Yesterday was a pretty good day. :o) I woke up to sunshine streaming through the front windows of the house, I was warm, I was alone (for the time being) because Blake was at work and the kids were at school and I just knew it was going to be a good day.

Around 9am, Cheryl, one of my nurses, was scheduled to come do my dressing, which the night before I was really pissy about because I didn’t want to get up early but I was glad for it when I saw the sunrise. God I love sunrise.

As I was looking out the window at bliss, the phone rang and it was my mom. She said that I should check my e-mail very carefully because she got her Squam registration e-mail. I checked and checked and checked but I didn’t get one yet. My mom said hers said that I was her roommate and that we were staying in the Longhouse, which I know is a 13+ person cabin. Let the games begin! I cannot even imagine the fights to use the bathrooms haha I will most definitely be bringing my Lush “No Drought” dry shampoo! Since my mom’s e-mail said I was her roommate, I’m assuming my e-mail will be coming shortly. So excited!

After I got off the phone with my mom, Cheryl came and that was pretty uneventful. Cheryl is a smoker and she tries to cover up the smell of the cigarettes with perfume, which just makes it worse. When she leans over me to change my dressing, it smells and I can’t stand it. Also, she comes early and I hate that, whereas Janice and Siske come in the afternoon (and they don’t smoke). BUT since I had such a great day yesterday, I’m thinking getting up early isn’t a totally horrible thing to do on “office days” (days where I stay in my office the whole day making art, as opposed to the living room/computer).

After Cheryl left, I made waffles with the REAL maple syrup my mom got me for Christmas, which is one of my favourite things in the world (if you’ve never had real maple syrup, I truly feel sorry for you because it is one of the Earth’s most wonderful treasures) and I brought them into my office and started flipping around to see what was on TV. I watched Wife Swap, the UK version, which was nice and trashy but as always, one of the moms had a revelation that her life sucked and they all became friends and it was heartwarming.

After that, I took my plate into the kitchen, filled up my drink and came back to my office to make some ~*SERIOUS ART*~ (not really) while I watched…something. I honestly don’t remember what. Something that was an hour long and was probably a talk show. Whatever it was, I worked on Argent’s painting as I watched (or more to the point, listened). Argent’s painting is turning out to be a royal pain in my ass and I can’t wait until it’s finished and out of my house! EVERYTHING I’ve tried to do with it has failed miserably and I’ve had to make corrections like crazy. It’s making me mental! But it’s almost finished and I think he’ll be happy with it and that’s all that matters.

Once Argent’s painting was in a state of “no touchies”, I started working on my girl who will be on my last page of the Sketchbook Project sketchbook.

I think I watched Ellen while I was doing this and Colin Firth and the little dog from the movie The Artist were on it. Colin was very animated and talking about Gary Oldman being “hung like a water buffalo” and the little dog was very charming. Truthfully though, I can’t see myself seeing either of their movies. Just not interested.

After that, was The View. I like this show a lot, I’ve always been a Whoopi fan, but I don’t normally watch it because when I was working, I didn’t watch TV at the same time, and after I got sick and now that I’m home all day with my thumb up my ass, I spend most of my time in front of the computer which is something I’m hoping to change and yesterday was the first step.

(Paper peony)

On The View, the women did their hot topics but they weren’t all that interesting or I’d be able to tell you what they talked about. I know there was a story where Sheri was on a plane and Courtney Love was there with a short skirt and no underbums and she caused quite a ruckus. Their guest was an old guy from that Tom Hanks/911 movie I have no interest in. I just listened and worked on my girl.

Then it was Dr. Phil and boy, what a show. o_O They had on there a guy who was into infantilism. He liked to act like an 18 month old, sleep in a crib, play with baby toys, act like a baby, eat in a high chair and wear diapers. He had a regular job at a “big box store” working nights, but when he got home in the morning, he’d put on his onesie, hop in the high chair and his poor girlfriend would feed him and change his shitty diaper. I felt so bad for her. She was doing everything for him and he never did anything for her, like nothing, and Dr. Phil was like, “are you having a relationship with an 18 month old or a 24 year old?” and the answer was an 18 month old. And she said she wanted to marry this guy and have kids with him one day, but only if he could “tone things down”, which Dr. Phil said would not happen no matter what the guy said. And it wasn’t even a sexual thing, the guy didn’t get OFF on being a baby, that’s just how he felt naturally. Which I think is weird, but fine, it’s not hurting anyone EXCEPT your significant other who you’re lying to about it and basically using. He needs to find someone whose thing in life is wanting to take care of an adult baby and that girl needs to run away as fast as she can in the opposite direction because he will never change and things will only get worse as he takes it farther and farther.

