Errant pixels strolled across my computer screen and vaporized without a trace, perhaps taking a few stray html tags with them. Notes on assorted scraps of paper teetered beside the monitor, threatening to slide onto the keyboard or floor.

Sometimes this room has been so crowded I felt more like I wore it than entered it. The current level of chaos has made it an ill-fitting garment indeed.

But, at long last, the rebuild of the RiverStone Gallery website is up and running. I sit here in the litter left behind, feeling both exhausted and relieved.

More than 200 pages complete with slideshows of artwork, cross links, a brand new attached blog, page redirects, and god knows what all are online at last. The process of creating them took so long I forgot I might someday emerge from it all back into real life.

A light dusting of snow on the ground announces that fall has disappeared during the project. So I sit, as the shortened day slips into night far too quickly, and wonder what I will do next.

Chasing gremlins with a broom through the website took two or three weeks before their havoc subsided. I have dreamed of html in my sleep.

Perhaps tonight I will dream of cold snow against a black sky, and in the morning pick up a paintbrush dipped in deep red paint.

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Have you ever dreamed of wearing neon red trout shoes to a party? Somehow it had not crossed your mind? What could inspire such an outlandish concept?

Poetry, for one thing. Yes, poetry.

My husband Bern wrote a poem to his sister some twenty years ago. She saved it and then forgot about it. A few months ago she ran across it and once again read the line that refers to “neon red trout shoes.”

The oddest things can be an epiphany for Linda, and this was a big one. She realized Bern absolutely had to have a pair of those shoes for his birthday this summer. Her husband Greg agreed and they embarked upon on online search for trout shoes.

It is astonishing how great a lack of trout shoes exists in the fashion world. The category is an overlooked niche for sure.

Undeterred, Linda decided she had to create the neon red trout shoes herself. She purchased a pair of Converse shoes in her own size as the test version. She explored materials and a variety of design concepts and then transformed the plain shoes into a spectacular pair of neon red trout shoes.

Inspired by the success of the initial experiment, she bought a much larger pair of Converse that would fit Bern and set about creating his birthday shoes.

Bern’s birthday party was held at the Beartooth Fly Fishing Lodge near town. Fortunately Bern’s brothers, sister, and other family members were here from all over the country so they were able to join our friends for the party.

Linda kept her own pair of trout shoes hidden until she gave Bern his present. The shoes were a total surprise as Bern did not even remember the poem that started the project.

Bern and Linda both posed wearing the fabulous footwear. The fishing guides who attended say they expect to see him on the river fly fishing in those shoes.

So, just out of curiosity, what might you offer for such an incredible pair of neon red trout shoes? Obviously Bern is not going to part with his special shoes, but it could be fun to hear what unique barter ideas you might have.

This post is part of the Problogger group writing project. You might have a great time exploring the other submissions!

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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Jonathan Fields discovered this interesting bit of research and shared it on his blog. Basically this experiment tested whether mood would be improved by eating chocolate that had been treated with intentions that those who ate the chocolate would experience an enhanced sense of energy, vigor, and well-being.

Now just how did I miss participating in a great experiment like that anyway? Pass the chocolate, please, with or without added intentions.

The experimenters said that the people who unknowingly ate the treated chocolate did have better results than those who unknowingly ate the untreated chocolate. Egads, I really did miss out on something good!

However, many variables are not explained. In the comments over at Jonathan’s blog they are befuddled by one reference in the experiment abstract stating the ones who ate the least chocolate had the most improvement. On the face of it that runs counter to the claimed outcome of the experiment, although no one is certain exactly what this “planned subset” was.

One can speculate on both sides of the fence endlessly, since there is not enough information provided about the relevant facts. Perhaps the experimenters will explain at some point.

In the meantime, we chocolate eaters are left with a dilemma that can only be solved by conducting our own personal experiments with eating chocolate. That is my own preferred method of problem solving anyway.

I find people conducting experiments are often asking different questions than the ones I would ask anyway. For example, I don’t have any problem with the idea one can embed intentions into food or anything else, because that process has been my livelihood for many years.

Perhaps I should clarify that my work is with art, not with food. However, the same principles apply. Whenever you touch a brush to canvas, handle wet clay, or engage in any other creative act, your state of mind is imprinted indelibly into the materials.

In other words, your intentions combined with action shape the materials into a work which has a powerful presence not explained by the mere combination of materials. The exception, of course, is when your technique is so bad nothing can come through the bungled handling of the materials. Bad art or burned food come to mind as examples.

