So I guess this is basically a State of the Uterus address. Only gonna explain where I feel the need and it’s in no particular order. :o)

- I’m annoyed at my mom and she knows it.

- Blake’s having issues with his mom and I don’t even know what’s going on now.

- I’ve been playing a lot of Warcraft. New guilds are exciting. I’m playing a new faction, more or less, so a lot of the game is still new to me. I only played Horde a few times and always with a clone of the same character. Belf/shadow priest/Endometria. At least 3 times. But only to like, level 2 tops 2 times and late 30′s once. I made a million toons that I got to 10 or 15 when I played Warcraft before, but they were Alliance and I think Alliance is a lot easier, at least to get around. I feel completely lost, Horde-side. We’re playing on a PvP server, which, to the people reading this who don’t play WoW, means “player vs player” and most people, including me, find it harder to level a toon to the 70′s or 80′s, especially if you rely on soloing (playing alone) for most of your play time because there are people who are 10 million times more skilled than your average world monster or creature you have to kill, trying to gank your ass and camp it. Camping it means that they wait for you to resurrect yourself so they can do it again…and again….and again.

Word from my high level guildmates who are starting to have to go in the “flagged” areas to do their questing, this server appears to be more Alliance than Horde, meaning we’re outnumbered, which sucks and intimidates me. I don’t know if our server name is an Alliance name or a Horde name, but last time Blake & I  played on a PvE server (except for The Cotton Pwnies days) with an Alliance name and Alliance definitely outnumbered the Horde the whole time. Soooo, I fear that maybe we picked an Alliance named server to play Horde on and that there are enough geeks who know the difference and choose their factions accordingly and our PvP time is going to be a losing battle. I figure though, regardless of that, we’re getting to the point where everyone’s really close to 20 (the level you more or less have to quest in flagged areas)  and if we group quest, we’ll all have a better survival rate and get picked on less frequently.

We use a program called Ventrillo that allows us to speak to our guildmates (who are logged in) using a headset, which will also help (if people start using it, which I’m bad for too because I just really don’t like talking, so I just listen and type instead).

Last night we ran our first guild instance/dungeon, which took longer than it should have, but for the first time any of us had ever played together, I think we did a pretty good job. Some of our guildmates have been doing random PUG (pick up group) instances without us, to get gear I guess, but a few of us (Stephy/hunter, her husband K (holy priest – so heals), Warcorp (tankadin), me (face melter) & Blake (troll shaman, mon) waited to do it together and I think that’s awesome. I can’t wait to do harder stuff with these guys, like instances that take a whole Saturday and bosses that actually need strategy and MORE DOTS to take down. :oD K did a really good job of telling us where to go so we didn’t get lost. (Which I found impressive because I didn’t know where the hell we were half the time because I’d only even done Wailing Caverns like, once, and we didn’t finish it.)

I kinda think it’s funny that we’re playing in a Camwhores guild. Some companies have their softball teams, we have our WoW guild!

- I have the shits and have been up since 6am. This means I’m probably going to sleep most of the day since I don’t think we went to bed until about 12:45am. Oops.

- Tonight is my first yoga class and I’m terrified. Blake doesn’t even know how long the class is and he says that it’s Hatha yoga, whatever that means. Probably the only 3 things I’m going to accomplish today is looking up what that means, having a shower and sleeping. Especially since I believe it’s supposed to rain all day, or at least threatening to. The rest of the time will be spent being neurotic, or more to the point, sitting on WoW just chatting with people while I wait for an herb supplier in Silvermoon City spawn herbs that I can then sell to other people on the Auction House for a ridiculous amount of gold. (The economy on this server is absolutely fucked.)

- My friends in Oregon, Robert and Robin Peate, are like, having a baby as I type this, at home! I just think that’s so exciting and while I know updating LJ or Facebook isn’t or shouldn’t be high on the priority list during this time, I can’t help but refresh anyway.

- I have not touched a paintbrush in at least a week. Nothing is finished. Nothing is close to finished except for my sign, and I don’t care. Can’t say when I’ll pick up a paintbrush again. Maybe when we have good movies to watch while I paint. Maybe not until the novelty of WoW wears off. Really, I should be painting and then while things dry play WoW, but I’m still working on my productivity management system.

- My front garden has bachelor’s buttons galore but no cosmos yet and the “new” part at the bottom of the garden is taking it’s sweet time growing in. Veggie garden is leaving me unimpressed. My tomato plants are finally thriving and next weekend we have to tie the plants to the cages. My peppers are piddly in comparison and I’m worried we’re not going to get a very big yield there. Lettuce is starting to poke its head up and I’m thinking we may have planted the seeds too deep. Maybe I worry too much. None of the herbs are showing life but the garden’s full of weeds and I don’t know what’s good plant from bad so until things start growing and looking like the pictures on the seed packs, I’m not sending the kids out to weed. The beans are growing like crazy, as are the peas, which needed a stake/string trellis to grow up like, last weekend but obviously we had to do other things. The carrots are showing no signs of life. Neither are the onions.

Anyway, when there’s anything interesting to take pictures of, I’ll do so. Right now both gardens are pretty unimpressive, but I’m learning a lot just by watching, like plant lettuce shallowly and maybe skip the peppers next year.

- Our neighbour to the right, who owns the bar in town, has a for sale sign on his front lawn. So does Wayne & Judy’s old house to the left of us. And the empty lot next to that house has a for sale sign too. That only leaves us and the old lady on the corner in our little section of the road who aren’t for sale. I’m hoping a developer or someone wants all that space and offers us crazy money for our house so we can move. Hey, it could happen!

- I’ve been severely neglecting Twitter.

