I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me that I am this tired all the time. It’s like I have mono or something. I went to bed last night at like, 9:30pm and I got up at 4am. Then I went back to bed at 7am until about 9am. And I feel like I could go to sleep again right now and sleep for another couple of hours.  It’s a far cry from the mania-like state I was in over the weekend where I didn’t sleep very much and had crazy energy. I’m not sure why there was such a switcheroo.

Either way, I hate it. Give me mania any day.

On Tuesday I got a couple of surprise cheques in the mail, which Blake cashed for me yesterday and I dunno what bit me in the ass, but I decided that it was time to finally try SUSHI.

Actually, let me back up.

Last Thursday, I think, Blake went to work in Toronto and when he works in the city, I sometimes get him to stop off at the Zehrs grocery store in Barrie because they have an actual fish counter and deli (unlike our grocery store here) and there you can get salmon steaks, as opposed to fillets, which is the only way I’ll eat it. (Which is only partially true because I’ll eat salmon out of a can on sandwiches and I’ll eat tuna salad.)

Anyway, I got him to stop off there and he brought home some veggie sushi for himself. And I’ve been a little more experimental since getting sick when it comes to food, like, I’ll eat salad in the winter now (sometimes) for example and I’ll drink water (as long as it’s bottled or Brita filtered).  I asked him if I could try a piece of his sushi and he said yes, so I tried it and thought it was okay and said that I thought I would like to go to a sushi restaurant one day. He said next paycheque we would go to this Japanese restaurant he went to with his friend Charissa once where you pay a set amount and then you order from the menu as much as you want.

The reason I’d never really had sushi before is that:

- I don’t like plain rice.
- I don’t like pickled things.
- I don’t like seafood.
- I don’t like seaweed.

I’d tried sushi rice once before and didn’t like it. I’d tried seaweed before when I was in grade 5 and didn’t like it. And truthfully, I didn’t really *like* Blake’s sushi from the grocery store, I just thought it wasn’t totally disgusting.

That said, I have been obsessed with sushi for a long time. Like easily 10 years. I’m not a sushi expert, I don’t know what it’s all called and I don’t care, but I think it is THE most beautiful food that man has ever devised. Sushi is absolutely my food porn. I even have pictures of it I’ve had printed and put in one of my sketchbooks.

(Wes drew on this page when he was little and got a hold of a pen.)

I have a very specific art idea having to do with sushi that I’ve never put on canvas but I think I probably should sometime soon.

To say that I was stoked to try sushi last night is an understatement. I’d tweeted Ronny and Alex to see if they wanted to come with us because Alex knows lots about sushi and they did, so we met at the restaurant Alex recommended, called Akira, and they have a dinner “buffet” (like how I mentioned it works) for $20.99 per person, which I thought was a pretty good deal for the amount of food we got. (Although I do agree with the reviews on the site I linked that the waitstaff kinda sucked. It wasn’t especially busy but  it took us like, an hour and 15 minutes to have dinner between trying to order and the slow kitchen.) Apparently Akira is the best sushi place in town so I felt confident that I’d have a good first sushi experience.

For our first round, I ordered salmon rolls, tuna rolls, cucumber rolls and beef teriyaki, which is one of my favourite foods. I forget what everyone else ordered, except Blake who got sushi and something called udon that looked pretty nasty to me; those noodles were creepy.

I learned that I suck at chopsticks and since I just don’t give a fuck, I used my fingers and I ate a cucumber roll, which was the same, pretty much, as the rolls Blake got from the grocery store. The difference though, was that the seaweed was on the outside of the rice of all the rolls I ordered and it was on the inside of the rice on the ones from the grocery store, which I really would have preferred. Regardless, I ate the cucumber one and it was alright. Again, just alright. Not really good, not really bad, just. Period.

Then I tried a tuna roll and the stench of it before it even hit my mouth was almost too much to deal with, but I put it in my mouth anyway and chewed and it was just slimy and fishy and nasty.

I decided to try the salmon anyway, thinking maybe it would be different, especially because I like salmon a lot, but it wasn’t different at all, it was just slimy and fishy and nasty.

I ate all but one of my cucumber rolls because as it turns out, 6 is too much for me because after a while it starts tasting gross to me (the rice), so Blake ate my last one and I ordered more beef teriyaki, chicken teriyaki and tempura vegetables. I didn’t like the tempura vegetables either. :o/ I ate two pieces of broccoli and I tried a bite of eggplant (gross!) and while I liked the batter, it was hard to eat and not really worth the effort.

Ronny had ordered some kind of eel sushi with flying fish eggs on it so I tried a tiny bit of flying fish eggs but they tasted like bugs to me (or how I’d imagine bugs would taste) so I washed them down with Coke as fast as possible. I’d tried flying fish eggs in Vegas with Ana Voog many years ago but I’d forgotten their texture. (Seriously. Exploding bugs.)

All in all, it was a great experience but I think I’ll be sticking to looking at pictures of sushi as opposed to eating it. The smell of the fish really bothered me so I don’t even think I’ll be going to a sushi restaurant again either. The teriyaki was REALLY good but the portion was ridiculously minimal and I’m used to teriyaki stir fry so when they handed me a little plate with a slab of beef with some sauce on it, I was kinda shocked. Also the chicken wasn’t sliced all the way through so I had to tear it apart with my fingers because I couldn’t figure out how to get it apart with chopsticks. I also forgot to mention that I got chicken fried rice and it was horrible. It was just plain white rice with some soya sauce splashed onto it with peas and carrots and a few chunks of meat. It wasn’t really fried and it wasn’t really mixed together very well. It was the 2nd worst chicken fried rice I’ve ever had.

Having said all that, I think the restaurant was actually really good. Everyone else’s food looked pretty good and while I think the presentation did leave a little to be desired, it wasn’t horrible and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. And I think the price was pretty decent, like I said, for the amount of food we got.

I’m glad I got that out of the way so I can stop wondering if I liked sushi or not. It’s definitely a “not” and nothing anyone says to me will ever change that so don’t even bother telling me that if I tried “X” I would have had a different experience as that seems to be happening wherever I’ve mentioned it online. (Hello, I know what I like, okay?)

Despite not liking the food very much, I had a good time with Ronny and Alex. On Tuesday they met George R. R. Martin at a book signing in Toronto and they took my boxed set of the first four Game of Thrones books to be signed, which was pretty cool.

Maybe now I’ll actually read the books. How necessary is it to read the first one if you’ve already seen season one of the show? I like reading on the treadmill and since I’m supposed to be using it, I figured I might start with these.

Okay, I have to get back to my misterie projekt X giant canvas, I hope you’re having a wonderful week!

PS. I plan on putting certain old pieces of my art up for sale on my site (as opposed to Etsy) that I previously didn’t think I’d part with, starting with “Camp Tampon“. I don’t honestly expect anyone to buy them, but I figure if I don’t put them out there, no one really ever will so I might as well just go for it and see what happens.

PPS. Here’s an interesting article on the whole Pinterest debate: Copyright is Not the Problem, You Are! Here’s another one from the lawyer who deleted her inspiration boards. (Warning: She’s obnoxious and didn’t really tell us anything new. She just gushed like a 12 year old fangirl on how she got a call from the creator of Pinterest.)

PPPS. A big thanks to Alan for making our sushi outing possible! You rock our socks!

I am so in love with my husband it’s entirely ridiculous. I really only think about two things these days: Blake and painting. I’d like to be able to say that I’ve been in love with him since the day we met but that wouldn’t be a true statement. I was in lust with him since the day we met, but when we met I had a boyfriend so I didn’t/couldn’t act on it, however, the day my boyfriend dumped me (long story, we’re still friends today yadda yadda) I said to my friend Nicole, who was also friends with Blake, “what do you think Blake is up to?” and she FORBID me to go out with him. We, of course, ignored her, and we’ve been joined at the hip ever since.

Blake says that the very first time he saw a picture of me online (Naked Fan Fame on the Scratching Post website), he said to Nicole (the lead singer of Scratching Post) that he was going to marry me one day and obviously he made good on that. :o)

Anyway, ever since I got sick, or more to the point, ever since I started recovering from being sick, Blake’s been on my mind pretty much constantly because I’ve been so worried about him. It’s like…I remember going to the hospital in Midland because I had the worst pain in my stomach I’ve ever experienced in my life (child birth x 1000 kinda pain) and then basically all I remember is waking up in a different hospital and being told what had happened to me. More to the point though, I woke up and my husband was an entirely different person. He wasn’t the happy, positive person I’ve always known him to be, he’s been irritable, emotional, downright miserable at times and just unhappy in general as he finally has the chance to process the events of the summer when breaking down was simply not an option.

Slowly but surely he’s coming back to me but the problem is that he doesn’t know how to have fun anymore and we don’t really know how to have fun together. And to heal, we need to have more fun in our lives, more fun together, outside of the kids. I’m not talking about “putting the spice back into your marriage” kind of stuff (although we’re trying that too, not out of necessity but out of a sense of “why not?”), I’m talking about like, board games, going out for dinner dates and stuff we haven’t even discovered yet. The artist dates were not a part of that, that was for me and Blake doesn’t really have the greatest time on them because he finds buying art supplies really boring (because he’s crazy, obviously…).

