Blake is currently at my mom’s boyfriend’s cottage dropping the kids off for March Break and I’m pretty much sitting here waiting for him to come home because I want to watch movies and work on my ACEOs, but we usually watch movies together because…well, because we only watch movies in my office and I’m always in my office and if I’m not watching the TV, I don’t like it on while I’m doing other stuff, so if I watch a movie without Blake, there’s a good chance he’ll never see it unless I liked it enough to watch it twice. (Which is often the case, I love movies, but not always.)

Right now we have Pandorum and The Hurt Locker to watch, plus Friday night’s Caprica, which I can’t watch without him. The Hurt Locker I probably could because it’s a war movie and he doesn’t like those, but I don’t know when he’ll be home and I think it’s too late to start a movie right now because he’d walk in partway through and not be able to pick up what’s going on, necessarily.

SO COMPLICATED, I know.

So instead of doing what I want to be doing, I’m writing a blog post about basically nothing…or at least that’s how I’m going into it.

I was just thinking though, because Blake’s with my mom and John right now, about my mom and John getting married. I have absolutely no idea how their relationship is (which is weird because historically, I would), so I don’t even know if marriage would be a possibility, but for a moment there I had a flash of a summer wedding and in it, I was sitting in a seat in the middle of “the bride’s side”, away from the rest of my family, and I was happy. It’s lame, I know, but I like John and I like his son Chris and I’m really rooting for him and my mom. As I’ve mentioned before, I just like who she is and who she’s become since she’s been with him. And I think she’s been good for him too, from what I understand. He makes art now, really really beautiful art, and from what I’ve been told, that was my mom’s influence. And the best part of him making art is that they sell their art together. For the first time in like EVER, my mom finally has an honest to god partner in crime and I think that’s fucking awesome. With my step-dad and Keith, I could never envision my mother growing old with either of them, and my bio-dad was obviously a bust, but with John I can totally see it and the whole idea of it just makes me so happy I could cry. In fact, I kind of am.

I don’t really talk to my mom that much anymore, not like we used to (we used to talk on the phone for several hours a day, every day), but I wonder about her moods when she’s with John. My mother’s kind of infamous for being self-deprecating and moody and kind of a bitch (I come by it honestly…) and all my life she’s been prone to bouts of intense, crippling depression, but now, at least on the surface, that seems to be less of a problem now that she’s with John.

I’m kind of morbid though. I often worry about my mother dying of cancer, both because it’s in my family but also because she’s been smoking for a bazillion years and her own father died of esophageal (holy crap, I spelled that right on the first try!) cancer due to smoking. Sometimes when I’m just sitting here by myself, I think about taking John aside one day and asking him, “are you going to look after her when she finds out she has cancer?” because I think if the answer to that is no, he needs to go. But I think the answer would be “yes”. He so obviously loves the shit out of my mother that I really do think that, whether they get married or not (since my mother has often said she has no desire to get married again), this is a “forever thing”.

And that makes me happy.

So I’ll stop being sappy about my mother now…I’m sure it’s revolting. It’s just hard to explain how our relationship is. Whether we talk every day or not, whether she’s with someone or not, whether I’m living with her or not, until I got married myself, it’s always felt like my mom & I against the world to some degree or another and it feels good to detach in a positive way, with positive results for both of us. Like I said, it’s hard to explain.

In other news, I guess I should talk publicly about something else that’s happening in my life. Wayne & Judy, our neighbours, and Blake & I, are no longer friends. Due to reasons that I don’t believe should be public knowledge, I started trying to detach myself from them as sort of a New Year’s resolution because I just couldn’t abide by some of the things they were doing anymore and because the relationship was becoming more and more parasitic.

At the end of February, I got fed up with some of the stuff that was happening next door and I unloaded some of it in a protected, friends only post on Live Journal. Unfortunately I came to find that there is at least one person on my Live Journal friends list who doesn’t like me very much and who decided to find Judy’s daughter Ashley on my Facebook friends list (which was public, unbeknownst to me) and paste my post into a message to her. Wayne & Judy happened to be dropping Ashley off in Toronto when this message was sent and Ashley printed them off a copy.

That night Judy came to my house, wouldn’t listen to a word I said and made it quite clear that we were no longer friends. Honestly, I don’t blame her for that, I probably would have felt the same way. She & Wayne have every right to be mad at me for saying some of the things I said, especially when I called them stupid and that I wished they would move, which is what Judy mostly seemed to be upset by.

