HOLY FUCK! THERE IS FUCKING FOOD GROWING IN MY BACKYARD!

This fact, from time to time, when I really think about it just blows my tiny little mind. I don’t really know why I think it’s such a big deal, but I’ve been examining that tonight and I think it’s the whole “not being dependent on the grocery store” thing. And maybe the fact that I nurtured these CRAZY HUGE PLANTS from teeny tiny seeds since March, not really knowing what was going to happen. It’s not like my frontyard garden where I scatter seeds, let them do their own thing out there with very little help from me except watering them twice in the beginning and then I know more or less what’s going to happen to them. They are going to grow into purple, pink, white, blue and sometimes yellow flowers that grow into this one gigantic bush that people walking past marvel over.

And here’s where I might as well segue into what some of you will see as bad news: this is the last year I’m going to do the Keep Off the Lawn Project (which is just a stupid name for my wildflower frontyard garden for those not in the know). Blake’s going to weed whack the garden in a couple of weeks before everything starts going to seed and next year instead of spreading wildflower seeds we’re going to be spreading grass seed or laying down sod. :o/

Here’s the fact of the matter: I love my frontyard garden, like really really love it, but at the same time it gives me massive anxiety and this week, after I went out and took pictures of it and noticed all the weeds and fretted over the seeds that never grew or the fact that the back half of the garden is all bachelor’s buttons and the front is all cosmos and it should be the opposite because cosmos are taller that bachelor’s buttons. Also, the bachelor’s buttons bloomed in July and started going to seed at the beginning of August while the cosmos just started blooming a couple of weeks ago so the whole thing looks uneven ad unkempt, like in a bad way. And unless I spend hours and hours and hours out there transplanting, there’s no way to fix it (and even that probably wouldn’t even be possible, everything’s way too close together).

And here’s the thing, which I’ve explained before: I can’t spend hours and hours and hours out there. I can barely spend the few minutes out there it takes me to take pictures of the garden. I feel like I’m being watched and judged by people n the cars going by and I’m terrified of someone walking down the street talking to me or worse, my neighbour who I barely know and our relationship is super awkward for a million reasons I won’t go into right now. So I sit here and fret about the weeds and how REAL gardeners walking by are judging me and my garden. I paid the kids twice this summer to weed the garden (and again to deadhead the bachelor’s buttons), but kids aren’t very good weeders, they aren’t very strong and I can’t be out there telling them what to pull or what to leave or how to do it. I mean they do their best and really weeding the garden is just an excuse for me to give them money anyway, but that doesn’t help my anxiety over weeds.

Wayne & Judy’s house, well “old house” I suppose, on the left of us is for sale right now for only $99,999.00 (it was purchased for $150,000!) so it’s getting a craptonne of people looking at it and they make me nervous as all hell. Wayne & Judy’s backyard and back deck, as I’ve explained before, overlooks both our front AND backyards so there’s absolutely no privacy ad lately every time I’ve gotten up the courage to go out and do something in either garden, there’s been some stranger either touring the house with the real estate agent or ever crazier, people have been pulling over, because the price of the house is advertised right on the “for sale” sign, and have gotten out of their cars to look in the windows and come right into the backyard and look around. To even GET into the backyard you have to open a latched gate! I don’t get the nerve of these people!

AND WORSE! GET THIS! Two weeks ago some creepy balding guy knocked on my door and wanted to know if I knew anything about Wayne & Judy’s house! WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, RIGHT? I just about had a goddamn heart attack right there, I swear to god! And I was SO STUPID about it too. When people knock on our door, the dogs generally bark like crazy until they sniff whoever it is (no matter who it is) and then they go lay down. This guy knocked gently enough that he didn’t set off the dogs, which I always see as a good thing (I’ve trained just about all delivery people to do that because the barking makes me crazy and I don’t know how to make them stop – anyway, totally different topic…) so when I answered the door, I actually stepped outside and closed the door behind me. So the kids didn’t know I was interacting with this stranger and the dogs didn’t know and what if he was a crazy stalker person who wanted to kill or abduct me? No one would know I was gone or hurt or dead or whatever! In hindsight I was just like, what, are you fucking retarded? That was so stupid! Anyway…

