I got the book, Mandi! Thank you so much!

I was going to work entirely from home today, but I've suddenly got some errands to run. So, I'm headed downtown. I'll likely be there when Julie gets off work ("Can I have a ride, Honey?").

For a couple of my jobs I need to get myself:

1. A nice binder of some sort
2. Some good celtic knotwork clipart (I've already searched the web exhaustively, now its time for books)
3. A shipping box for that framed drawing I did yesterday.

I still have some artwork to draw:

1. 2 HFRs
2. Jessie's tattoo
3. Bethanie's commission
4. Matt's commission
5. CT's commission
6. Chris's logo
7. Something kind of naughty that I have in my head

I hope to work on three of these today. So you'll probably find me down at the Drop at some point with my portable studio, a refill cup o' drip, and four chocolates.

Man, I've really gotta get rolling on that Harmless Free Radicals collectible ceramic coffee carafe selection!

Last night was totally awesome. Chocolate and friends and redbull+ and cloves and backrubs. Candlescent yum.

Kathy is going to call me back (today or monday, I assume), and I biked to campus from my apartment without getting hit by cars (it was only close once)... so yeah! Win!

Currently hanging with Aaron in the SAC, thinking about poking Casey's new Vaio in a bit.

Stayed up until about 3:30 last night, woke up at 9:45 on my own (alarm was for 10, because of neededthings this morning) -sigh- Want naaaap before sleep before work tomorrow!

Breakfast/lunch was a cliff bar and a bottle of mtn. dew. ;p

Julie and I have our radio set to go off in the morning to wake us up, and we have it set to KGMI for that "local" news. They've gone through a lot of changes in the last few months, probably part of the whole industry shake-up going down with news in general. Anyway, they've started to become rather repetitive lately. It used to be that you'd hear relatively new headlines every morning. Granted, they were still the same headlines as what were on the front page of the local daily, but at least they were usually different. As far as I can tell, this week is the first week in which the headlines were the same all week long.


And the two headlines that made it the entire week were:

Businesses are cutting more jobs.

Inflation is coming! Inflation is coming!


Every fucking morning, first thing, the message was, "You are not going to be able to afford your food."

Despite having an awesome night, I kinda feel like hell. I just cried on Matt for half an hour or so, whee.

At least it's not the first time. But the problem with the second (or nth) go-around is that you no longer have hope that it (whatever it is) will end in the near future, or end well.

"I don't like seeing you like this." -hug- Much affection.

I go to hang out with cool people! xD ("Nice to meet you, nice to hang out with you again." "...Wait, isn't that backwards?" "No- (explanation)" "...zomg."

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

The Alaskan Wilderness is a nice guy but he's dangerous too.
They tell stories about times he's gotten mad the same way they talk about bad winters.
“Remember '63? '63 was a bad 'un, no foolin', worse than anything since. These young fellers, they think they know but they don't, not really, what with not bein' around for the one in '63.”
In '63 he broke loose in a bar out Kenai way and didn't come down for three days.
It took everyone in town to bring him down, and half of 'em were laid up sore and broken-hearted for months.
He was real apologetic afterwards, but no one could say it was his fault.

When the Alaskan Wilderness gets mad there's always a reason.
You never have to wonder if he's going to come after you, for example.
You might maybe think that he won't, he's such a nice guy normally, you might think you can push and push and be okay, but you'd be wrong.
He's not much to look at, five foot nothing and kind of homely with a sweetheart of a grin plastered from one cauliflower ear to the other, but when he's loose you might as well try to fight off the spring thaw.

They like to talk about the time he got into a fist fight with a mountain lion.
Mountain lion was coming down the trail while the Alaskan Wilderness wanted to go up, and there wasn't room for both of them to get around.
Mountain lion sizes him up and thinks maybe he'll take a chunk out of the Alaskan Wilderness's leg but the Alaskan Wilderness isn't having any of it.
It went on for hours, fists against powerful back legs, neither one willing to back down, but when the dust settled the Alaskan Wilderness had himself a hundred new scars and a handsome new rug.
The Alaskan Wilderness denies the whole thing, naturally, but on the other hand he won't talk about where exactly that cougar rug came from, either.

Based on the time and energy it took me to do it, this is what I should be shooting for when I agree to do a drawing for $25:



As I get better, the time it will take to do that will go down. I'll let the quality improve from there, too, but that's a good baseline. (BtW: There was no measuring or use of any planning tool other than graphite in that one. Totally freehand from a reference photo of queenfrizzle)

Does anybody want their drawing to look like that?

Of course, I can always work in other media, too. But I need to find the baselines for pencil, charcoal, crayon, and mixed stuff. That should be my assignment for next week.

Tomorrow, I'm going to put $25 worth of coloring into it.

And speaking of coloring, here's my first test with doing watercolor on vellum finish bristol cardstock:



Serviceable. Especially if I trim off the warped edges. I've been giving myself quite a margin with some of my latest work. Makes it easier to frame and sometimes gives me a testing space. I also have better colors available than these. I'm still not happy with the leaves. I may use acrylic for those.

Oh, right, and I've got these nifty, accidentally distressed frames! They're free to anyone who buys a 7" x 5" drawing from me:

Yes, there's a tapdance lesson happening in my room right now.

Oh, and I learned how to ride a tandem bike yesterday.

celtic_tiger, I just did the roughest of preliminary sketches, basically circles, lines and rough outlines of the characters, and I am already in love with this drawing!

I shouldn't say more, I should just get back to work, but it isn't really often I get to draw two people caught in the act of being affectionate!

I should really draw this sort of thing more often.