So the questions I would ask would have more to do with how to effectively use the process of adding intention to the materials we use, whether for art, eating, or other purposes.

An experiment simply to find out if intentions even have an impact is only interesting to someone who does not already know the answer. The age old tradition of blessing food already embodies that wisdom. Obviously, someone who simply mouths a few appropriate sounding sentences, more intent on sounding good and holy than on actually blessing the food, is likely to miss the mark by a wide margin.

As with anything spiritual, the intent is must be precise for maximum results. Personally, I would say the same of intentions in chocolate and in art.

Now let’s break out the swiss chocolates and paint some flowers, maybe we can find out how combining intentions with food and art at the same time works! Mind you, this is strictly in the interests of science…

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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Now I know why people go to film school. It took close to nine weeks for my husband and me to create a one hour and forty-eight minute fly tying video.  Then it took approximately another two weeks to figure out how compress a thirty-two gig video file so it fits on a single layer dvd without looking horrible.

There evidently are hundreds of possible ways to configure the compression and I tried quite a few of them. They either were too large or looked awful. I was actually shocked when it finally worked.

I had burned one more test disk and it worked acceptably on the computer. However the dvd player hooked to the tv had gone berserk a few days earlier. All the sound had turned to horrible static and I had not been to Bozeman to buy a new one yet.

However, I thought I could insert the new disk, ignore the obnoxious static, and if I had a picture I could assume the disk would probably work on tv screens, my final hurdle. So I put it in the player expecting one more dud.

For a living wonder not only did the video show on the tv but I also heard nice clear audio! We watched the whole thing to evaluate the video. I was worried it would look worse on the tv screen than on the computer.

One more surprise in the learning curve for me, it actually looked better on the tv! What a miraculous day, the whole fly tying video fit at last onto a dvd, it worked better than expected, and the dvd player obliged us by briefly providing good sound!

The player only lasted through the next movie before it reverted to static again. We are so deliriously happy to have the fly tying dvd finished we really do not care.

I designed labels for the dvd and case and promptly started filling orders. Our customers even like it! How much better can life get? Power Streamers is a viable product!

I do not recommend picking up a camcorder for the first time and plowing through the project we chose for a first time video effort, but it is possible to survive doing so. My husband and I are even still happily married in spite of the odds.

One benefit of this unexpectedly long drawn out process is I can’t think of anything that will scare me in video now. Problems will inevitably come along with new projects, but I have already weathered the worst possible scenario.

Prior articles in this series are Hollywood Is Not Threatened and Hollywood Still Is Not Threatened.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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So far we have filmed several hours of tape, which I had not expected to be necessary. However, Bern is actually an extremely shy man and has no public speaking background. I had to draw on my old debate experience to coach him into trusting his own natural rhythm of speaking.

Despite all my support and encouragement he still frequently froze in mid sentence. He also absolutely refused to allow me to film anything but his hands. I was resigned to having to do the whole video with only his hands and voice.

When he was doing everything right I was still having troubles of my own with the camera. Eventually I began to get along with the autofocus feature, discovering how to keep it from paying attention to the wrong areas.

I began putting segments together in Final Cut Pro and editing all the odd noises out of the audio. Actually I was also having to fit different pieces of audio together as I chose his best spoken parts.

Just remembering how to do the myriad commands possible in the program was a challenge. I often wanted to do something I vaguely remembered and had to go look up the exact process again.

Apparently our gradual progress on the project began to encourage Bern because five weeks into the project he suddenly was willing to speak facing into the camera. I was astonished but quickly jumped on the opportunity.

This, of course, made obsolete most of the work I had already done on the intro section. I also had begun to realize this was not a simple project at all. Every idea Bern had made it more complex, although they were good ideas.

His passions are his art and fly fishing and he wanted this fly tying video to be both. I had just wanted to make a little video showing three flies being tied and that would have been fine with me.

What we have at this point is an intro with him showing his paintings of large trout, telling what streamers he used and where to catch those trout, describing the various world class rivers in the area and the best streamer variations for each river, techniques to effectively fish with streamers, and a mention of his most recent book about his fly fishing paintings.

We have segments that show and describe all the materials used in the flies. And, last, but not least, we have each fly actually being tied with easily understandable step by step instructions. The way Bern speaks now on camera in this final version is amazingly different from the first efforts weeks ago.