On March 18th, for example, we’re going to see the TIFF Game or Thrones exhibition in Toronto. I saw an ad for it in this free movie magazine we get from our cable company and told Ronny about it so he could call the number and get us tickets because I knew Alex would want to go too. I thought that that would be something that didn’t cost us money (okay there’s gonna be lunch and parking) and something that would be adult fun with our adult friends. That’s the kind of stuff that I’m trying to incorporate into our lives to help Blake recover from my almost dying this summer. Fun things for us to do together, both large and small (and if anyone has any suggestions on things we could do, I’m more than happy to hear them; the cheaper the better because we are b-r-o-k-e).

Last night we went to The Stag Shop in Barrie, which is an adult store full of rubber dicks and various other sex paraphernalia. The reason we went was two-fold (and I’ve okayed talking about this with Madison): Madison has expressed an interest in a vibrator and I wanted to get flavoured condoms so we could engage in an act that was purely focused on Blake.

Now, obviously getting an almost 14-year-old a vibrator could be seen as controversial, I understand that, but she asked for one and I’d rather her do things the right way than to do what one of her friends did (stole her mom’s “back massager”, which by all descriptions appears to be a Hitachi Magic Wand LOL), or what another one of her friends has been doing (masturbating with Sharpies…) or doing what I did and start using mine when I wasn’t around because that’s gross. (She can’t use our showerhead like I did when I was her age because the hose isn’t long enough.) She’s 13, she’s masturbating. In fact, she started masturbating when she was like, 7 or 8, in full view on the couch in front of us and we had to have a talk about privacy – kids masturbate. Some parents don’t want to hear that but it’s true! So why wouldn’t you want them to do it in the safest, healthiest way possible?

So I chose for her this little pink vibrating bunny. I threw out the box already so I can’t link you to the exact one we bought but it’s literally a bunny figurine made out of that jelly stuff they make vibrators out of. It’s meant for clitoral stimulation and I did this on purpose because I don’t think, for reasons that I won’t get into, that she’s ready for penetration yet. She won’t even use a tampon. This bunny is pretty unassuming and when I gave it to her she genuinely seemed to like it. I made sure to confirm that she knew where and what her clitoris is and told her how I would use it if it were mine, but that she would need to experiment with it to find the best possible way for her to use it. We also told her about keeping it in a place where Wes wouldn’t find it, washing it after each use and in general, just how to take care of it. Oh and batteries for it, from this point forward, are to be purchased with allowance money.

All in all, I think we did a pretty good job with talking to her about it maturely and not embarrassingly, and that she came away with it with healthy curiosity. This is what I wish my mom would have done with me. If sex hadn’t been this totally mysterious, dirty thing I probably wouldn’t have made a lot of the choices in life that I did regarding it and I would have had a much healthier sex life than I’ve had most of my life. I think masturbation is the foundation for a good, healthy sex life and I feel that it’s important that my kids know how to do it and how to do it “right” in that, you do it in private, you do it with the appropriate things (ie. not Sharpies or electric toothbrushes) and that you don’t let it flow into other people’s lives (ie. you don’t leave your jizz socks in the family laundry hamper for someone to stick their hand on when doing laundry!).

Anyway, it’s something that you don’t really think about when they’re really little (well, I did…but most people don’t) but it’s something that I think parents need to be totally prepared for. And I’m not saying every girl needs a vibrator – although I do believe that, in theory! – you can have the same type of discussion with them and only talk about hands and fingers. It’s just that I told her a long time ago that if we could afford it, when she decided she was curious enough about sex to want to experiment with a vibrator, I would buy her one and yesterday I made good on that promise.

And before someone freaks on me for talking about this publicly, again I have Madison’s permission to do so. She thinks this is a totally healthy thing and that every girl should have a mom like me. She sees the girls in her class and how curious they are but how stifled that curiosity is by their parents (most of them, anyway) and she’s glad she’s not one of them.

Onto adult things…

Like I said, we also got flavoured condoms because I will not give a blowjob to completion. I think semen is fucking disgusting and I do not want it anywhere near me. Traditionally, I use my oral skills for foreplay and then we finish off by having sex. That’s how it’s always been my entire life with every guy I’ve ever been with, but right now with my stomach muscles all over the place and this big ugly binder I have to wear and the fact that I have this giant wound on my abdomen so I can’t shower (I use washcloths and baby wipes, I’m not a dirty pig haha), actual intercourse is few and far between. And intercourse is about the two of us as well, which is all fine and dandy but sometimes, a lot of the time actually, I’d rather just focus on Blake because I’d just like to make him feel good. He does so much for me in all facets of our lives and while I’m an agoraphobic freak and have limited resources, a blowjob I can do! But not without flavoured condoms. Soooo that’s what we picked up yesterday and we tested out this morning with GREAT SUCCESS!

Once Blake explained to me recently that sometimes he just wants to have an orgasm without having to do anything, something clicked in my brain and I was like, “I can make that happen!” and now I’m all gung-ho to do things that’ll make him happy. Because he deserves to be happy and I want him to be happy and he’s been so UNhappy that it just breaks my heart so if I can take 20 minutes out of my day and blow his mind, I’m going to do that. Sex is how adults play, so let’s play! Y’know?

I also got this Doc Johnson vibe, which I’m really really excited about but haven’t used yet.

Also yesterday, my Curry’s order came in and my big, beautiful 30 x 36 inch behemoth of a canvas is now sitting on the coffee table in my office, base-coated in “Surf” by Martha Stewart which is this gorgeous light aqua blue colour. Originally I’d painted the canvas with Americana’s “Spa Blue”, which is almost identical to “Surf” but a little lighter and a little more blue (but like, so close it’s almost imperceptible to anyone but me) but when I went to Michael’s last night to get more “Spa Blue” to do a second coat and to have another bottle on hand to paint over mistakes, I found that Americana doesn’t even make that colour anymore! In fact, which was really really fucking obnoxious Americana doesn’t make ANY of the colours I needed anymore so I had to improvise mostly using Martha Stewart paint instead of Americana!

I’d made a really detailed mock up of the painting I want to do with colour swatches and the whole works that I brought with me to Michael’s and I’m extremely glad I did because without it I would have been lost. Since it was so detailed, I could hold paint bottles up to the colours I’d chosen for things and could re-choose colours based on that.

In the end, I got all of the colours I needed and in fact some of the colours I got from the Martha Stewart line were being discontinued (I think) so they were on clearance for $1.49! Score! Plus honestly? I think I like the Martha Stewart paint a lot better than Americana. Americana has more colours but that’s to be expected since they’ve been around forever and Martha’s line is pretty new. Martha’s paint just seems to be thicker and more pigmented than Americana, which it should be because the price difference between the two is pretty outrageous. For non-metallic Americana, it’s $1.99 a bottle and for non-pearlized Martha Stewart colours, they’re $3.99. For the same size bottles. BUT I’ve been to Michael’s like, every week for the past 2 months and the Martha Stewart paints have been on sale for 30-40% off the entire time and they’re just better so that’s what I’ve been buying. Don’t get me wrong though, both companies are essential for what I do. For example, Martha’s only metallic (sorry, “pearlized“) red is called “Holly Berry” and DecoArt’s (the company that makes Americana paint) metallic red is called “Festive Red” and while the difference between the two is very very subtle, there is one and “Holly Berry” is slightly more blue than “Festive Red”, which is a true red. So that’s why I would need both lines for what I do.

Because so many of the colours I needed were on clearance for $1.49, my total for paint was only about $23 when I’d originally estimated that I’d need about $50 worth of it to complete the project, so that’s good. However, I kinda blew my savings when we went to Curry’s to exchange some of the brushes I’d ordered online because the bristles were this awful scratchy stuff instead of the white, soft bristles I’m used to. I just ordered the wrong ones by accident. I’d ordered three large flat brushes starting at an inch wide and going down slightly by size and I exchanged them for two large flat brushes and a 3/4 inch angled brush that I’ve been coveting for a while now and decided I needed for this project. However, the brushes I’d ordered online were cheaper than the ones I wanted in the store (the kind I normally use, it’s not like I was going crazy buying brushes or anything) so I ended up going $15 over my brushes budget. But it’s a big canvas so I needed big brushes, what can I say?

Also from Curry’s, I ordered my gel medium for Squam and I got a good pencil sharpener for Squam too since I don’t want to bring my electric sharpener. I got spray fixative as well, which I’ve never used before. Spray fixative is this stuff, kinda like varnish, that you spray over something like watercolours so you can do a layer over top of them. Or at least that’s what I’ll be using it for. I’ll explain that better: Okay so I use watercolour pencils in my work a lot (although you’d probably never know it). So if I used watercolour pencils as layer 1 and I allow them to dry but I want to do something over TOP of that layer, I would spray fixative on it, which would enable me to do a second layer of watercolour over top of the original layer, without it affecting the original layer. Does that make sense? Because if you let your original layer dry and then tried to do a second layer over top, it would disturb the original layer and you’d probably end up with a brown mess. The fixative I bought is made by Krylon, who makes the spray varnish I often use, but fixative *isn’t* varnish. You can still work on top of fixative whereas you cannot with varnish. Varnish is the final layer, a protective finish.

