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Tomato Salsa from Jamie’s Food Revolution cookbook page 273.
Blake says: “I’m a fan although I didn’t get it perfect. The kids, not so much.”

Cherry Tomato Sauce with Pasta from Jamie’s Food Revolution cookbook page 55.
(Recipe here, also.)
Blake says: “Liked by the adults, once again, not so much by the kids. I think I need to do less tomatoes if I want the kids to like things.”

I didn’t try the salsa because A) I was sleeping and B) I don’t like salsa, but the pasta was pretty good. A bit heavy on the balsamic vinegar though, I think next time Blake’s going to use less.

We are putting this Jamie Oliver book to good use. :o)

So, did any of you read my article on LunaPads? Probably not, since it was posted on Buttercup, but I backposted it on my site and it can now be found here.

Anyway, I got them roughly 3 months ago, when I only had a week left of bleeding (I usually bleed for a full month) and I felt a little cheated. BUT I’ve got 7 birth control pills left in this pack (the 2nd pack of 3), which means in 7 days I’m going to start bleeding for a full month and I get to BLEED ALL OVER MY NICE CLEAN LUNAPADS.

For some reason, there is something extremely satisfying about that. I can’t even explain it.

And that’s all I really had to say.

“Womb” is finished and is now for sale in my Etsy shop!
If this painting looks familiar, it’s because I originally painted it in 2003-ish, but didn’t finish it until today.

My friend Jay Holben linked this in Facebook this afternoon and I just got around to watching it now. Pretty interesting stuff. It’s a year old, so you might have seen it and I’m sure the stats have changed, but still interesting I think. Anyway, the text moves faster than I could read, so I suggest pausing when necessary and also possibly viewing the video in a larger size than I’ve embedded here. Here’s the YouTube link to the video.

So, is social media a fad? Even before watching this video I would have said “absolutely not”. The world’s changing and I feel really privileged to be alive at this point in history when the world’s changing changing changing and doing it faster than a lot of people can even keep up. I mean, how many people reading this can even figure out their Facebook’s privacy settings? (Take a look at Time magazine this week, that’s the cover story.)

I dunno, I just like this stuff a lot so I thought I’d share the video. I’m too tired to make a real post about it, so excuse me for not being my normal verbose self tonight…

Edit: Here’s this year’s version of the same video with updated stats, it was released this month.

This is a gladiola.
This is probably not a gladiola,
but I haz many of them.
I tried to kill them by moving them…okay that’s not true, here’s the story:
5 years ago this July, we moved in here.
The summer after that was the first year of the frontyard garden.
I moved these glads, there are probably a good dozen or more plants, from the flower bed under the window to their current location in front of the flower bed in front of the porch, which I realize now is kind of a stupid place for them and I should have left them alone.
So that would have been 4 years ago that I moved them.
And they never bloomed.
Then last year, Blake & I had that tragic miscommunication where he sprayed my whole garden with herbicide, including the glads and I thought for sure they were really dead this time.
But now they’re crazy blooming so I’m thinking they’re okay and glads just don’t like to be moved.
The End.

I’ve been having varnish woes for a while now, which escalated a couple of weeks ago. My issue is that the varnish I LOVE and ALWAYS USE a) turns any kind of pink paper orange and b) once a painting ages about a year, the varnish gets harder, which would be a good thing if I were using it on wood, but I’m using it on canvas and that means that if you took one of my paintings of that age and pressed on the back of the canvas, the varnish would get hairline cracks.

When I found out about the cracking (on my own, on a piece that was in the house – thank god) I was really upset because the varnish I use is awesome and is the only thing I could use to achieve the effect I do. So now all paintings come with care instructions and as Blake pointed out, putting pressure on the back of a $220-$300 painting is idiotic and NOT normal wear & tear so I shouldn’t worry about it. Mostly I agree with that, but still, if I can figure out a way to make that not happen, I’d feel a lot better about it.

So I went out and bought Krylon. Krylon’s been around for roughly a hundred billion years and is a spray varnish. It comes in a bunch of variations but what I got was their Crystal Clear in gloss. I got 10 friggin’ cans of the stuff, which in hindsight was probably unwise. The reason I haven’t been using Krylon this whole time is because it IS a spray and in the winter, I have nowhere I can use a spray. The varnish I normally use, called Triple Thick, is by DecoArt and is a brush-on.

The reason I was considering the switch to Krylon is because of the cracking issue of course, but also because of the orange issue. It actually kinda sucks not being able to give my girls pink dresses, especially when I do so many pink paintings.

I’ve used Krylon before, Crystal Clear even, but not in a long time and not since I began doing the glitter paintings. Rather than test it on a finished painting, I figured it would be a wise decision to do a test first, to make sure it would do what I wanted it to do. You can stop reading right here, if you want, because I’ll tell you right now that it did not.

(more…)

I’ve just been featured in an Etsy treasury for the very first time! Lookit!

I really hate that saying. The one in the title. It bugs the hell out of me. EVERYONE gets bored and EVERYONE is interesting, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never met an uninteresting person in my whole entire life and I can guarantee that the most interesting of all the people I’ve ever met, happen to get bored too, whether they admit it or not.