Normally I don’t watch Dr. Phil because I think it’s pretty trashy and only a few degrees away from being Jerry Springer, but if there’s nothing else on or if the topic is interesting, I’ll watch. Yesterday’s was interesting.

By then it was 4pm and the kids came burting through the door just as a Roseanne rerun came on. They asked me what the show was about and I said it was about a family a lot like ours. They decided to watch it with me and they wanted to know who in the show was like who of us in real life. I said that I was Roseanne, Blake was Dan (obviously), Becky was Madison and Wes was DJ. I also told them that it was probably the best sitcom to ever grace the airwaves. Wes was really into it (it was the episode where it was Dan and Roseanne’s 20th wedding anniversary and he took a part-time job to pay for her present) and Madison not so much. Right after the first episode there was another episode so we watched that one too and in that one, Darlene and David break up because Molly kissed David and Madison got more into it because David is on Big Bang Theory and apparently so is Darlene. This, along with Mayim Bialik, makes me think I should give that show a second chance because when I first watched it, I just wasn’t into it but everyone I know loves it and the various clips I’ve seen online of it, I really liked.

Anyway…after Roseanne, it was Golden Girls, which I knew the kids wouldn’t be so much into (although I was into Golden Girls when I was their age) but they watched it with me anyway. The two episodes we watched weren’t very good ones (one where they were remodeling the garage and Rose is dating Mr. Terrific and the other was where Rose’s boyfriend retires and wants to sail around the world) but I explained to Madison, who’s very interested in gay issues and equality, that the Golden Girls was an extremely progressive show for its time because Blanche’s son was gay and they had some episodes dealing with that, but also the show itself was about women at a time in their lives that you just didn’t – and still don’t, really – see on TV. This made her more interested in the show, but only snippets found on YouTube, not the actual episodes. I’d still really like to get the whole series on DVD or Blu-Ray. It was probably my 2nd favourite sitcom of all time.

By the time the Golden Girls was over, I’d finished my girl and stuck her in the sketchbook and today I’ll give her arms, sew the trim on her dress and give her a quote. Then all I have to do on the sketchbook is a girl for the cover and then I’m finished! YAY!

The only difference between this pic and the one above is that I inked her hair and legs/feet.
She’s just so damn pretty, I wanted to post her twice!

After Golden Girls, Wes went into the living room to watch Pokemon, which he’s obsessed with (by the way, his birthday is in 3 weeks if anyone was planning on getting him anything – e-mail me if you need our address), and I flipped around channels to see what I could find. Blake and Madison were going to the high school for like, a parent/teacher transition night type of thing  so I took that opportunity to watch something Blake would never in a million years watch with me: Toddlers & Tiaras.

I can’t help it. I love this show. I never know when it’s on, so I don’t watch it all the time or anything but every episode I’ve seen I’ve really liked. I think that show falls into 3 categories: ones where the kids are total brats to their parents on camera and therefore the episode is funny because it makes their parents look like losers, ones where the kids are really into the whole pageant and they’re just cute as hell and ones where their parents look like monsters and you feel sorry for the kids. Yesterday I saw 2 of the above.

The first one I watched was where the theme for the pageant was Groovy Girls. Or maybe that was the pageant’s name, I’m not sure. Either way, there were 3 categories in the pageant: beauty, costume of choice and one other one I forget the name of and the pageant was “full glitz”, which means that the girls had acrylic nails, spray tans and “flippers” which are like fake teeth. In this episode, all of the girls were actually really into the pageants and they were old enough to choose that this is what they wanted to do. The mothers weren’t overbearing at all, they were just supportive and this was just what they chose to do with their daughter, like any other family would do hockey or soccer. I *DO NOT* like the spray tanning and acrylic nails and fake teeth, I think that’s dumb, but it’s part of the competition, just like shin guards and helmets and sticks and shoes, so as long as the kid’s okay with it, and all these ones were, I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t have a problem with the makeup either, a lot of little girls like to play with and wear makeup. And as long as the kids are GOOD winners and losers, I don’t have a problem with it. In this show, two of the girls who apparently compete a lot and win and lose to each other all the time, are actually friends. I liked that.

Anyway, seeing the girls in their little bell bottoms and vests and sunglasses and go go boots and stuff like that was sooooooo cute. I especially liked seeing like, the 18 month – 2 year olds all dressed up in their little costumes, they were just adorable. And really,  thinking these kids were cute in their costumes is no different than Halloween. The whole show was just cute little girls being cute little girls and I enjoyed the show immensely, enough to watch a new episode that aired at 10pm.