At least that is my understanding of fixative. I could be wrong but that’s what the directions indicate and that’s how I plan to use it. You can also apparently use it on top of charcoal, chalk and pastels.

Okay, I’ve been up since 5:45am and the only productive thing I’ve done so far today is give Blake a blowjob so I think it’s time to watch Doctor Who and tackle this canvas. Today is my 9 hour workday so it’s gonna be a long one.

Have a great weekend!

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~

Wanna know a secret? Okay so it’s not so much of a secret. Blake and I will have been married 10 years on July 8th of this year. And we’re going to have a party. And I’m very very excited about it. :o) We just decided on the party a couple of days ago and after working out the few kinks there were to be had, all systems are go and this is going to happen.

It’s going to be held at Haugen’s, which is where Blake and I go every year for our anniversary to get ribs and fresh strawberry pie, which is world famous. We figure the party is kinda like the wedding reception we never had and we’ll be inviting about 20 people. After dinner, we’ll be going back to our house to drink our faces off with anyone who wants to drive that far. I think it’ll be a good time.

I also think I need to buy a dress for the event, but don’t tell Blake that because he complains that I have too many clothes as it is. :oP I want this one so so badly and there’s only one left in stock. :o( Maybe I can convince Blake to go halves on it with me or something. I’ve been coveting that dress since I saw it in the fall and I’m afraid that if I don’t get it soon, it won’t be available anymore. But that’s what I want to wear to our anniversary party. My birthday is in a week. If anyone wanted to get that dress for me, I’m a small. A SMALL, DAMMIT! Blake said I could order it! w00t! <3

This morning while I was cutting an apple, I sliced my thumb open on one of our new knives and it won’t stop bleeding. That was over an hour & a half ago! Enough already! Plus I’m eating pistachios right now (an apple & pistachios for breakfast, I’m awesome) and I keep getting salt in it. Nice.

Y’know, back to the anniversary party for a minute…part of the reason I didn’t want to have a wedding was because I felt like I didn’t have enough people in my life to invite and I felt like a loser. Plus my step-dad and my mom couldn’t be in the same room together and both of them would get mad at me for not choosing the other. But now things are good and I have 20 people in my life that I’m close enough to to have a party like this and who genuinely love me. That’s a pretty good feeling, y’know. Especially because really, there’s 40 people I’d like to invite but we can’t afford to. Maybe for our 20th we’ll do it bigger and invite everyone! That’d be cool. I guess we’ll see where we are in life in 10 years.

We’ve really come a long way though, from living above my grama’s furniture store and living on Blake’s wages as a pizza delivery guy. Now we own our own home, as of yesterday we’re completely out of debt, we both have good paying jobs, we’re both relatively happy, we have good kids (except when they’re not). I like our dogs. The cat’s alright. The only thing I think would be better is if I had my own car. I’d also like a nicer house but I know that’ll come in time so for now, we’ll just make do with what we have and be happy with it.

Speaking of my grama…so when I was in the hospital, so was my cousin Janet with what they now know was cancer, which ultimately killed her. Apparently the whole time Janet was sick – and again, this is at the same time I was in the hospital dying too – my grama would bring her mother, Eunice, casseroles and was on her ass like a dirty shirt. My grama never once offered to bring my mother anything. I don’t know why this is. Is it because it was me? Why would she not do that? It just reaffirms my decision to never have anything to do with that woman as long as I live. She just wasn’t there for my mother at all during the worst time of her life and that’s just not cool with me. She should have been on my mother like glue unless my mother said to back off. That’s just what you do for your kids. I don’t understand that woman.

And since we’re on the subject of family, my brother never replied to the e-mail I sent him months ago. He still has no idea I was ever sick.

Family! God!

And let’s go there, shall we? I really really don’t want to invite my father to our anniversary party. (Lisa can come though. I love Lisa.) I am and I will, but for the record, I don’t want to. It’s not that I don’t want him there it’s that I know he’d rather be elsewhere. All I do know is that my sisters will not be invited and since they so rarely get babysitters, I’m betting they won’t even come since that’s the case. I just don’t want my sisters there, it’s not going to be that kind of party. Plus I just don’t want to pay for their dinners when chances are they’re going to ruin mine by being bratty. I’ve never been in a restaurant with them, but I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that I bet they don’t know how to behave in one. They can be very sweet, don’t get me wrong, but they can also be very terrible and I just don’t want to deal with that. My kids weren’t invited to Phil’s 50th birthday party last year so I’m sure they’ll understand and if they don’t, then they don’t come. Fine by me.

And that’s all the bitching about my family that I’ve got in me right now. Lucky for you guys, huh?

Onto other things…

Honestly nothing interesting has happened since yesterday so there’s not a whole lot to report. Today’s plan is to have a nap after Cheryl leaves, then work on the colouring book some more. The colouring book was put a bit on the back burner the last couple of days while I worked on my girl for The 4 x 6 Exchange, but I’m back on track as of today.

And that’s all the poop that’s fit to scoop! Have a lovely weekend! YAY!

So, one of the things I like about myself is that if I decide something, like to do something, I really decide to do it. Like throwing up. I decided I wasn’t going to throw up anymore (due to pancreatitis, I don’t have an eating disorder or anything) and I’ve only thrown up TWICE since that decision was made. Fluke? Maybe. But it also seems to be the way of things with me.

A while back I had this girl who liked to troll me. I forget her name now (I suck at names, I did know it at the time but I can’t think of it now) but this was a few years ago. She would play this stupid game with my Google Analytics where she’d Google something like “Sunny Crittenden is a fucking asshole”, which naturally would bring up my site in the search results and she’d click on my site in the search results so that phrase would show up in my Analytics as a legitimate search term. Clever, I thought, but ultimately useless as far as doing any real damage. Kevin and I figured out who she was, where she lived etc etc etc and I just kinda smiled at it because she thought she was getting away with something when she really wasn’t because I knew exactly who she was.

The thing was though, that some of the search terms she used to do this were more off-putting than others. I have no problem if you say “Sunny Crittenden smokes tiny cocks”, that’s just funny. But she would post things like, “Sunny Crittenden is the most negative person on Earth” or “Sunny Crittenden needs to stop whining already” or “Sunny Crittenden should stop complaining so much”. She would also post things like “Sunny Crittenden is a nasty fatass”, which is typical troll fare of course, but it was the other ones that had me really examining my life.

I realized after a while that while I was loathe to admit it, this troll of mine was correct (some of the time) and that in my depression, I had grown jaded and negative. For a while there everything I posted was extremely dark and just…I dunno, I was ungrateful for the things I had.

So I changed. Getting on the right medications helped (I’m bipolar for those who don’t know) and she was still a fucking asshole troll for trolling someone while they’re clinically depressed, but I can’t deny that her words changed my life. I just woke up one day and decided to be more positive, to be grateful for the things I had rather than the things I had not, and to appreciate the smaller things in life.

Until her comments, I had thought I already did that, I mean, I had a gratitude page on my site! But no, in the day to day workings of Sunnyland, there was a cloud and I was under it and I unknowingly spread that energy out into the universe like a plague.

I can still be extremely negative, being a natural pessimist I have to work to keep things positive, but I like how I am now better than how I was before and I’m glad – in the grand scheme of things – that this girl (I just remembered her name, Jenni Yarmin), probably unknowingly, changed my life. So thanks, Jenni. And also, fuck you. :o)

These days, ever since getting sick, I mostly walk around in a bubble of pink light. Being winter, it hasn’t been easy to maintain this bubble and I won’t deny that I have good days and bad, but there have been far more good ones than bad ones and what they say is true: what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. I have CHOSEN to embrace the life I have and to try and cram as much stuff in it as I can within reasonable limits and boundaries. For example, the $10 artist dates. The colouring book. Work. Going out for dinner with Blake and breakfast with the kids. Experiences rather than “things”.

I am damn lucky to be alive right now. I am even more lucky in that, they only expected me to be out of the hospital a little over a month ago, yet here I am. My leg muscles still aren’t all the way back to where they were and I still have a long recovery to look forward to with these surgeries, but if I take it slow and steady and just let things come when they come, everything will be fine.

I find it really strange that I DON”T need a shrink right now. I go to my shrink and I kinda stare at her and she stares at me and we don’t really have a whole lot of things to talk about because really, I’m fine. You would think that with such a near death experience I’d be a little more fucked up or something, but I’m not. I’m frustrated that this huge wound on my stomach isn’t healing faster. I’m frustrated that I look 8 months pregnant and I feel really fat because I have a 38 inch waist but most days I know it’s only temporary and on the days I don’t, I have Blake and Madison keeping me together.

I’ve also learned, mostly (I’m still learning), to let things go. I will NEVER EVER forgive my father for not being with us through this thing. Never. In fact, I’m pretty much fed up with him and want nothing to do with him ever again. So, that’s my hypocritical statement for the day right there. But I’ve also learned that for some of my friends who weren’t exactly there throughout this whole thing…I don’t think they knew how to be there for us (unlike my father who, in a perfect world, could not NOT be there) and like my mother said, there’s no manual for these things. You forgive and you forget because that’s what you need to do to move on. I mean, yeah it kinda sucks dicks that they bailed when they were needed the most, but they’re back now and honestly? Where am I going to find better friends anyway? Would anyone else have done it any differently? Because I don’t think so. (WOuld *I* have done it differently if the tables were turned? Again, probably not.) I’m not going to throw away 10-15 year relationships because they dropped the ball and froze.