I took precautions to make sure I didn’t hurt anyone with my post and someone circumvented that in a malicious way that hurt not me, not Blake – because realistically we were trying to detach from Wayne & Judy anyway – but 4 people who were strangers to them and didn’t deserve that: Wayne, Judy, Ashley and inadvertently Judy’s 9 year old daughter Courtney as well.

Yes, I take partial blame for the incident because I was the one who wrote the words and I was the one who added this malicious person whose identity I don’t know to my Live Journal friends list because I used to have a policy where if someone added me, I’d just add them back and that has resulted in a rather large friends list, but one I thought I could trust considering that most of the people who are on it have been on it for several years. It’s been a very rare occurrence over the last several years that I would add anyone new, unless they were vouched for by someone I trust.

Regardless, I put the bulk of the blame on the person who sent Ashley the post because what I did was venting to my friends, which everyone on planet Earth does, whereas what the person did who sent Ashley the post was flat out trying to be malicious toward me, but they ultimately ended up being malicious to 4 people they don’t know from Adam. I went out of my way to try not to hurt anyone, and this person went out of their way to try and hurt someone, not even bothering to think about collateral damage. (Or maybe they did, in which case they’re an even bigger douchebag.)

Since Judy would only let me look at the printout for a few seconds, I’m not even sure if what they saw was what I actually wrote. For all I know, this malicious person threw in a few extra jabs or put other words in my mouth. Since I printed out the post myself so Madison could read it and know what was going on, I know it’s 3 pages long (in Word) and what Judy had in her hand was also 3 pages long. However, Judy’s copy had more text on the 3rd page than I had in the copy I printed out, so I’m really wondering if the person who did this didn’t add some of their own flavour to it. Not being friends with Wayne & Judy anymore, I’ll never know. What I do know, however, is that the person who did this did not include the comments on the post, which would have been the proper, fair thing to do. Had they have done that, Wayne, Judy & Ashley would have seen that there were some damning comments that I disagreed with and thus, didn’t reply to. The only ones I replied to were the ones that concerned a fairly minor matter pertaining to Wayne & Judy and something they were already aware of my opinion on.

As with everything I write, I stand by my words, I don’t regret writing them and I don’t feel guilty that Wayne & Judy read them because I didn’t do anything wrong, the person who sent my post to Ashley did, and I certainly didn’t misrepresent them in any way. If anything, I held back in that post and I’ve been holding back in regards to them for a very long time.

What I do regret is my past policy of being trusting enough to add just about anyone to my Live Journal friends list and that is a mistake I won’t be repeating again. There’s no way to know who the person is who betrayed my trust and if I cut my friends list, chances are I wouldn’t remove the person who did this and that would make for one smug hater, so that’s not what I’m going to do. In fact, I’m not going to do anything but continue to be me and do what I do  and I’ve made my Facebook friends list not public. I suggest everyone else do the same, because really, why should strangers even have access to that list of people anyway? To change yours, go to “Account” on the top right of your Facebook page and play with the privacy settings. You may find that a lot of them, due to Facebook changing some things a few months ago, are not how you had them set originally and you may want to rectify that. Another way to make your Facebook friends list not public is by going to your profile and look at where your friends are displayed. There is a pencil icon there and if you click it, there’s the option to uncheck the part that says “show friends list to everyone” and if you uncheck that, your friends list will be visible only to those already on your friends list.

So that’s currently what’s happening in my life right now, or at least one of the bigger things. It’s unfortunate that Wayne & Judy are in the process of losing their house because their mortgager is selling it out from under them (which I guess can happen when your mortgage is held by a person rather than a bank, depending on your contract – which they broke anyway, but that’s a whole other thing) but I’m glad that they’ll be moving soon, not because of what’s happened between us, but because as I said in the beginning, our relationship with them was becoming more and more parasitic and we were trying to detach from them before all of this blew up anyway.

Truthfully, I think their mortgager is going to have a hard time making any kind of profit on that house as it’s badly in need of some expensive work, like the kitchen needs to be redone pretty much from scratch, but he seems pretty committed to selling so who knows what’s going to happen. Blake & I’s theory is that the mortgager was waiting until the spring to evict Wayne & Judy because we think it might be illegal to evict someone in the winter.  Either way, we’re hoping it happens sooner rather than later because it’s going to make for a really uncomfortable spring & summer when they’re on their deck drinking beer every spare second they have and their deck overlooks both our front yard and back yard, giving us absolutely zero privacy from these people.

Even prior to us becoming friends, I was scared to do anything in my garden in case they started talking to me (which happened constantly) and now I’m back at square one in that regard, unless the mortgager evicts soon.

