Not that I’m unsatisfied with them, but I tend to fall out of love with my own images very quickly. I’m sure I look at them more critically than anyone else, and I’m always thinking of ways I could have improved them. This little digital piece is an exception

click here to go to my Flick’r site.

If I looked long enough, I’m sure I could find a few little things to change, but it doesn’t matter. I love the feel and atmosphere. I want to be there.

Most of the illustrations I do are for publication. You always have to bear in mind that any image you’re working on will end up being ink on paper, and whether it’s done with pigment or digitally, big areas of black will only work - if then - when done by top-end presses on very high quality paper. I started this painting knowing all that and still couldn’t bring myself to stop and paint something more “useful”. Because of the family difficulties I mentioned, I haven’t sat at a campfire in years. I will again. Until then I think I’m going to make this little digital piece my screensaver.

I can’t use this image for the original purpose, but it did bring back memories of a poem I wrote as a teenager 40+ years ago. I can’t remember it all, but the last two lines are…

“Imagination’s endless paths
My mind at peace to tire,
All past adventure known again
To sit before a fire.”

For those who would love a Mammuthus primigenius for Christmas as much as I would, click here!

Before we go on, let’s get these curved teeth straight. Saber-teeth evolved from normal, conical canine teeth into two forms. Dirk teeth were the long, curved, finely serrated blades that we normally think of when we think saber-toothed. The famous Smilodon - the saber-toothed “tiger” of LaBrea Tar Pits fame - was a dirk-toothed true felid. There were also scimitar-toothed animals with shorter, more coarsely serrated blades that usually evolved in conjunction with longer-legged cursorial body types. Most of the dirk-toothed animals were compact, robust stalkers.

For a closer look at Barbourofelis fricki click here

Barbourofelis fricki was the last of the nimravids, dirk-toothed and huge. Its name, “Barbour’s Cat“, shows just how close and how confusing convergent similarities can be. This was a massive creature, the size of a modern lion, but more heavily built. At rest or when walking, it stood and moved in a plantigrade fashion, rather like a bear. One look at the business end of the animal however, lets you know that Barbourofelis wasn’t looking for berries. It possessed some of the largest saber-teeth of all time, and the body to back them up. Behind the catlike face, the head had a flat profile caused by the expanded occipital region at the back of the skull. This allowed for the attachment of powerful neck and shoulder musculature, the driving force behind the sabers. This was a stalker and killer of large game.

Nimravids have an interesting history in North America. Throughout the Oligocene, they assumed all the predatory roles later taken by true cats. But by the beginning of the Miocene, 23 million years ago, they had all disappeared. For whatever reason, perhaps because there was an abundance of arctoid (doglike) carnivores of all descriptions present here at the time, there were no nimravids in North America for the next few million years. Felids also were missing and made their North American debut in the form of a small conical-toothed animal, Pseudailurus, about 17 million years ago. (Showing up to really confuse things a few million years later was a scimitar-toothed true cat named Nimravides! Got that? “Barbour’s Cat” is a nimravid, and Nimravides is a real cat! Aurgh!!!)

Finally, after a 10 million year absence, nimravids returned, most likely from Asia, in the form of Barbourofelis. They show up as moderate-sized creatures with moderate-sized dirk teeth.

For a closer look at Hipparion’s very bad day click here

This is an early barbourofelid species based on California material attacking the three-toed horse Hipparion. It is also one of my very first digital paintings. It was done a few years ago for an article by Joe Eaton in the September, 2001 issue of Bay Nature, a Northern California publication dedicated to all aspects of San Francisco Bay Area natural history. Getting this image ready for Olduvai - and I did work on it - I was amazed at how much I’ve improved with this computerized medium. The drawing is fine, except that I gave Barbourofelis a tail that was too long (digitally fixed now), but the color rendering was primitive. My thanks to the editor, David Loeb, for letting me experiment on his dime.

One of the problems with having killing teeth like this was eating the meat once it was secured. Barbourofelis solved the problem by having robust incisors and shearing carnassial teeth to strip and slice meat from bone. Utilizing the carnassials must have been problematic, because the animal had to move its cheek out of the way behind and outside the sabers. You don’t have a 5 million year history without solving those gnawing problems. (I’m SO sorry! I couldn’t stop myself.)