So this guy, who again, was totally twitchy and creepy and I just got a seriously disturbed vibe from him, asked me if I knew about the house and I said that I could probably answer any question he had and he was just like, “well tell me about it” so I told him the downsides: electric baseboard heaters, no place for a normal furnace if you wanted to upgrade, because of the electric heat and the fact that it’s a seriously old house with no weather-proofing, Wayne & Judy had like, $400-$500/month hydro bills in the winter. You can’t get a queen-sized boxspring upstairs because the stairs are at an angle where you can’t get it around the corner, so if you want a queen-sized bed, you’re getting a mattress on the floor. One bedroom doesn’t have a window or a door.  Mice. Lots & lots of mice. No basement. Living room carpet was pissed on so much that it needs replacing and the house stinks of dog pee (unless the owner replaced it, which I doubt).  Blah blah blah. So I told him all this and he starts telling me about how he’s going through a divorce and “the bitch” is getting half of their $400,000 house and she took all of his “fucking” retirement money and he’s like, telling me all these details about his divorce, like the fact that he’ll be paying $1100/month in child support and I’m thinking “dude, what the fuck” but just nodding and hoping like hell that this creepy as fuck guy will not be my new neighbour…then two days ago I was in the backyard checking on the veggies and there that creepy guy was on the back deck of the house with the real estate agent. The house still has a “for sale” sign on it and a lot of people have been through since I saw that guy so I don’t know anything but man…I hope this dude doesn’t move in next door. I mean, he kinda leered at me when he was with the real estate agent. So creepy.

Wow, did I ever go on a tangent there.

My point is that the frontyard garden stresses me out more than it gives me pleasure so after talking to Blake about it, I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m still anti-lawn, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t have to deal with grass. Mowing is Blake’s job. There *are* two flower beds in the front where I will plant flowers, I don’t know what kind yet because the beds are in a shady area and I don’t know what to plant,  but I figure I’ll let the kids have one of them each to grow whatever they want from a list of what will grow there and they can start their seeds in March when I start mine for the back garden.

Speaking of the back garden, Blake & I are considering expanding it next year, although we haven’t decided definitively. Our neighbour on the right (named Frances, I haven’t written about him much because there’s nothing to write about), whose house is also for sale, never goes in his backyard EVER so I don’t have to worry about making small talk with him because we have no privacy. I will have to contend with new neighbours once Wayne & Judy’s house sells but I’m going to treat this as immersion therapy and try to just ignore them. God help me if they’re friendly, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

So that’s the plan.

Out of everything we planted in the back garden, which was a lot, the only things that thrived were sugar snap peas, burgundy beans, bobcat tomatoes, sugary cherry tomatoes and green and purple peppers. The tomatoes and peppers were started indoors in march and the bobcat tomatoes out there are fucking ridiculous. There are 3 plants, that are more like BUSHES, that have grown so big it just looks like one giant tomato bush. The tomato cages were useless because there were too small, so the tomatoes grew tall enough it pulled the cages right out of the ground and they’re all supported by leaning on each other in like, a tee-pee formation. Only one of my cherry tomato plants thrived, which sucks because they’re awesome, but the cage was useless with that one too because of it being too small. I had no idea how big tomato plants could get so I got the small 99 cent cages instead of the bigger $4.99 ones. Next year we’ll get the bigger ones.

And I guess that’s enough of my crazy talk, I’ll just get on with the pictures.

(more…)

The Flower contrasts a utopian society that freely farms and consumes a pleasure giving flower with a society where the same flower is illegal and its consumption is prohibited. The animation is a meditation on the social and economic costs of marijuana prohibition.

We have peas! Lots and lots of peas! They started being ready 2 weeks ago (when these pics were taken) and we’ve been picking a large sandwich container full about every 3 days ever since. They’re mostly finished now, but the beans are almost ready!

