Who, What, Where, When and Why? I do not know.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Slowly but surely.

Today could be a great day! I've been shaking the trees seeing what fruit will fall out. This morning alone, I have three leads for illustration jobs and am sort of excited. Sure, they don't pay much, but when has it ever paid much. Right now, I'm looking for the exposure. Sure more money would be great, but I'll take what I can get.

I've been working on painting ideas and have been fiddling around, trying to get the rust out of the brain. I hope this is the start of an avalanche of work.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

What is happening?

The past 9 months have been the most spectacular roller coaster ride I have ever had. Somewhere after the first big drop, the cars derailed and set my entire family careening off into the air.

Here I sit, suddenly unemployed AGAIN, in my old room at my father's house. Options? I have a few. I'm not sure what direction to take. Over ten years ago, I had freelanced illustration for about three years until several companies stiffed me by having the nerve to go out of business. Six months of work, wasted and down the drain. We lost out house, our cars, our condo, our vacation property. Everything. Even the art work I had sent off never came back.

God had a plan though.

We became houseparents at a children's home in Georgia where we took care of up to 8 boys 24/7. We did that for eleven years until there was an administration change. To make a long story short, my wife and I spoke up about some questionable ethics and decisions the administration had made and eventually, we were terminated. Yeah, I take full responsibility for that.

They gave us 4 days to pack up eleven years of our lives with the threat of being thrown off the property if we so much as spoke to another person there or attempted to contact the children we had been parents to for most of their lives.

God had a plan though.

After three months of living with my brother and his wife. We accepted a position as houseparents at a home in Ohio. We packed up everything and hauled it up there only to resign our position less than 6 months later. We had been told these children were a high level of care, but after being assaulted nearly every other day, being urinated on multiple times, having feces thrown at me and having my daughter threatened to be killed, was enough. Not to mention, I was a wreck every single day.

God had a plan though.

We packed all our stuff up again, and hauled it all back to Georgia. Which brings me to now. We're going through some tough times again. My children have been in private schools all their lives and now they are enrolled in public school. It's culture shock for them.

My wife and I don't even have a room together. She shares a room with our eleven year old daughter and I share my old room with my sixteen year old son. It's sort of neat, being able to share the room that I grew up in and my old house and yard with my children, but it's really kind of strange as well. There's no room for my eighteen year old daughter, so she's with my brother. That sucks. My twenty two year old daughter is out on her own, but now I have no place for her to stay when she is in town. That sucks, too.

God has a plan though.

I just haven't seen it worked out yet.