The other thing is, friends aren’t psychic. You need to tell them what you need and you need to ask for help when you need it because if you don’t, you can’t get mad at them later for not being mindreaders. This is something Blake has taught me and that I’m still learning.

Also, things aren’t always what they appear either. Just because, for example, there are no comments on a post on my site? Doesn’t mean we aren’t having a comment party over at Live Journal or that I’m not having a deep conversation about it in messages on Facebook or e-mail. What’s on the surface isn’t always so. I say all the time, “my friend so & so did this” and people are like, “who? why have I never heard this name before?” Well that’s because A) you don’t know everything and B) I have a very loose definition of the word “friend”, which I think is a good thing. My friend Halcyon says, “the world would rather hug you than hurt you” which I agree with emphatically, and in that same vein, I believe that all people you know are friends until they prove otherwise (and then you defriend them on Facebook ;o)).

I dunno, I’m still learning. There are just a lot of thoughts in my head these days and I feel like I have to be careful these days with what I say because…I dunno, my mom’s drilled it into me that you have to be careful about the energies you put out there and since I reach so many people, I have to be extra diligent to make sure that I’m not being negative. At the same time, I think I have every right in the world to bitch all I want to but I think that’s kinda counter-productive to the healing process so I’m trying not to.

Anyway…onto other things.

Yesterday Madison and I watched BEACHES. Yes, you heard me. Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey and Mayim Bialik BEACHES. What scared me the most about that movie is that apparently I’ve seen it so many times that I can recite a good portion of it and I know the words to every single song in it. I think Madison thought it was cheesy, as she probably should, but that’s what got me on the topic of friends today.

That movie, in case you’ve never seen it, is about two best friends who go through life writing letters to each other through thick and thin and they’re friends for like, a million years and then some stuff happens and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who’s never seen it. That (and Thelma & Louise) is probably THE quintessential ”chick flick”. And it’s awesome, DON’T YOU DARE SAY IT’S NOT!

It makes me a little sad though. Not because of the thing that happens in the end, but because I don’t really have a best friend like that. Alex is my closest friend and for all intents and purposes she’s my best friend, but we don’t like, call each other on the phone and talk about life, hell, we don’t even e-mail! They come over once or twice a month and we talk on Twitter and sometimes Alex comments on my blog posts but other than that we have no other contact. Blake and Ronny BBM all the time, but Alex and I don’t.

Nicole used to be my best friend but when we moved up here she pretty much abandoned me. This totally awesome thing happened in our lives (buying our first house) and she totally wasn’t even a part of it in the slightest. She’s never been here. Now she’s managing a band and I’m not there for her. I don’t come to their shows. I should, I know I should, but I don’t. We’re still close, but we’re not best friends anymore.

And that’s pretty much it. I don;t talk to anyone I was friends with when I was a kid. Not even on Facebook. All my friends now are (more or less” “new” friends. And that’s tooootally fine, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also wish I had a friend that I’d had my whole life who I shared everything with and who I stayed connected to all the time. Do you have a friend like that? Tell me about them! I’d really like to hear!

And this isn’t to say that I take my friends for granted, I really don’t. I love Ronny and Alex and like I said, they are my best friends, and I hope, that in 20 years, Alex will be my Barbara Hershey friend who I’ve stayed connected with forever and ever because she’s the coolest girl I know and she’s never failed to be there for me if I’ve ever needed her. Especially through the really rough shit.

And that’s as deep as I’ll go at 7 o’clock in the morning. I woke up at 5am with a backache, just as I do every single day lately, and I couldn’t get back to sleep because my back just hurt way too much. The theory is that since I’m carrying all my guts in the front like a pregnant woman, I’m getting backaches like a pregnant woman. Not sure what to do about them except to get up in the middle of the night and work or whatever and then to go to sleep again later in the day. This is another way my work schedule is absolutely perfect for me in every way imaginable.

So like I said, yesterday Madison and I watched Beaches and while we did, I drew this girl for the colouring book:

The idea was that she’d be a bride in the 1920s, but I have no idea what a bride in the 1920s would actually wear and I was too lazy to Google it so this is what I came up with. The dress is “floor length” and she’s wearing satin slippers.

Later, Blake and I were watching Doctor Who (I think we’re at the end of season 2 or the beginning of season 3) and I drew this girl, who Madison has deemed her favourite:

I based her off of this dress at Free People but gave her more of a rodeo flare than ballerina. (She’s wearing cowboy boots.) Like I said, Madison’s in love with her and once everything’s scanned and edited for the colouring book, I’ll probably tear her out and give her to Madison to colour.

Well, Wes is going to be up any minute so I think I’m going to make my toaster strudels and watch some Oprah Behind the  Scenes while planning more girls to draw. It’s actually REALLY hard to draw new girls every time because you don’t have the luxury of colour variations to work with so each one has to be 100% different.

Anyway, happy Monday! It’s Family Day in Canada so if you’re off today, have a great holiday!

PS. This man named Joe Beasely commented on one of my Pinterest posts here and if you’re interested, it’s worth checking out. Pinterest really hoses photographers.

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So we went to see Dr. Hanrahan yesterday. This was taken while we were waiting:

Issues. He has them.

I can’t even remember half the stuff we talked about really. We of course talked about the fact that this Dr. Mays who’s supposed to be doing my pseudocyst-draining procedure, still hasn’t contacted us and the furthest we’ve gotten with him is an estimation of like, JUNE for the procedure. Apparently he still has people waiting from July of last year. Dr. Hanrahan said she was going to put the feelers out to try and find someone else to do it but that we shouldn’t get our hopes up because it *is* a complicated procedure.

It’s complicated but it’s only going to put me out of commission for a day, three days tops, and then I’ll be ready for my big surgery.

My big surgery is going to go fine. I’m not worried at all. I was before, but after she squished my guts all around yesterday to make sure that they’d fit where they’re supposed to, I’m not worried. She said that I should do what I can to maintain my current weight. I asked her how long recovery from the surgery would be and she said 6 weeks. But then she corrected herself and said 6 weeks of not lifting ANYTHING (her emphasis). I asked her if I could still type and stuff and she said I could and I asked her how long I’d have to be in the hospital and she said “a few days”. So not the WEEKS Siske was leading me to believe, thank god.

Dr. Hanrahan did remind me that she would be working with muscles and that there would be a lot of pain to deal with, but I’m glad I’ll at least be able to type because that’ll give me something to do while I recover. I might even still be able to paint.

Before I segue into painting, I took these pictures when she sent me for blood work.

They claim that’s less than a tablespoon.

Just routine blood work. Oh and I told the doctor about those weird pains I get in my pancreatic region now and then, those stabbing, radiating pains that sent me to the ER about what, a month ago? She said it’s just the pancreas being unhappy having those cysts on it and that there’s nothing that can be done. She wrote me an rx for Percocet, which scares the living shit out of me because I know it’s habit forming and I know I have a super addictive personality. I have just heard so many horror stories of prescription painkillers, this one in particular, causing so many people’s downfalls that I’m terrified to take any. I want to take one just to see what it’s like, but I have to wait until I’m in pain so I’m kinda hoping I’ll have one of those attacks soon so I know whether or not Percocet is going to knock me on my ass. Like, is it going to make me pass out or will I be totally fine? I’d really like to know *before* I need it so I dunno, so I just know that if I take this, I’ll need to lay down or if I take this, I’ll be fine.  But I can’t just take one, so I have to wait.

I took those pictures of blood work paraphernalia because I’m sloooooooooowly getting over my fear of needles.

So yeah, that was my yesterday. So much fun, let me tell ya. I feel like I’m forgetting something about yesterday but I can’t, for the life of me, think of what it is. Oh well.

So painting…I royally fucked up my orange tiki girl when I pasted her onto the board and I’m afraid she’s not fixable. It’s kinda hard to explain, but I kinda accidentally gave her knees. Oops. I’m going to have to give her a loooong grass skirt and if I do that, she’s totally recoverable.

The sun mandala painting is ready to be scanned, but I don’t know how to use the scanner, so I have to wait until Blake can help me  and teach me how tomorrow. Bummer. So the agenda today is working on hula girl and to try and reshoot the video I made yesterday.

Yesterday I tried to make a video of me drawing one of my girls because someone said they would like to see it. So I made one. But now that I’m looking at it, I see that the angle is all wrong and I’m going to have to reshoot it today. The problem is that I have nowhere to put the tripod for it to be on my left so my right hand isn’t in the way of the shot. But I’ll figure something out. I’ll either use what I shot yesterday ANYWAY or I’ll see what I can do about reshooting it.

I’ve decided that the colouring book is absolutely going to happen. I just have to figure out the logistics, draw everything of course, scan everything of course, lay everything out of course, and then I’ll publish it through Lulu or Amazon. I think Lulu has the most choices as far as types of paper and the covers and stuff. It’ll be a softcover because I’ve never seen a hardcover colouring book in my whole entire life, and the paper won’t be “colouring book paper” because that bleeds through with markers or wet media, so I’m going to use heavier paper for the scribblers, daydreamers and those who colour outside the lines.

