Saturday, September 06, 2008

shopping

Sometimes I pity the farmers. Bad soil, lousy weather, Wisconsin bugs – it’s enough to make you reconsider.

Our images of the whole field to table thing are, of course, sweeter, gentler: young buds pushing their way up, growing and spilling their bounty into the harvesting machine (or hands). The farmer, smiling, piling this bounty into a truck, to bring it to our paved parking lot. Weathered faces and hands – so rewarding to see right up front, as we reach for the good stuff, anticipating the many meals that we'll make henceforth.


At the Westside Community Market, I see these vendor tables in the bright light of a sunny September morning, and I fill my basket, and it is all rather joyous.


003 copy
Buy print 2010




015 copy
Buy print 2009




021 copy
Buy print 2008




025 copy
Buy print 2007




030 copy
Buy print 2006




Back at the condo, Ed and I work on improving the storefront on the Ocean Store page of my website. If you have never tried to build your own click-through shopping cart on the Net, I’m telling you now – it is so complicated, so frustrating, that it’s enough to make you reconsider.

Ed has done the brunt of the work on it – days and nights of learning enough html code to make things work. Really, it has been one long nightmare. Much of it is beyond me, but what I have plunged into has been truly beyond hard.

All for your shopping pleasure. So that when you do eventually decide to buy this book, or some future book, or a photo, or cards for the holidays, or whatever, we’ll be all smiles and handshakes and kind thoughts about one another.

If creating merchandise is hard, creating a storefront for it is like working to get that squiggly worm out of an otherwise fine apple.

Uff. Happy shopping.