The one I watched at 10pm was vastly different than the one I watched earlier. The one at 10 had horrible parents pushong their kids to do this when they really didn’t want to do it. The one little girl was SICK and feeling like crap but her mom made her compete anyway because the grand prize was $10,000. This mom made the poor little girl not wear her glasses when she was on stage and then belittled her when the little girl didn’t do her routine – which she’d only learned 2 DAYS prior – because the girl couldn’t see the judges or her mother in the audience telling her what to do. Then another mother, who was a hardcore Russian immigrant, was just a monster. He would withhold her daughter’s favourite stuffed bear, “Micha”, and only give it to her when she had to do pageants because apparently when the little girl held and played with Micha, her thumb would go in her mouth and this is how they stopped it. The little girl, Mia, would only get to play with Micha at pageants and seeing the reaction of the girl, who was only 4, when she got to see Micha, it was just heartbreaking. I almost cried. She was just so happy to see her friend again. Then in one of the cutaways, Mia said to the camera, “I want to do good at the pageant because that’s how I know my mommy loves me” or something like that and I *DID* cry, it was just so horrible. And worse? When Mia was on stage doing her beauty routine, she wasn’t listening to the emcee who was kinda like telling her to get off the stage but nicely and Mia’s mom flipped out and started screaming in their hotel room that the emcee hated Mia and that they had to “forget about it” (winning) and that they should just go home. In the end, Mia won a high title and $500 and the FIRST THING she wanted to do when she won was to show her mother and her mother PUSHED HER AWAY. OMG my poor heart. :o( That woman was just a horrible person and she was so blessed to have such an adorable, loving little girl and she didn’t even appreciate her in the slightest. If I can find a clip, I will show you this awful woman so you can wretch with me.

In between episodes of Toddlers & Tiaras, I actually watched a show called “I Cloned My Pet” which was the most pathetic hour of television I have ever watched in my whole entire life. These people were all fucked in the head. There was literally nothing else on except a rerun of the same Wife Swap I’d watched in the morning and that’s the only reason I watched this extremely stupid show.  EXTREMELY stupid.

After that my choices were a show about hoarding or American Idol and because hoarding shows just piss me off because the world just does not need that much excess, I chose American Idol because as much as that show bugs me, I have to admit, the auditions at the beginning of each season are always entertaining.

As I watched American Idol, I started working on an art journal page that uses vellum as bubbles which is a technique I’ve used before and I’ve always really liked, but the only vellum I had on hand was green, yellow, orange and red so my bubbles actually look a lot more like polkadots (hmmm, polkadots are also apparently two words OR one word and they have their own Wikipedia entry). It’s not finished yet and it was night by the time I started working on it which meant that the light in my office was garbage so I figured I’d work on it again today and take pictures of it tomorrow when it was finished. I have absolutely no idea what to write on the page, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnd that was my (mostly) internet-free day yesterday in support of the SOPA protest! I will say one thing though: I didn’t tweet yesterday because Twitter was supposed to be part of the black out but I had TweetDeck up just out of habit and I was really disappointed by some people who I *know* knew about the blackout and who tweeted inane bullshit anyway. Some people retweeted SOPA-related things instead of posting which was better than what other people were posting, I guess, but posting at all is the opposite of the concept of a “blackout”. I really, truly thought my Twitter feed would have been completely dark yesterday but it wasn’t and it’s making me evaluate who’s on my feed and why. There are some folks I have on there who I’ve kept just to be nice, but they’re not nice to me back or they don’t interact with me so I wonder why I bother. Soooooooo, I think over the next few days, there are definitely going to be some cuts. Hopefully people won’t make a big issue about it.

Okay, going to go to my office now…WAIT, one more thing! Apparently my posts aren’t always showing up on peoples’ LJ friends lists for some reason and I don’t know if it’s my x-poster or if it’s Live Journal but I’ll x-post an entry and it’ll go through fine, but when I go to edit a post via WordPress and click “update” it’ll tell me that my password for LJ is wrong (it’s not!) and it’ll only update the version on my site. So I dunno what’s up with that. Also when I go to a Live Journal entry and manually edit a post’s userpic and mood, which I do with everything I post, I’ll come back a few hours later and the post will be back to my default userpic. The mood will still be set to what I changed it to, but the userpic will be default. So I dunno WHAT the hell is going on but if you guys on LJ don’t hear from me for a few  days, either check my actual LJ or my site. I *think* the error is with LJ because they were having a lot of problems over the weekend so I’m just waiting for them to fix their shit before I investigate further.