- I’ve been reading Eat, Pray, Love and am ashamed to report that I’m actually liking it so far. I didn’t want to like it, being basically an “Oprah book”, but I can’t help it, I do. I read the Oprah Biography by Kitty Kelley and I’ll probably never be able to see Oprah the same way again. That was a good read too.

- I was supposed to do a show on Camwhores last night but my vagina started bleeding on Sunday night so that kinda put a damper on things and I had to cancel. I’m still bleeding and just not really in the mood to be on cam, so the show’s been put off indefinitely. I was supposed to bleed all month, which is traditionally what happens, but this month I only bled for 3 days and then a bit of light light light spotting sporadically until yesterday. I’m not sure what’s going to happen when I take my 7 day break from the pill, which will be in 3 days. Anyway, I plan on hanging out on Camwhores for a bit after I post this, if anyone else is around. I won’t be updating my cam, but I’ll sit & chat for a bit.

And I guess that’s really all I have to say at the moment. Things are busy and hectic and complicated but we’re having fun being nerds at the same time and things should calm down once the kids are out of school for the summer.

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)

Everyone in our house is sick right now except for me. I just got over a cold that lasted a month and this seems to be what the rest of my family is afflicted with. Right now both Wes & Madison are home sick and Blake’s wishing he could be home sick.

Regardless, this weekend my mom & John came up to give us a badly needed new mattress (ours had springs sticking out of it) and a new couch & chair which can only be described as “interesting”. The couch is a fold-out bed, so between Madison’s trundle bed, the futon in my office and now this fold-out bed, we’re good to party whenever the need arises. Here are the couch & chair:

See? Interesting. Our living room has absolutely no colour scheme or decor of any kind so these pieces fit right in. Also all we had in there before was a loveseat & chair that were both falling apart, so now we have more seating.

Last night Blake and I went to Michael’s to buy art supplies. We were supposed to hit Curry’s too, but they (stupidly) closed at 6pm and Blake didn’t get out of work in time for us to go. But whatever, we went to Michael’s where I bought a whole whack of what I call “sticky bindi jewels” because that’s mostly what I use them for (also necklaces) because they were on sale, 2 jars of varnish because I was down to my last jar, 3 bottles of white pearl paint, the set of 12 glitter flakes that I wanted (decided to forgo the other sets of glitter because when I really looked at them, I just didn’t like them), 2 bottles of glitter (blue sapphire and purple sapphire) and a whole bunch of scrapbook paper that was on clearance. I got several pink papers, determined to find one that doesn’t turn orange when I apply varnish because nothing I make leaves this house without at least 2 coats of varnish.

Then today during his lunch, Blake’s going to go to Curry’s and get me 9 canvases (12 x 12), acrylic glazing liquid and silver & gold pens, which I use for signing my work.

After all’s said & done, I will have completely spent all the money I made from the sale of “Love Fairy” the other day. I didn’t even get myself Starbucks this time, I just needed art supplies.

I think my next project is going to be a turquoise version of “Love Fairy”, using the tinsel glitter I have in that colour. I should be working on my “Go Bananas” cheerleader, which has been in my bedroom ready to go for months, but I still haven’t totally figured out how I’m going to do her so I think the idea needs to stew a little bit more before I go there.

I was going to buy a few art supplies and buy the dress that I wanted but when I went to order it, it said it was currently unavailable so I bought art supplies instead but now I see it IS available and now I have no money. Godammit! Hopefully I’ll sell another painting soon so I can order it and have it in time for The Square Foot show, which I believe is in July. (Edit: I just called Blake and he told me to order it and I can pay him back when I sell my next painting. Hopefully that won’t be too long because I hate owing money to anyone, especially Blake.)

And I guess the only other news I have to report is that my neighbours, Wayne & Judy, will be moving this weekend. What sucks is that we’re going to be outside using the sod cutter to get my front garden in shape for seeding the weekend after and it’s going to be awkward watching them move their stuff out. I plan on giving them a card wishing them happiness in their new home. Blake says that’ll just piss them off more, but y’know what? I can’t control what other people do, I can only control what I do and that’s what I want to do.

So that’s that.

I hope everyone reading this is having a wonderful day and I’m sure I’ll post again soon!

So I just finished watching Food Inc., which for some reason aired on CBC Newsworld last night so I recorded it (I just find this sort of weird since I think the documentary only came out on DVD like, last week? also, if you’re in Canada, you can watch it on the CBC website here but I don’t know for how long) and while most of the contents of the movie I already knew, it really helped to give the whole thing a bigger picture and at the end of the movie it’s not “welp, we’re fucked!”, they actually give you tips on what you can do to help change things.

Two of the tips were to eat locally grown foods and to buy produce when it’s in season. So the first thing I wondered was, how in the hell am I supposed to know what’s locally grown and what’s in season? I mean, I live in Ontario, Canada, what could possibly be “in season” in the dead of February when there’s 4 feet of snow on the ground? And another thing is that, just as an example, the only grocery store in our town, the entire time I’ve lived here, has never once had locally grown strawberries in July, when they’re in season, despite the fact that we live within 3 km of several strawberry farms. Every strawberry I’ve ever seen in that store has come from California, same with blueberries, blackberries and raspberries.

Anyway, we have these really annoying commercials on TV in the summer about Ontario farming with this really horrible jingle that goes, “Good things gro-o-ow, in Ontariooo!” and as soon as the thoughts above entered my head, I thought “durrrr” and Googled “Foodland Ontario”, which is like, the government “brand” for produce in this province and lo & behold, on their website is a chart as to which produce is in season during which months. So I bookmarked that, right next to my bookmark for the grocery store flyer and this family is going to make a concerted effort to only buy produce when it’s in season. If I want a BLT in February? Well that’s just too damn bad, I have to wait until March. Since it’s all grown in-province, that’s killing two birds with one stone.