Anyway, I thought since I took them and haven’t done a garden post in a while, I’d post these pictures. Right now the front garden isn’t doing a whole lot. Last week I paid each kid $3 to go out there with a pair of scissors and “deadhead” all of my bachelor buttons, which they did with gusto, so as things stand, the cosmos at the front that should be in bloom within the next two weeks should coincide with the 2nd round of bachelor’s buttons and I’ll take pics of the whole works then.

On with the pictures!

The kids picking peas.

Madison picking peas.

Peas & beans.

Baby peppers that are now significantly bigger.

Bobcat tomato which is also now significantly bigger.

Cherry tomatoes which we have LOTS & LOTS of.

So that’s the state of the garden right now. The peas taste like nothing I’ve ever had from a store, but then again, I’ve never seen these kind of peas in stores before anyway. I haven’t tried the beans yet because I jumped the gun in picking the few I did two weeks ago thinking there were more that were ready than there actually were so those ones are still in my fridge because there’s not enough of them to really have with a meal. All of the beans should be ready to pick in about another week I’d say and then I *think* they’ll actually make another batch of beans in September but don’t quote me on that because I’m just going by memory of when I grew this type before and honestly, things are a bit foggy,

Alright as I said in my previous post, it’s the long weekend here so it’s time to turn my brain off and get my Warcraft shit in order! Have a great weekend!

A couple of days ago, Madison came running into the house to say “OMG MUM! WE HAVE PEAS AND THEY’RE ALMOST READY TO EAT!”, so I went out with my camera to investigate since I hadn’t been out to see the garden in about a week.

Before I get into the peas, let me tell you about the tomatoes…we’re going to have a LOT of them if all of these yellow blossoms are going to turn into tomatoes. Already with the cherry tomatoes we have baby ones but I didn’t see any yet on the bobcat plants. Both types of plants are monsters though, check it out:

You can tell which ones are the cherry tomatoes and which ones are the bobcats because the cherries have lots & lots of little yellow flowers and the bobcats have bigger versions of the same flowers but there are less of them. The plan for the tomatoes is of course to eat some of them, but we’re going to have more than we need, so we’re going to make salsa with them and jar it so Blake can eat it throughout the year, as opposed to buying it and it would also make nice, economical Xmas gifts for Phil, my uncle Paul and my mom’s boyfriend John. Now we just have to find a really good recipe for it, preferably a really hot/spicy one. I figure it shouldn’t be too hard and if all else fails, we can just use Jamie Oliver’s.

Next up is BEANS. MONSTER BEANS. We planted two rows of these because we really like them and they are growing like crazy. Right now they’re in bloom, but I forgot to take a picture of the weird flowers they have.

I’m not really sure how my peppers are doing because I don’t know how peppers grow and I threw out the seed packet so I can’t check. The plants didn’t grow very tall, but they have white flowers and a couple even have a pathetic looking baby pepper or two. Voila:

But the real monsters in my garden right now are the peas, which, as Madison said, are about a week or two from being able to pick. It’s as if as soon as we staked them, they got happy and made peas all over the place like, overnight! Look!

That last pic’s a little blurry but right now the sun’s right overhead and any pics I took out there right now would look like crap, so I’m not going to retake it. You get the point.

These peas are sugar snap peas, which means that they’re very sweet and the pods are edible. As soon as the peas inside the pods are, y’know, “pea sized”, they’ll be ready to pick, which the children will gleefully do.

Next year, definitely, we’re going to grow tomatoes, beans and peas but probably nothing else since the weeds in that bed are out of control and those 3 things seem to thrive despite it and those 3 things are things we really like. Next year we’re just going to grow more of them. The peas, just because the kids will eat them and like them, the beans so I can freeze them and the tomatoes so we can make sauce and salsa, pending the salsa experiment this year goes well.

