The Sole Proprietor has a history of starting projects at four thousand miles per hour, pursuing them for a year or so and then stopping. Photography for example. Bowling was another (he earned a varsity letter in his freshman and sophomore years at the University of Washington, stopped bowling and didn't bowl another game for 20 years). Model railroading was one. Writing. Four years writing a book. His work history is a bit spotty. Music. Reading. Skip women altogether.

The Sole Proprietor thinks about this lack of perseverence every now and then. He has known and worked with a number of people who have focused on a particular pursuit for their entire lives. Art and business both. Discipline and focus were there from the start. And maybe the Sole Proprietor envies that a little bit.

So the fact that The Solano Stroll marks the Sole Proprietor's first year shooting pictures has some meaning. One year of packing a camera. Does this mean the end of all this passion (and poor pictures) is on the horizon? It has in the past. All start and no finish.

We'll see. Notice there is more than photography, more, in fact, than the just "doing" of things in this, um, project. Pursuit. Whatever. Photographs, both photojournalism and studio work, learning how to translate them into pictures and images for the Web through digital manipulation in Photoshop and the other computer tools. Building a model railroad, writing all this deathless prose, getting back into the kitchen again, playing with these computers he makes his living with, all these pursuits from the past come together in this one project.

A project that solves his crapping out after a few years problem. Now the pursuit isn't just photography. Or writing. Or computers. (Skip the bowling.) Now the project is everything. All of it on the Web. Do less photography? Do more cooking. Writing less? Design and build some more choo choo trains. Don't want to futz with the computers? Take up reading again. Music. Alcohol. As long as it goes on the Web, its part of the project. No crapping out. Like life, its for the duration.

And maybe, if he gets a lot more ambitious and less shy, he'll try some other things. This video stuff is nice. Video cameras sending pictures real time to the world. There are more than a few Web mavens out there nibbling at the edges of something that may evolve into who knows? Some of it may become actual Art with a capital "A". The idea is intriguing. Maybe he'll join the club, point a digital camera at something meaningful like a brick wall or the entrance to Mary Staplenavel's House of Narcistic Delights and thereby find his own 15 minutes of actual fame.