While the Triffid Ranch by necessity remains headquartered in Dallas, Texas, we've been known to make trips and set up events outside the immediate area from time to time. Please feel free to check back for further events, and should you be organizing an event where the Triffid Ranch might fit, also feel free to contact me.
Due to various issues, mostly involving increased fuel and shipping prices, 2008 is going to be a relatively slow event year. However, we're trying our best, and I can usually be found at the monthly meetings of the Dallas Organic Garden Club if all else fails.
The upcoming FenCon 5 in Dallas, running from October 3 through 5, is going to be the last show of the year to date. While FenCon started life as a science fiction convention, it's been mutating into a pop culture expo for several years now, and the Triffid Ranch is one of the many groups and organizations appearing at the show. As of this writing, look for the Triffid Ranch in the dealer's room, but the Czarina and I plan to do a bit of wandering around during the evenings.
I haven't received the official invitation for 2009 as I write this, but the Texas Triffid Ranch had a spectacular launch event at 2008's CAPE pop culture expo in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas. Hosted and run by the intrepid staff at Zeus Comics in Oak Lawn, CAPE is scheduled in conjunction with Free Comic Book Day, but it also features artists in other media, and I was honored to be one of the first non-comics artists to be invited for 2008. If everything goes well and 2009's CAPE runs on schedule, I'm really planning to pull out all of the stops for the 2009 show.
It's actually been rather quiet so far as coverage in other media is concerned, but Andrea Grimes, the only writer at the Dallas Observer in a full two decades whose work caused me to smile instead of gag, was kind enough to write about the Triffid Ranch in December 2007. As I like to point out, while I'm flattered that she described me as "resembling an off-duty superhero", I'm not sure if the superhero in question is Alec Holland or Irwin Schwab.
Previously, while I wasn't quoted in Erin Covert's article in the Dallas Morning News on rainwater harvesting, the first of the Triffid Ranch's rainwater storage tank was featured prominently in Natalie Caudill's photography for the article. Without looking at the captions, just guess which storage tank was which.
When the site went live, Ben McKenzie, famed Australian science enthusiast and comedian, took the time to bring up that it went live right around Australia's Daffodil Day. Considering that I use daffodils and daylilies to gauge spring every year (the daffodils come up right at the end of winter, and the daylilies come up when we're sure that we won't see any further frosts), this was more touching than he knows.
Oh, and Jeff Somers at the zine The Inner Swine had good things to say about the first issue of the Hell's Half-Acre Herald in 2007. Jeff is a good guy, even if he has a thing about going through life without pants, and his long-suffering wife deserves better treatment, so buy lots and lots of copies of his novels and zines.
That's it so far. Should anyone come across other examples of newspaper, magazine, or blog coverage, please let us know.