We’re supposed to get a crapload of snow in Sunnyland tonight and tomorrow, 10cm each day with whiteout conditions from snowsqualls. To those who don’t live near a giant lake in The Great White North, a snowsquall is kinda like a snowy thunderstorm, minus the thunder & lightning (most of the time…on the odd occasion we get both & it’s pretty cool, lightning in winter is green). Snowsqualls, apparently, are a result of the wind & snow crossing the lake and we’re close enough to Lake Huron (it’s only 10 mins from me) that we get these storms. Often during the winter, our road is closed because of them, although I doubt that’ll be the case tonight (and I also doubt we’re going to get as much snow as they’re saying.)

Anyway, this afternoon the snow looked really cool, it was coming down slowly and softly like a white curtain and I tried to take video of it but I think the framerate on my camera is messed up somehow because when I came back inside and looked the the video, the snow was falling much faster than it had been in person. Regardless, I uploaded it to YouTube anyway and if you care to see it, here it is…it’s only 40 seconds:

This morning I had to get up early to go to the lab and get a blood test done, which had be thrilled beyond belief because needles and veins and blood are just my favouritest things in the whole wide world! Almost as awesome as getting up early in the morning! They chastised me for taking my pills with about 6 mouthfuls of Coke Zero instead of water (some of the pills I take are capsules with powder in them and I find taking them with water really gross because the damn things dissolve REALLY fast and then the capsules feel like they’re stuck in my throat, for some reason this doesn’t happen if I take them with something carbonated) because they claimed it would affect my cholesterol reading. Truthfully, I’m not sure I believe them and they almost wouldn’t do the test but I told them it was my last day to do it, that it was Blake’s last day of vacation and that my doctor’s appointment was on Friday so if I didn’t get it done today I was screwed, so they said they’d do it but to make sure I told my doctor that the cholesterol results might be a little off because I was a VERY BAD GIRL. I’m not really worried about it though.

Remember last year when my GP freaked out about my cholesterol and put me on cholesterol meds? My shrink thought/thinks he was being a bit extreme because apparently my levels weren’t really anything to be worried about, especially since I wasn’t taking the medication that caused the spike anymore and while I’m still taking the cholesterol meds because I figure I might as well, I’m not worried about the 6 mouthfuls of Coke Zero I had this morning skewing my test results one way or the other. I am a little interested to see how my cholesterol looks since I began eating all these eggs though. Oh, did I mention I lost 2 & a half lbs last week? That’s almost 11 lbs total since I started eating eggs for breakfast 10 weeks ago. w00t!

After my blood test, Blake & I went to the post office where there were two packages to pick up. One was an Amazon box for the kids for Xmas from Blake’s mom & Charlie and one was a book called the Artist Trading Card Workshop by Bernie Berlin from Lia! THANK YOU LIA! I flipped through it when I got home, but then I got sidetracked and haven’t had a chance to pick it up again. It looks pretty wicked though, so many different kinds of cards! I plan on spending some time with the book later tonight. Again, thanks Lia, you’re awesome!

And of course, speaking of artist trading cards my first 8 are almost finished. They just need arms and a coat of varnish and then they’ll be done. And I guess when they’re “done” I have to figure out a way to put my name & stuff on the back…honestly, I’ll probably just write it. My printer is slowly but surely dying and there’s no way it would print labels nicely, even if I had any. I could also glue my business card to the backs of them, but I don’t really want 40 “internet people” having my home phone number. I’ll figure it out. Anyway, here’s a group shot I took of the 8 after I took the books off of them that were drying them flat:

Throughout the rest of this post, I’ll show you some of them close up. All images can be clicked to enlarge.

Doing the smaller girls has definitely been a lesson in trial & error. For the 8 that are almost finished, I screwed up just as many because like I said in a previous post, drawing them so small is actually kind of hard. I’m getting the hang of it though, and last night I started a sheet of 15 more, which I’ll work on while these ones’ arms and varnish are drying. Once the 15 I started yesterday are finished, I only have 1 more card with gold sparkles to do and then that stack is finished. The rest either have iridescent or silver sparkles.

