Send off

Here we are, scarcely three weeks after having returned from Europe. I'm getting ready to take Mary to RDU to go back to Alaska with the sole intention of shooting pictures with her real camera.

She has geared up for this mission: new laptop, suitcase and all manner of little stuff. Not without reason, she's a little apprehensive about things like weather and light. I'm a little apprehensive about bears, though she'll have a bear bell and bear spray and in principle knows what she needs to do if she sees one of the big fuzzy guys. She has downloaded all manner of apps to her phone and knows for instance that she really needs to predownload maps for AllTrails before going out in the woods. She just needs to remember to do it.

It's an exciting moment. My little girl's going out in the world on her own. She did a road trip with her collaborator River in support of their A Positive Life book on HIV-positive women many years ago, maybe '95-96 or so. I remember her talking about how exciting it was to be driving across a bridge in Tampa out on her own. That was a long time ago. This is really her first major instance of professional travel since then. We'll see how long it takes for the romantic sheen to wear off of it.

Then there's also the small matter of packaging, pitching, and selling the work. Finding venues and distribution channels. This is true as well for her Gamelands series she did last year. A whole corpus waiting to be shown to the world. There's still time for that in the grand scheme of things

In the short run, it would be nice to get some revenue in the door for tax year 2023 so that we can expense all of her costs without the IRS deeming her art work a hobby as opposed to a profession, so if anybody needs a print or a book, holler at me.