And I think people don’t admit boredom because of that saying in the title. Because they’re afraid to appear boring. And I think that’s dumb.

So obviously, I’m bored. It’s is roughly 6.2 billion degrees in my little house, so hot that I can’t even have the lights on because the heat from the lightbulbs pushes the heat over the edge of tolerable and I can’t deal with that. It’s also very very humid and the humidity plus low light means that I can’t paint. And that’s really unfortunate because that’s what I want to do.

The low light also makes it very difficult to read, which is my other option. I could watch TV, but it’s 4pm and my best option would be Oprah, which I think is a stupid topic today.

So that leaves writing and napping, and I’ve already done the napping. Twice, in fact. So here I am in my darkened office blabbering on about boredom without a real plan in my head as to what I should say next.

And the weird thing is, I actually really like the heat, I love it when the weather’s like this, what I don’t like is the expectation (from whom? I mean really,  f r o m   w h o m   ?) that I should get up in the morning, have my breakfast, start working and doing my thing, have lunch, work some more, have dinner, watch TV with my husband as that’s my wifely duty, to spend time with him after a long, hard day, maybe have sex, and be asleep before midnight. I HATE THAT. But do I hate that expectation? Or do I hate that I can’t adhere to that expectation because it’s so damn hot that I’m more productive between 9pm and 5am and there’s really no reason in the world, since both of my kids are in school all day, that I can’t sleep the day away?

I ponder this like crazy every single spring and make myself mental over it until about mid-June when I’m finally like, “fuck it” and keep the hours I want to keep. Nay, need to keep. Because like I said, who has the expectation of me that I be diurnal? No one important. No one whose opinion I should really care about. My shrink doesn’t like the idea but she’s not opposed to it either. As long as I get enough sleep, she pretty much leaves me alone on the issue. (Sleep is very important to maintaining good mental health when you’re bipolar or have other mental illnesses.)

Every spring, like clockwork, I hit this phase where my natural body clock resets itself or something  and for about 2 weeks I get really bad insomnia. That’s what’s been happening for the last week & a half or so and like I do every year, I try to fight it because of this pressure I feel to conform to the “9-5″ workday model of sleeping and every year it’s useless because by the end of that 2 week period, I end up right where I am now and much happier for it.

The opposite thing happens in the fall. In the fall I start wanting to be awake during the daylight hours because I have S.A.D. and there’s a 2 week period where my sleep’s all screwed up while my body adjusts to a completely opposite schedule.

….and I feel like I’ve made this post before. Do I make this post every year? I may have to go back and check that.

Anyway, the kids are home now and I’m going to bribe Madison with freezies to get her to water my gardens. She’d probably do it just because I asked her, but I know what it feels like to be “paid” for services rendered, so I went with the freezies thing.

I think what I’m going to do right now is get a piece of cardboard and matte medium little swatches of every pink patterned scrapbook paper I have to it and then spray the whole thing, after it dries, with Krylon to see if the Krylon also turns pink dyes into orange like my normal Triple Thick varnish does.

Yes, I think that’s what I’m going to do.

PS. I am 26 days smoke-free.

The veggie garden has been planted and soaked soaked soaked with water.
Since nothing’s really growing yet, I took pictures of the veggies’ headstones.

And Blake took a picture of me planting beans.

There are two rows of beans because they are “royal burgundy” beans, which are purple when raw but turn green when you cook them. They’re HYPERCOLOUR beans!

There’s a joke about Blake and a hoe here but I’m too tired to be that witty at the moment.

I may attempt homemade pesto…it’s just basil, pine nuts & garlic, right?

Two rows of leaf lettuce, the colour of which is one of my favourites. I’ll take pics when it starts growing.
(Obviously.)

Green onions for stir-fry. :o)

Oregano for spaghetti sauce.

Parsley to make me fart.

Lots & lots of sugar snap peas because Madison and I love them. We have to wait until next paycheque to buy some lattice for them to climb on. Theoretically the peas will be the first thing ready (in July).

Carrots were also planted but the picture of their headstone was blurry because I took it upside down as not to step on any of our rows.

Blake & I planted all the seeds while the kids played with toads and the dogs lounged under a tree. The last time all 4 (well, 6?) of us were in our backyard together was the summer before Wayne & Judy moved in. It felt GOOD being out there. In PEACE.

My arms are soooooo sore from mixing all that dirt yesterday and now I’m all sleepy from being out in the sun.
I need to find a non-greasy sunscreen for my face. Leah sent me one once that I really liked but it expired and I threw it out and now I forget what it was. :o/

When we came in, I had a shower so I’m all squeaky clean.

I just finished making a huuuuuge salad with romaine lettuce, Campari tomatoes, English cucumbers, sweet yellow, orange and red peppers, snow peas, baby carrots and little cubes of mozzarella cheese. I’m having shishkabobs as my main dinner and Blake & the kids are having BBQ’d chicken.

So we’re gonna eat until we feel like exploding, while watching the pre-LOST finale show, watch the finale and then get our sleepy asses into bed under nice clean sheets.

Today has been a good day.
:o)