Another tip from the movie is to grow your own vegetables, which as I’ve mentioned, we’ll be doing for the first time this summer. I bought enough beans, for example, that my intention is to have 4 rows total, 1 for us to eat during the summer and 3 for freezing. That won’t do us for the whole winter, but that’s just how much land I have to work with and considering that we’re doing the garden this year for financial reasons every little bit helps.

As for meat…well, we’re still going to have to rely on the grocery store for that because the organic food store in town is just too cost prohibitive. I already don’t eat chicken, though the rest of the family does and the only time I eat ground beef is in spaghetti sauce, which I’m going to stop doing, even though the rest of the family uses it to make hamburgers out of. Our dinners are still mostly meat-based, but gradually our meat portions have been decreasing and our veggie portions have been increasing, so that’s good, and we also have at least one meatless dinner per week.

We’re not gonna save the world and we’re not exactly models of nutrition, but I know we’re doing better than most of the people we know in that we’re actually doing something. Compared to say, 5 years ago, we’ve gotten a lot better as we’ve learned to do better and we’ll continue to do better.

And that’s really all I have to say about food today.

Sometime this week I’ll start taking pics of my grow-op and make my first official Keep Off The Lawn post. Right now on the living room windowsill I have cherry tomatoes, bobcat tomatoes, green peppers and purple peppers starting in beer cups. Some of them are getting too big for their Saran Wrap hats already while others haven’t even sprouted, so tonight when I replace their hats with clear plastic cups, I’m going to reseed the ones that haven’t sprouted yet because I have a feeling they’re not going to. Also, I noticed today that my daffodils are up and there are tons of little crocuses and tulips out front that I have to take pictures of before they get decimated in 2 weeks by the sod cutter. Somehow grass has overtaken about half of the front garden so next paycheque we’ll be renting the sod cutter to get rid of it so I can plant my wildflower seeds in May.

Next week is Gogol Bordello which means that also next week I’m going to be quitting smoking…again. It’s like my dad says, you just gotta keep quitting. When you start up again, if you start up again, you just have to quit again because every time you quit, that’s at least a few months worth of smokes that you won’t be smoking. I’m hoping that this time it’ll be permanent and Blake & I have decided on some things to make it permanent, namely, we’re not going to become friends with anyone who smokes until we’re both several years in the clear as far as being nonsmokers. Since we’re not friends with Wayne & Judy anymore and since they’re moving May 1st (*happydance*) and since none of our current friends smoke, there will be no temptation for me to smoke and no opportunity. As I know I mentioned when I quit last time, Wayne & Judy would practically put cigarettes in my mouth and light them for me (Blake too) and it was impossible to say no because they just won’t take “no” for an answer and they don’t respect the fact that you’ve either quit or are trying to quit. Instead, they would sit there and every 5 minutes say, “are you suuuuuure you don’t want a smoke? The pack’s right there, just help yourself,” or Wayne would toss you a smoke and say, “here just smoke it, I know you want to” and things like that. Then if you still found the willpower to say no, Wayne would sit there and basically tell you why you’re an idiot for quitting, how it won’t make a difference and how if you die of cancer, that’s just what God has in store for you, there’s nothing you can do to prevent it so you might as well enjoy your smokes while you wait.

So with Wayne & Judy out of the picture (our other neighbour doesn’t smoke), there will be no pressure and no opportunity to smoke unless I suddenly develop the courage to walk to the store myself and go get a pack, which would never happen. The fact is, unlike other attempts to quit, I actually want to quit, it’s my decision, not a decision being made for me. And I’d love to say that it’s for health reasons and while that’s partly it (I’ve developed asthma and it would be idiotic to ask the doctor for Ventolin rather than just quitting), it’s mostly financial. As a condition of me starting to smoke again last summer, I had to start paying for them myself and in the beginning that was fine because I was only smoking 2 packs a week. Since then it’s escalated to almost a pack a day and I just don’t make that much money and more to the point, the bit of money that I do make, I don’t want to waste all of it on basically nothing, not when I’m desperately in need of canvases and I’m quickly depleting my supply of the more expensive art supplies like gel medium, Weathered Wood and acrylic glazing liquid which are each about $12-15 a bottle and therefore (to me) expensive to replace. A pack of 3 canvases is about $25, also, again to me, expensive to replenish and I just started working on my last one yesterday.

So, it’s time to quit. Hopefully for good. I’ve decided to do it the day after Gogol Bordello because Gogol Bordello has me stressed out of my mind and I’m going to be around smokers that night, plus my mom that afternoon. Before I go to bed Tuesday night, I’ll be breaking and flushing all of the cigarettes I have left and that’ll be it. I’m not worried about it being hard, it’s not like I haven’t done this before, I know the first 3 days are going to be monstrous, but after that it just gets easier and I’m going to stock up on Skittles and Starbursts beforehand so I have something to occupy my mouth throughout the first week. (Insert lame and obvious oral sex joke here.)

So that’s that.

This weekend I was ridiculously productive. On Friday I finished “Ooh La La“, as I posted about, and Saturday & Sunday I worked on what I’m calling my “silly painting” for right now…because it’s a silly idea and I don’t even know why I’m doing it…and started a 3rd which is going to use the pink tinsel glitter I posted about the other day and which is going to have a fairy on it, although that’s as far as I’ve worked it through.