Did Ayn Rand write anything that wasn't fanfiction?

So, I've been doing crossword puzzles a long while now, starting with my first teaching job in Brooklyn where I'd do the easy puzzle in the Daily News every day on my break.  I built up from there to doing the easy and medium puzzles in Games magazine, and the NY Post's daily puzzle (which was strangely way harder than the Daily News, even though the Post readers tended to be mouth-breathers).  I started hanging out with people who I could work on the Sunday puzzles with, though rarely finished them.  I learned all of the cheap crossword words ("etui", "epee", "omoo") and then, when I moved out here, started doing the NY Times puzzles (though in the Seattle P-I, which is a few weeks behind the actual Times).  As they increase in difficulty through the week, I can now almost always do Monday through Thursday, rarely Friday without computer aid, and never Saturday.  On Sundays, I like to sit at breakfast with K and kick the puzzles ass when we can.  It makes me feel somewhat smart.
Then there was today's puzzle.  I did this puzzle without much difficulty.  However, the way this puzzle is set up made me realize that I'm not as smart as I'd like to believe, through its meta-mechanism.  The puzzle is designed to have ten clues that are factually lies.  They are the wrong answer.  Why des this make me feel less smart?  Because afetr doing the puzzle, I only knew four of the ones that were wrong as wrong.
What this means to me is that I am solving these puzzles, or answering these questions more on sight recognition than on knowledge.  It's not a big deal; they're puzzles, after all, but I would rather know what I was talking about than be able to figure out how words fit on a grid.

i got so angry while waiting for the bus yesterday (i mean, while waiting 20 minutes when i should have only waited four) that i started thinking of everything that's "wrong" in my "life" right now. i sometimes wonder if i'll ever be really "happy". also: i'm working nearly 40 hours a week right now. i don't hate it--i can afford new glasses!(!!!)--but it just...takes some getting used to.
however, in my free time i have been working my way through the seventh harry potter. it is very good and very sad and i'm notgonnalietoya, i'm glad to finally be done with the series.

my day got better after i went to work yesterday. most of my shots were near-perfect and jonathan was very helpful. i still need help sometimes. in general, i mean. i want to start smoking again and learn to ride a bike and wear more dresses. that's what i'm working on right now: i want to be a dress-wearing smoker on a bike. and while i'm at it, i want a Vacation Hat and maybe some more time with LittleGuy, the 7-pound bestdogever.

Something I've come to realize just this year is that if I'm feeling down and unready to work, if I complain it makes it worse. If I don't complain, I have a strong chance of turning that feeling around within a couple of hours.

The result is that it has been something like eight or nine months since I've said the phrase "I don't feel like working today."

I have said variations of it, unwittingly. But that very phrase has been mentally verbotten, and to fairly good effect.

I know my dad has been repeating this advice since I got my first job, but it took me until around about last November or December to make the observation in myself.

It just reinforces an earlier realization I've had. Sometimes, all the advice in the world won't help, you just have to experience something for yourself 100 million times first before you can learn it.

Anyway, this morning is a particularly challenging morning. I intend to overcome it.

Let's see how many drawings I can draw at the same time!

I do not want moderation, do not want the amount that might be a good idea! Some things are too valuable to do by halves.

Old man Murray got thrown by his horse and he landed bad and snap went his neck and that was it for Murray. It put us all into a pickle, and no fooling. The Brewery boys were starting to rear up on their hind legs and the john laws were cracking down due to the elections coming up in the fall and of course there's always the other outfits looking to muscle in on our playground, and all in all it was just a damn inconvenient time for the boss to go and get popped like that. Especially in such a stupid, pointless way. I mean, Murray was a fighter, a square-jawed, cauliflower-eared palooka of a boss, and by all rights shoulda gone out like he lived, guns a-blazing and teeth a-clenched.

Anyway, we scraped it together as best we could and soldiered on. I mean, what else could we do, right? We slapped the Brewery boys back in line, but quiet-like so the bulls wouldn't feel like they had to step in, and if we took a little heat from the muscle-men from back East, well, sometimes that's the way things break. Longneck really put himself in the forefront, right where no one had ever expected to see him, but I guess you never really know what a kid's capable of until he gets a break. It worked out okay. We had kind of a thin season, but by the next year we were back on top.

Oh, the horse? Heh. Well, that's kind of a funny story. One of the first things Longneck did was, he and a coupla other kids, they went down to the stables and they shot the horse, neat and clean and proper, right between the eyes like you'd do to anybody who popped your old man. They even paid the stable for the horse, so it was all nice and legal. I mean, who complains if you wanna shoot your own damn horse, right?

I'm doing the intensive reading and highlighting and note-taking part right now.  It is so interesting!  My paper is about how to teach "culture" in the foreign language classroom.  Synthesizing this in twenty pages is going to be a challenge.  It would be so much easier to just rant and then stick a bibliography at the end.

I don't know how I could work in anything but academia for an extended period of time.  This stuff is just too darn fascinating!  I would probably start assigning myself research projects, just out of sheer boredom and curiosity.  Like when I used to do statistical analyses on my psychic connection with my little brother, and write plays which I would then force the neighbor kids to perform, and invent codes to encrypt my diary.

Anyone see any postings for a professional nerd without any math skills?  'Cause I'm your gal!

Dinosaur Comics did not remind me in time that yesterday was Pi Approximation Day. But, as the inimitable Ryan North writes, "Today is Approximately Pi Approximation Day, however, so today you can just sort of rub pie around your face with a much greater margin of error."

I'm excited, I'm on my way to dinner and a movie with my fellas!