So that’s the garden so far. :o)

The front garden is coming along nicely and I’m actually surprised so much is growing so soon. Usually when I plant flowers from seed, they don’t start blooming until the beginning of August, minimum, but I guess this year the bachelor’s buttons seeded themselves enough that they started to grow, and thus bloom, early. The cosmos? Not so much. They needed to be reseeded this spring and will always need to be reseeded because they don’t seed themselves for shit.

Here’s the front yard, pics taken this morning:

That whole front part is where we had to use the sod cutter to cut away…sod. Growing there now is a whole jungle of cosmos:

I planted bachelor’s buttons here too, but all I see growing is cosmos. I have a feeling that this summer the garden’s going to be lop-sided with chest high cosmos in the front and waist high bachelor’s buttons in the back. (Although it does appear that *some* cosmos are growing up through the bb’s.

I’m very curious to see the comos this year because I planted 4 varieties, whereas I usually only plant 1. Buuuut all that’s growing in there right now is bachelor’s buttons and a lone poppy (and some weeds that Madison’s going to take care of today for another $3, not the $20 she proposed…) so that’s what I took pictures of:

In this last pic you can see an itty bitty pink cosmos at the bottom middle-ish.

So that’s the front garden so far, doing MUCH better than previous years at this point, although as I said, I’m a little worried about it being lop-sided…but hey, what are you gonna do? I mean the whole point of my front garden is to throw the seeds around and see what happens, naturally, the only intervention is watering the seeds 3 days in a row in the beginning and about 2 weedings a summer, which consists of removing like, 10-15 plants total. (I leave the milkweed for the butterflies even though it’s not the prettiest plant in the world.)

Anyway, more pics will follow as things progress! Now I’m going to have eggs, watch more of this Intervention show and work on the pics for the next post!

I got up this morning a little after 7am because I had a nightmare that I was in fostercare on a pig farm and my foster father was abusive to my foster mother and us kids weren’t looked after at all. The whole dream was me and child versions of Meredith Grey, Christina Yang and Liz Lemon trying to escape. When I woke up from that, I couldn’t get back to sleep.

I checked e-mail, Twitter etc. and when I got to Facebook, my friend Missy said that she was watching the Intervention marathon on A&E today and asked if anyone was going to be watching with her. Never having seen the show, I said I would and turned it on. Now I’m an episode & a half deep and I maintain that this show is absolutely terrible but I’m still watching it anyway because it sure beats morning television.

Anyway, this is the first of what I think is going to end up being many posts today so here we go…

Our vegetable garden is largely one giant fail. Allow me to show you what’s going on:

See all that vegetation? That’s about 3/4 weeds. But the problem is, I don’t know a weed from oregano. Or a weed from a carrot or parsley or anything else we planted that I’m not sure is coming up. In fact, I’m fairly sure the carrots never came up at all and the same with the oregano and basil and onions but with all those weeds, it’s hard to tell and I don’t want to pull any of them in case I’m pulling out the good stuff.

Out of TWO packets of seeds, we have like, 3 or 4 tufts of lettuce growing and our pepper plants are absolutely pitiful:

Our tomato plants are thriving though, as are our peas and beans…everything else, thus far, appears to be a write off.

Tomato plants

One of our pathetic tufts of lettuce.

Purple beans

This weekend’s big project was to finally stake our peas, which really should have been staked last week or the week before but shit happened and the peas didn’t. However, at work Blake got a gift certificate for Home Depot for being awesome, so on Sunday he went there and bought wooden stakes and “garden jute” and he made a sort of trellis for the peas to climb up. My job today, probably right after I finish this post, before it gets hot, is to rearrange the peas so they’ll actually grow up the jute. Here are our thriving peas:

Between the peas (left) and the beans (far right) are where the onions are supposed to be, but I don’t think any are growing. Why so many things didn’t grow is beyond me, my only guess being that we planted some things too deeply maybe? I planted in pots on my porch thyme and rosemary and only one of them is growing (but I forget which I planted in each pot so I’m not sure which one is growing – thyme, I think, though).