NOW I’m going to my office! Happy Thursday!

~*Please donate!*~

So, I’m awake. I woke up around 3am and decided it was a great time to start making turkey soup in my brand new crock pot! The crock pot cookbook I got with it had a recipe for turkey soup and I more or less followed it, except I think I filled the crock pot a little too high. The instructions for the crock pot said to fill it 3/4 of the way full and I think I’m more like ALL the way full.

Sooooo I guess we’ll see what happens!

I started making the soup at 3:38am, see?

I started with a sweet potato first because the cookbook said to put your root vegetables at the bottom so they cook better. Honestly, I think sweet potatoes are actually pretty gross, but they’re good for you so that’s why I decided to throw it in.

Cutting sweet potatoes is a fucking pain in the ass which is why I only used one. We have really crappy knives and they just don’t mesh well with sweet potatoes. I actually had to use TWO knives to get the sweet potato peeled and chopped!

Next I cut up potatoes. Pretty uneventful. I used red potatoes because I think they look nicer, but really it doesn’t matter what kind of potatoes you use I don’t think, I just like to have really colourful food when I can help it. I don’t peel potatoes because I’m convinced that most of their nutritional content is found in the skins, so I just chopped them up. I didn’t end up using all 4 though, just 3, but really, I probably should have only used 2.

I almost forgot to add onions! I was getting the carrots out of the fridge and saw the onions at the bottom of the crisper drawer, so I got them out and started chopping. Truth be told, I’d rather have had red onions, but we always just get normal, everyday, ho-hum, run-of-the-mill cooking onions because they’re only like, $1 a bag when they go on sale.

I looooooove carrots. Blake and Madison have a thing against cooked carrots, which I totally do not understand, but Wes and I like them a lot and they’re cheap so I always put them in soups and stews. Again, when they go on sale, they’re only about $1.50 a bag and I’ll also use them grated up for Hospital Salad.  Carrots weren’t on sale this week, I don’t think, but I didn’t check the flyer so who knows…aren’t they beautiful though? Look at those rings! Nature wasn’t fucking around when it made the carrot.

Now for the gross part, or at least I think so. I hate the smell of left over turkey so when I opened the container we had it in and it hit me like a wall, I literally almost threw up and had to leave the room. Something strange about the whole pancreatitis/being in the hospital for a few months thing is that ever since I got sick, my sense of smell has been like, a super power. I can be in the living room and smell Blake cutting CUCUMBERS, which of course have  barely any scent, in the kitchen.

Anyway, the smell of the turkey was gross so I had to wait until the air cleared a bit before dealing with it.

Once the air was clear, I just grabbed pieces and cut them up and threw them in the crock pot. One thing I love about turkey soup/stew is how stringy the meat gets when it’s really tender and that’s how the meat was this time. It’s going to be phenomenal when the soup is finished cooking!

We had a LOT of leftover meat.

And finally, spices…the recipe was like, thyme and fresh parsley. Well, I don’t have fresh parsley but I did have thyme so I put in about a teaspoon of that, along with a teaspoon of sage and a teaspoon of garlic powder. Then I threw in some cayenne pepper for good measure. Oh yeah and I threw in a can of diced tomatoes (with the liquid), as well as the gravy that Blake made because why the hell not?

I stirred it around a little bit just to make sure I could with it being that full and I could so we’re all good. I set the cook time for 10 hours and I got finished around 4:30am so it’ll be ready at 2:30pm tomorrow afternoon, just in time for my afternoon meds. I’m verrrrrry excited! It’s like, this is my magic cauldron and I’m brewing up some super nutritional food for my hungry family. Look ma, I’m cooking!

When I was in grade 4, I had this really amazing teacher named Mrs. Lewis. One day she came in and had us all sit at the front of the portable on a rug she’d brought in from home, with throw pillows all around and she told us the story of Stone Soup. She told us the story very slowly and in the beginning, when she got to the part about the stone, she produced a medium-sized stone and she placed it in the crock pot. Then she filled the crock pot with water and as she told us the rest of the story, she would add ingredients to it, like potatoes and carrots and onions and a can of corn and eventually, when she got to the part about the meat, she started browning ground beef in an electric frying pan and she added that too. Then some salt and pepper and maybe some other stuff too. Near the end of the day, we were all given a bowl of soup with some crusty bread and butter and it was probably the most delicious soup I’ve ever tasted and it’s one of my favourite childhood memories. I’d really like to make Stone Soup with Wes.