I thought about whether or not I’d just draw the girl and skip making her a scene and I’ve decided that that’s probably the way to go. The kids (or the kids at heart ;o)) can draw their own scenes. They’ll probably be better at it than I am. I do think I might write a little bit about each girl though. I always envision their lives while I’m drawing them so I thought maybe I could include my drawing daydreams. We’ll see.

But this is absolutely going to happen. I’m going to start drawing it TODAY.

The other thing is that I really liked my friend Mariko’s idea of magnetic paper dolls. I was thinking normal paper dolls in the beginning but I wondered like, do girls actually play with those anymore? And they probably don’t. Plus it’ll be really hard to make sure the dresses fit and the tabs are where they’re supposed to be. Magnetic paper dolls, like these, just make sense.  But the thing is, where was I going to get those printed? There’s no print on demand company like Lulu or Zazzle or Cafepress that’ll do those and we don’t have money to pay another company up front to have them printed and then, could I even sell them on Etsy since they’re not exactly handmade? But then Mariko, because she’s a fucking GENIUS, linked me to these bad boys and now I’m obsessed with the idea of magnetic paper dolls.

If I ever get my job back, the very first thing I’m going to do is buy a whole bunch of those magnetic sheets, a new printer that I can use for both the magnetic paper dolls and prints and then I’ll be in business.

My only real concern now is A) what should I call my girls? I liked Madonna’s “The English Roses” so I would like a name like that, but I can’t think of anything and B) how do I package the magnetic paper dolls? Should I cut them out myself or leave them for the parents to cut out?

Lots to think about. The thought of real live little girls colouring in MY little girls on rainy days fills me with such joy, you have no idea. Like, I never would have imagined that was possible. And the idea is so obvious too! How the hell did I not think of this sooner?

Okay, today’s my big day off so I think I’m going to go find breakfast, do my morning pages and then get to work. This colouring book isn’t going to draw itself!

PS. OH. MY. GOD. I just had a thought. It’s too late to do it this year but NEXT year I could totally do a colour book of Valentines for little girls to cut out and give to their friends. That would make my life.

PPS. For future reference, it’s never a wise thing to tell me I *can’t* do something.

Yesterday was artist date #2 and I had a FABULOUS time only spending $14!

I decided we’d just go back to Michael’s for artist date #2 since artist date #1 was so successful. Michael’s is probably my favourite store on Earth because I get in there and I just feel like I’m home. I look around at all the beautiful things and just kind of enter this trance-like state where I’m in absolute creative bliss where all there is IS imagination. My brain starts firing a mile a minute and I’m bombraded with images of the things I could do with the things all around me. I don’t just see a package of Swarovski crystals, I see the bindi of a mermaid in Fiji. Know what I mean?

The first priority was getting a sheet of foamcore because I need it to make my girls sturdy so I can put them in the shadowbox and have them stand up straight. Jeck is sending me some vintage Valentines and what I have envisioned is two girls giving each other Valentines, but what I’m afraid of with that is that it’s too specific. *I* would have something out like that year round, but would anyone else? I dunno. My other idea, which I kinda like better, is to make a burlesque girl or two and make the background like a stage. Then I’d paint the outside of the shadowbox black with red sparkles and get Blake to drill small holes all around the sides of it so I can wire the inside with Xmas lights just like the bulbs on a burlesque stage. The lights are LED so there’s no heat from them to burn the paper so it could be left on/plugged in indefinitely.

I’ve been looking for a way to make girls with “mink” stoles (made out of marabou) but it was bugging me because you can’t really do that with canvas for fear of the canvas fraying and wood would be difficult because you can’t sew through it and if you drilled through it, it probably wouldn’t look right, but the shadowbox idea would work extremely well for it and I think I’ve just convinced myself that this is precisely what I’m going to do. I think one should be in a long, red “va va va voom” kinda sequined dress with a red stole and one should be in a white flapper type dress with a black or white stole (thoughts?). I’ve got this lovely metallic ruby shade that would be perfect for hair that I’ve been dying to use (which they’ve now discontinued!), so I think I’d put that on the girl with the white dress and I’d probably make the girl with the red dress a blonde.

It’s funny…a couple of weeks ago I was pissing and moaning that I was all out of ideas and now I’m so full of ideas I hardly know what to do with myself. I feel like I have so much work to do between the shadowbox, which is going to be a lot of work, and this “orange girl” I’m doing.

Blake got me that orange Martha Stewart glitter paint last week called “Orange Sorbet” that I’m completely obsessed with so I think I mentioned that I painted two boards with it, one a thin layer for putting under white crackled paint and one a really thick layer to use on its own as a background for an undetermined girl. I’d been staring at the second board all week, not knowing what to do with it, when I turned to Twitter yesterday and asked for ideas. Katie suggested “Creamsicle”, which I liked, but it still didn’t feel right and neither did anything else anyone suggested so I tweeted that I’d put the board away and work on something else rather than force it when my friend TE came up with a genius idea that is so good I can barely stand it. I don’t wanna say what it is though in case I mess it up and get frustrated with it and it never happens, which is a possibility because it’s not the easiest thing I’ve ever attempted. I think it’s going to be pretty easy, to be honest, but it’s something that could frustrate me easily too, so I don’t wanna count my chickens before they hatch. If I can pull this off though, I think it’ll be really cool.

So anyway, foamcore. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s two pieces of Bristol board (er, cardstock weight paper, I guess) with a piece of light foam sandwiched in the middle of them. I don’t know what other people use them for, but we used it a lot in ad school as the background for our print ads when we were doing presentations. Because of that, I thought it would be a good idea to check Staples on our way through Barrie because it was on the way to Michael’s and it was also on the way home, so if it ended up being cheaper at Staples, we could easily go back and get it.

Well, foamcore at Staples was $5.56 a sheet. For the same size sheet at Michael’s, we lucked out because it was 3/$5! I only needed one, so I could pay for it with the change in my wallet and still not put a dent in my $10 artist date budget!

On our way to Michael’s, we were behind this guy:

You can’t really tell because my camera was focusing on our dirty windshield instead of the car but that’s a fucking HUMMER with the license plate “SIZDZMTR”. It was being driven by a guy, so is he admitting that he’s overcompensating for his tiny penis?

Anyway, at Michael’s I got sidetracked by the Martha Stewart paint again because it’s on sale for 40% off, which is an extremely good deal that was very very hard to walk away from. The glitter paint is just so goddamn beautiful. But I can get paint any time and god knows I have enough of it and what I don’t have, I can mix myself anyway, so I figured paint wouldn’t be a wise investment at this juncture.

We kinda wandered aimlessly for a few minutes, just going down aisles and looking at stuff, when we got to the bacck of the store where the yarn is and it sucked me in like a Dirt Devil: GLITTER YARN. MARTHA FUCKING STEWART GLITTER YARN. Check these bad boys out:

I had a REALLY hard time deciding on colours. They had a nice light purple, a nice light turquoise (but I figured I’ve done enough turquoise for the time being), a really interesting bright green, red, a really crazy magenta that I almost bought but Blake said it was too overwhelming and again, I decided that until “Magenta Love Fairy” sells, there’s no point in doing another girl with that colour scheme. They were $5.99 per skein BUT they were also on sale for 40% off so I could afford these TWO plus my foamcore and this:

That journal was $1.50 but I had a 40% off coupon so I saved 60 cents! So not only did I get all that for like, $13 but I had $1 left over to get a ginger molasses cookie from Tim Hortons on the way home. SCORE!

For some reason Madison laughed at me, I think, for taking pictures of my yarn. I set the yarn up on my desk to take the pic and when you turn my camera on it makes a tinkling sound and when Madison heard that she ran into my office and almost wet herself she was laughing so hard. o_O She never did tell me why she was laughing, but I think that was why. I dunno why that’s funny.

Anyway, she is one smart cookie who is definitely on the same wavelength as me because she told me exactly what I intended the yarn to be: the trim on a girl’s dress.

So for those playing the homegame, I’ve got the shadowbox on the go, the orange girl and now a pink girl and a blue girl who are going to have frilly trim on the bottom of their dresses. Busy busy!

Now I think I’m going to go do my morning pages and then when Blake wakes up, I’m going to have eggs and breakfast sausages. I am SO glad he’s home! I am SO glad everyone’s home! The house just wasn’t the same without them.

PS. We ran into Raymond & Lauren in the Michael’s parking lot and it was really good to see them. Sometime soon I think we need to invite them over.

PPS. Argent is so fucking wise and amazing and he said something to me yesterday that he probably wouldn’t want me to share but that I will cherish always. Thank you so much for being my friend. I am not worthy. <3

PPPS.

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I finished Argent’s painting on Saturday afternoon but I’m going to post about it last so it still remains a surprise for him when he gets it in the mail so….

…ARGENT, DON’T LOOK AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST!

Blake and the kids left for Militiagan on Monday morning and my time alone has been both interesting and bittersweet.