In the hopes of encouraging the pepper plants to grow bigger, which I actually think is a futile attempt considering they appear to be flowering already, I paid Madison $3 to weed between them and the tomato plants yesterday while Wes supervised. Then the money-grubbing little bugger came inside and said she’d weed my FRONT garden for $20. $20! I asked her if she was on drugs.

Oh yeah, Madison dyed her hair auburn and she also dyed Wes’ hair orange using this temporary mousse dye I got in my stocking a few years ago for Xmas. They are both very much impressed with each other’s hair at the moment.

So that’s our pathetic attempt at a veggie garden. We’re still undecided as to whether or not we’re going to attempt to do this again next year but right now all signs are pointing to “no”. It really depends on the yields we get from the things that are actually growing as to whether or not it’s even worth it. Right now hot house tomatoes, grown in Ontario, on the vine, are like $0.99/lb and they’re only going to get cheaper as the summer goes on. To me, growing my own doesn’t seem worth it, looking at those prices. Yes, mine are organic and non-GMO for SURE and I can’t say the same for the ones in the store, but Sunny Logic dictates that vegetables grown in Ontario greenhouses are probably not GMO because there are no bugs in greenhouses and no weeds, so there’s no need for herbicides or pesticides and therefore no need to grow vegetables that are unnaturally resistant to either. They also don’t need to have an unnatural shelf life  or bruise resistant skins because they’re not on a truck for a week or two before getting to the store.

I realize that I’m totally guesstimating here and that this is very much Sunny Logic, but don’t tell me otherwise or I may never eat again.

Also, a couple of weeks ago we got Ontario strawberries (which are THE BEST strawberries in THE WHOLE WORLD) and on the lid of the container, it said:

“Did you know?

- Every $1 spent on Ontario food generates more than $2 in other Ontario business.
- Choosing Ontario fruits & vegetables over imported food saves fossil fuel and reduces CO2 emissions.

Thank you for supporting Ontario agriculture!”

To which I say, “you’re welcome!”

So there’s an argument against growing my own tomatoes, again, depending on the yield. My purple beans you cannot buy in stores, they just don’t have them – or at least I’ve ever seen them. I’m not sure if I’ve explained, but the purple beans I grow are dark burgundy when raw, but they turn green when you cook them. This impresses the kids and makes them eat them and they also taste 50 billion times better than the frozen beans we usually buy. (I don’t have a lot of luck buying fresh green beans at our local grocery store. Wal*Mart sometimes has decent beans but I don’t want to go to Wal*Mart just for beans and god only knows where they’re grown.) The same goes with the peas I’m growing. I forget now, without looking at the empty packet, what they’re actually called but basically they’re a sugar snap pea variety where you can eat the shell & all. Madison and I LOVE these. My Aunt Betty used to grow similar peas when I was a kid and they were my favourite thing in her garden. Again, you cannot buy these in the stores. You can buy similar ones, but they’re not the same and they’re kind of expensive. I think the two packets of seeds I bought were about $5 total and we’re going to have peas coming out our ears pretty soon.

So, despite the fact that most of our veggie garden is fail, next year we’ll probably, at the very least, still grow beans and peas. Just probably MORE of them. The beans are a bush bean so they don’t need staking. The peas do, though, but I still think it’s worth the cost.

Anyway, that’s our veggie gardening experience thus far. Next post will be the front garden…

….and this Intervention show is still terrible, why am I watching this again? Oh yeah, morning television sucks.

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.

So, I mean, I’ve been around…I just haven’t been updating with anything of too much importance or excitement or anything and this post is really no different, but I figured I’d tell you all what I’ve been up to.

Mostly I’ve just been keeping my nose to the ground and trying to win this contest over at Camwhores where I can win Blake a pretty cherry new laptop, which he could really use because his laptop’s basically held together with duct tape. That’s why I’ve been going so hard with the Camwhores posts, but don’t worry, at the end of the month I’ll stop pushing as hard as I am right now.

