Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, St. Louis Co, MO The other day I went to check my PO Box and was surprised to find a check from an online art company. I’d submitted one of my photos about two years ago then forgotten about it, and apparently it had sold several times and they mailed me a royalty check. Yay! It’s not a lot of money, of course, but it makes me realize that I should submit more photos and this time not forget about it. ;-)

Of course, it was fun being published, too, as has happened a few times here and there. My Paranoia photo, for example (in 2005). But I’ve since removed all photos I had up on free stock sites.

A funny story: last year a newspaper article included information about some stuff I’d done and submitted online in 2002, and thinking back, I should have said something to them because they ripped off a photo I’d submitted to that site as well (that is blatantly marked as all rights reserved to the author) and published it in the newspaper with the article. Of course, I was so happy to be published in more ways than one, I let it go. But I’ll bet if I pursued it I could have gotten some money, lol. I’m actually really surprised that they did it at all, they should have known better. I was also a bit embarrassed about the image, I guess, since it was done on this crappy camera so long ago and scanned on an even crappier scanner. I’m really not sure why I didn’t use my good SLR for those photos… maybe I forgot it that day, who knows?

Anyway, since my sign-up with the art site was so long ago, getting back in was absolute torture. I tried every email address known as man for password retrieval but they all returned “no such user.” I emailed them… a month went by and I emailed them again. I got back two responses as opposed to the none the first time. One was not helpful whatsoever and I doubt they even read my email at all (and I told them as much) and the other instructed me to call a 1-800 number. The poor guy on the line that I ended up getting had no clue what to do and had to have a chit-chat with his manager. You see, they’d given me the customer number, not an artist one. Finally he came back with a new email address. I emailed them and that guy responded within a couple of days with the email address and password.

But things are going well in this respect, too. Since we joined that debt reduction program in June, we’ve been paying on our debt and not adding to it at all. And a month or so ago, I was able to open up our first savings account ever! And even better? That money has been added to twice, and nothing withdrawn! Yay!