady. Second lady is like "we have spots available for additional dates" and I'm like, ha, no thanks, please just find my payment for the two dates I wanted. These lulus.

New personal rule: If an event can't figure out how to take online payment in 2021, it's probably very poorly coordinated and more trouble than it's worth.

Spouse thinks it is funny that I've got nothing but squinty-eyed suspicion for this organization. But listen, these are exactly the sort of play-pretend businesspeople who talk a lot about "creativity" and "community", change their logo to rainbow and have their pronouns listed on their email footers but behind closed doors are walking management horror stories. They aren't artists. They eat artists for personal enrichment. If they were serious about art they would have had drop in life drawing sessions (pre-covid). Giant red flag #1. I'd even accept an urban sketching club as a substitute. If you're supposedly an art center with no ongoing life drawing sessions or urban sketching, you are a parasite full of absolute bullshit.

Anyway, we'll see how this plays out.

I've figured out how to run the portable monitor I got for the raspberry pi off my phone and a power bank. Which means I can set up a quick product video on loop for my booth. I had to get a newer power bank with more oomph and then there was a foofaraw over cables (why is it you always need the one connector type you don't own??). But now I have the right accoutrement it'll play video for 6+ hours straight on a full charge, not bad. Going to rig a sunshade - hope I don't get stuck in full sun. I am just tired of telling anyone who comes near my booth that I engrave by hand over and over. I am too introverted. Here, watch this snappy little video.

I got a small solar powered turntable to test out and it works better than anticipated for the smaller cups. Seems to have plenty of juice even in shade. Nice. Hate buying batteries. Turntables work so well as attention getters.

Been hot and humid the past few days. In the interests of upping my heat tolerance I had been keeping the apartment 5-10 degrees above normal, which is good because now our air conditioning unit is not keeping up. I bought a little battery powered fan in the spring and DAMN has that thing been great! Runs all night long on a charge, clips almost anywhere, really really handy and makes the temps much more comfortable. If this keeps up I am going to have to dig out my hand fans for everyday use. Funny how in the NGA a lot of the portraits were of women holding hand fans. They knew something back then.

We finished the NGA (main building, I may go back to the second modern art building myself) and now the museums on our lists are the museum of the american indian, the african american museum and the air and space museum annex (regular air and space museum not open yet). African american museum was very popular before the pandemic and tough to get tickets for, and is currently booked solid, naturally. So we're going to the american indian museum tomorrow. The museum in anchorage has an extensive world class exhibit devoted to inuit and yupik that we have visited, so it'll be interesting to see more of the central continent peoples.

Pre-covid we did the american history museum (okay, few nice highlights but mostly meh), the natural history museum (must see), and we blitzed the air and space museum but didn't really count as seeing it. That was all we were able to do before we had no time for museum visits. So we are hellbent on mainlining them now.