There’s also the fact that right now I’m #1 on the site (I could be #2 by now, I haven’t checked – Kaitlyn looked poised to overtake me last I looked) which means I can do shows every 3 days instead of every 7 days and I’m really trying to make the most of that as my Camwhores earning potential decreases in the summer months because the kids are home from school. And the truth of the matter is, the proceeds from this week’s hardcore camming is primarily for the kids, so I have cash money in my wallet to send them to McDonald’s for ice cream or so I can send Madison to the store on her bike to get the ingredients for pizza or so we have the money to get subs for dinner and eat them on the beach after Blake gets home from work or so, if Madison needs $20 worth of fabric to create something with her sewing machine, I can give it to her. So I can buy my kid Lunapads when she has her first period. Blake’s income has no room for things like this, but mine does, so I’m trying to make the most of it right now. Tips are appreciated, by the way.

So that’s the deal with Camwhores. That and I’ve been having a lot of fun over there as I tend to always do. And you probably would too. I’ll shut up now.

In other news, I have a garden. A garden that seems to be filling in nicely. These pictures were taken last week and it started raining on me today or I would have gone out and taken new pictures because the lettuce is starting to come up.

Beans!

Peas!

The whole shebang!

The tomato vines are getting pretty unruly, so the plan for today is to tie them to the cages as opposed to staking them, just to get them up off the ground. The stalks of the pepper plants are turning kinda woody at the bottom and the plants are getting big, which is good. The ones at the back are still a liiiiittle piddly though, but I’m not sure there’s much I can do about it. Peppers need a long, hot growing season and for the past week or so, it’s actually been kinda cold. Last week I even wussed out and turned on the furnace for a day because it was only 12 degrees (C).

We’ve also had a lot of rain, which means the peas and beans are almost twice the size they are in these pics and next paycheque (next weekend), we have to find some way to give the peas something to climb up on that’s CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP. My suggestion was to get a piece of wood lattice the length of the garden and just stick that in the ground but I’m not sure how much that costs or how feasible it is. We’ll figure something out. There are wire “pea fences” you can buy, but the ones I saw in the Vesey’s catalogue were like, over $50 and I’d need 2 of them so screw that.

I haven’t even looked at the herbs I have growing in pots on the porch, so I have no idea what they’re doing and truth be told, I kinda forget what I planted (thyme & rosemary?). Oops. The front garden is filling in nicely in the parts that were established last year but the part where we cut the sod earlier in the spring is taking its sweet assed time. The filled-in part already has a metric fuck tonne of blooming bachelor’s buttons and the cosmos are about ankle high. The part we sod cut? So far all I see growing in there is more goddamn GRASS despite planting literally LBS of bb & cosmo seeds there. Hopefully with the rain we got this week and the heat we’re supposed to get next week, those seeds will start growing.

I am pausing this post because an oldschool song just came on my iTunes that I feel I need to share because to me, it’s such a summer song. This band (Chaka Demus & Pliers) has another song I like called “Tease Me”, which I’ll also embed:

Okay I’ll stop being random now. I’m gonna guess that Dirty will be the only person on my LJ friends list to appreciate those two videos haha

ANYWAY…

I’ve been making art. Quite a bit of art actually, I’ve been fairly productive over the past two weeks or so. I have two paintings almost finished, a new one started and I’m painting a very mysterious sign that’s going to hang beside my front dor which I will reveal as soon as it’s ready.

So here’s what I’m working on right now. This is the turquoise version of “Love Fairy” that of course needs arms, but don’t they fucking all…*grumble*….I haaaaate dong arms….anyway, here she is (and she should have been finished two weeks ago but I got sidetracked by too many things – oops):

The turquoise love fairy or “Love Fairy II”, as I’ve been calling her, is exactly the same as the original, using confetti glitter as opposed to rounded glitter, the only difference is her palette and her lips are bigger than the pink one’s. All she needs to be complete is definition of her wings using white metallic paint, arms of course, a wand, my signature and a 2 coats of varnish, all of which I should be able to make happen this week if I stop procrastinating. (Or as Jackie says, “procrasturbating” lulz.)