This same teacher taught us about Medieval times and we had a Medieval feast at the end of the unit. We put all of our desks around the edges of the room in a circle and we put garbage bags down on the floor. We drank mulled cider (from her magic crock pot!) and ate Kentucky Fried Chicken, throwing the bones on the floor in the middle of the room. Some people were serfs and we had a king and queen and prince and the whole royalty deal (we drew names from a hat) and a couple of people were dogs and we all dressed up to the best of our ability. It was awesome. (Oh and I was a serf, for the record.)

This same teacher also sent me to Literary Guild, which is this neat workshop thing where every teacher in the area chooses one student to go to it and you go there (a school hosts it) and you share your story and discuss it with others and you eat food and then there’s a guest speaker. The first time I went (I went in grade 4 and again in grade 6), the guest speaker was ROBERT MUNSCH! The world’s greatest children’s author!

Anyway, Mrs. Lewis was fantastic and I hope she’s doing well.

Now I think, since it’s 5:30am, that I’m going to go back to bed. I’m a little uneasy about going to bed with an appliance plugged in and turned on, but that’s what they’re meant for so I guess I should just “trust and allow”.

Goodnight!

I love Salt-N-Pepa.
So here are some videos.
(In chronological order, according to Wikipedia.)

My Mic Sound/s Nice:

Awww. Embedding disabled for Shake Your Thang. Watch it anyway.

Push It:

Twist and Shout:

Let’s Talk About Sex (omg Vevo blanked out the “wet” in “wet dream”, wtf?):

Shoop (this is probably my favourite S-N-P video):

Whatta Man w/En Vogue:

None Of Your Business (awww they blanked out “assholes”):

So totally a different era, but I found this by accident and it’s great so I thought I’d tack it onto the end of this post. I love the Fat Boys because they rapped about food. Not guns or violence or sexy hoes, they rapped about FOOD (and Freddy Krueger!).

The Fat Boys Are Back:

Also this:

AHHHHHHHHH LOVE LOVE LOVE!

Who remembers this show?

“I love you in the morning and in the afternoon! I love you in the evening underneath the moon!”

I was going to post a picture of my boobs but it occurred to me that some of you may be reading from work so I decided not to. I’ll post them on my site some other time. If that sentence confused you, it’s because I’m x-posting this to Live Journal where the action really takes place as far as comments and discussion. I’m also x-posting this to Camwhores, where there are all kinds of boobies, including the pic I decided not to post.

Now that that’s been said…

It was a pretty ho hum weekend.

On Saturday, Blake and I planted and hung our cucumbers. The system is really weird, you don’t water the dirt directly, there’s a reservoir at the top with these moisture-sucking strips that go down and rest on the dirt and over time the moisture-sucking strips water the dirt. And then on the side of each bag, there’s a slot for a moisture stick which tells you if the dirt is wet enough. Despite the fact that the dirt is wet enough on all the bags, two of the three aren’t doing so well, as you can see:

I think it has less to do with the moisture of the dirt and more to do with the fact that when I was pulling the vines through the hole at the bottom, blindly, I snapped them. I don’t know if the plant will compensate for that or not but next year we’re planting these things a LOT earlier than we did this year so the plants are still small and easier to stick through the hole. I wanted so long this time partially because I’m lazy and kept forgetting but also because I wanted the roots to be nice and thick so they wouldn’t fall apart when I tried to put the plants through the hole. I don’t think that’s a good strategy though so next year we’ll do it differently.

Also this weekend, I did my fingernails TWICE. On Friday I actually got up like, 3 hours before my alarm so I started work 2 hours early which meant I got done at 4pm instead of 6pm.  As soon as work was finished, I put in Burlesque (shut up) and started working on my nails. I spent HOURS on them. Then I decided to get drunk and play cards with Blake and when I was trying to pick cards up, my nail polish kinda shifted. It didn’t chip because it was still a little mushy, it just kinda slid. That made me very upset because I’d spent so much time on them so Blake helped me remove all the polish and I tried again on Saturday, however by Sunday evening, the polish had chipped already so I decided “fuck this” and I’m just not messing around with fingernail polish anymore or ever again. We just don’t get along, never have, never will. I’ll still do my toes, I don’t seem to have a problem there, but never my fingers again unless there’s MAYBE some special occasion or something.

Sunday was D&D day. Ronny, Alex & Raymond came over and we played while dining on veggies & dip as our snack and pizza for our dinner. It took us like, 4 hours or something to finish one encounter because we’re all n00bs and we still have no idea what we’re doing. Blake’s doing well being our DM, it’s the rest of us who suck because we don’t know our spells and abilities or when to do what etc. We’re still having a good time with it though and believe it or not we ARE getting faster and better the more we play so continue we shall. I also healed for the first time last night, which was interesting. Sucked that I could only do it twice because I’m only level 1, but still, it was something I never had to do before. Right now we all have 435 XP so I figure within maybe 3 more sessions we should be level 2.