While I’ve been doing these, because this is just how my mind works, I’ve been thinking about the ones that I’ll be selling and I’m not sure how I’m going to do that. I know that each card is going to be $30 + $2 shipping, but I don’t know if I’m going to sell them on my site or the site I linked a while back where all they sell is ATCs (or more properly ACEOs) in an Etsy-like setting. That site, from what I’ve been able to tell doesn’t take a cut, so I don’t have the issues with it that I have with Etsy and eBay, but I don’t know how popular it is or if the artists actually sell their cards. Another thing with that site is that you have to scan each individual card and list each one separately, which I guess makes sense, but that’s a lot of extra work and if I can avoid extra work and achieve the same result, I’m more inclined to do that. Selling on my site I have 2 options: scan, post and make a PayPal button for each one or DON’T scan them all, just show examples of each colour and then the card(s) the person gets would be left to my discretion. What do you guys think? I’m thinking that I’ll sell more if I scan each card and post them all with their own PayPal buttons, but I’m torn as to whether I should do that on my own site or on that ACEO site that just sells ACEOs. I suppose I could sell some on my site, like all on one page, and then on that page say that there’s more for sale on the ACEO site and give people the option to buy them there too, if the card they want happens to be there. I really really suck at the business of art, seriously.

Another thing I thought I could do, if I ever sell a freaking painting & actually have some money, is I could matte (mat?) and frame say, 3 cards and sell them as one piece. I have no idea how much framing costs though, so I don’t even know if that would be realistic or if I’d end up ripping myself off in the end because you can only price something like that so high.

Maybe it’s tacky that I think about selling things as I make them, but I’m a really utilitarian person and my grama, aka The Antichrist, is/was an artist’s worst enemy. I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but when I was Wes’ age, I would make things and sell them in my grama’s furniture store and that taught me early that you only get to create things if you’re going to sell them. Even when I was an adult and we were living above her store and I started painting on canvas, I’d show her what I’d created and her response would always be, “Okay so you made it, now what are you going to do with it?” and when I’d tell her I was going to sell it, on the internet, because I knew that was the “right” answer, she’d say “Well who in the hell is going to buy that?” (This was back when I was going through my “fetal phase” and fuck you, grama, I sold every goddamn piece!)

While my mother definitely raised me (at least until I was 15), I spent just about every weekend of my life with my grama and the attitude that you can only create to sell is very deeply ingrained in me. The only thing I’ve painted for myself, in the 8 years I’ve been painting, is the covers of my sketchbooks and even those are extremely hard for me to do because as I’m doing them, I’m thinking that I could be spending that time and those supplies on something that’s going to potentially make money.

And back to the utilitarian thing for a second, I’m not a keeper on “nicknacks”. You will find very very few of these in my home and the ones I do have were given to me as gifts, I would never in a million years buy anything like that for myself because I think they’re a waste of money. They just sit there. Also the only pictures adorning my walls are my failed attempts that I don’t really know what to do with.

It would be lovely to say that I have this fabulous home and studio full of inspirational things, but I really just don’t. It’s the same thing with the way I dress, I mean people expect artists to be these crazy dressers with crazy hair & all that, but I’m pretty plain & boring. Today when I went to the lab, I wore grey trackpants, a brown t-shirt and a grey hoodie. Other times I just would have worn my pajamas because A) I live in sleepwear and B) I just don’t care. If I’m dressing up to go somewhere, whatever I’m wearing is usually pretty simple and usually pretty black. I suppose sometimes my hair, when I dye it crazy colours, is more conducive to the artist stereotype but it’s never really a conscious “oh I’m creative so I must look the part” thing, it’s just “hey I feel like having pink hair this month.”

I was actually reading about this very thing in the book Living the Creative Life a couple of months ago. Most of the artists who were interviewed for that book were like me when it came to dress and a lot of them said that they’d rather put their creative energy into the things they created than into looking the part of the “creative artist”. I couldn’t agree with that more, obviously, and it made me feel a lot better hearing it from other artists. I mean, why the hell wouldn’t I paint in my pajamas? I have nowhere to be, no one to impress and y’know what? I’m gonna get paint on them! And it won’t matter!

So there ya have it, my take on living the creative life.

Something else I’ve been doing this week is taking pictures and video for the background tutorial I keep being asked for. Today was the last step. I’m still not going to post it until after the new year because with Xmas & Buttercup & everything else I have to do these days, the tutorial is fairly low on my priority list. And actually, in writing this down, I’ve realized that I have one more picture to take for it and then all that’s left to do is edit everything together and make it into a post.

What I will tell you about it though, is that the background I made for the tutorial is the same as the black & gold ATCs on this page and the girl that’s going to be going on the painting is going to be a BEE GIRL wearing a tutu. I haven’t drawn her yet and I’m not sure if the tulle I have is tea-stainable, but she’s in my mind and I’m really excited about her. Again though, I’m not going to start working on her until after Xmas when things have died down a bit.