Monday afternoon I started watching that stupid Red Riding Hood movie with Amanda Seyfried BECAUSE Amanda Seyfried is in it and she’s like, the embodiment of one of my girls but I got bored halfway through, turned it off and decided to have a nap. This was at about 4:30pm. Well when I woke up, from a nightmare about being in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter with a serial killer on the loose, the house was pitch black because it was still light out when I went to bed and it didn’t occur to me to turn on any lights before I laid down. So I laid there in bed, in the pitch dark, listening to the wind and the heat register in my room making ticking, knocking sounds as the metal cooled from the furnace being on and I freaked myself right the fuck out because I was convinced there was a serial killer casing the house. Then the goddamn dogs started freaking out and barking in my office, which they do when someone’s at the door. I was practically crying by this point and it took me 20 minutes after the dogs calmed down to convince myself it was okay to leave my bed and go turn on all the lights and close the living room curtains.

I’ve been carrying my pink, aluminum baseball bat around with me in every room I go to ever since and I’ve only been letting the dogs out one at a time because I figure if there IS a serial killer out there, the logical thing for him to do is to poison the dogs so I have less protection right? So if I only let them out one at a time, theoretically he’d only poison or kill one of them so I’d be left with the other for protection. DO NOT FUCK WITH MY LOGIC, PLEASE! IT IS KEEPING ME SANE!

On Tuesday I woke up in a lot of pain in my pancreatic region, the same pain I had when we went to the ER a few weeks ago. I took all my drugs in the morning, including the morphine, plus a handful of Tylenol 1s and that didn’t help. By 1:30pm it was time to take more morphine, so I did and also took more Tylenol 1s plus a mega strength Ibuprofen. That didn’t help. Then I took my last Gravol and that DID help so I got worried about what I would do if the pain came back and I didn’t have any Gravol to take so I messaged Ronny to see if they would come keep me company that night and if they would bring Gravol with them but he wasn’t replying so finally at about 4:30pm, I called Alex and explained what was going on and she said they’d come over around 6:30pm for dinner because I was in the process of making beef stew in the crock pot. She said picking me up Gravol would be no big deal and so they came over at around 6:30pm as promised, I took more of the Gravol they brought me and I felt totally fine.

We ate beef stew and watched Glee, which I’d never seen before and I’ll probably never see again because it was stupidity on a scale I couldn’t even comprehend and I think the stew turned out pretty okay. It wasn’t phenomenal but I liked it enough and was hungry enough to have one & a half bowls of it. Ronny and Alex only had one bowl each so I’m not sure if they were genuinely full or if they didn’t think it was so great and were just being polite haha (It won’t hurt my feelings if they didn’t like it, I used a mix.)

Then it was 9:00pm and time to watch their shows, New Girl and Raising Hope. Now one thing you need to know about me is that I traditionally can’t stand sitcoms. Especially ones from the past 10 years or so. Roseanne? Wicked show. Loved it. The Cosby Show? Television genius. Golden Girls? As Jax said the other day, “Betty White is a flawless human being.” I loved Blossom. My Name is Earl was pretty good. Love The Office. I can’t think of anything else I really watched that was a sitcom growing up. I watched a lot of one hour shows that were more drama or comedy than a sitcom like My So-Called Life and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Six Feet Under and those are the types of shows I prefer to this day.

Anyway, Raising Hope was just “blah” to me but New Girl was FANTASTIC. I love Zooey Deschanel in movies so I kinda figured I would like this show but I never knew when it was on or what channel and I didn’t really care enough to figure it all out. I didn’t realize it only started this fall and we’re only 11 episodes in. I thought it started last year and I didn’t really feel like catching up, y’know? But now that I’ve seen it and I’m in love, Blake will be d/ling all of the episodes that have aired so far and we’ll be keeping up with it because it’s great.

Another show that Kevin actually recommended to me is Up All Night with Christina Applegate. I’ve still only seen one episode of it, but it’s like New Girl in that it’s shot more like a movie than a TV show and what I saw was really really funny. (I forget what I saw now though. My mind is a like a sieve.) I think that one only started this fall too, but I don’t know when it’s on or what channel and it’s not OnDemand like New Girl is. (But they only have the last two episodes of New Girl OnDemand, which sucks, but we have a PVR so I can just record it.) Anyway, I think that’s a show I’m going to get Blake to d/l so we can catch up on it too.

Ronny and Alex left around 11pm I think? And then Blake called and we talked for a while about what he’d been doing in MI and then I stayed up until about 1am working on a painting (more on that later) but had to get up at the asscrack of dawn yesterday morning because stinky Cheryl left a message saying that she was going to be at my house at 8:30 in the goddamn morning. I really dislike Cheryl, she makes me get up early even though we’ve asked her not to (they’re supposed to work around OUR schedule), she never listens to me when I tell her that I need a strip of drape across the top of my dressing or the Hypafix tape they use will pull down because my belly hangs over and is heavy, and come unstuck and the whole dressing will fall off. (She listened to me yesterday morning though because she knew Blake wasn’t around to patch me up. She just likes rushing through my dressing and doing the bare minimum so she can get off of work early and leave Blake to do the drape. That’s my hunch, anyway.) Plus she reeks of cigarette smoke which she tries to cover up with perfume and it’s just friggin’ gross. I mean, she’s nice & all, but out of all the nurses I have, she’s the one I like the least. Siske’s my favourite because she’s just awesome, I can’t even explain how or why, she just is, Janice is next, she’s just so nice and bubbly and she has a great sense of humour, then there’s Blue, who’s brand new and doesn’t know how to do my dressing AT ALL (I really hope I don’t get her on Friday…) but she’s nice and funny and chatty and I just really like her. And then there’s Cheryl.

After Cheryl left yesterday morning, I was exhausted from staying up the night before, so I fell back asleep on the pull-out couch in the living room until about 10:30am, then I made and ate waffles, then I feel asleep again until noon and then I was up for the day. I watched The View and Ellen and Dr. Phil while I worked on this painting I’m doing. The painting is hard to explain, I guess it’s sort of a mandala of the sun, but my intention for it is to either photograph it or scan it and make prints of it to raise money for Squam. My dilemma is that I don’t know how to go about making prints and because I used glitter (of course), I’m not sure how well that’s going to print. I don’t know if I should take orders and then go to an actual printing place and print that many or if I should use a 3rd party service like Zazzle or CafePress. I’m thinking the latter would be a lot easier considering we’d have to *find* a printing place around here that does giclees (because if I’m going to go to an actual printer, that’s what I’d want) and do a test printing, so that’s one trip, then another trip to set up the printing and pay the money up front for them, then another trip to pick them up, then more trips if I sell any more and time is a really precious thing around here because I don’t drive and Blake has so little of it. So I guess I have to decide between Zazzle and CafePress and I’m going to have to order testers from them to see if the quality’s good enough to sell to the public. Do you think I should do products too? Like mugs and t-shirts and stuff? I suppose that question is best answered once you guys see the finished painting. Hrm.

My plan for today is to nap, since I got up at 5am, and then to watch movies while I finish this painting. Blake said I could order a pizza tonight, so I fully intend to do that even though I’ve been living on pizza products all week. Monday night I made a frozen pizza (which was disastrous, my god can I ever not cook), then yesterday I had Bagel Bites for lunch/dinner and I have Pilsbury Pizza Pops for lunch today and tomorrow. Right now, y’know, just to mix things up, I’m eating a chicken teriyaki TV dinner. Blake really needs to come home so I’m not eating absolute crap. I feel like garbage from eating so much processed junk. I mean, I *love* microwaveable junk, but only sometimes, not as my main diet.

So, Argent’s painting…

ARGENT, STOP READING NOW!

Argent’s painting is a disaster. :o( It gave me trouble from day one, right up until the very bitter end. I think I explained the beginning but I’ll go over it again in case I didn’t.

Argent plays the lottery so I intended to make him a lottery fairy and I succeeded at that, but I had him send me old lottery tickets, which happened to be black, white and pink, so the painting’s colour scheme was pink and blue. (I added the blue so it wouldn’t be as girly, but in the end you could barely tell there was any blue in it.) I went through TWO canvases trying to glue the lottery tickets on as a background because my exacto knife went through them when I tried to trim the excess off the edges, so I switched to wood.

When I was done with the background, you couldn’t even tell there were lottery tickets in there but I figured that was okay, I could just use the tickets as the fairy’s skirt. Well, that didn’t quite turn out as intended either. When I used matte gel medium to adhere the sparkly overlay across the skirt, it totally wiped out all the numbers so all that remained was the pink strip across the top. *head desk*

Then I spent a million hours doing the lettering. They were stick-on letters, I didn’t do them by hand, but they didn’t stand out so I had to make a paste of white glitter and acrylic glazing liquid and a bit of water and I had to VERY carefully smoosh it next to and in between the letters, then let it dry over night and then once it was dry, I had to sand it so it looked like an outer glow. I think I was successful at that in the end, but it was a total pain in the ass to do and I was damn lucky that I thought to do that because it wasn’t planned.

But then this bitch of a painting bit my ass pretty hard when it came time to varnish her. I usually use Micron Pigma pens to do my outlining, usually an 02 or an 005. This time I decided to use an 08. The difference between the two is just how big the point is, an 02 is finer than an 08 and a 005 is finer than both of them. I wanted a thicker line, so I used the 08 and I left it for 3 days, doing other things, so it should have been completely dry and “cured” so to speak.