After D&D, Raymond went home because he hadn’t slept in over 24 hours, Ronny and Alex played video games with Wes, I removed nail polish and I don’t know what Blake and Madison did (Blake helped me get the polish off my right hand at one point), then we watched the season finale of Game of Thrones. I’ll avoid talking about that in case people haven’t seen it yet but I’d avoid the comments on Live Journal if you haven’t seen it yet because I have a feeling it’ll be discussed. I really want to read the books now, which I think about a million people are also thinking.

My Lush order should be here any day now. They ship UPS so the mail strike we currently have shouldn’t affect the delivery but it WILL affect the delivery of the nail stamps I bought and that Eryn wants me to use on her next weekend for graduation the week after. This is what I ordered from Lush. 10 of them because they’re limited edition. I think I’m doing better with money considering that’s all I bought and I also put almost my whole paycheque on my Visa a few days ago. If I do that one more time, the Visa should be almost paid off just in time for my vacation. Ha!

I’m still having a really hard time with this holiday business. I mean, the fact that it’s costing us a LOT of money, half my paycheque, for me to have this holiday time really bothers me. I don’t have ill will toward my bosses or anything, it’s just that in my family you don’t take holidays. If you can make money, you do it. You don’t do things to lose money. I don’t think my mother, my grandmother or my grandfather have ever had a vacation in their lives because it would have been unpaid time off, which is what I’m doing the first week of July. I’m trying not to think about it but yesterday Alex asked me if I was looking forward to my holidays and I just started crying because no, no I’m not. I’m afraid that while I’m on holiday all I’ll be able to think about is money. But, it’s either take this vacation time or burn out and I can’t afford to burn out so holidays it is.

I plan on doing a lot of painting on my holidays. Painting and the beach. (Send vibes of a heat wave up here, please!) And I have to see my shrink to discuss the fact that I’m basically not okay right now, not at all. Possibly adjust my meds. Ask about “weight loss agents”, which were briefly discussed at metabolic clinic. I also plan to use the treadmill a lot when I’m on holidays and read. I give up on my shoes, they just keep giving me a really painful blister on my heel, so I’m going to use it in bare feet. Some studies say that’s better for you and some studies say it’s bad for you, so I’ve decided I don’t care and that’s just how I’m going to do it. I would lose weight if I could eat eggs for breakfast every day but I just don’t have the time to cook them with this job, let alone eat them, and even when I make diet kwish (diet cheese, broccoli and or onions, ham – you need the cheese or the egg dries out) and don’t have lunch I still don’t lose weight. They have to be 3 eggs over easy with 2 pieces of toast for it to work its magic and I just don’t have time for that. And you may think that’s ridiculous that it has to be that precise, but that’s what worked and variations do not work for whatever reason so it is what it is.

Admittedly my diet has been a little stupid for the last few weeks because I’m on the “Fuck It Diet”, which was invented by Margaret Cho. I see it. I eat it. Fuck it. But even when I was doing metabolic clinic and my diet was perfect and I was keeping a food journal and everything, I only lost 2-5 lbs that I gained the next week, that I’d lose the week after etc etc etc. In other words, I didn’t lose anything. I did the treadmill daily, 30-40 minutes, for 3 weeks and didn’t lose one single pound.  Didn’t gain any either. I was rollerskating, albeit not as long, but still, nothing. I do yoga once a week. I’m not inactive. Something just isn’t right with my body so I’m going to ask my shrink for “weight loss agents”, which I don’t even know what they are but I’m assuming maybe thyroid medication or something. I think my thyroid’s fine though, so I dunno. All I know is that my metabolism is still fucked from the risperidone and I want answers.

This week Charlie suggested I buy a bikini for my holidays and I just cried. 3 years ago I was wearing bikinis. Now I’m Shamu. I’m 45 lbs heavier than I should be and that’s a problem.

Anyway, enough of that, it upsets me.

My yellow begonia is basically dead and I don’t know why. The plant itself is alive and seemingly healthy but it doesn’t have any flowers. The orange one had about half the flowers it did when I bought it and again, I don’t know why. The yellow one was in partial shade, which the little stick they came with said is fine, while the orange one was in full sun so now I’ve hung the yellow one in full sun and put the orange one in the railing beneath it rather than hanging either of them on the hook on the other side of the house. You can’t really see what’s hung there anyway so whatever, I just wish I knew what was wrong with them. I’ve been dead-heading the dead flowers like you’re supposed to so I dunno.