As per usual, all things Xmas have me stressed out beyond belief. I know I’ve explained this before, but every year for the past few years, we’ve gone up north to my dad & step-mom’s Xmas Eve, stay there Xmas Day, have Xmas dinner across the road at my uncle Paul’s house and then have to drive home Xmas night to do it all over again with my mother on Boxing Day. As I also explained in a previous post, last year my dad really disrespected my dogs by not cleaning out the garage and it upset me quite a bit. I didn’t sleep at ALL on Xmas Eve because I was worried about the dogs and felt sorry for them, only having the space of a blanket to lay down or move around on that wasn’t flooded or full of my dad’s van.

This year, to avoid all that, the original plan was to have my neighbours come and let the dogs in & out while we were away but as we get closer to actually having to do it I’m having a hard time dealing with it. Agoraphobia is the fear of the outside world, yes, but part of it, at least for me, is a fear of letting people into my inside world and the idea of people in my house while I’m gone really bothers me. I mean, I trust Wayne & Judy to look after the dogs, but I don’t know if I trust them not to take a tour of my house and inspect how clean my toilet is.

Last week I was really considering staying home with the dogs and not going to my dad’s at all because honestly, that sounds like the perfect Xmas to me – no Xmas at all – but even that stressed me out because like it or not, there are all of these societal pressures put on people during Xmas that you either have to adhere to or people will think you’re a shitty person. If I don’t go up north for Xmas, I’m a shitty daughter and a shitty mother (even though my kids couldn’t care less if I was there or not) and it’s going to look weird when they go over to Paul’s for Xmas dinner and I’m not there. People are going to expect Blake to explain and there really isn’t an explanation that would make anyone happy or us to seem less weird (when they already think of us as pretty fucking weird).

So after a lot of inner debate, the original plan stands, that the entire Crittenden family, those on 2 legs and 4 (well, minus Pixel who gets a nice vacation from all of us for Xmas), are going up north for Xmas and Blake’s going to call my dad personally and tell him (in nicer terms than I’m gonna put it here) that if that goddamn garage isn’t fit for MY dogs, we’re turning around and coming home. Blake also called the vet today to see if you can give dogs Gravol and yes, yes you can (1/4 of a children’s one, apparently), so this year we won’t be pulling over on some back road to clean up Lucky’s vomit with a box of Kleenex because that’s all that’s in the car.

To make matters worse, ALL of our Xmas shopping is being done on Thursday’s paycheque because we haven’t been able to afford it until now. And even then, and I’m sure Blake will love me for posting this publicly, we’re looking at deferring this month’s mortgage payment to even have Xmas this year because we simply don’t have the money to give the kids the kind of Xmas they’ve enjoyed previous years. Also, everyone who isn’t under the age of 12 this year is getting gift certificates because I just don’t know what the hell to buy anyone. When I’ve asked, I’ve been told gift certificates, so that’s what everyone’s getting. Our kids are getting clothes because they need them and we can’t afford to do “fun stuff” and clothes, so that’s just the way it’s going to have to be. My sister Raili  (aged 4) is getting Barbies and my sister Rachael (aged 10 months) is getting Little People because that’s what was asked for.

Also, I don’t even know for sure what the hell is going on with my mother this year and I’ve been too afraid to ask. The “tradition” has been that she comes here Boxing Day and we do presents and have dinner, but with her moving in with John, first of all, I don’t know if he and his son will be coming (which means extra gifts/extra food) and second of all, now that my mother has an actual HOME, she may want to start doing Boxing Day there like we’ve done for most of my life. The thing is though, with going up north and all the bullshit associated with it, we don’t want to have to do more traveling on Boxing Day and if she comes here, I hope she’s fine with pizza or Chinese food because I’m NOT leaving halfway through Xmas dinner at Paul’s house to make it back home in time for me to get enough sleep to cook Xmas dinner the next day for my mother.

Have I mentioned how much I fucking hate Xmas? Seriously, it kills me. I wish it was never invented. I wish I could sleep through the whole thing. I wish I could stay home, with my dogs, watching bad movies and pretending it wasn’t happening.

On a more positive note, did anyone see the Leafs game last night? Was that fucking beautiful or what? My throat is still sore from cringing/yelling at the TV.

And with that, I’m out and you’re probably thinking “thank god” because this post is 3,100 words long.

PS. My review of the new Sims expansion is up on Buttercup for those who were waiting for it.

PPS. I stand corrected about the snow. I just went outside and we got at least 15cm in the time it took me to write this post.