Also on my coffee table is “Shimmer II”. The original “Shimmer” had a kid-related accident and can no longer be sold. I’m still gonna hang her in my house, but she’s got some cracks now and she just can’t be sold, so I’m painting a new one.  Because I can’t really paint the same girl twice, despite it looking like they’re all basically the same, “Shimmer II” and “Shimmer” actually look quite different and since I sold “Shine” last week and the triad (?) is no longer complete, I’m debating as to whether or not I should actually write “Shimmer” across the top like the original or if I should just leave it plain. What do you think?

With “Shimmer II” there are quite a few differences between her and the original, some intentional, some not. First of all, her background is a lot more turquoise than the original and that’s basically because I’ve forgotten how to do backgrounds the way I was doing them a year ago. That’s another strike, I think, in the column for not writing “Shimmer” across the top because she no longer fits with the other 2 paintings in her series because of the different backgrounds. If you were to hang all 3 side by side, you could tel that “Shimmer II” was painted at a different time.

Also, I fucked up her hair, but I didn’t realize it until it was too late. The original “Shimmer”‘s hair was a custom mix of champagne gold and metallic white so it would look more sun-bleached and I forgot to do that with “Shimmer II”. You guys would never be able to tell the difference by pictures, but putting them side by side in person, you can tell.

If you look at the original “Shimmer”, you can see that her boobs are a lot more, hmmm, is “siliconey” a word? With “Shimmer II” I tried to make them a more realistic shape for someone who’s never worn a bra in her life. She will, of course, have jewels for nipples, but I can’t do that until I give the poor girl some arms. After she has arms, all she needs is my signature and 2 coats of varnish and she’s done, but I’m still really torn on the “Shimmer” issue. Seriously, do you think I should write “Shimmer” across the top or should I treat her like a whole new painting? This is why I’ve been procrastinating on getting her done, I just don’t know what to do. I’m leaning towards not putting it and just leaving her plain, but I just don’t know.

And like I needed to start another painting…but inspiration struck…here’s what I’m calling “She’s Like a Rainbow”, inspired by my internet friend Megan who just had her hair dyed this way:

She doesn’t even have a dress yet (and I don’t have one in mind) or a canvas prepped (which I usually do first but with the other 2 on my coffee table, I don’t have room!) so I’m not really sure what I’m doing with her at the moment, but there she is all the same. All I know is that she will probably have a purple bindi jewel on her forehead and her dress is going to be of the petticoat variety, although I don’t have any papers in mind yet.

Annnnnnd last but not least, I’m working on a sign for the front door of my office (which acts as the “front door” of our house, even though it isn’t actually our front door) and this project is priority #1 right now. In fact, as soon as I’m finished with this post, I’m probably going to finish watching The Runaways (is it just me or is this movie really really ungood?) and work on this sign. What the sign is going to say is top secret for now, but it’s something you’ve all heard me say (or write) a thousand times before so it should come as no surprise to most of you. It is also going to be the first of probably 3 signs that will hang next to my front door. So, saying all of that, I’ll show you the girl I made for it, tell you that it’s on wood as opposed to canvas and leave it at that:

Lettering always makes me nervous, so I’ve been practicing on paper first and it will be the absolute last thing I do on the sign. Really all that’s left to do is her dress, which will take like, 10 minutes tops, and then the lettering which I know is going to be metallic red, possibly with a black outline…I haven’t decided yet.  Part of me thinks the outline will look really awesome, part of me is thinking “why make it more complicated than it needs to be when you suck at lettering to begin with?” So we’ll see.

