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Dear Barbara,

As far as I can tell, you're the only person actually reading this journal. So I might as well drop the pretense of writing for a legion of fans, and address it directly to you.

There's actually not much to report on the deck right now. I'm waiting to hear back on colors before I send out my greeting cards. Still making slow progress on the website, but having lots of fun learning about Flash in the process. I had a breakthrough over the weekend, when I figured out how to include a variable in the name of an .swf file to be opened. That lets me use one menu for all the suits instead of four separate menus, and a function for opening the cards rather than repeating the command on each menu item. This should reduce file size considerably. (That probably means nothing to you, nor should it. Let me just say that I got up and did a little dance when it worked.)

I read in Diane's trip report on the ATA conference that you mentioned Victoria Regina in your talk. That was nice! It must have been a thrill to see color proofs of Robert Place's new deck. If I get press sheets of Victoria Regina, I'm going to hang them on the wall. I love the way they look, with registration marks along the edge.

It's kind of odd to have such a flurry of activity a couple of weeks ago, and now nothing. Classic "hurry up and wait" I guess. But anyway, since Victoria Regina is on hold, I've been filling my time with a new project that I'm really excited about: my car.

I don't know if you know this, but I used to drive an art car called "Little Pig Boy." Living in Minneapolis you've probably seen lots of art cars. But here in Durham, I was the only one. (There is a woman in Chapel Hill with a really cool art car, and I think there are a couple in Raleigh.)

Little Pig Boy died last year, alas. I've been driving a borrowed truck for about a year, but in the past month I've finally gotten a car I can make into a new art car. It's a 1991 Mazda 626 and I have such wonderful plans for it. It's going to have an underwater theme. You know that nasty green outdoor carpet that looks like grass? Well they make it in bright blue too. I'm going to cover the whole car with that carpet. First I'm having the car painted blue to match (it's currently red, which would show through).

When the carpet is on, I'm going to put underwater objects like fish and seaweed and scuba diving Barbies all over it. I have it all sketched out, which I'm sure will change a lot depending on the objects I end up with. You don't want to put anything expensive on an art car, because things fall off sometimes, or people steal them. So you end up combing thrift stores and dollar stores, looking for cheap durable things. The best objects are sturdy plastic: strong enough not to melt, not breakable or too heavy.

My goal with this car is to get it in good shape in time to enter the big art car parade in Houston next April. I've been reading about the parade for years. In 1999 they had 250 cars! Pig Boy, a 1978 Toyota, would never have survived the trip. But this Mazda and I, we're going to be there!

I have an appointment at Maaco on Saturday, and so this morning I took some "before" pictures of the car in its original state. I want to document the car's transformation from the beginning. I wonder if I should start a new diary for the car? Or use this space for both the deck and the car? The main question is, would the people reading the Tarot diary (that means you, Barbara) mind reading about the art car as well? Would that clutter up the diary? Or would you enjoy seeing photos of the car, especially when I don't have any Tarot news at the moment.

Maybe I could separate it out, into "tarot entries" and "art car entries." That way if you only wanted to read about one thing, you could skip the other. Would Greymatter sort the archives for me? Hmm. I'll have to think about this.