What else? Well, there’s one thing in the works that I’m not going to write about because apparently there are people out there who would like to sabotage my life, but if/when it happens, you’ll know about it.

I guess the only other news is that last week or the week before, I ordered the seeds for the vegetable garden Blake and I decided we were going to do this year. This house came with a vegetable garden already, which is about 12-14 feet wide by about 4 & a half, maybe 5 feet long. We’d talked about doing veggies before but ultimately it came down to money, time and energy that we didn’t have so we couldn’t do it. The garden, since it’s been unused for the past 5 years, is completely full of weeds and will need at least a day’s worth of digging to become usable and Blake’s committed to helping me do this, so I ordered the seeds and when they come, a lot of them will be started indoors because apparently some of them need to be.

I don’t know anything about growing vegetables or even if we have enough room for everything I ordered, but I figured I’d just approach this like I approached the front yard garden: trial & error. Here’s what I ordered:

Royal Burgundy Beans (2 packets of seeds)
These beans are cool because they’re purple when they’re raw, but they turn green when they’re cooked. They also grow in a bush rather than a vine, so I won’t need to stake them.

Napoli Carrots (1 packet of seeds)
I just picked these ones because they sounded the yummiest when I was looking through the Vesey’s catalogue. I only got one packet of seeds because each packet had something like 1000 seeds or something and I figured 1000 seeds would mean 1000 carrots and we don’t need that many!

Thunder Cucumbers (1 packet of seeds)
Again, I just picked these ones because of the write-up about them in the catalogue. Apparently they’re resistant to most of the things cucumbers have problems with, so that’s mostly why I chose them, but I also chose them because they looked the most like the cucumbers I buy in the store. I’m worried that we won’t have room for these because I’ve seen how cucumbers grow and it seems like they need a lot of room, but I figured I could plant them along the top of the garden and let them grow out onto the 2 feet of grass between the garden and the house and that we could just lift the vines if Blake needed to mow the lawn there.

Simpson Elite Lettuce (2 packets)
We at a lot of salads in the summer and I’ve grown this before, in the front garden. It’s a leaf lettuce and if you want a salad, you just go out to the garden, cut off as much as you need and you’re good to go!

Parade Green Onions (1 packet)
We use green onions a lot, from stir fry to garlic pasta to spaghetti sauce, so I figured I’d try growing them.

Super Sugar Snap Peas (1 seed packet)
These are Madison and I’s favourite but they’re so expensive to get from the grocery store. Growing your own means that they’ll be ready to eat in July and from what I remember about peas, they don’t grow continuously throughout the season, so at least we’ll have all the peas we can eat in July! Madison and I just eat them, pod & all, but they can also be thrown in stir fry too if we get sick of eating them. I think these will need to be staked.

Fat & Sassy Peppers (1 seed packet)
These are just red & green sweet peppers and will need to be started indoors. As long as I cut them up for them, the kids love eating peppers raw and Blake likes to put them in salad, so I figured they would be worth the trouble. (I hate peppers with a passion.) I think these will need to be staked too.

Purple Star Peppers (1 seed packet)
Just sweet peppers that happen to be purple. I thought the kids would get a kick out of them so I figured we’d do half a row of the normal ones above and half a row of these ones. These’ll need to be started indoors as soon as the seeds arrive and will need to be staked as well. (Where do you even buy stakes? The garden centre at Wal*Mart should have those, right?)

Bobcat Tomatoes (1 seed packet)
I picked these because their write up and picture in the catalogue sounded the yummiest. I debated a lot on whether or not to start tomatoes from seed or just to buy plants from the garden centre, but in the end seeds won out because they’re cheaper and I can easily just start them indoors and make my own plants that’ll be ready for planting at the end of May. These will have to be staked too, I’m pretty sure.

Sugary Cherry Tomatoes (1 seed packet)
I love cherry tomatoes in salads, they’re like, my favourite part (well, that and the cheese chunks I throw in salads), so we had to grow these. Again, I could have gotten plants from the garden centre, but seeds were cheaper than plants would be and I have enough room to start the peppers and tomatoes this month so they’ll be ready for planting at the end of May. I’m pretty sure these ones will have to be staked too, once they get big enough, although I grew similar tomatoes last year in pots on my porch and didn’t stake them, so I’m not sure. The ones I grew last year were on a vine, I don’t know how these ones grow.

Luckily, Veseys sends you a growing guide when you order veggie seeds from them and that’ll tell me everything I need to know about all of this stuff. Again, I’m a bit worried about space, but I think with proper planning we should be okay and if all else fails, I can just grow the tomatoes in containers on the porch as long as I fertilize them well. I’ll have to invest in some containers though, as what I have will be too small, except for one pot.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to the veggie garden this year. I love the idea of growing your own food and while we spent $50 on seeds, I know we’ll end up saving a lot of money in the long run from not buying produce at the grocery store.

