Home is where the high-dollar waterfront property is...

Not really. It's more like "Home is where the 1922 farmhouse that had no bathroom when it was built and hasn't improved that much since is". For the next year or so, anyway. We want to move before my son (that blonde kid far left) starts junior high next year.

My wife and I moved back to our hometown 7 years ago, and the family grew by two daughters and shrank by 2 dogs (R.I.P. Dexter and Caleb) and then grew by one dog since.

All that time, we have been no more than 5 miles from the ocean. As the years passed, at the beginning of the summer, we began to say, "We really have to try to go to the beach more. People scrimp and save money, and drive hundreds and hundreds of miles to spend their hard earned vacation hours on a week at the beach! And we hardly ever go." And then...we would go about, say... once a summer for a few hours.

For the last 7 years, I have worked as a freelance illustrator and broadcast and graphic designer. You meet great, creative people, but the hours are long. We are talking 120 hours a week long. We are talking, "People scrimp and save money, and drive hundreds and hundreds of miles to spend their hard earned vacation hours on a week at the beach! And we hardly ever go. But I still can't go." long. We are talking, "When did my kids grow up?" long. So we never did much of anything unless there was no work.

This summer was my first summer working almost solely as a visual artist (still some freelance projects lurking about). It only took me 29 years to get from my first sale to committing to making my living from my art. This was also the first summer that we were able to finally go to the beach more than once for the summer. It's almost like creating my art wasn't going to bring about these changes until I had fully committed to this dream of doing nothing but art. But as I began to take note of the fact that my art-related activities were filling more of my time, things started falling into place to make being a working artist a possibility.

We went to the beach several times each week this summer. We all got tans. The kids' hair got blonder. And life got better for us all.

So for the first time in a long time, I'm kind of sad to see the summer go. For a long time I was often unaware of what season it was. And though we might still have a few more weeks to squeeze in a short trip to the beach on a weekend afternoon, the mornings here are already cooler, and I know the chances to go will taper off to nothing till the weather warms again.

I know... I know... you're right. Poor me.