So as you can see, when I haven’t been whoring it up on Camwhores this month, I’ve been pretty busy creating and the rest of this month is dedicated to actually finishing. I signed myself up for The Square Foot Show, which is August 21st-September 5th at AWOL Gallery in Toronto but I have no idea what I’m going to enter yet. The original plan was “Sparkle”, “Shimmer” & “Shine” and they were painted expressly for that purpose last summer, but things happened and I didn’t do it last summer and now “Shine” is sold and the original “Shimmer” is damaged, so all that really remains is “Sparkle” sooooooo I’m just going to work my tail off creating from now until the drop-off date (August 10th) and just see what I come up with, then pick 3 to put in the show and that’ll be that.

The shitty thing about The Square Foot Show, which I know I talked about last year, is that you have to pay a $20 fee to get your work in, first of all, and then they sell your paintings for $224 each – which is fine since that’s only $4 more than I usually charge if you don’t count the exchange rate – but then AWOL Gallery takes 50%. And that sucks. But that’s apparently how galleries work and according to the people who give out Ontario Art Council grants, you’re not a real artist unless you show your work in galleries, so that’s the price I guess I have to pay. *shrug* I’ve decided that if I get turned down for another grant next year, I won’t be applying again and will just focus on building my business myself through Etsy. So far I think I’m doing pretty good, my only hang up is that I don’t get the work done fast enough and because of that, my shop is a little bare right now, as far as variety. All summer my focus is going to be 12×12 inch paintings, which is the size I prefer to work in, but I plan on doing some works on wood in the fall, as well as getting back to ACEOs since people seem to like those. (Although I wish people would buy up the ones I’ve already made! I have red & gold, black & gold, green & gold and purple & gold!)

Anyway, that’s what’s what. Blake is up now and I think we’re going to have breakfast sooooo I’m going to stop writing now and pay attention to my family. Hope you’re all having a great weekend and the rain’s not gettin’ ya down!

PS. True Blood tonight! w00t!

My lilac bush came today, thanks Rugg! <3
Eat, Pray, Love, as you can see, came today also.
I ordered it last week after seeing Julia Roberts on Oprah promoting the movie adaptation that comes out in August.
I wanted to see what the big deal about it was and why it pisses some people off.
Anyway, I have to get through the gigantic Oprah biography by Kitty Kelley, which is total tabloid fluff and completely unauthorized, before I read this one.

The lilac is called a “sensation lilac” and will look like this one day:

It’s raining right now and it’s going to keep raining all night from what I understand, but that’ll make the ground nice and soft for when I plant the bush to the right of the carport tomorrow. I wonder how long it takes a lilac to grow big enough to produce flowers? Also I stole that image from Google image search so if it’s yours and you want credit/want it down, lemme know.

Speaking of bush…

I did dirty things on Camwhores last night.

And I’m thinkin’ I might do dirty things on Camwhores again tonight…

…but with a bit of a different flavour, meaning that I just finished shaving off my playoff pubes. So if you wanted to chat and watch me upload from my webcam live, you should click here to sign up.

As an added bonus? I did one hell of a streaming (more like “screaming”) members only show last Friday that I’m told was very entertaining to watch. Just do yourself a favour and turn your speakers down. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

I have another streaming show scheduled for this Friday at 11:30pm If I stay in the top 3 (I’m currently #1), I can do a show on Saturday night (I think) but if I slip to #4 or below, I can’t do a show until next Wednesday because I did one tonight – so I’m tentatively scheduling one for Saturday night in the hopes that I stay more or less where I am, rankwise…but as is the case with all streaming shows, you have to be a full member to watch. So click here to sign up. I think there’s a 3 day membership option for those who don’t want to commit to a full month.

BUT

I have it on good authority that it’s going to be a pretty great month with lots of participation so it might be worth sticking around.
Click here to sign up.

There are 200 or so camgirls, blogs (I just did a blog post today on how to make spaghetti sauce – with pics), a busy forum, an even busier chat (tagboard) and even an arcade, for those who have never been to Camwhores before. It’s a nice little adult community.

Click here to sign up.

And I think that’s all I really have to say for right now.
Maybe I’ll see you tonight. :o)

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