I am sooooo sick. I don’t know why. I spent the morning barfing my guts up and moments ago, I came dangerously close to literally shitting my pants. I don’t know if it’s a bug or something I ate or what but I feel like absolute shit right now.
On top of that, work is not going so great these days. I can’t really go into detail because I think my bosses read my blog, but things have been really stressful. St. Patrick’s Day, this week, will be my 6 month anniversary with the company, which only I seem to care about. For me it’s a big deal! This is my first job EVER and to make it 6 months and (I think) I’m doing a kickass job of things, that’s a big deal, don’t you think? Kevin doesn’t think I’ll get a raise, and I don’t think I will either, but it would be pretty cool if I did. Truthfully though, I doubt my bosses even realize that it’s my 6 month anniversary and even if they did, I doubt they would even care. :o/
On top of THAT, I”m on the rag and basically miserable, so yes, today sucks. It sucks hard.
Right now I’m working on an angel. Yes, another one. Yes, another gold one. I don’t know why but I just associate gold with angels. She’s nowhere NEAR finished yet, she needs her details refined, but here’s what she looks like so far:
Here wings are mulberry paper and I actually kinda messed them up.
You can see the brown, where I went over her face, underneath.
As I said, I need to fill in her details, but this is what my girls look like before I do that.
She still needs her eyes and mouth more defined with Pigma Micron pens.
Her canvas is the usual: white crackled background with gold underneath, fine and chunky glitter to make a super sparkly background. It’s finished, I just have to finish the angel, adhere her to the painting, sign it and then varnish. Her working title is “Goldeneye” but I don’t think I’m going to keep it. Any idea what I should call her?
Someone asked me the other day why I’m not blogging about this metabolic clinic I do every Tuesday. Here’s the deal with that: the clinic is confidential. I can tell you anything about the other women who are doing it for that reason and I find the women in the class the most interesting part of it. The other reason I haven’t really blogged about it is because I haven’t been making any progress. They teach us how to eat better but they never told us how MUCH we should be eating for our activity levels (Raya told me how to do that so I’ve been sticking to about a 1300 calorie per day diet, but I haven’t lost any weight), they taught us all about metabolic syndrome, which we all have because of our meds. Our last class was a fucking JOKE. It was called “Walk Tall” and it was all about how to carry yourself as a fat person and what to wear. If I could have skipped that class, I would have, but I didn’t know what it was so I went anyway. The recreation therapist module was alright, but not really helpful for me since I don’t leave the house. I dunno, I think I just expected more from this clinic than it’s giving me. We have all of these evaluation sheets for each module that I still have to fill out and I think I’m going to have a lot of writing to do because I’m mostly finding the whole thing extremely unhelpful and the fact that I have to take time off work, that I have to make up on weekends, to do this thing doesn’t make me very happy, especially if it’s not helping me any.
The treadmill’s been here about a week & a half now and so far I haven’t even been on it. That’s because I’ve been dying of uterine pain and have been barely able to walk to the bathroom, let alone a kilometer or so on the treadmill. The metabolic clinic people want us to walk 3k steps in a day and I have a pedometer to track that but just running around in my house every day I only do maybe 1k, hence the need for the treadmill. I also haven’t been going to yoga because it’s on the same day as the metabolic clinic and between that and having to work, it’s just too much for me to do in a day. By the end of metabolic day I’m just way too frazzled to even contemplate doing the perfect tree pose.
Once the metabolic clinic is over and I don’t have to make up time on weekends, I plan on doing 10 minutes here and there on the treadmill as I wait for e-mails to come in, to get myself up to the 3k steps they want me to take. As I mentioned in a previous post, Blake bought me the perfect pair of shoes for my birthday that are Mary Jane style, so I don’t even have to find socks to put on, I can just slip them on and go. Another thing that’s making me not want to go on the treadmill is the fact that I have to climb over several laundry baskets to do so. Plus a box, at the moment, and a bag of Lush paper garbage packaging. And a coffee table. If it takes me 5 minutes to get on the fucking thing because of all this debris in the way, it’s not really all that motivating when I’ve only got 10 minutes to spare.
And I kinda lied when I said I haven’t been making any progress with the metabolic clinic. Every week I either gain or lose 2 lbs or I gain or lose an inch or an inch & a half on my waist. That to me isn’t really progress at all, it’s just your body’s natural loss/gain as it does every day.
It also doesn’t help that my new anti-psychotic to help me sleep is giving me a loss of appetite, so I’m sure that everything I eat right now is being stored as fat because I’ve only been eating once a day and now my stomach’s shrunk and I can’t eat very much at one time. In a way, that’s probably a good thing, but I can also see why it’s a bad thing too.
Could this post be any more negative? I’m sorry. It’s just been a really shitty day and I need to vent.
One thing I would like to say about the metabolic clinic is that I think I’ve made a new friend through it, possibly two. There’s a woman there named Sherry who’s our peer support and I really really dig her because she seems like my kind of person. She’s got a great sense of humour, and I feel like she “gets” me, whereas none of the other people do. There’s also a woman there named Christine who I find really interesting. She’s SUPER smart, like genius smart, and she’s really outgoing and I just really like her. I don’t talk to her as much as Sherry but I feel like these two women would be women I’d actually hang out with, be in a book club with, talk to on Facebook, y’know? They’re both older than me and they’re the kind of women where I think they could teach me a thing or two. I dunno, I just like them and I hope that after the metabolic clinic ends on April 5th that we stay in contact. Also, Sherry is probably reading this, so “HI SHERRY! *waves*” :o)
Other things…
My Lush presents arrived at their destinations last week. I got my mom Curly Wurly shampoo and R&B leave in conditoner/curl definer, among other things. I can’t remember what I got Lisa, my step-mom, but I know there were some bubble bars and bath bombs in the little kit I made up for her.