Something I have to say though, is that I am absolutely in love with these little storage cups I bought from Stockade when I bought paint last month. They’re the same kind of plastic cups you get coleslaw in when you get takeout, look:

I custom mix a lot of my paint colours and all of my glitter mixes and when I do so, I often have excess paint leftover that I’ve never really found anywhere to put. I tried plastic pill bottles because god knows I have a million of them, but they’re not air tight so the paint would just eventually dry out. Prior to that, I was just letting the paint go to waste, but with these little containers, I can store the it and use it for other things. In the picture, the top container is full of black glitter mixed with water and acrylic glazing liquid, the pink ones are metallic pink that I mixed this weekend, the blue is pearlized turquoise that I used for “Ooh La La”‘s eyeshadow and the purple is purple glitter mixed with acrylic glazing liquid to make sort of a paste that I used as eyeshadow on the “silly painting” I’m working on now. It doesn’t look like it in the picture, but the two pinks are actually two different colours, one’s a lot lighter than the other. One will be used for splatters while the other one will be used for hair. I should have put a coin in the picture so you could see how big the containers are. Each one holds about 3/4 of an ounce of liquid.

Anyway, they’re awesome, although a bit expensive for what they are, and you can get them here. If anyone knows where to get these cheaper and in bigger quantities, please let me know. I’m assuming you can find them on restaurant wholesale sites but they probably have minimum orders and really all I want is these cups.

Well, Blake’s going to be home soon, my paint is now dry, so I’m going to get back to working on these paintings before dinner. I hope everyone has had a good Monday and I’m sure I’ll blabber at you some more tomorrow.

That is what I’m doing right now. It is something I’m exceptionally good at, as I just posted on Twitter. If procrastination was a marketable skill, I’d be rollin’ in cheddar.

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!

It’s 5am and I’m awake. I went to bed at about 12:30am but woke up about half an hour ago because Lucky was whining to be let out and when I tried to go back to sleep, it was a no go because there’s too much on my mind, namely agoraphobia.

Yesterday or the day before, Blake had a troll on his Cubeless blog and the troll said, “Grab yourself a job instead of claiming agoraphobia of convenience which seems to kick in every time you have to go shopping, but lifts when there’s an art show or a concert you absolutely have to attend because you’re ‘creative’.” And that wasn’t the first time in the last couple of weeks where people questioned my agoraphobia. At a forum I frequent, there’s a thread in a secret forum called “Reasons to feel good” and when our Gogol Bordello tickets came, I posted the picture of me holding them up to the cam in that thread and a couple of people said “wait, don’t you have agoraphobia?”

And that’s the thing. Agoraphobia isn’t a cut & dry thing. It’s different for each person. In my case, I can’t go anywhere by myself and there are certain places, like grocery stores, that I avoid because they give me anxiety to the point of panic attacks whether Blake’s with me or not. And in the case of the grocery store, yes, Blake does the groceries and it’s not so much because I can’t (well, since I haven’t done it so long and have next to zero concept of money anymore it would cause a problem anyway) but it’s simply a case of, “why make it a family outing when Blake can just go in, get what we need and come home”? Since I can’t go by myself, and I don’t have a car even if I could, that’s the way things have to be and the way things are. In case I wasn’t clear, when it comes to groceries, why take 4 people to the store, which over-complicates things, when Blake can just go in, get what we need, not go over budget, not impulse buy, and be home in half the time it would take us if all 4 of us went. Plus, if all 4 of us went, there’s a very good chance that I would have a panic attack and would require medication (Ativan) to first get there and some more to actually stay there.

As for art shows, well, that’s actually a laughable thing. I’ve only ever been to one art show in my life and it was Touched By Fire, which is put on by the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario. If anyone’s going to understand my idiosyncrasies at such an event, it’s going to be those people, or at least that was my logic behind going. Being in the city (Toronto) makes me very very nervous and the night of that art show, I must have taken at least 4 Ativans. But the thing was, I was totally fine at the show and I actually questioned this after the fact the next time I saw my shrink. I wanted to know how come I was totally fine at that show, yet I can’t go to Wal*Mart or even the art supply stores by myself and she said that it’s because at an art show, I have a defined role, I’m an artist, and therefore there’s guidelines as to how to act which are comfortable to me because I can easily play that role for that is what I am. I mean, I wasn’t totally fine at the show, when Gayle Cutler wanted me to do a commission, Blake had to navigate the business end of things because that’s not a role I’m comfortable with. While he did that, I hid in the bathroom. Literally.

And as far as concerts, well gee, the last concert I went to was either System of a Down or Metallica, I can’t remember and both of those shows were at least 7 or 8 years ago. With Metallica, I almost didn’t go because I had a meltdown half an hour before we had to leave. I ended up going to the show in my pajamas after Blake spent 45 minutes talking me into going. With Gogol Bordello, they are my favourite band right now and there are certain experiences where I know I’d have regrets if I didn’t go and this show is one of them because Gogol Bordello doesn’t come to Toronto very often. As I said when I posted the picture of the tickets, I have roughly 2 months to psych myself into going. A normal person wouldn’t have to do that. And even when I do go, I’m going to have to be chowing down clonazepam (klonopin) and Ativan like there’s no tomorrow. I won’t be in the pit. I’ll probably be way at the back, away from people. I’ll also be with Blake and our two best friends so I’ll have like, a circle of protection, which helps. Going to this show is not going to be an easy thing for me at all and actually another aspect of this endeavor is that when I posted the pictures of the concert tickets on that forum that I frequent, one of the members there, whom I’ve known for many years and who lives in Toronto, asked me if I wanted to get a drink and meet up before the show, to which I replied “hellz no” because that is completely outside of my comfort zone, especially when going to the show is going to be hard enough as it is. I am already losing sleep over this show because I don’t know what to wear – and it’s 2 months away.

I don’t know what to wear because where I’m at right now as far as weight loss is that I don’t fit into my “normal” clothes just yet and my “fat clothes” are now too big. Chances are, I’m going to have to buy something to wear to the show and since we’re not particularly made of money that stresses me out.

