Wandering Artist's Journal

"Gull Patrol", 10" x 20", acrylic on canvas, ©2013 Anna L. Conti 2013 was a pretty good year for my attempt to document the marine traffic on San Francisco Bay. I finished 12 paintings, a few watercolors and a series of etchings. I expect this coming year to be even more productive. It's been a fascinating learning experience for me. I've been combing the used bookstores, looking for old military, shipping, sailing, and other maritime manuals. Today I really lucked out at the Book Bay in Ft. Mason: I found a copy of the Saga of the Delta Queen (sister to the Delta King, now berthed in Sacramento.) The Queen was once the "most lavishly appointed and expensive sternwheel passenger boats ever" built and she carried passengers between Sacramento and San Francisco. The book was written in 1951 by her captain and it is loaded with insider info!

I just spend three hours yesterday and nearly two hours today, signing up for health insurance via California's Health Insurance Exchange . It wasn't easy, or painless, but from what I've heard on Twitter and elsewhere around the web , I had it easy. It was a lot like doing your own taxes. Online. Lots of dead links. Verrrrrrrry long waits. Lots of WTF? questions. Lots of repeated entries of long numbers and the same old info every government program asks you over and over and over. (With all this loss of privacy, increased government surveillance, and secret buildings full of digital archives, wouldn't ya think they'd know all this about me by now?) But hey - it's done. Now I can go back to painting. I'm working on a shipspotting series these days. The one above is "Smokin," acrylic on canvas, ©2013.