The trouble with a post like this is that it’s a book in the making. There is so much to draw and write about, and so many questions yet to be answered, that I really don’t know what to leave out and what tidbit people might find most interesting. For instance, looking at the paintings the one thing you can’t help but notice is the dependent flange on the mandible of the animals. These protected the sabers when the mouth was closed and there was little room to spare between the saber and the bone of the lower jaw. Maybe I’ve missed it, but I can’t recall having seen anybody paint this as the gum-lined half sheath I’ve portrayed here. There certainly wasn’t enough room for hair to grow, and unless the tooth was supported by being in contact with the flange, it would have defeated its supposed purpose. (I should add that the dirk-toothed felids like Smilodon didn’t have the flange. This is such fun.)

I want to note that things will be changing here at Olduvai George soon. I’ll have an announcement next week about some exciting new developments that will help me to post more often and include more new illustrations. New old whales are coming.

I was hoping to have Kutchicetus up this week but I haven’t nailed the look yet as the new work is based on material I hadn’t seen until last week. 2007 promises to be a very busy year.

Luckily, the deviation from what I’d planned is fairly small. I’ll still be working on North American ground sloths and other Pleistocene animals and, of course, whales. There might even be a whole new additional website about cetacean evolution and phylogenic relationships.

Today however, I’m posting an acrylic image I did a few years ago. It portrays a time at what is now Fossil Butte National Monument, when southwestern Wyoming looked and felt like Florida.

This image has been seen before at Chris Clarke’s Creek Running North (shameless link, as Chris is back blogging). The head of the massive Brontops emerging from the river can also be found at PZ Myers‘ Pharyngula (another absolutely shameless link - I always get many more hits when PZ links to me), as one of his many revolving header illustrations. Brontops was the culmination of his line. Eight feet (2.3 meters) to the high point of his back, this final “thunder beast” died out at the end of the Eocene, leaving its relatives - horses, rhinos, and tapirs - to carry on the business of being perissodactyls.

Speaking of rhinos, the smaller animal getting out of Brontops‘ path is the early “running rhino” Hyracodon. While small here, its close relatives in Asia would evolve into the largest land mammal yet discovered, Paraceratherium (formerly the Baluchitherium or Indricotherium of my childhood). Hyracodon’s build was very horselike. In fact, while skeletal and dental characteristics identify Hyracodon as a rhino, superficial features may well have been extremely close to its contemporary, the three-toed horse Mesohippus. Had I placed the neck a bit higher on the shoulders and moved the orbit further back on a slightly more gracile skull, I could well have used the same painted image as representative of that small, browsing horse.

And now, just because I can…

This painting is another private commission piece done in the late 1990s. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the previous image except that I painted them both in acrylic on canvas within the same year.

This little prosimian is the lesser bush-baby, Galago senegalensis, a current resident of dry forest and thorn bush regions of Africa.

Both of these paintings were scanned off the originals on my first small scanner and had to be pieced together in Photoshop. At least at this size I did seem to blend the pieces back together well enough. The only thing lost from the originals was some of the subtlety of color (especially in the skies). Back with more whales and other things next week.

Click here to see a much larger version.

I remember visiting Hans Thewissen in his lab at NEOUCOM in Rootsville, Ohio. It was after I had sent him the painting, and the second I saw the real material I said “damn, I made the femur too long!”

In doing the drawings for Zimmer’s book, I had consulted with Dr. Hans Thewissen, who had found the fossils of Ambulocetus in Eocene (approximately 49 million year old) rock in Pakistan. Hans and I became friends, and in appreciation for his help, I painted the image for his lab at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine (NEOUCOM) where he teaches Gross Human Anatomy to future doctors to facilitate his passion for protowhales and other early Cenozoic mammals.

When dealing artistically with an animal like Ambulocetus, for which there are no modern analogs except seemingly bizarre combinations like crocodile/seal, I remind myself (just as with Pakicetus) not to think about it as halfway to something else. Ambulocetus was a large (11 to 12 feet long), powerful and successful animal of its time. Looking at creatures that live in similar habitats today, comparing features, and staying true to the bones (at least the measurements and photos I was given - new discoveries change things all the time) I try to keep my imagination and my ego in check. When I’m working with a scientist who has spent years studying some particular creature, what I want to produce is the animal that they see when they close their eyes and think of their subject as an animated living being.