Annnnnd I was going to start writing about my front yard garden but y’know what? This is really really long and I’ll do that when the seeds for THAT get here.

Have a wonderful Sunday!

Also finished is the painting I was working on for Ashley’s baby shower, although there were some technical difficulties after varnishing…the girl’s petticoat? It should actually be purple with flowers, but for some reason the varnish turned it more reddish. This has happened to me once before (pink paper turning orange) so some papers, I guess, just turn different colours when the varnish is added. There’s nothing I can really do about it and thankfully the colours have never been so far off that it looked bad, it just doesn’t look as good as it originally did.

Anyway, I’m tired today so without further ado, here’s the pics of Ashley’s painting:

Anyway, realistically I don’t think I’ll be going to the baby shower, but as I think I said in my previous post on the subject, I doubt Ashley will care.

That’s really all I have to say today. As I said, I’m really tired. For some reason I decided to get up at like, 6:30am and I’m just dead on my feet right now considering I didn’t go t o bed until around 1am. :o/

An artist once told me that in order to produce work in more volume, I should stop watching TV and I thought that was insane advice because I paint while I watch TV. Or more to the point, I paint while I listen to the TV, looking up when i need to, but mostly just listening to it while I concentrate on whatever’s on my desk. The very odd time I’ll paint while listening to music, but that’s pretty rare and usually only happens when there’s nothing on TV or I’ve seen all of the good movies on The Movie Network On Demand that month. And even then, I’m more likely to put in a DVD of a movie I’ve seen a thousand times than to paint while listening to music. Music is for writing. TV is for painting.

Perhaps predictably because I never finish anything, the story I was writing last month has been put on the back burner.  I was going strong on it, got 10 pages down easily and then Xmas happened and I just kinda lost steam. I fully intend to go back to it, but probably not until the spring when painting urges start slowing down.

The ACEOs/ATCs…I haven’t really been working on them. The ones I posted a while back are still sitting on my desk without arms (because I really really fucking hate doing arms, I cannot say this enough!) but as soon as I’m finished the two paintings I’m working on right now, I’ll go back to them. I mean, I have to, I have no money for more canvases so unless I want to paint on wood (which I don’t), ACEOs it is. A lot of people have been asking me about them and when they’ll be ready and the fact of the matter is, I’m going to finish all 60 of them before any of them go up for sale. Because I’m working on them all by colour, I don’t want to release them for sale as I make them because say I release the ones I’ll have finished in a couple of weeks. Those ones are purple and gold. So someone buys a purple one and then 2 months later I put the pink and turquoise ones up for sale and the person who bought the purple one thinks “dammit! I like those better!” and regrets their purchase. I don’t want that, so that’s why I won’t be putting them all up for sale until they’re all finished. Or at least that’s the plan at this very moment. I’m glad to hear that there’s interest in them though, that makes me very happy. Sometimes when I’m painting I get into negative self-talk and think “why the fuck am I even doing this? No one’s going to like it, not enough to buy it blah blah blah” but I don’t with the ACEOs because I know people want them. So that’s a good thing.

Anyway, onto what I’m working on now. My bee girl is almost finished (she needs arms), or at least I thought she was. When I was drawing her, I made her slightly smaller than 8 inches tall to give me headroom for her antennae on a 12 inch tall canvas. Well, I needed less headroom than originally anticipated, so now there’s all this space above her head that I need to fill with something. Warning: Shitty picture…

She needs words. I just don’t know which words. The idea to paint her came from the “No Rain” video by Blind Melon, so “No Rain” is the obvious choice here, but truthfully I don’t think she’s  grungy enough for that. The girl in the “No Rain” video was an outcast, with nerdy glasses and a plump body. This bee girl is obviously a little more glamourous. (After she’s varnished, she’s going to have a fluffy black tulle tutu.) I think if I were to see this painting when I was out somewhere with the words “No Rain” on it, I’d probably laugh at it for trying to hard. So that’s out. Also out is a play on words (unless it’s very clever) on the word “bee”, like “Bee Yourself” and stuff like that, but I’m not opposed to bee references in general like, “It’s good to be Queen” (although I think that’s too long and doesn’t fit with this painting). So if anyone has any suggestions for this one, I’m all ears because I’ve been looking at it since last night trying to think of something and I’m at a loss. Later today I’m going to look up bee facts on Wikipedia to see if anything pops out, but if anyone thinks of something in the meantime, shout it out! Just try to keep it to 3 or 4 words, if possible. (And thank you in advance!)