And as far as meeting this person I know from the forum I frequent well, the thing is, I decided a while back that I wasn’t going to meet people from the internet anymore with very few exceptions and the reason for that is because…I’ve met roughly 200 people from the internet in the last 12 years and during the last several encounters, I’ve realized that people sometimes don’t want to meet me to actually meet me, they want to judge me to see whether I’m the same in person as I am online (which I am) but more than that, they want to be able to tell people that they met me because it gives them cool points or something in our respective circles. I’m a notch on a belt and I’m not cool with that.

The fact of the matter is, I have agoraphobia. It’s not a phobia of convenience as Blake’s troll implied, it just presents itself in a certain way where I can go certain places and do certain things, but quite often those things take a lot of planning, a trip to my shrink, psychiatric medications and a lot of preparation.

I left the house the first week of January to see Avatar. I was supposed to go to a baby shower in Toronto at the end of January but I couldn’t deal with going to a place with a bunch of people I didn’t know so I didn’t go. Seeing Avatar in January was the only time I left my house that month. In the first week of February I went to my doctor to get a new prescription and in the second week of February, I went to my shrink appointment. In the middle of February, I went with Blake to the grocery store for about 5 minutes. And that’s it. I left the house 3 times in February. Now it’s March. I went to the doctor’s tonight to get a pap smear and chances are, that’ll be my only outing for the month of March. A normal person wouldn’t be able to tell you the exact places and the amount of times they left the house in any given month, but I can because it’s such a rare occurrence and since they are such rare occurrences, I mark these outings down on my calendar. Again, a normal person wouldn’t do that.

Last spring, when I took a walk down the Trans-Canada Trail by my house to take pictures, that was the first time in about 6 & a half years that I went anywhere by myself. Last spring I tested my agoraphobic limits with mixed success. When I went to one of the local restaurants to have breakfast all by myself, I was so freaked out by the situation that I didn’t leave the house for a month. Last spring & summer, Lucky and I checked the mail and mailed things in the middle of the night and that was a huge deal. All of these things can easily be searched on this blog under “agoraphobia” for those who are interested.

My agoraphobia is compounded during the fall and winter by Seasonal Affective Disorder. I simply do not leave the house unless I absolutely have to during this time. In the spring & summer, that’s when I go back at it with the immersion therapy, although truth be told, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve mostly given up on that because at this point I have zero motivation for trying to get better. I live in a shitty little town with nothing in it and nowhere to go and I have no car. I don’t think I can get better here. I’m not sure where I could get better exactly, but here ain’t it.

And that’s the thing, which I don’t know if it’s part of the phobia or what, but 95% of the time I’m okay with not leaving the house. I stopped fantasizing about a different life a long time ago.

Also, part of agoraphobia is that quite often, as is the case with me, the person has a hard time letting people in to their homes. It’s not just about leaving one’s home. Having people in my house is a very hard thing for me to do. At Xmas time the neighbours offered to watch my dogs for me so we didn’t have to bring them up North with us, but i couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have people in my home when I wasn’t there. And even when I am here, if people are going to come over, we all make a mad dash for the cleaning supplies because I don’t want people judging me by our home, which isn’t exactly the nicest home to begin with. A babysitter being here so Blake and I can go out? Unheard of. My kids have only been babysat in our home by our friends Alex & Ronny and my mother. When the neighbours watch the kids, the kids go over there. Hiring a babysitter, like a teenager or whatever, simply wouldn’t happen.

I think my agoraphobia started in two ways: 1) I’m pretty sure that whenever I left the house when we lived above my grandma’s furniture store, she came into the apartment and snooped. That made me so mental that I stopped leaving the house so she couldn’t do that and that’s why I can’t have people in my house when I’m not there now. 2) When Blake moved in and had to give back his car, he took over mine and it was just easier for him to get groceries on the way home from work than for me to go do it after he came home and I have access to a car. Since we lived in the middle of nowhere, there was nowhere for me to go, especially without a car. And this lasted years until it became habit and then became phobia.

But long long long before that there were signs that this was just part of my natural state. When I was 15 and living with my boyfriend at the time’s parents, I rarely left the house then too. I would go to check the mail which meant walking about 20 feet from the house and I would do so in my pajamas at 2:30am. Sometimes I’d go to my Aunt’s house in town, which was about a 15 minute walk, but again, I’d only do it at night and most of the time in my pajamas.

I know when I absolutely have to, I can leave the house, kick ass and take names. When Zulu got hit by the car, I didn’t even think about it, I got in the car with the cop who stopped to help, with Zulu in the back seat and I dealt with the vet by myself and went back home with the cop while Blake was on his way to the vet’s to take care of the rest. When it was just Madison and I in our apartment in Uxbridge, I only had a bar fridge and I’d load Madison up in her stroller and we’d do groceries every day. When I was in college, I dealt with Madison going to daycare and drove myself to Toronto every single day because in all of the above scenarios, what choice did I have?

If Blake died tomorrow, I’m fairly confident that we’d all be okay and that I could get shit done. (Don’t get me wrong, Blake dying would suck, but life does go on, bills still have to be paid, kids still have to be driven to school.)

As things stand though, as I said, there’s little motivation for me to get better. There’s nothing in the outside world for me except these rare situations like an art show, a movie or a concert and I do all of the above extremely seldom.

As I said in the beginning, agoraphobia is not a cut & dry thing. It affects everyone differently. Yes, there are similarities in every agoraphobic patient, but they all have to be treated on a case-by-case basis. I’ve just explained how my case presents itself and it is my hope that I won’t have to do it again.