My ears have taken to the earrings fully and completely and the holes aren’t weeping at all anymore. So yay! I’m even contemplating getting them pierced again. And then maybe again. And again. Do you think it would be better to do that one at a time or should I get all the holes I want pierced at once. I figure one at a time is probably better because if it gets infected I can treat it and it’ll probably be fine but if I do them all at once, if one gets infected, the rest probably will too and that would be a hard infection to get rid of. So one at a time is probably best, right? I don’t even know where you get ears pierced anymore. When I had mine done originally when I was like, 6, it was done at a jewelry store. In fact, the first one hurt so bad that I wouldn’t let them do the second one until some time later when the kids at school made fun of me for only having one earring. And then they both got infected too often so I took them out and left them out. That’s why I was so surprised the holes hadn’t grown over and I could get these new earrings in smooth as silk, I didn’t have to push through grown over skin or anything, they just slid right in .

I’m babbling, this is probably a really boring post. To be perfectly honest, I just have a lot in my head right now and it needs to come OUT.

We didn’t go up North for Father’s Day this year because we weren’t invited, which I found…interesting. I was glad because I didn’t want to go up there but at the same time, I can’t help but wonder why we weren’t invited in the first place. I don’t think I’ve done anything to offend anyone or anything like that so I dunno. Last year my mom got pissed at me for going up there so I’m kinda glad I didn’t have to deal with her in regards to this this year. Why did she get  pissed off? I dunno, she gets pissed off at me for no reason all the time, especially when it comes to Mother’s and Father’s Days. No matter what I do, she’s gonna get pissed off at me both of those days so I’ve stopped wondering why. My absentee prick of a brother can get away with sending an e-mail and be the next coming of Christ but I’m expected (I think) to jump through hoops for love and approval. I don’t get it and I no longer care. Both of my parents from now on are just gonna have to be happy with me writing on their Facebook walls because Mother’s and Father’s Days are now about Blake and I and no one else. I’m not going to sit there feeling like shit on a day that’s supposed to be about ME because I’m the mother. Phil doesn’t even call his father on Father’s Day so it’s unfair and hypocritical to expect me to call him, especially when I’m mentally ill and only use the phone to talk to Blake or for emergencies. And I’m still annoyed with his little lecture about me not calling him “dad” but calling him Phil instead because that’s his name. He’s never been my dad so let’s not go down that road. Let’s not forget that half of his friends and acquaintances don’t even know I exist. And my mother…well if she wants to spend her Mother’s Day being pissed off and catering to her own mother’s whims and dealing with sister aggro, so be it, but leave me out of it. Nothing I do is good enough so I’m just not going to do anything anymore.

And that’s all I have to say about that except that they’re both probably reading this so it should be considered “notice”. If they’re not then I guess we’ll deal with it next year.

Strangely, my mother-in-law was the most gracious of our parents this year and for that I am thankful.

Madison is such a weird kid. Do you know what she’s reading right now? BELOVED by Toni Morrison. Or maybe she’s done now. Either way, I thought it was an odd choice for a 13-year-old and she totally chose it for herself and put it on her birthday wishlist, it’s not like it was suggested reading or anything.  She’s also been reading Stephen King, but I don’t find that weird at all. I started reading Stephen King (It) in grade 1 so I actually think she’s a little late on that one.

She’s kind of flush with books at the moment, but as soon as she’s not, I want her to read The Handmaid’s Tale (which I’m re-reading right now), Middlesex, Water For Elephants, The Virgin Suicides and so many other books that I have sitting on my shelf just waiting to be read. I want to blow her mind with literature. Maybe then she’ll realize that what I’m working on, Cammity Jane, is absolute crap. It bothers me how good she thinks that is because I know it’s not and that’s not me putting myself down, that’s just a fact. It’s fluff, it’s not literature by any stretch of the imagination. I think the primary audience for it is young adults, so it’s good that she likes it as much as she does because she’s my target I think, but I feel like it should be beneath her. She should be smarter than that.

Bleh.

Okay I think I’ve ranted and raved and wasted enough of your time. I think I’m out of things to discuss. Please go to my site and take a look at the two images I posted. Here’s the first one, here’s the second one. Thanks.

PS. I am 15 days smoke-free.

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Help RAPS win $25,000!