Here’s an early version of Ambulo I call my fur seal phase. Too much hair and bulk for me today, but the drawing shows the splay-legged stance and outward rotated hand. Its name may mean “walking/swimming whale” but it must have been very clumsy on land and incapable of anything we’d think of as a normal mammalian walking stride.

I’ve drawn or painted Ambulocetus a dozen times - pelted, haired and naked - and I’ve never gotten it right. I’ll never know its color pattern, the length or density of its hair or the exact amount of muscle or fat on its frame. Those qualities are beyond the scope of what we can ever absolutely know, and exterior features can evolve very quickly. What I can do is be as conscientious as possible in proposing a look by considering as many factors as possible and providing reasonable external characteristics for the proposed lifestyle.

Fossils of Ambulocetus are found only in deposits that indicate the environment was near-shore marine and swampy or brackish. At the time, the site of discovery in what are now mountains in Pakistan, was a warm, shallow sea and tidal river delta. I gave Ambulocetus very little in the way of fat or blubber, as it simply wouldn’t have been needed for insulation and its ancestors had evolved in the even warmer world of the earliest Eocene. Originally, I portrayed it attacking and removing a primitive perissodactyl (horse, rhino, tapir or brontothere - you choose) from the gene pool, but in this latest version I have it hunting crabs in a tidal shallows. Perhaps not so animated, but still predatory, and I think, quite a beautiful beast.

Click here to view a much larger image

Or click here to see Ambulocetus without the distortion imposed by integrating the animal into a full painting

I’ve painted its face as hairless except for the robust vibrissae, for grubbing along the Tethys’ shoreline hunting for mollusks, and I’ve also scarred his snout, neck and shoulders from imagined battles with competing males. That formidable head and those impressive teeth seem to me not just for crushing mollusks and crustaceans or for capturing fish, but for gaping, ritualistic displays to intimidate rivals, and if push comes to shove, actual combat. O.K., I said just a couple paragraphs ago I keep my imagination out of it, but after the construction is done, you have to come up with ways to make the animal alive, and that involves behavior. Besides, considering the displays of hippos and other related artiodactyls today, it’s not such a stretch. I’ve also taken some license with the coloring here. If I were doing this for a museum display, I’d probably make the animal darker and mottled or even faintly striped above and light below to better blend the hunter into its background. Here the object is to show the proportions and anatomy, and I didn’t want a camouflage pattern to interfere with actual contour.

I’ve talked a little of the difficulties of recreating long extinct animals and touched very briefly, in my Pakicetus post, on the complications of understanding what lineage diverged when, and from exactly what, in the evolutionary process. While I look at each creature I draw as an individual and complete entity, our knowledge of them and the science behind it is an evolutionary process itself. As with so many other things, our journey of discovery about whales and their ancestors is really just beginning. Yes, we know quite a bit, but in our written history of over 5,000 years, we’ve only been developing the methodolgy for looking at the world around us rationally for the past few centuries. Dr. Phil Gingerich found that first Pakicetus skull less than 30 years ago, and Dr. Thewissen found Ambulocetus in the early 1990s. Rodhocetus, Kutchicetus and others, coming soon to a blog near you, have all been unearthed within the last 10 years, and DNA and other biochemical work is in its precocious, brilliant infancy; stay tuned!

Legend is not too strong a word. Dad started playing for money with a traveling team at 16 during The Depression. It’s hard to imagine today how popular baseball was in the 1930s. When dad played for GE, 10,000 people would show up for a Saturday game. He always led off and led the team in batting. In 1939 he won the title by a mere 110 points hitting 519! I couldn’t do that in Little League. Yes, the GE team really was called “the Refrigerators”!

My father used to love to tell the story of their first date. Always the romantic, after a casual diner dinner he took mom to the local bowling alley where my mother proceeded to beat him by 100 pins in a three game match to the accompanying hoots and laughter of his friends. I call it a match, because while it started out as fun, it soon became apparent that “popular baseball star” was being trounced by “girl”. Dad got serious, but it only got worse. He always jokingly insisted that he didn’t really want to continue the relationship (a lie, mom was a hottie - see below); he simply kept coming back asking for dates trying to beat her. He never did, and fell in love instead. It was much easier.