Due to the need to make graceful transitions in the video in the many places I had to patch the audio together, I introduced different video to go in parts of those segments. To my immense consternation I have now used at least once almost every single technique described in Apple’s training book on Final Cut Pro.

I was incredibly relieved when I finally got the whole thing together complete with nice moving titles for each section backed by music (hey, we got this far, why stop now!) and decent audio. When we played all one hour and forty-eight minutes, it flowed well and did what it was supposed to do.

It was like birthing an elephant. But it looks like a surprising good elephant. It smoothly covers every area of interest to someone who wants to learn to tie special streamers developed for these rivers.

In my last remaining bastion of blissful ignorance, I thought all I had left to do was burn the dvd.  Those of you who know better please keep the snickering to yourselves.

I currently have a 32 gig movie file I am still trying to figure out how to fit on a single layer dvd without compressing all the quality out of it. This is indeed possible, but I have not deciphered which of the dozens and dozens of settings I need to combine to accomplish that.

Apparently I am stuck with learning how to use Compressor and Dvd Studio Pro to do so. As soon as I post this, I am going to go start reading another 500 page manual. Sigh.

For the previous article in this series, go to Hollywood Is Not Threatened.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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I usually avoid the dangerous and difficult fishing days by the simple expedient of muscle testing so I intuitively know when to stay home. My husband does not muscle test, so I missed quite a few times when he and his friends went only to get caught in bad weather.

However, I did participate in one of the worst ever fishing days on the Madison River a few years ago. It was the one winter trip I did not muscle test. It was a beautiful day, good weather report, and I just wanted to go no matter what. So I went.

The first hour was lovely. Then we saw a big black wall coming from the north, quite an alarming sight, especially since we had put in at Varney Bridge and had many miles to go before there was a place to get out of the river.

The wind hit first, driving snow sideways at us. That was unpleasant enough, but the temperature then dropped forty degrees in an hour. Trying to take a driftboat down a river into an intense headwind and heavy snow at ten degrees is an open invitation to hypothermia.

We abandoned any fishing and focused on getting out of there. Driftboats are designed to float high and light on the water so they maneuver easily, which means wind moves them equally easily. The boat was actually blowing back upstream.

It is a bad day when you have to row to move downstream. The wind got worse so that Alan and I were not strong enough to do it. That left the job to my husband, Bern, who is a big strong man.

Unfortunately, as the wind worsened he soon was not able to move it downstream either. So he turned the boat around and rowed backwards so he could apply more power. I stood up facing into the wind and snow and pointed where he should aim the boat so he did not have to twist his neck to see where he was going.

In the worst open stretches his backwards rowing did not work either. Then we all had to get out of the boat and push it downstream. I had ice on my waders from getting in and out of the boat.

We were quite relieved to get to the Burnt Tree boat launch. Our troubles were not really over yet because the launch was blocked by ice and mounds of snow. We were prepared to handle it though.

Bern backed the boat trailer to the top of the launch and attached a long rope to our winch and just cranked the boat up the ice and snow to the trailer. This is not a conventional loading method but it worked.

We were in no mood for photography, but I wish I had a photo of the boat with the four inch icicles hanging off the edge all around the sides. I have never seen icicles hanging on the boat any other time.

Alan went to get his lanyard that he had laid on the back deck but he found it encased in layers of ice. He had to leave it with the boat until we got it thawed out several days later.

You can see why I now stick to muscle testing whenever I decide whether to go fishing or not during the Montana winter.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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This was not a criminal activity at the time, although I am sure it would be terribly illegal these days. It was a more, well, not innocent, perhaps oblivious time as far as environmental dangers are concerned.

To give you the context, we lived on Pine River in Michigan and a chemical plant ten miles upstream spewed horrendous chemicals into the air and the river. Nothing could live in the river except a few carp, but my mother spoke of washtub sized turtles from when she was a child.

I remember one day going across the bridge and seeing a thick foamy electric blue mass spread across the whole surface of the river coming downstream. It was unnatural and frightening looking.

In that setting burning a few cars from time to time was positively innocuous. It also was part of my father’s livelihood.

He owned a salvage yard and would sometimes scrap cars. The methods have changed a lot from those days. He would remove the engine, transmission, chrome, and gas tank and anything else he did not want to burn.

