Author: admin

A few weeks ago we had a hailstorm here. I was here at the shop late as usual, trying to get inspired &/or motivated to do something really great that will make our life better, hearing the rain coming down harder & harder, then the rattling on the roof so I ran down the stairs to pop the back door open to check it out. Sure enough, there’s hail coming down & it’s covering the ground, making ice floes on the river that just started flowing down the alley beside the shop. Normal sized hailstones, then it kicks up a notch or two & really starts pounding & the hailstones begin to look like mothballs. Down at the Old Base, a few miles south, they got stones that were two inches across. Then it stopped, the hail, anyway. It continued to rain a while longer.
A few days later the Hail Damage Guys started showing up. In one day three different guys came to the shop to get me to do signs & banners for them as they’re setting up at auto dealers, tire shops, auto glass shops, parking lots & whatever with their trailers & tools & crews. In a couple more days there’s like thirty different outfits set up around town doing Auto Hail Repair.
Now it’s been weeks & most of them are still here, still busy. It’s like around $1,500 a pop, more if it’s a big ol’ Expedition or Navigator or something.
We made a bunch of money, well, not a big bunch – we didn’t get into five figures or anything – but it was real easy, slam-dunk cut vinyl sign work, the kind that pays the bills without stressing you out. Some clouds do indeed have silver linings.
It hailed for like ten minutes or so.

We’ve been at this location for a year now, & we finally got our sign up.
It was made for, & hung at our previous spot at the Stripmall of Death, I mean Monterey Plaza, one mile west of here. It’s a big heavy thing, it’s got 2 inch angle iron on the back of it to stiffen it up. It took 4 guys to get it off the roof where it’s been laying, down to the hanger bracket that we bolted to the wall a couple of months earlier.

Here’s a family portrait I did for the ZMonkey family in Groton.

Well, it was.
He would be 128.

Oh, I was on TV today. On the news! No, I wasn’t arrested.
The guy from KBIM TV Channel 10 here in Roswell came in the store this afternoon to interview me about the Roswell Spacewalk which is our little roadside attraction. It’s a walk-through blacklight installation that takes you back in time (dioramas of the Roswell Incident) & then to the future where you find yourself on a spaceship, looking through the portholes at spinning galaxies, planets, satellites & flying saucers, all in perception-altering Lumiere Noir (blacklight).
Sharon & I have built this thing out of mostly scrounged materials, set it up, taken it apart, hauled it somewhere else & rebuilt it about five times since 1999. This is the abridged version.

People come from all over the world to Roswell. Because it’s Roswell, man! And they want to see something Roswell. So they go to the International UFO Museum and Research Center that’s in what used to be the downtown movie theater, the Plains; & that’s okay, but they take themselves seriously there, so it’s not very entertaining, & after that, there’s nothing to do but buy more T shirts. So we humbly offer this little attraction to give visitors something that’s uniquely Roswell, as we try to sell them more T shirts & tchottchkes. I guess you could call it folk art. People mostly seem to get a kick out of it.
So the guy, I totally forget his name, did a little puff piece about it. Turns out he’s the anchor guy, but it was just him & his camera, he was the whole crew.