Oh procrastination, definitely my best skill. Right now I’m supposed to be writing an article on what it was like being raised by a teen mom for Buttercup but instead I’m sitting here listening to music and contemplating a full day of Dragon Age Origins.

The last few days have been phenomenal for me. First, on Sunday my country won gold for hockey and the game was unbelievable, one of the greatest games I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I told Blake at the beginning of the Olympics that if Canada’s men took gold, he wouldn’t be able to stop me from ordering myself a Team Canada jersey, which I’ve always wanted. So, minutes after Sidney Crosby scored the final goal in overtime that gave Canada the win, I whipped out my credit card and ordered my Team Canada jersey. I wanted a medium, which is the same size as my Leafs jersey, but Blake wanted to be able to wear it too so I got a large.

Then on Monday, it was my birthday, which was pretty low-key. Blake got me Y the Last Man books 6, 7 and 8, so I spent the day reading those and eating half of a McCain’s chocolate cake. (I also did a show that afternoon, which is available in the archives, although it’s nothing spectacular.) My mom sent me a card in the mail with a $25 gift card to Michael’s (an art supply store) and on his way home, Blake asked me what I wanted for my birthday dinner, but I felt too sick to eat anything (I’m just getting over a stomach flu) so I told him I’d take a raincheque on that for another night. And that was pretty much my whole birthday.

But then YESTERDAY was like, an extension of my birthday where many good things happened. It started off not so good, as I was awoken by my dogs freaking out because someone was knocking at the door. I tried to ignore them but they kept freaking out so I got up and by the time I did, whoever was knocking was gone and there was a DHL post-it on the door saying that they’d try again tomorrow (today) to make their delivery. Since DHL is an international shipping company, I knew the package they were delivering was contraband from Cuba that our friend Drew had sent to us when he was on vacation there since he couldn’t send Cuban stuff to his home in MI. I signed the post-it saying that they could leave the package at the door and stuck it back on the door and put one of the large magnets we have on our door so it wouldn’t blow away.

After that, my neighbours called and asked me to come over, so I did and we sat & chatted for a couple of hours. They gave me a birthday card with a scratch off ticket inside for my birthday and that was cool. Then I came back home and made myself eggs and watched the movie Private Benjamin, which I’d never seen before and now that I’ve seen it, I cannot for the life of me figure out how or why Goldie Hawn won an OSCAR for that role because she was as Goldie as she’s ever been in any other movie I’ve ever seen her in. It must have been a slow year that year.

While I watched the movie, I renewed a couple of domains I own and registered a new one (my youngest sister’s name), and then I put in my order with Vesey’s for the seeds for the veggie garden we’re going to have this year. Our house came with a veggie garden already “built” in the backyard that’s about 14 feet by maybe 6 or 7 feet and bordered by railway ties. I ordered Royal Burgundy Beans, which are a bush bean that is purple, but when you cook them, they turn green and for that reason, they’re a big hit with the kids. I also ordered napoli carrots, thunder cucumbers, simpson elite leaf lettuce, parade green onions, super sugar snap peas, fat & sassy green peppers, purple star peppers (that are sweet peppers that are PURPLE and look lovely in salads), bobcat tomatoes and sugary cherry tomatoes. Truth be told, I’m not sure the garden’s big enough for all of that stuff, but I’ve never had a veggie garden before so I’m kind of going by trial & error. Mostly I’m worried about the cucumbers because I think vines need a lot of room to grow, but I figure if I plant them along the top of the garden they can drape over the 3 feet of lawn between the garden and the house and we just won’t mow there or we’ll move the vines when we mow and then put them back. And as I do every year, the whole gardening experience will be documented on my site.

After I ordered the veggie seeds, the movie was over and I took a nap which I was rudely awakened from by the dogs freaking out again because my kids were talking to other kids in our driveway.

When I finally got out of bed, after the kids had come inside, there was an Amazon package sitting on my desk that Madison told me had been sitting against the front door when they came home. So I opened it and inside was all kinds of birthday presents from a friend, including Dragon Age Origins which I’ve been wanting to play since it was released.

After I opened the Amazon package, I sent a thank you to the person who sent all of it and after it was sent and my browser came back to my inbox, there was an e-mail from Vancouver 2010 telling me that my Team Canada jersey had shipped and that it should be here in a few days. Score!

Shortly after that, Blake called me on his way home and I asked him if I could have my belated birthday dinner and he said yes, so I asked him to bring me home an assorted sub from Mr. Sub, because I had full intentions of installing Dragon Age as soon as I got off the phone with him and a sub is an easy meal to eat at the computer. See? Always thinkin’ ahead.

Well, I got distracted by Madison, who had sprained her toe and required drugs because she was in pain. Her toe looked horrific, it was so purple it was almost black, but she could move it, so at least it wasn’t broken. She said she sprained it when she fell at recess. Soooooo I drugged her and she went to bed.

Then Blake came home and I began installing Dragon Age, which I played for about 5 hours and then I went to bed.

Annnnnnnnnd now you’re up to date with the past couple of days of my life. :o)

Super old cam pic from when I made hundreds of wax paper hearts for mobiles that I put up over our windows for Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day has always been one of my favourite holidays, even though these days I don’t do a whole lot for it. In past years, I’ve been known to do special creative projects for the holiday, such as the mobile pictured above, or I’ve sent out Valentines to my online friends, but as I’ve gotten older (and poorer and busier)  these things have fallen by the wayside. That’s okay though, because I know it won’t always be like this and I’ll be able to do more in future years. (Kind of like my attitude toward Halloween. I want to be one of those families that decorates their house and gives out awesome candy but alas, we don’t get any trick-or-treaters where we are and couldn’t afford to do it even if we did.)