World War II ended dad’s baseball dreams. He was called up by both the Cleveland Indians and the US Army in the summer of 1941. The Army won the contract and dad was on a ship on his way to the Philippines when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He didn’t see my mother for over 3 years. My mother passed the time by marrying some guy named White and then having the marriage annulled after a very short time. This part of the story didn’t come out until I was 17. It’s still unclear to me exactly what happened exactly when, but she was waiting for dad when he came home, so whatever occurred, they worked it out long distance. After the war, dad was invited to tryouts by Brooklyn and St.Louis, but experiences in the Pacific had left him shaken and at the time, my mother seemed more comforting then baseball.

My father Harold, mother Ellie, and My dad’s brother Don, also a terrific ballplayer and later New York State amateur golf champion. As the first Buell of my post-war generation, the expectations were enormous.

Banking on his local popularity, dad got a job as a sportswriter and turned his love for sports into a 45-year career. Later he would win an Associated Press award as outstanding minor-league baseball writer (for an early 50s series called “View From the Dugout”), but at that moment he was happy just to be home, employed, and engaged. My parents were married, March 1946, and 8 months later, I was born.

I was a honeymoon baby!

Mom and I. This is the earliest picture I could find of myself. I know there are maternity ward pictures somewhere, but I had all the wrinkles then that I’m getting back now.

Yeah, sure. The family mythology says that while 8 months pregnant, my mother, ever the athlete, tried to move the springs of a 1945 Desoto that were in her way on the porch and immediately went into labor. I don’t think that explanation holds water however, because after mom’s broke, I was born 7 lbs. 9 oz., a perfectly respectable birth weight.

Mom and I during our “Grapes of Wrath” phase.

There was hardly any room in the cradle what with the bat, ball and glove, but I managed. It seemed like a good start to a life, and it was, at least for a while. Things would change, but that’s a story for another time. Today I’ve been alive for a full 60 years and I want to enjoy the moment, giving it all the how-the-hell-is-this-possible fear it deserves. Friday I’ll have another whale post up.

Until then I’ll leave you with a photo of a type of unfortunate behavior that would make my life all too complicated in the coming years. It was taken in Schenectady, New York, the summer of 1948.

For a closer look at Orcinus orca click here.

or this…

For a closer look at Balaenoptera acutorostrata, the Minke Whale, click here.

From this?

For a closer look at Pakicetus click here.

It took a long time and it’s going to take a number of posts.

We’re back in time a little over 50 million years. The dinosaurs have been gone for only 13 or 14 million years. Gone too are the great marine lizards. Along the shoreline of the shallow Tethys Sea, on the south coast of the landmass of Eurasia, mammals are turning their interest to an abundant realm long denied them. In nature, no available resource is ever ignored for long, and a coyote-sized animal named Pakicetus is taking the first tentative steps into the warm waters of streams and deltas in its (uppermost middle) Eocene world.

It had a long, narrow snout and brain case, close-set eyes, a robust sagittal crest, and the heavy tail of earlier archaic mammals. It also had fairly long (for the time) legs ending in small hooves. What makes Pakicetus interesting to us here however, can’t be seen in my painting. The skull has an ear region that is highly unusual in shape, and resembles the same area only in the skulls of modern and fossil whales. This feature is diagnostic for cetaceans, is found in all cetaceans, and in no other animal. Pakicetus certainly could swim, but not strongly, and perhaps foraged as a wader, or moved along the streambed like a modern hippo, feeding on crustaceans and other aquatic animals using its long vibrissae- covered snout to feel its way through the shallows.

Even earlier, lost for now in the mist-shrouded era of the Paleocene, an archaic ungulate ancestor gave rise to animals that would eventually lead to artiodactyls (even-toed hoofed animals with incredible modern diversity including; camels, deer, cattle, goats, sheep, antelope, pigs and hippos), mesonychids (carnivorous, or at least omnivorous, hoofed mammals, all now extinct), and cetaceans. The timing of exactly what diverged when is still being researched and debated. I’ll have a number of diagrams, cladograms and trees up in the near future.

