Well, time,rest, and the ministrations of my lovely lady have taken their toll and I am doing much better now. I am no longer on the wound vac, although the incision site continues to require daily maintenance.

I've been exercising, both with resistance and aerobic training, in an effort to replace the tremendous amount of muscle mass I lost following the emergency surgery. Seriously -- I was down 40 pounds! Not a diet I'd recommend, however.

Oh, and I was on a liquid diet for about ten days due to a kink in my lower intestine, a "complication" of the surgery (sometimes it seemed like it would never end). Fortunately, I am back on solid food now. As an aside, they show a lot of food commercials on television.

Being off the wound vac has made it much easier to get around. Plus, I can shower practically with impunity now! I can get out of the house and even walk the distance from the car to the doctor's office. I'm also back to doing some housework (dishes and laundry mostly).

So I'm slowly getting back to the person I was, albeit with an eight-inch scar on my abdomen. I won't be entirely back to normal until my final surgery sometime in the July/August timeframe. Still, dealing with what I have now is waaaaay better than all that other crap.

Well, the "routine surgery" I was going in for went south and I damn near died. Seriously, I was in the hospital eighteen days, four of them in intensive care. I had one emergency surgery, which was one more than I should have had.

Now, all my muscle has atrophied, I can barely walk, and am generally weak as a kitten. I have an open wound on my stomach and a wound vac running constantly. On the plus side, I am not dead, and probably won't die anytime soon. Oh, and I'm finally home.

This is what got printed inside my annual Christmas card, which can be seen at this [link]

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Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and best wishes for the coming new year from Bob & Kathryn’s household!

2008 while not a tremendously busy year was, overall, a good one, marking our second year together. Things are still going quite well between us and we’re very happy that we found each other!

Bob continued his job working as an editor for the online publisher Arcamax (www.arcamax.com). It was a banner year, with sales exceeding all expectations as more and more people seemed to get their news online.

Kathryn continued in her job at W.H.H. Trice, a local property rental agency. The downturn in the economy doesn’t seem to affect the fact that people need to rent places to live, so she remains very busy.

The year started out with a lot of fun at our local science fiction convention, MarsCon, in January. Bob continues to be involved behind the scenes, so he’s pleased to say that 2008 was a huge success with everyone looking forward to 2009. Kathryn, who was a vendor, enjoyed both the con and her sales.

We followed up with no fewer than three other conventions in the following months; StellarCon (in North Carolina), RavenCon (in nearby Richmond), and HorrorFind (in Maryland). Bob was an artist guest at the first two, with Kathryn vending, while both of us vended at Horrorfind.

Of course, one of the best parts of traveling to these shows is staying with and visiting friends and family. They’re like mini-vacations you take throughout the entire year!

Kathryn continued her sideline of making soft-sculpture dragons, although on a less aggressive schedule than in the past. Her biggest show remained the Maryland Renaissance Festival. While she’s no longer a full-time vendor, she was juried in as a guest for two weekends. The first was marred by tropical depression Hannah on Saturday, but things were much better on Sunday. Her second weekend was blessed with excellent weather, making for brisk business all around.

We also expanded our furry family by one this year, adding little (but growing!) Edmund to our brood of Mina, Oskar, and Graehling. He's quite the bundle of energy, but also very snuggly, with a purr like a Harley engine starting up. He’s fit in quite well with the older cats, frequently engaging Oskar in wrestling matches - tubby Oskar being a very... err... stationary target.

Some bad news -- Late in the year, Bob was diagnosed with diverticulitus. Complications from it will lead to surgery early in 2009, although he’s expected to recover fully. Unfortuntately, issues associated with it caused us to cancel our holiday travel plans.

Otherwise, things have been rather quiet for us, which is something that we relish, as unplanned upheavals tend to nudge their way into one’s life much too often. We continue to have our monthly book group meetings, as well as weekly coffee klatches with local friends.

Here’s hoping that all of our friends and family can spend a joyous holiday with the ones that they love this holiday!

The con was a bit of a mixed bag. While I walked out with over $250 in my pocket, I can't really say that much of it was profit, in spite of our doing the weekend on the cheap -- crashing at scarydavedc's place (and , honestly, he and his lovely wife were the nicest hosts one could possibly ask for!) and ordering in Chinese rather than eating hotel food. In the end, I probably just about broke even, but it's not all bad.

First, according to geckoman, big_danny_t, the aforementioned scarydavedc, and most of the hucksters I talked to at the con, it was a pretty lackluster affair, with the fen keeping their wallets firmly locked closed, so what I saw was probably the bottom-end of what I can expect to see at future events. Given that the tables were prohibitively expensive here (I only managed to afford it by riding in on dragonmakr's coattails), a con with more affordable tables but less attendance might be more successful, or at least equally so.

Honestly, even the sword dealer couldn't move anything. The only hucksters doing any real business were the bootleg DVD dealers, and if they can't move merch, nobody can!

I did get some good exposure and feedback. The $10 matted mini-prints were popular, the cards less so. I was able to "upsell" from the mini-prints to full-sized, unmatted prints three out of four times, and I need to do that more often as the simple prints are considerably less work and, thus, more profitable. I sold a few of the full-sized, double-matted prints, which was nice gravy as they're premium priced. I decided to get out of the t-shirts as they're bulky to transport and don't sell well. I just can't compete with the dedicated t-shirt vendors. I'm better off licensing my designs to them and letting them do the heavy lifting.

Speaking of which, I did get a little interest from one, and a lot of interest from another on doing custom t-shirt designs. Seems my style is perfect for silk-screening. With a little luck I can get a bit of side work from that angle, which is fine with me as I enjoy that sort of drawing and design work.

Overall, this first step into full-fledged artist dealer-dom was pretty successful. I suspect I can do okay at a regular sci-fi con, especially if they have me as a guest. It also increases my exposure tremendously, so even if I break even it's a worthwhile venture. And as I build up a larger variety of prints I'll probably be able to sell even more (I mean, I did all this with only eight marketable prints!). I should still hang in the art room, but with an eye towards it as an advertisement for my work in the dealer's room.

Of course, if I start doing work that ties in with dragonmakr's dragons, then we'll have a really marketable brand going, and who knows where we can go with that?

Went to the print shop today to get printouts of the pieces that I think will sell best this weekend -- $75 later I walked out with a stack that would choke a horse. It's tough trying to determine what will sell, but experience has shown that cheap is best. To that end, I'm going with single cards (as opposed to the packs I tried at RavenCon, which got lots of interest, but nobody seemed to want multiples), unmatted prints, and tiny, $10 matted prints. I reconfigured three of the pieces completely to fit the 3x5" format and I think they look pretty good.

I got the cards bagged tonight. Tomorrow will be spent cutting mat board after mat board. Of course, the key is that all the mats are exactly the same size, so I should be able to knock them out relatively quickly. Still, I'm glad I have a stack of blades!

Kathryn did pretty well with my work at the spring Horrorfind show, and she only had about a third of what I'm bringing (and that show only has about a third of the attendance of this show). Plus, gas is dropping, and the fen may have a few extra quatloos in their pocket. So I'm being cautiously optimistic.