Anyway, Blake & I aren’t doing anything special today, especially because he, Wes & I seem to have a particularly nasty stomach bug of some kind and our bathroom has practically had a revolving door all weekend.

Valentine’s Day means two things, however. It means that there’s only two weeks until my birthday and everyone should get me lots & lots of presents and it also means that there’s one month until Steak & Blowjob Day. Since my article on giving head is linked on the Steak & BJ Day website, it means that my site is currently getting twice the traffic it normally gets and by the time the actual holiday rolls around, my traffic will have tripled. That’s a whole lot of new people around here reading my crap! So hello new people! Welcome to Sunnyland! Glad to have ya. :o)

Another thing Valentine’s Day means, to me and some of my friends at least, is that it’s Love Your Vulva day, or V-Day for short, something that we’ve been celebrating all month over at Buttercup. Buttercup’s actually been pretty hoppin’ all month, you should pop over there and check it out. So far this month we’ve had articles on VDay.org, Katie’s sexually repressed upbringing, how chicks dig porn, Blake’s experiences growing up in a penis-centric world, an article on our featured site, Camwhores.com, an article on vulva art, phenomenal woman, Holly Hughes, who you’ve probably never heard of but probably should, and finally an article by Jade about some of the strangest vulva-centric products we’ve ever seen – with much more to come during the rest of the month! We’ve also added two new groups to the mix. S/he is a group about sexism and so far the conversations have been really interesting and enlightening and we also added a group for sports, which needs a better name than “Sports”, so if you have any ideas on that, we’d love to hear them! Along with the new groups, we’ve also redesigned the front page a little bit and we have plans to redesign it further for next month. Lots of changes thanks to the feedback we got from the Buttercup community at the end of January! Thanks readers!

So, things over at Buttercup are doing good. You should take a peek if you get the chance. :o)

I realize this month I’ve been fairly quiet as far as blog posts go and there are a million reasons for that, namely preparing for and celebrating Wes’ 7th birthday, but also I’ve been hard at work painting ACEOs for my Etsy shop since art is pretty much all I can do when I’m in the kind of pain I’ve been in for the past couple of weeks due to endometriosis issues. I plan on doing nothing but working on ACEOs until this batch is finished because so far, they’ve proven to be pretty popular items in my Etsy shop, having sold half of the first batch I put up 2 weeks ago with the other half getting plenty of views. This first batch that I put up was of gold & black and purple & gold cards and right now all that’s left is the gold ones. The ones I’m working on are more purple & gold ones, some green & gold ones and a whole bunch of red & gold ones. I’ll, of course, make a post when this batch is ready and up on Etsy. In the meantime, you should take a look at the gold & black ones I have up there currently as I think they turned out rather well and hey, these things are supposed to be collectible, so if you buy a gold & black one this month, there’s no reason you can’t buy a red & gold one next month! *cough*

As I’m reading the Etsy forums, I’m learning that ideally what you’re supposed to do is market to people outside of Etsy and bring them into your shop. For that reason, I spent yesterday afternoon designing Moo cards with my artwork on the front of them and my website addresses on the back to include a couple with Etsy orders. By including more than one, it means the buyer will probably keep one and potentially give the other one(s) to friends. I’m also working on getting the funds for another promotional item, which I’ll write more about after I have the money to order them and actually send them out to people. If all goes as planned though, they’re pretty cool – or at least I think so – plus they have sentimental value, which again, I’ll write more about when I actually have them in my possession. (I’m only 1 ACEO sale away from being able to order them!)

And I guess that’s all I really have to say at the moment. It’s been a busy month and it’s going to continue to be busy. My neighbour’s daughter, Ashley, is due to have her baby any day now, so since my neighbour (Judy) doesn’t have a camera, I’ve lent her mine and that’s why there haven’t been pictures of anything in my recent posts. Ashley was actually due like, 4 or 5 days ago, so she could literally pop any day now and I should get my camera back soon.

Okay, I hope you all have a wonderful Valentine’s Day! I’m off to watch the Olympics and work on these ACEOs.

I don’t know what’s been up my ass lately but I’ve been super productive over the last 4 or 5 days. My bee girl painting is almost finished and so is the one I’m doing for Ashley for her baby shower. All I’ve been doing is drawing/painting and watching Six Feet Under starting from the first season (I’m now on season 3). Today I’ll continue to work on both paintings and watching Six Feet Under and then I’ll watch the Leafs game and repeat.

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!

Last night Judy watched the kids and we spent 2 grueling hours in a packed Wal*Mart doing the bulk of our Xmas shopping. This year I/we decided fuck it, if you’re a grown up who can buy your own crap, I’m not even gonna bother hazarding a guess as to what you DON’T already have, so (and hopefully none of them are reading this, but I guess it doesn’t matter much if they are) all grown ups in our lives are getting pictures of the kids and gift certificates. Blake got almost all of the gift certificates yesterday on his lunch and only has one more to get today and then we are DONE.

Today Madison and I are going to clean the bathroom, then tomorrow after work Blake is going to vacuum and then my house will be presentable enough for when my mom, her boyfriend John and his son Chris come over to have Xmas with us on Boxing Day. I didn’t get John or Chris anything for Xmas because my mom basically told me not to, which was a great relief because we’re in the poorhouse as it is and my poor Visa is dangerously close to its limit. We decided not to defer our mortgage payment this month, but instead do all of our Xmas shopping on Visa and pay it off when Blake gets his bonus in March. If anything comes up between now & then, like say the car blows up, then we can defer a mortgage payment if need be and have it taken care of.  Now that we’re done our Xmas shopping, the only “big ticket item” we have to worry about is getting all of the animals their shots in January and then getting their township tags.