As an artist and not a scientist, I’m going to leave questions of timing up to the molecular biologists and paleontologists involved, and simply supply the illustrations. I’ve been fortunate to participate in a peripheral way in a number of projects by portraying many of the creatures in the evolutionary transition back to aquatic life. You’ll be seeing most of them here in the next few months. I might even have a guest post or two from the scientists I’ve worked with.

A note on the restoration of Pakicetus

Unless you find that once-in-a-lifetime, fully articulated skeleton with skin, scale, fur or feather impressions, the further back you go in time, the more difficult the process becomes of bringing an extinct animal to life. Hopefully, any guesswork involved is educated guesswork based on comparative anatomy, but Pakicetus, as portrayed here, is based on a skull and non-articulated post-cranial material. That means it’s a composite. The bones are from a number of individuals. As more fossils are found and described, Pakicetus’ look will change. My take on any fossil-based animal is just that, my take. You can only be true to the fossil evidence you have presented to you and then try to make informed decisions about surface features and color based on possible relatives (or ecological equivalents) of your subject that are alive today and the type of environment the animal lived in.

The one thing I always do, is try to look at each animal as a completely formed individual. What I mean by that in this case, is that I didn’t think of Pakicetus as a “future whale” or an early step toward whaleness - even though it certainly was from our viewpoint. Any naturalist transported into the past would see Pakicetus as a successful creature in the world of its time. Changing conditions, differential survival, and genetic mutation would do their work, but Pakicetus lived and breathed and foraged and mated and died a complete creature.

For a closer look at Lagenorhynchus acutus, the Atlantic White-sided Dolphin, click here.

This little white-sided Dolphin - a fast, acrobatic, and conspicuous resident of the North Atlantic - is not an “end” result, but simply a glorious, present-day manifestation of Darwin’s final words in The Origin of Species: “…endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

For right now, I’m putting up the last animal “portrait” I did for a private client. I painted this Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) for a friend some 8 years ago. The original is acrylic on canvas, 30 x 36 inches.

Click here for a much more detailed image.

There’s the idealized animal that we see in our mind and memory, and then there’s the real critter. Whenever I first sketch a cat of any genus other than Panthera, I tend to make the head too big in proportion to the body; cheetahs especially so. First drafts also see my Hippo and Weasel legs too long, and my eagle feet too big (except for Harpies and couple others). The trick is to realize it and make the adjustments.

As I was painting this piece I remember wishing I could paint Wyoming as the background. Up until a few thousand years ago, we had cheetah or very cheetah-like cats here in North America. They still reside here in the evolutionary memory of the Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), and in my dreams.

Click here to see this image (almost) the size I painted it. 

The rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is an acrylic painting I did 10 or more years ago for … (?) I honestly can’t remember! (If you’re out there please email me) I’ve probably drawn and painted a couple hundred trout and salmon over the years, and I can’t tell you what happened to most of the images. This one was done while I was living in Mammoth Lakes, in the Sierra Nevada of California. All I remember is that I was given the flies and streamers that surround the fish by an avid fisherman, and put color into the animal that the stocked rainbows of the “Lakes Basin” above town just didn’t have. It would have made more sense had I made the background a sage-covered hillside behind the willow and alder along Hot Creek, a great nearby fly-fishing stream.

These little mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki) were done through Split Rock Studios for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was my second attempt at doing fish digitally in PhotoShop and I’m still very pleased with the result. The fish here are much larger than life size. I remember counting the scales on a number of fuzzy photographs. Not fun; nor was trying to wrap them accurately around the larger female.

The yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) and the Indo-Pacific blue marlin (Makaira mazara) are both acrylic paintings that were done for a project that never came to fruition. Again, I can’t remember exactly why I painted them, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Some of you have seen the yellowfin before as one of the many recycling background elements on PZ Myers’ Pharyngula.

That’s enough for now. I’m still getting used to the new WordPress setup, and with Brent Rasmussen laughing in the background as I stumble through the netherworld of computer software changes, I’m going for consistency. Once I’m up to speed with the new procedures I plan on posting each Tuesday and Friday. I need to push myself while establishing reasonable deadlines. I wish I could paint faster.

It took months to get this image up, please click here for a better view!