Alma Metals paid more money for scrapped cars that had been burned. And I don’t mean just a little fire in the interior either, I mean really burned. All the paint had to be completely gone from every inch of the vehicle.

Do you have any idea how hot you have to get a car to burn the paint off the very front and back of those long fenders? Cars left to burn at their own rate do a poor job of it.

That is where the skill of properly burning a car comes into the picture. We would fill the interior with all the trash available and my dad would put an old tire in the front seat.

Which brings up another question. Do you have any idea how hard it is to set a tire on fire? That rubber has to get really hot before it will burn. The trash in the interior, even combined with all the upholstery, could not set the tire on fire unless we closed all the doors and windows.

That was the really boring part. The darn thing just sat there smoldering for the longest time. No more oxygen was entering so it could not burn rapidly. We would go ride our bicycles but we were careful not to stay away too long, or we would miss the best part.

Eventually the smoldering would fill the interior with rolling smoke and the tire would, thank goodness, finally catch on fire. The intense heat of a burning tire changed the equation dramatically.

All the windows suddenly blew out and flames shot twenty feet in the air. It was fabulous to watch. And that, I assure you, is a fire hot enough not to leave one bit of paint anywhere on the car.

Sometimes for fun we put popcorn on the roof of the car. By the time it popped, the car was too hot to go near, so then the popcorn burned up with everything else.

But the most spectacular burnings were done after dark. The night we burned seven cars at once was so dramatic people came from miles around to see it. I will never forget all those cars blowing their windows and shooting huge flames into the night sky!

But, as I said, times have changed. I would shudder now to spew all that smoke into the air. There is no telling what manner of contaminants would be released. And these days I probably would get arrested for it, even it was my own vehicle.

So I just don’t burn cars anymore.

See Burning Cars and Environmental Karma for another article on this topic.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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I opened Digital Video for Dummies and immediately discovered their version of iMovie did not match the one on my computer. This brought me to a complete stop.

I switched to Final Cut Pro since learning iMovie was not going to have the ease I had hoped to find. Obviously Final Cut Pro skips ease entirely and goes directly to heavy duty features, and lots of them. But I had intended to go there anyway, why not just jump in totally over my head?

Imagine bubbles rising as I gasp for air…

Just using the camera itself has also presented its own issues. Being quite naive about camcorders, I thought a nice way to present one of Bern’s paintings would be to show it full frame, zoom slowly in and follow the composition in a spiral around the painting, and end up in the eye of the Indian, where I would zoom to fill the frame with the eye.

Yeah, right. The idea was great and my execution was utterly dismal. I quickly learned why fluid heads for tripods are useful for video. Herky jerky movements are just hideous. I also did not want the camera going in and out of focus as it hunted for proper focus as I zoomed or moved it.

The results looked like every bad home video I have ever seen. How disappointing!

I now have a different tripod that has a decent fluid head. The results are improving, but I am beginning to suspect I chose an approach to show the Indian painting that might be difficult for my equipment even if I was more skilled in using it.

However, my husband was ready to start work on an instructional video showing how to tie some of his unique and personal streamers that consistently catch large trout. Hmmm, how about some more big learning curve here?

My first discovery was that he had no idea what showed in the viewfinder and often was trying to demo something outside the field of vision. My efforts to pursue his movements were ridiculously off target because I do not tie flies and had no idea where he was going or what he was trying to do. This was amusing if not instructive.

The fly tying scissors make a loud noise when laid on the table, at least the way this camcorder records sound. The fly tying scissors landed on the table often. The textured wall behind the fly tying table was often in focus while the fly itself was not, the wonders of autofocus tormenting us.

I completely related to the frustration I often see in toddlers. They want to do everything they see big people doing around them, but the results just are not there for them. That was precisely my situation with the camcorder. I wanted smooth professional results and was just a newbie using it. Sigh.

We watched the results and discussed ways to coordinate our efforts more successfully. Our second version worked a lot better. We still see some areas that can certainly be improved but we actually have usable material.

I also managed to upload the video into Final Cut Pro with less difficulty. The project is really beginning to show promise.

On that note, we are going to try our third version of fly tying this morning and see what we can do. Perhaps I can follow the rhythm of tying the fly smoothly with the camera. Perhaps he will keep his hands from obscuring the view when he puts head cement on the fly. Perhaps we will get all the way through this one with flying colors!

Read the next article in this series at Hollywood Still Is Not Threatened.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2007. All Rights Reserved.

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