After we got home from Wal*Mart, Blake made a great steak dinner that I couldn’t eat because right now I’m pretty fucking sick and the only thing keeping me sane is Advil Cold & Sinus. I thought it was just a cold when it hit me on Friday but I’ve had a fever off & on all weekend and yesterday, my whole body aches etc. so I’m putting it more in the flu category. I am SO SCARED to get any of these friggin’ kids sick (ours + Courtney) that I reek of hand sanitizer and there have been no bedtime hugs. I just do not want to deal with 3 sick kids during the 2 & a half week holiday break, especially not if I’m sick myself.  I feel really bad that I felt too bad to eat the dinner Blake made us last night. :o/

We (well he) ate while we watched the Leafs vs Sabres game I started recording while we were at Wal*Mart and when food was done, I got started on wrapping presents. We got Madison this cute makeup bag that’s turquoise patent leather and her first set of makeup. I went way way way overboard in hooking her up with a good variety of stuff (like 6 bottles of nail polish, 3 compacts of eyeshadow…) and I wrapped each thing individually and put it in the bag, with cotton balls on top, zipped it up, then put the bag in a box and then we wrapped the box up. Annoyingly, Blake left a bag on my chair this morning with my hoodie over it which contained makeup removing facewash and mascara that should have gone in the bag with everything else, but I thought all of the cosmetic type stuff was in the bag I was wrapping from…soooooo I wrapped up the mascara & taped it to the box and the facewash I’ll just put in her stocking or something.

And that’s all I got wrapped last night because rapping all of those teeny tiny things took me the entire hockey game and when it was done I was exhausted so I just went to bed. What kills me about wrapping presents is how bad I suck at it. I make all these cute little girls with cute little paper dresses and I’m a whiz with scissors etc. but when I wrap presents, it looks like it was done by Wes. In fact Wes probably does a better job than I do. That’s why every year I usually get Blake to do all the wrapping but this year there won’t be enough time for that so I have to pitch in. While we were at Wal*Mart I bought gift boxes so at least some stuff I won’t have to wrap.

The next thing on my blogging agenda is that my cat is fucking retarded. Every single year for Xmas I buy her a treat or a toy and every single year she wants no part of it. Last year it was a laser pointer, she wanted nothing to do with it. The year before that a mouse or something, I can’t remember but she didn’t want anything to do with it. The year before that I bought her like, 5 different kinds of cat treats but she wouldn’t eat any of them. She just likes her cat food and that’s it. A few weeks ago someone on Facebook linked a YouTube video of all these cats getting stoned on catnip in a garden and I thought HEY WE SHOULD TRY THAT because I’ve never seen a cat actually high on catnip before. So last night, I bought some and it came with a little heart-shaped toy to put the dry catnip in. So I filled it up and got the cat and got her to sniff it and…she wanted no part of it. The toy then split apart and I spilled dry catnip all over my office floor so I picked a bit up and got her to sniff it and no dice. I thought maybe, just maybe, after we went to sleep she’d start getting all stoned on the pile which I left on my office floor for her but when I woke up this morning, it was undisturbed. So I give up. The cat no longer gets anything for Xmas and I guess Alex’s cats have a new toy and a big bag of catnip. Someone remind me next year that my cat sucks and not to get her anything because I know I’ll forget (or maybe it’s denial).

Blake & I weren’t going to get each other anything for Xmas this year due to money, but when we were at Wal*Mart I picked myself up some makeup because I’m running low on the essentials and this was an excuse to replenish my stock. We also happened to be going down the aisle with all the sports stuff and Blake pointed out Leafs jerseys….that were PINK & WHITE. Obviously not regulation, being pink & white, but NHL sanctioned and so Blake got me one for Xmas and I got him a Leafs home jersey (not regulation either). One day I will have a regulation Leafs home jersey to go along with my Leafs 3rd jersey but since they’re over $100, we’ll make due with Wal*Mart jerseys for now.

The rest of the stuff we got was mostly odds & ends, like I was out of incense so I picked up a bunch of that and I wanted to get a plastic “boot mat” for under the dogs’ bowls because they make such a mess and there’s constantly dog food all over my kitchen. (Lucky eats laying down and if Hoover’s eating too, Lucky will pick up his bowl and eat in the living room.) I also wanted to get Madison some yarn because I know she’s getting crochet hooks for Xmas and books about how to crochet, so we picked up a bunch of that too. She also needed pajamas and bras so those went in the cart as well.

We didn’t really get anything for Wes at Wal*Mart because Blake had gotten him stuff at Toys ‘R’ Us yesterday afternoon (Lego, some plastic dragons, I forget what else), but we did pick him up Lego Batman for his DS and Blake had already gotten him a few pairs of pajamas and some clothes so he’s good.

We got my 4 year old sister Raili some Barbies and my 10 month old sister Rachael a set of Little People. We got Courtney next door a DS game of Deal or No Deal. What else? I don’t even remember and you probably don’t care anyway. Long story short, after Blake picks up a couple of things on his lunch today, we are done our Xmas shopping completely. I plan on spending all afternoon today and tomorrow wrapping things and getting the house clean and after that we should be good to go.

Blake called my dad on Sunday and asked him to clean up the garage for the dogs, which he said he’d do and that takes a lot off my mind. What do the dogs get for Xmas? Well my dad hunts and I’m not sure what he hunted for this year, but usually it’s deer and moose and occasionally bear but whatever he hunted for in the fall, he gets the butcher to save him some of the bigger bones for his dogs and mine to have at Xmas.

I also have children’s Gravol to give the dogs before we leave so they don’t puke in the car on the way up. (And yes we called the vet and yes you can give dogs half of a children’s Gravol if they’re the size of mine.)

So I guess that’s it, we’re on track for Xmas. I had more to say but I think I’ll just end things here and start wrapping presents.