The painting I’m doing for Ashley’s baby shower is pretty straight forward, just a pretty girl on a REALLY REALLY sparkly background. (And I mean REALLY REALLY sparkly, I kinda went nuts with the glitter on hers.) Her background is crackled white paint over metallic purple paint, with light purple, light yellow, champagne gold and metallic purple splatters and light purple sparkles over top because the baby’s room is being done in all purples and yellows, apparently. I asked Ashley to send me samples of the paint she bought for the baby’s room, which she did, and I matched the samples to my paint pretty much perfectly, she’s going to love it.

The girl for the painting is basically Ashley herself in a fancy dress:

That pic (and the bee girl pic) is kinda crap because I took it outside thinking the white light from the grey day would make for better pictures, but it didn’t and I didn’t really realize it until I’d already uploaded the pics. Her eyes are a metallic light blue which is essentially the same shade as Ashley’s eyes and Ashley’s hair is long, straight and dark brown and she wears it in pretty much that style every time I see her. I’m assuming, since her boyfriend also has dark hair (but I don’t know what colour eyes) that the baby will have dark hair too. They’re both Italian and everyone in their families has dark hair, so I figure that one’s a given.

If I have time before the shower (and money) I’m going to make a trip to Michael’s to see if I can’t find metal words for the girl to be holding. I’m pretty sure Making Memories makes a set that includes the word “family”, which would work, but I’d really much prefer “daughter”. If I can’t do that then the girl will just be clasping her hands in front.

The baby shower is on the 24th and is in downtown Toronto. I told everyone I’m going and Judy’s excited for me to come, but in all honesty, there’s a very good chance I won’t go. Being in a hall with about 50 strangers with weird food 2 hours away from home for a baby shower is not my idea of fun at all. I’m gonna need so many drugs to pull this off that I just don’t even know if I’ll be able to. Judy really wants me there though, so I’m going to try my best to make it. (Ashley probably won’t care either way, as long as I send a gift. That’s just how Ashley is.)

Anyway, I think it’s time for me to make my eggs, start watching more Six Feet Under and get back to work on these paintings. I hope you’re all having a wonderful day!

PS. Buttercup‘s got lots of interesting stuff in store for January, you should check it out!

As I mentioned, Judy has an infected tooth (more like an abscess) so she came home from work at around 10:30am and went to the doctor who prescribed her antibiotics because she couldn’t get in to see the dentist today. She was supposed to work until 3pm and then go to Wal*Mart shopping, where she’d meet Wayne and they’d do some more shopping until about 5/5:30pm.

So she was home all day and we couldn’t get started on decorating until 3:15pm when she left to go to Wal*Mart! But, that ended up being plenty of time to get everything done and by the time they got home from Wal*Mart, we had all the lights off and we did the “SUPRISE!” thing and she was definitely surprised.

This is the cake that Madison and Courtney (Judy’s 9 year old daughter) made for her this afternoon:

Ashley, Judy’s 23-ish year old daughter who’s currently pregnant with her first child and her baby daddy came up from Toronto too, then there were the three kids from up the street, Madison, Wes, me, Blake and of course Wayne & Judy, so it was a full house. Wayne had bought chicken wings to go with the lasagna Mikayla’s mom made and he also brought home this “3rd degree” hot sauce for them, which is like, industrial strength hot sauce that the deli at his work (he works at a grocery store) uses on their take-out wings.

I didn’t have any because I don’t like chicken wings or spicy stuff, but the stuff was so hot that Ashley couldn’t even finish three wings and Blake & Wayne were practically crying as they ate theirs, which was followed up by a great deal of beer.

Blake had mentioned earlier that he rarely walks away from a dare and somehow Ashley dared him to drink two shot glasses full of this hot sauce…which he did because he’s an idiot. Here’s the proof:

After the hot sauce was down the hatch, Blake pretty much downed an entire can of Coke Zero and about an hour later, he went outside and barfed three times between Judy’s house and ours…because he’s an idiot. After that he felt much better though and when we went back to Wayne & Judy’s, he consumed more wings with hot sauce. During that time, I actually came home and had a nap for about an hour & a half because I’m currently taking an assload of pain medication and it was making me sleepy.

Between Blake barfing and me having a nap, the cake was served:

After that, we just sat around and shot the shit and long story short, a good time was had by all, especially Judy who sampled some of my pain meds because of her tooth and washed them down with a hell of a lot of beer. And that was pretty much our day.

THE END.