People think that my specialty is illustrating animals past and present. If I’m honest with myself, in truth that specialty has always been playing with metaphorical and emotional guns and shooting my career in the foot every couple years. In 1999 I was living in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was my 7^th state and at least my 30^th place of residence since I left upstate New York back in 1972. I was living on my own after being a lousy husband to a good woman and wonderful (amazingly still a) friend who really deserved better, when my father called and asked if there was any possibility of my coming “home”. As was always the case, I really didn’t think about what I might be getting into, I just let it happen. An old New York friend gave me the opportunity (and an entire building) to set up a studio where I could work and live and yet be close enough to enable my folks to stay in the only home they’d known for 60 years (my mother, in 82 years, had NEVER lived anywhere but her beloved hillside).

Things worked out fairly well until shortly after 9/11. My father had the first of three strokes and my mother started forgetting things. You know where this is going. As the sibling without a mate who could work at home, I inherited my parents. By the end of 2001, my life and my limping career were in storage and I was back where I swore I’d never be…home…literally. These past five years I’ve been a full-time caregiver and live-in nurse. My father passed away last summer two weeks short of ninety, and my mother, now 88, has descended into the depths of dementia and at last has an excuse for not recognizing who I am. When I started Olduvai on my 59^th birthday last November, I had my old dog Tito to get me out. He was my sanity, but as many of you reading this probably know, he died in early March.

So here I am in my 60^th year. Even though I once had a friend tell me that when he died he wanted MY life to flash in front of him, I wished I had planned things just a bit. Take away the two computers, the Concept II Rowing Machine (on which I spend an hour a day working out my frustrations) and the (truckload of) books, and I have the net worth of a second-rate, third world subsistence farmer AFTER chasing the elephants out of the crops.

If I believed in karma I would suppose that this phase of my life is penitence for the 35 rather self-serving years that preceded it, but it’s been worth it if only because I found out I have infinitely more patience than I ever believed possible. I’m also working on the premise that 60 is the new 40 (well, 45) and if I’m lucky, keep eating well, and stay in shape, I still might have 20 years of decent art in me. Who knows, I’m even learning to control my pathologically obstinate aversion to being told how things have to be done.

O.k., enough purging; Olduvai after all is my attempt to get away from responsibilities and lack of (fill in your own blank) for a few moments each day. Besides, writing this post has taken much too long. For three months* (I’m actually getting better, my first post last November took a year) I debated about how much I should delve into my present situation, and what you’ve just read in part is me finally saying to myself, “Oh shut the expletive up and post a picture!”

Although I’m not quite the attention whore I was years ago, I’m beginning this incarnation of Olduvai as I started it last November, with a self-portrait. Yes, I really am an exact stand-in for the 6-foot human silhouette that always seems to be used to show scale when depicting extinct creatures. I also have the redeeming social quality of being exactly as dumb as I look. No beer this time. Let me introduce my friends. Behind me is the Jefferson’s ground sloth Megalonyx jeffersonii. (Many thanks to Dr. Greg McDonald for providing me with wonderful skull and skeletal reference) To my right (your left) is the short-faced (and very leggy) bear Arctodus simus and the toothy “little” fellow in front is the “giant” (not exactly a) beaver Castoroides ohioensis. I promise I’ll get into each of these late Pleistocene residents of North America in depth in the future, but right now it’s more important to me to put this post up and be back in the blogging community. I’ve missed you guys and I want to thank everyone who took the time to email me over the past spring and summer to ask how I was doing. I was amazed and deeply touched.

*The worst part about taking so long to write this post is that since the accompanying illustration is digital, I kept looking at and changing it. I sent a jpeg of it out to half a dozen people before this posting and each time it was slightly different. Each of the creatures has been changed numerous times. When I started the drawing and it had no deadline, I worked in a very strange way for a guy trying to present anatomical accuracy. I pulled images out of my head (some might say I pull them from elsewhere) and worked with them without reference until I thought I was getting close. Only then did I refer to bone drawings, skeletal and skull photos, and measurements. I’ve been doing this for so long that I was well within the “ballpark”, but the animals I remembered and imagined were not exactly what the bones indicated and the resulting alterations were more like sculpting than painting. PhotoShop and Wacom tablets are such wonderful tools, but they enable my crash and burn and rise again methodology.

I am SO glad this is finally posted. I need deadlines! One would think since I’m so far past the midway point of my “career”, that I’d have learned better discipline…but NO! I have a third-grader’s dream job and still too often approach it like I’m in third grade.