Well, when I went to brush on the varnish, the ink smudged, ruining the entire painting. I can’t sell a painting with a flaw like that, so I sent a letter with it to Argent saying that I couldn’t accept payment for it because of the flaw and that he could just have it.

I was really  upset about this. I worked so damn hard on that painting and it was such a pain in the ass to do and I was really counting on that money to help pay for Squam, but I just couldn’t, in good conscience, sell it like that. Because Argent’s my friend, I was only going to charge him $250 for it which is the same price as almost all of my paintings, even though it was custom and I normally charge a more for that. That would have dented my Squam fund pretty nicely, it would have covered my deposit and then some, but at the same time, it’s not like I’m really out anything but my time and the cost of the letters ($20 because I had to buy two packs to get both colours), everything else was stuff I already had. The stars are pretty expensive because they come in a kit and ONLY in a kit (12 colours I think), so it kinda sucks that I’m now out of white ones but it’s okay because I really do think stars are lucky and that this painting is lucky and that Argent’s going to win the powerball EVENTUALLY because he has this painting. It was such a pain in the ass that I figure it HAS to be lucky! haha

Anyway, I took some pics of it before I sent it off (oh that was another thing; I had it all wrapped up and addressed when I suddenly remembered that not only did I forget to take pics of it beforehand, I also forget to take pics of MYSELF with it, which was my new year’s resolution…so I slapped on some makeup and Blake took some goofy pics of me laughing because he was making fun of the fact that I take pics on burst all the time…you had to be there…):

I’m trying to train myself – and I think I’ve maybe mentioned this, at least I know I have on Twitter – not to let things be “precious”. Meaning that I like to hoard things and I’m afraid of wasting materials or making mistakes. For example, I would normally only use one jewel on a painting because I only have so many in my stash. On Argent’s painting I used five: three stars for her necklace, one for her bindi (that one was a Swarovski crystal, actually) and another for her wand. This painting was definitely an exercise in things not being precious, believe me.

Anyway, here are the goofy pics. I look like shit (keep in mind, I’ve lost a LOT of my hair from being sick), be kind:

THE END.

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PS. Blake and I got our sketchbooks for The Sketchbook Project out in time! He finished every page of his, I didn’t. My mom didn’t finish hers either, I don’t think, but I know John did. My friends Stephy and Alicia also finished theirs, who else participated this year?

First, lemme get this out of the way: Argent’s painting is finished. I haven’t photographed it in full yet but I will and after he receives it, I’ll post those pictures. Here’s one pic I took before I varnished it though:

I am absolutely in love with those little Martha Stewart glitter stars. I used white ones and pink ones and they’re all iridescent and they have names like “sugar cube” and “sugar plum”. I used up almost all of my white ones on this painting and they only come in $30 kits, so I won’t be using white ones for a very long time.

Next up is…Blake’s Uncle John died yesterday morning. He had early onset dementia and from what I’ve been able to gather is that he either basically starved to death (in a home) because he stopped eating or he had a heart attack because he was anorectic. Blake said that John was around 100 lbs when he died and he was a very tall man. He had apparently been sick all week but no one told us that until yesterday morning. I happened to have gotten up at 7am and when you see a 248 area code on your call display at 8am on a Saturday, you answer it. So I did and it was Blake’s Aunt Pat and she was so upset because that was her brother and it’s all just very sad because he was a wonderful man and the person in the family Blake related to the most. He’s taking it pretty hard.

Originally just Blake and I were going to go to Michigan for the funeral because hey, it’s not like I have anywhere I need to be, but then he wanted to bring the kids basically for comic relief and so they could get to know the Albanian side of the family and there was a chance that his sisters would be bringing their kids as well, the youngest two Blake has never even met because they live in Lake Tahoe.

Last night Blake and I decided that it would be best if I stayed here because I’m just not ready to be that far away from home and the hospital and my nurses just yet. I would be completely self-conscious about my belly and my extremely thin hair and I’m really emotional since being sick and if anyone mentioned me being sick, I’d probably lose it like I do, still, when people bring it up here. We’re just not okay and we’re not really ready to talk about it. Also we would have to bring all of my medical supplies and pills because I have a dressing that needs changing every other day and while Blake is perfectly capable of doing it, it’s just one more thing for him to worry about so I’ll just stay home and let the nurses deal with it. Another thing is food and feeling sick and potentially throwing up. I get really worried about it and then Blake worries about it and he doesn’t need to be dealing with that on top of a funeral for someone he was really close to and keeping track of the kids.

He also wants to go visiting Michigan friends while he’s in town and he wants to stay longer than is necessary for the funeral and I just don’t have that in me. I get tired really easily. I’m on really heavy doses of certain medications that makes me forgetful, not good company and I need to be in bed by 10pm. And I usually need a nap in the morning because I get up at like 6am and then I take hydromorph. I can’t just be go go go go go which is what this week in Militiagan is going to be.

So, we agreed it’s just better for him if I stay home where he doesn’t have to worry about me when things will be stressful enough. Ronny and Alex are around if I get scared or if something bad happens and I have the dogs. The nurses will be coming every other day to change my dressing and make sure I have all the necessary medical supplies. People will be around.

And honestly? And before you call me a selfish bitch, Blake and I have discussed this; 4 or 5 days of being alone and being able to watch all the bad TV I can handle and making art in my office and eating what and when I want to and sleeping where and when I want to sounds pretty damn good to me! Blake says I can do that now, but I can’t really. Someone is always wanting my attention or I feel guilty for not giving it to them even when they don’t ask and my “me time” suffers as a result. (That sounded horrible…please don’t take that horribly.) It’s taken me 5 months to feel okay enough to even go in my office and spend the day in there, when that’s where I belong.

So that’s what’s happening.

Onto yesterday! Yesterday we went on my artist’s date and it was GREAT! I had my $10 and I decided before we left for Michael’s that I’d bust open my Buddha bank to get some change for tax in case something was $9.99 and what I found in there was $20 in twoonies, loonies and quarters! So I loaded my wallet with that and put the pennies, dimes and nickels back in the bank and off Blake and I went to Michael’s. My mission was to first of all, buy gesso because I need it both now and for Squam and now that I was $20 richer, I could afford to get it, but my artist’s date mission was to buy something for $10 that I wouldn’t ordinarily buy and then come home and make something with it.

On our way to Michael’s, Blake wanted to stop off at this health food store because right now he’s eating 5/6 meals vegan as per Knives Over Forks. He’s been using the crock pot to make veggie soups and stews for the week’s lunches and he’s been having steel cut oatmeal for breakfast. Then sometimes a salad or tofu or stuff like that for dinner (but sometimes he eats what we eat). We’ve also, as a family, completely switched to wholegrain breads and cereals but I can’t do pasta because whole wheat pasta is just way too disgusting.

Anyway, Blake went to this store while I stayed in the car and he bought tempeh and this weird soy sauce stuff that I forget the name of but he put it on his salad last night and it smelled really gross. While he was in there, I could see in my side mirror that right next door was a flower shop. Wanna know a secret about me? Flower shops are one of my favourite places on Earth. Especially in the dead of winter. When I had my job, all winter I would make sure that I had flowers on my desk because I just absolutely love them. I cannot stop touching them and smelling them and staring at them. The kind doesn’t even really matter but I love flowers where the edges of them are a different colour than the rest of their petals. Carnations and roses often have this and those are my favourites. Next I love daisies, particularly gerbera daisies because they come in all kinds of colours.

When Blake got back to the car, I told him I wanted to go to the flower shop to look around, which we did, and they had a bucket of pink and orange carnations so Blake and I decided to go halvesies on them, using the change from the Buddha and his change from the car.  I was very happy because this kind of carnation is one of my favourite flowers, I just cannot even explain my love of them, I think they’re absolutely gorgeous.

After that we were back on our way to Michael’s and when we got there they had coupons at the front of the store for 40% off any item and Blake explained to me that this was better than the coupon I had for 25% off my total purchase because I was only buying one thing and with a 40% off coupon, I could get something for like, $17 for $10.

Just because part of my mission was to go down aisles that I normally wouldn’t go down, I went down the wood aisle and looked at little wooden plaques that were around $2 and I thought I could paint girls and put them on these but ultimately I decided not to get any of those because really, how would those little wooden plaques differ from the big pieces of wood I have sitting in my office? Or even a canvas? It’s just another substrate for the same old thing!

But in that aisle, something caught my eye. It was on the very bottom shelf, kind of hidden by other things. There were 3 or 4 of them but I only needed one. It was a wooden shadowbox with a wood-framed glass door that stayed shut by magnets. And it was $17. With my coupon it would only be $10 Blake said and the moment I saw it, ideas practically melted my brain so I had to have it. So I put it in the cart, declared I was done, let’s find the gesso and get the fuck outta here.

Well, we had to go down the paint aisle to find gesso because it would make sense that it would be there. For the record, it is not, but what IS there is that gorgeous Martha Stewart paint that I love so much. I had to stay there and look at all the colours again for a little while because they are just so goddamn beautiful. What really struck me this time though, was this orange glitter paint called Orange Sorbet. Paint was not in my budget so we left the paint aisle and found the gesso which was $11. Just then I had the crafty idea that if Blake got another 40% off coupon and we went through the checkout separately, I could get the gesso for $9. So that’s what we did because we are very very sneaky!

