Sunday, 01-Mar-20 20:49:27 CET

Sam 1 March 2020

It is Sunday, March 1, and I am on my way to a live painting session in Amsterdam. I received an email this morning from Saskia telling me that Suzana got sick so that there will be another model today.

I was well on time at the platform, and that is incredible because I realized really late that I had to leave for going to Amsterdam.

Yesterday evening I decided to look into how it would be to port my blog system to a newer version of the system. To try out, I first made a snapshot of the blog server, and then I upgraded it. The result was catastrophic. I decided to look into that project another time. When I look at it, for plan A, I will probably rent another server. Then I will take a snapshot of the first server and put that on the second server. While the first server is still running unchanged, I will work on the second server on upgrading it. When that is done, I can switch over the DNS settings to point to the new server. This means I will have two servers for a while. I don’t know if the ISP can do an operation like this. That would be absolutely cool. If they cannot do that, then plan B will be to rent another server and build it from scratch. Oh well, we will see.

At the moment, I have pain in my hands. Actually, I have pain everywhere. It is my joints hurting. From time to time, I have a crisis like this. I try to be happy with what I am doing. It is hard, but I am a tough person. Apparently. In a couple of weeks, I will be back to normal pain levels, just regular everyday pain.

It is plenty of overcasts today, but there is a little patch of sun here and there. I took a photo outside the Weesp of the fields.

Now we arrive at the station.

I arrived at the same time as Ron. Saskia was still putting things together, so Ron and I made coffee and tea. There are eight cups of coffee going into the machine. Ron is 75 years old but actually very young for his age. He has been Architect and also worked in education to help organizations around the world. He just started learning to play the flute. That’s the spirit!

The artists today were Ron, Floor, Irene, Saskia, and me.

The model was Sam, 12 years old, watching a movie on the phone lying on his lap. He had a giant headphone on his head, a headphone with a microphone as well. That headphone also had a bright red cord. I liked that a lot. As a final humoristic touch, I decided to paint my signature with his headphone cord. It is unusual for me to put my signature on the left side but I did that because it would not interfere with the cord of the young man. On the other hand it could have been fun to make the cord really integrate into the signature but I suppose I was not making it that funny. That is for another time.

Also I think that the cord gives the painting a resolution to a mystery. If that cord was not there it would be hard to figure out what the person was doing. Is he sleeping or is he doing something?

In the background there are paintings from Saskia. I copied Saskias work!

Although the “real” model was missing I had great fun painting this young man. When done I got offered transport by Irene to Almere. She drove me to the train station in Almere where I had my bike.