At some point in 2010 I started following this artist on twitter.  Something about his style really interested me and I knew I wanted to own one of his pieces, I just had to figure out which.  After looking through his archives and several months of watching his new posts, I finally found the one for me.

So a couple of quick emails to the artist, a painless Paypal payment and I had my tracking number.  All I had to do was wait.  And wait I did!

The package was shipped in April of 2011 and was successfully delivered around August 15th, 2012.  I say around as at that time in 2011 I was subletting from a friend and the package was delivered to her place. I’m not 100% sure of the date it arrived, but that’s about when she called me to say she had received it.  I just met up with her last week so I didn’t get my hands on it till then (hence the delay in my post).

You can see here the post mark from 2011.  The next two images are just to show that there isn’t anything on the packaging to explain the lengthy delays…

I have a screenshot of the tracking information from usps.com which you can find here.  It’s pretty clear that the folks from USPS got the package into the country without too much hassle, but it seems to have fallen behind a desk for a year after that.

Here’s a rather cute note attached to the back of the painting.  I like to think that it was this little guy who helped the package arrive in the end!

And here’s a quick photo of the piece.  I’m very pleased it arrived in the end, it’s getting framed shortly and will be the first thing I hang in our new home when we move in next year!

It was almost a year and a half ago now when my hosting company upgraded a few things on the backend of my server.  One of their upgrades was to force a new version of WordPress (the blogging software I use here) which broke a lot of the customizations I had made to the old version.  It was largely my own fault as I was making changes to the core of the program and not the templating system that they’d intended users to modify.

The most annoying (and difficult) things that broke was the fact that the site menu structure (the red bar on the right there) had disappeared from the gallery making navigation a pain in that area.  This site uses a combination of the aforementioned WordPress for the framework and Gallery 2 for the photo gallery (and a plug-in called WPG2 to glue the two together).  Using a standard WordPress template will nicely integrate the gallery into WordPress, but not the other way around so I had to do some tinkering to get the WordPress menus to show up correctly while browsing the gallery.

Long story short, the WordPress menu is now available throughout the site and I’m rather pleased about that.  Also, WordPress upgrades should no longer break anything.  I hope.

I haven’t posted many fencing photos in quite a while, but I’m still taking a lot.  They’re now being posted over at my clubs website in the gallery there.

My hosting company “upgraded” me and it seems to have broken quite a few things.  I’ve upgraded wordpress but now need up upgrade the gallery mod so that things work like normal again.

Very annoying either way though.