New year, new blog.

In our lives, we will take all kinds of journeys; some journeys take us to new places, while other journeys happen from within. Mine has been a bit of both, since 2006, and I will spare you the grim, gory details, but suffice to say, it has taken me five years to recover, and while I know I am still a work in progress, the person I am now is not at all the person I became while in that situation.

A little about me.... I am an artist, first and foremost. I love working in all kinds of mediums and my style (I think) is eclectic, depending on my mood. I'm a photographer; I like to animate, draw and paint; I enjoy sewing (even though I am not super good at it), making things with Sculpey; and my current obsession is painting in Photoshop. I like to create weird, quirky things and have a rather dark, morbid sense of humor. I'm a sucker for kitsch (as you can see from the above photo). I am an avid movie buff and will probably write about movies that I really like from time to time. My taste in movies (like everything else) runs from the strange to the sublime. When I am around people, I  can be as chatty and social as the next person, but people wear me out, so I value my quiet alone time too; that's when I get my most creative work done.

So....it's 2019 I am embarking on a brand new year. In my mind, that new year actually started in April of 2018 when I thought I was having a heart attack. Turns out it was something called a bronchospasm, triggered by the chilly morning air (hey, those things are painful!), but it scared me enough to wake up and make a drastic life change. I dropped the classes I was taking and made a decision not to teach that summer, opting instead to work in a garden center. Smartest thing I've ever done. Since that time, I've found satisfying work, made friends, and traveled to many places with my son, and we plan to keep on traveling, because it is something that I enjoy immensely and was denied for so many years. This blog is intended to chronicle my adventures and tell about the fun (and often unusual) sights I see and things I do. I hope that you will enjoy it and that it might even come in handy if you plan to visit some of these places yourself some day.

Happy New Year!

Jamy Gearhart
1/4/19