I just felt like these two women in my life are sometimes under-appreciated and I just wanted to tell them how much I love and appreciate them both.
When I have more money (I am VERY broke right now…) I plan on sending Blake’s Aunt Pat a care package full of Lush too. I noticed in her bathroom that she has a lot of bath products so she seems like the kind of person who would appreciate Lush goodies. I’m also sending her “Turquoise Love Fairy” when I have the money to ship her out, which could be a while because like I said, I’m in debt up to my eyeballs at the moment. I didn’t factor in the Guy Fawkes masks I bought Blake and I on eBay when I did my budget, nor did I factor in the extra $50 I’m going to have tacked onto my cell phone bill due to roaming charges in Militiagan. Oops.
Speaking of Militiagan, Blake’s Aunt Bonnie died last week. I don’t know how she died, but she’s been ill for a long time, both mentally and physically. The funeral’s in April, which Blake is going to solo, and there’s a memorial type of thing in May that his sister Shannan may fly in for with her 2 girls, so we may meet her in London for lunch or something. I’m not sure what the plans are, all I know is that I can’t afford to take any more time off work. This weekend I FINALLY finished working off the time I had to take for Blake’s grama’s funeral.
This means I can finally take a very needed day off once metabolic clinic is finished next month and that will be GLORIOUS. A day of watching nothing but the Oprah channel, painting my little heart out and playing Sims Medieval. I absolutely cannot wait! But I can’t do that until metabolic clinic is finished because I have to take a half day off for that and I have to make that time up on the weekend, which SUCKS, but I gotta do what I gotta do.
~*My boss just messaged me and apologized for being short with me last week. That makes me feel better, knowing it’s not me.*~
Lately I’ve been fantasizing about buying a car. I wonder if maybe I had my own car that I would actually drive places but it’s one of those things where I won’t know until I get one. I think I would though. I get to keep $375 of my paycheques every 2 weeks so theoretically, I could afford a $375 car + insurance payment and I *think* I could maybe get one of the 2012 Beetles if I did that. Of course I haven’t seen one yet, no one has, but I saw the outline of it on Oprah’s Favourite Things show where she gave one to each of her audience members and I think I really want one. I hope they come in yellow! And who knows, maybe by my one year anniversary with the company I WILL get a raise and then I’d really be able to afford one. But it’s hard to say. Blake says that if we move and get the kind of house I want to get, I’m probably going to have to chip in for the mortgage and if that’s the case then I won’t be able to afford a Beetle. I’d rather have a nice house in a town where I can walk to places than a car anyway, so either way I’m good. Plus, the town we’re looking at has boutiques that would potentially sell my paintings so there’s some extra income potentially because I really need to start moving my creations. My last sale was a few months ago and I’m really hoping things start to pick up soon. Usually the winter is my best selling period but it’s pretty much been a bust. I was hoping to sell a few paintings before the summer slump kicks in.
With Etsy’s new “circles” feature, I can see who’s “favourited” my paintings and lately there have been a lot of them but it hasn’t translated into sales. I’ve been featured in a bunch of treasuries lately too, but that hasn’t translated into sales either, just a lot of people “favouriting” certain paintings. Maybe that’ll eventually translate into sales, who knows? But I could really use the money.
I need to buy a kitchen scale so I can start doing my shipping through PayPal. Apparently, according to my mom’s friend Jamie, who also sells on Etsy, you get better shipping rates if you do your shipping labels through PayPal and that would make my life a lot easier anyway because I could do my shipping and customs labels at home and then send the packages with the kids who pass the post office on the way to school and I think it’s open that early. I’ll have to check.
BUT, in order to buy a kitchen scale to weigh my own packages, I need to sell a painting, because as I said, Sunny has very little money right now, and none to spend on Sunnyland Studio stuff, so things need to start happening.
Right now I have more new ideas for girls than I have time for, which is really annoying. I’ve decided to postpone work on the big painting for now because I have a lot of little paintings in my brain that I need to take care of first, like fairies with gold leaves for wings and I also bought a bunch of pressed flowers when I was at Michael’s last week which I’m full of ideas for. I’ve also bought a metric fucktonne of sparkly ribbon that I need to incorporate into paintings somehow. Some of it is skinny and some of it is very thick. I bought a whole giant roll of fine black tulle ribbon and I want to make a dark fairy out of it. I also bought a similar roll of gold ribbon that I want to use for fairy wings as well. Plus I bought a roll of thick ribbon that is purple, white and blue but the colours are all graduated together and I think it’ll make excellent fairy wings. I bought so much of this ribbon because the ribbon I normally make fairy wings out of is becoming increasingly hard to find and I’m running low, so it’s time to try something new.
I also think I’m going to use up the 8×8 inch canvases I have to have paintings at a lower selling point. In reality, these smaller paintings take as much time to do as the big ones, but you can’t sell a small painting for the same price so I’ll have to sell them at a lower price. But any money right now is better than none, so that’s my plan.
I also have new canvases that are odd sizes so you would hang them vertically or horizontally depending on what I do with them, whereas the ones I do now are standard 12×12 inches. These new ones are all like, 12×18 and stuff and I plan on doing more with them than just sticking a girl in the middle and calling it a day. I’m not sure WHAT yet, but the wheels upstairs are turning.
Anyway, I think that’s enough bitching for today. I’ve got a crustini in the toaster oven for my lunch and hopefully I can persuade Blake to make that kickass cherry tomato, basil, balsamic vinegar, olive oil pasta he does that I love so much for dinner. My mouth is watering just thinking about it!
So that’s it for this post. I hope everyone’s day is going better than mine and hopefully tomorrow will be better. <3