I went through the checkout first and my shadowbox was $11 with tax and I was practically laughing on my way out to the car because I felt like I was getting away with murder! I just couldn’t believe I was getting this magnificent thing for such a low price! And then to get $11 gesso for $9 on top of that, I was laughin’!

So I got out to the car and put the shadowbox in the back seat and checked into Foursquare while I waited for Blake. I knew he’d be a while because Michael’s was having a major sale on custom framing and there were a lot of people in line behind me so I screwed around with my phone and when Blake got into the car he handed me the gesso AND the orange Martha Stewart glitter paint I oh so coveted because he is just so goddamn romantical! I almost cried!

On our way home, Blake said he was feeling kinda bummed out about John and wanted to know if I’d go out for dinner with him to this new burger place he’s been wanting to try called South St. Burger Co. so I said “sure” because they serve New York Fries, which make the best poutine in Ontario as far as I’m concerned (not counting actual poutineries in Toronto and Ottawa). So we went there and Blake got a big burger with pretty much everything on it and fries while I got a small burger with just ketchup and a small poutine and the food was great. This place only uses grass fed, free range, hormone and antibiotic-free beef and I didn’t think there’d really be a difference but there really was. It was just…beefier, if that makes any sense. Anyway, it was good and afterward we just went home.

Once I got home, I was in a pretty good mood and eager to use my new paint so I decided to smash my date into my Smash Book, so here are pictures of that:

So all in all, a good time was had by all and Blake’s mind was taken off the funeral for at least a little while and I got inspiration IN SPADES. I am going to be very very busy for the next week or two, I think! I don’t even think I’ll need an artist’s date next week! Or if I do, I think it’ll probably just be a trip to Starbucks or something (which Blake may need after being in MI for a week) because I was literally flooded with ideas yesterday. There’s no more room right now for any more because I have to get these ones out first!

Okay, now I think I’m going to go start my list of things Blake needs to get from the grocery store so I don’t starve to death while he’s gone and then I’m going to hide out in my office staring at my flowers and wiping orange glitter paint on my apron.

A few days ago, my friend Joey Michaels wrote a post about E/N which brought back a flood of memories for those of us who were involved in it back then and then Artfag made a top secret, invite-only Facebook group where all of us old-timers have been catching up and remembering old times.

It’s so funny to think about how little has really changed for me. Out of all 80 of us, or at least the ones who have been participating, I’m the only one who’s really still blogging the same way I did back in 2000. Every single day. I’m still on Camwhores (formerly portal 9), where I’ve been since mid-2001. I still post in the E/N style, I think. On both sites.

I dunno, I just never really thought about it before today, that things never really changed for me. Everyone else is off doing grown up things and talking about “the good ol’ days” and I feel like I’m still pretty much living them. It’s never really occurred to me until today that most of the people reading this post have no idea what the E/N scene was, let alone were they a part of it. People rarely believe me when I tell that that I started blogging, like for real, before the word “blog” even existed.

Back then, camgirls were smart as well as beautiful (not saying they aren’t now, necessarily, some are, but in a totally different way) and most of them were super geeks who coded their own websites by hand. I didn’t though, I used Dreamweaver which was notorious for writing sloppy code so even though I used it, I would have to often go into html mode and fix the code by hand, so I consider it a half & half thing for me.  This is an image of the main page of the last layout (I think) I coded and created by hand. I was so damn proud of it:

If you’ve never read my “About the Site” page and are curious about my site’s history, you should check it out. There’s a link in there to my first Angelfire site even. Remember kids, everything you do on the internet is PERMANENT! What’s so funny to me about my Angelfire site is that my version of a blog sometimes back then was to write on paper, then scan it in and post that. I should do that more often NOW haha We have a new scanner but I don’t know how to use it or I would totally do that. Also I was talking to Blake about this design just last week:

When I lived in Rob’s basement when I was in high school, on one wall I made this design, except in a circle, as a huge mural. I don’t think there are any pics of it but it was pretty cool and I was pretty proud of it. I was telling Blake about it last week but I can’t remember why, except I did say that I should draw it again in my sketchbook so it wouldn’t be lost forever and lo & behold, here it is!

I don’t like poetry. I don’t like reading it and I don’t like writing it, but after Rob and I broke up, I went through a brief poetry phase. Here’s one of them:

Piss Off

Go back to where you were.

Go back into her arms.

No one needs you here,

all you do is harm.

I hoped you were in a ditch somewhere.

I hoped for blood and gore.

I hoped that you had killed yourself and

your little whore.

I wished that you were starving,

And didn’t have a home.

I wanted you to know great pain,

I wanted you to roam.

I prayed that you had been beaten,

I prayed that you were dead.

I thought that you were staying there,

and you’d stop messing with my head.

But now you’re here and I hate you more,

Than I ever thought I would.

I thought that you had finally left,

finally gone for good.

I wished that you would disapear,

Or shrivel up and die.

But you’re still here living happily,

and I still wonder why.

Why couldn’t you have been a good boy,

And slit your fucking throat?

Nothing I would love better than to

watch your dead body bloat.

Can’t win them all I guess,

But I can always hope.

If you ever want to kill yourself,

I have lots of rope.

Hahahahaha!!! Isn’t that hilarious? I also think it’s funny that on my Angelfire site, I had a “PMS page“, which was basically the original version of my “Shit I Hate” page. I’m also still really proud of this troll story I wrote. If you knew the guy it was based on, you would find it hysterically funny too! :oD

More poetry; I wrote this one for Madison when she was first born:

Too funny!

But yeah, it amazes me how much and how little has really changed since then. Especially the latter for me since I feel like I’m still in the same place, doing the same thing as I was 11 or 12 years ago or however long it’s been (I started my first site in 1997, so how long ago was that?).  On the FB group, we were talking about “what if…” and wondering why none of us ever really made it “big” in the blog world and I still don’t have an answer. It kills me that people like Dooce get all this recognition for the same thing myself and several others have been doing better and longer. What makes her so special? What makes her more marketable than us? Why did she get a book deal? I don’t get it. She’s not the only one, I’ve written about the Mormon mommy bloggers before and that whole thing STILL baffles me.

Anyway, the trip down memory lane was a welcome change from the usual. Do you remember the E/N scene? What/who do you miss the most? Spill! I miss being pretty and having nice hair. Oh yeah, I still maintain a small webcam archive, which can be found here.

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~

PS. Another thing I just remembered is that a few years ago on Facebook, someone referred to me as an “internet celebrity*” and Madison saw it and was like “wtf does that mean?” so I had to show her my site and some of my Camwhores archive and explain the whole shebang to her. She actually thought it was really cool but now that she’s aware of the fact that there’s a relatively big audience, she won’t let me post everything about her anymore, which sucks, but I respect that. Wes knows about everything but my activity on Camwhores and he thinks it’s the coolest thing ever and constantly tell me what I should tell you guys about. “Tell them I did this!” he says all the time, like when I’m filing him or taking his picture. A total ham.

Okay, nurse Cheryl (ugh) is going to be here in 2 hours. I’d better get a bit more sleep.

(* It’s easy to be an “internet celebrity” when there are only 50 people on the whole entire internet haha)

Edit: Apparently Steph formerly of Delightz.net made the FB group, not Artfag and Steph wrote a really nice post about it which you can find here.

Edit #2: Here’s Artfag’s post about the whole thing.

It’s almost Valentine’s Day! I love Valentine’s Day so much because I just love the decadence and how over the top everything is. I love doilies and lace and chocolate and hearts and pink and red and white and TURQUOISE and cherubs and LOVE and LOVE FAIRIES LIKE THIS ONE!

Or maybe she’s more your type?

Either way, it’s almost Valentine’s Day and I’m getting pretty giddy about it. I don’t have anything planned for it, I never do (which is kinda weird considering it’s my favourite holiday) but I’m looking forward to everyone’s blog posts on Valentine’s Day themed cards and art journal pages and crafts. :o)

Yesterday was crazy productive. I finished my girl for the Sketchbook Project book so all I have to do now is slap a quote on her page, do something with the cover, varnish the cover and I’m done! But then I have to start working on the Sketchbook Project Limited Edition, which honestly? I know I’m going to do a half-assed job with because my heart’s just not in it. For me, the Sketchbook Project is a lot of work and I just can’t afford to spend my energies there right now. It’s not due until April though so maybe I’ll find some time between now and then.

I worked on Argent’s painting yesterday and she’s almost finished. I have NEVER worked so hard on a painting in my life. This one was a lot of work and I really hope he likes it. I”m really really worried he won’t. :o/ The point of the painting is for it to be good luck so I’ve been putting as much positive energy into it as I can and only think happy thoughts while painting it no matter how frustrated I get with it. And if this fucking thing wins him the Powerball, I’d better get a cut! :oP

Anyway, there will be pics of Argent’s painting AFTER I send it to him so I don’t ruin the surprise.

Now I have to go write my morning pages and start working. Cheryl was my nurse today and I don’t like her, she never listens to me and she comes to fucking early it just ruins my whole day. Hopefully today will be okay.

Happy Wednesday!