My friend Phaedie loses one of her friends at least once a week. That’s because she works for a high-capacity cat sanctuary in Richmond, British Columbia, run by the Richmond Animal Protection Society, and unfortunately feline leukemia and feline AIDS is a part of the job, especially when dealing with such close quarters.

To keep cats out of shelters, people need to spay and neuter their pets and that’s what RAPS is aiming to do with Pepsi Canada’s Refresh Project contest. Their aim, with the $25,000 to be won, is to help low-income families spay, neuter and vaccinate their pets in order to help curb the already problematic business of sick, unwanted pets.

So how can you help? It’s easy. Click here and vote. You can sign in using Facebook connect so it really does only take 2 clicks and you’d be making a world of difference for animals and their people. Plus you’d be making Phaedie and I incredibly happy.

We need to try and get them to #1 or #2 as only the top 2 spots receive funding. Currently they’re in 3rd place, so we need to make a solid push to get then into 2nd! I know people don’t have money to give to every charity that comes their way, but if you’d normally be clicking on Farmville crops anyway, please use your mouse-fingers for this as well and help make a difference in the world. Thanks.

The contest voting is until June 30th, it’s a daily vote and I’ll be posting every few days to remind you to vote in case you forget.

Yesterday morning I had a dream that lasted forever where I was playing Barbies, specifically with ethnic Barbies, not the blonde haired blue eyed Barbies. When I woke up, I was inspired and in between working, I sketched a bunch of brown girls in my sketchbook (or they would be brown if I had coloured them in) and decided that I needed to get some ethnic Barbies just to sit on my desk for inspiration and to help me draw my girls.

So the first place I went was ToysRUs.ca and do you know that they only had ONE non-white Barbie on the whole site and it was just one of those big Barbie heads where you’re supposed to play with their hair? On the ENTIRE site, that was the only non-white Barbie they had. This pissed me off and let me down because if they didn’t have ethnic Barbies on their site, how was I supposed to find ethnic Barbies where I live, which is 95% white?

Nevertheless, after I was finished work, Blake and I went on the hunt for Barbies of a different flavour. The first place we went was Wal*Mart and I found 3 black Barbies there but 2 of them were really ugly and one was kind of expensive ($25, I was looking for $10 Barbies). Regardless, it’s what they had, so I bought the non-ugly black Barbie and we searched every box but there was no asian one to be found. Bummer.

We went to the mall and had poutine for dinner and then we went to a brick & mortar Toys R Us where I found 4 ethnic Barbies! Three black ones and one asian one! I was so happy! Here they are:

Note to Jeck: green eyes.

This one’s my favourite. I just love the shit out of her.
And she has gold eyes, like my angel.

This is the “asian” one.

She doesn’t look very asian to me, but we held her up to the $50 Japanese Barbie and their faces were exactly the same so this is Barbie’s version of asian, I guess. From looking at this doll, I think I’ve figured out how to make my girls asian, which I’m going to try later tonight…

Note to Jeck: green and purple eyes.

Here are all my ladies standing on the corner of my desk.
Have I mentioned how much I love them & how happy they make me?
Have I also mentioned that I played Barbies until I was in grade 9?
I LOVE BARBIES.

It should probably be noted that besides the Japanese Barbie, who was dressed in Japanese gear, these were the only ethnic Barbies with any diversity. The last one I posted with the purple eyes’ face was the one used in all the rest of the black Barbies we found and we did see a black male doll named Steven which almost came home with me too, but I’d already spent $100 on the ladies and I don’t draw boys so I didn’t need him. He was strictly for play…and I’m not going to play with these so…yeah.

Looking at them now, I think I screwed up assembling the asian one’s doll stand. I’ll have to fix that.

So that’s it. People were asking me on Twitter why I was looking for ethnic Barbies and the simple answer is for inspiration for when I’m painting. That’s it. And in the case of the asian doll, to help me figure out how to make asian versions of my girls, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while now but I’m slow and couldn’t figure out how to draw my eyes without them ending up as caricatures. But I think I’ve gotten that figured out.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about my new Barbies.

Day 14 – A song that no one would expect you to love
(This was really really hard because I think musically, I’m pretty damn predictable. :o/ But this song goes through my head at least every other day because Sesame Street is the devil.)

Ann Arbor’s Teen Centre, Inc. (Neutral Zone) slipped to #7! Please vote and help bring them back up to at least #3! They need to stay in the top 15 to get funding from The Bank of Ann Arbor!  WE NEED YOUR HELP! It only takes a few clicks and it’s for CHARITY!

VOTE HERE!

Please feel free to spread the word! We need all the help we can get!

Day 08 – A song that you know all the words to

Day 07 – A song that reminds you of a certain event