My Dad’s cancer was deemed to be in remission early in 2005, and he was getting able to handle life ‘on his own’, so I moved back home with my family, and tried to get back to some semblance of normalcy. The business didn’t suffer too badly from my 6 month stint of working from South Haven, and I seem to remember a lot more highs than lows in the next several years. Income stayed fairly steady, although not nearly has high as my apex year of 2004. I did a bit more experimenting in styles during this period, while continuing to push the scratchboard as the dominant style.

I had quite a few assignments from Cricket and from Cobblestone this year, and capped it all off with a cover assignment in the second half of the year. I was also getting to be known as the “dead guy” memorial portraitist at New York Newsday, and did several of these over the year.

AG Edwards, which had been keeping me pretty busy over the last several years, eventually closed up shop, and those quarterly assignments went with them. But other clients were amping up their usage of my services, so I didn’t notice the missing work all that much. I would pick up a few new clients who were subsidiaries of the Wall Street Journal, including Barrons and the Far East Economic Review, and I was still working for a lot of my long time clients, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and the CRC, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Wall Street Journal, but the times, they are a changing . . .

It was this year that I also released my first collection of music. I had written a collection of songs with a friend and collaborator and we put it up for sale on CD Baby. It went largely unnoticed, and I grew disenchanted with the project by the following year, but it whet my appetite for making music. However it would be another 5 years before I got back to it again.