Hi.

I’m posting THIS so I don’t lose the link. It’s a short story called The Yellow Wallpaper by a writer named Charlotte Perkins Gilman and it was written in 1892. It’s considered an important piece of feminist literature but never having read any feminist literature, I’ve never read it. Blake’s told me the concept of it a million times though and I plan on referencing it in an upcoming painting, so I suppose it’s about time I read it.

Speaking of reading, this article on the Goatse phenomenon is fantastic and I must thank Joey for posting it on Facebook because I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a long read but, I think, definitely worth the effort. I will not never in my life forget the name “Kirk Johnson” and I’m glad to know that he is not, in fact, deceased. (Stile is quoted a lot in the article and they talk about E/N a tiny bit too, if those are selling points for you.)

I’m listening to Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers right now and it’s very distracting because I keep singing instead of typing. “Swing the Mood” is probably in my top 5 favourite albums of all time. I just went on Amazon to see if they had any other albums and they really didn’t do anything beyond this album it seems, probably because they couldn’t get the commercial rights to all of the songs they mixed. Even on this album, all of the Elvis parts are sung by an impersonator for that reason. Actually a lot of the stuff is redone for that reason it seems. Interesting.

Anyway, there were/are great and I love this album like no other. I know the entire thing by heart. A little known fact about me is that I know the words to an impressive (for my age) amount of music from the 50s and 60s because growing up all my mom listened to in her store was an oldies station (1050 CHUM AM I’ll have you know) and then when I lived with my ex’s family as a teenager, there was a radio station that did Saturday night oldies (in fact, they still might – I should look into that because that was great) and all summer we’d sit on the back deck and drink until the oldies were over at about 3am. I would actually much rather listen to music of that era than anything created in present day because with an oldies station, I’ll probably like 90% of what they play but with anything modern, I’ll probably only like 20%.

When the Jive Bunny album came out, our library had the album so I took it out for a week and took it over to my grama’s house because she had a tapedeck with two decks so you could record one tape onto another and she was the only person I knew who had a stereo that could do that. Well, she loved the album too because this was all the music of her youth of course and I remember her trying to teach me how to swing dance in her kitchen. I think I would have been about 11. (She wasn’t always evil.)

I think it might have been Chalibear who sent me this album on CD a long long time ago from my wishlist but it’s been so long now that I forget. Either way, it’s one that sits on a shelf on my desk as opposed to being buried in my bedroom closet.

Here’s the video for “Swing the Mood”. I just rewatched it and the album version is a LOT different, using the actual vocals for most of the songs and just better mixed in general:

Another facet of my early exposure to early top 40 was that my step-dad was obsessed with The Everly Brothers. I probably know every word to every song they ever did as a result and I actually think that he liked them so much, now that I’ve kinda peeked through what they were really about and watched some videos, because it was probably one of the only kinds of SUPER HARDCORE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL he was allowed to listen to as a kid because his parents were super strict and super assholes who ruled all 6 kids with an iron fist.

I’m getting way off topic though…not that I actually had a topic.

So Blake and I stayed up late last night in bed talking about art well past our bedtimes. I can sleep during the day after my shift so I was okay but he was up late the night before with little sleep because he was on call and his work had “the biggest release of the year” over the long weekend and of course things broke, so he was exhausted but I’ve come to learn that it’s best to get him when he’s exhausted because that’s when he has the best ideas. (He’s going to murder me for saying that but to be fair, it’s not like I do it on purpose, it just ends up that way.)

We hammered out a lot of ideas and I think I have found my direction for the next painting. I can’t see beyond that one and I still have my last one to finish (and one I’m making for myself) but we basically decided that I don’t add enough detail. The metaphor (?) he gave me was the cow jumping over the moon. If you just draw a picture of a cow, there’s no story, there’s nowhere for the viewer to go, but if you draw the picture of the cow over the moon, even if you only change that one little detail, the scene and therefore the story, changes.

With “Me, two.“, there’s a story but I didn’t put in enough detail for the average viewer to really understand everything I meant. When I posted it my friend Jeck said that there was too much negative space and my response to that at the time was that was what was intended and that’s true, but the viewer is left to their own devices as far as understanding why I did that and they’re probably not going to come to the correct conclusion. (That painting is supposed to be a natural miscarriage and something that “just happens”, hence the plain blue sky background.)

Even with “Menarche“, my background is less than apparent. A little more is going on but still not a story, not a communication. I don’t think that needs to have a story or anything like that but I think maybe I leave too much to interpretation when I’m perfectly capable of doing so much more and there’s really no excuse not to except that I get excited and want to share before the idea is fully finished.

I’ll let the cat out of the bag (not that it was some kind of big surprise or anything) that the painting I’m working on that goes along with “Menarche” is “Menopause” and while “Menarche”‘s background is pure, white daisies, “Menopause”‘s (how the hell do I make that punctuation work, technically?) is forget-me-nots, using the exact same method, just changing the colours. That’s what I like best about them, I think.

I’m not really happy with “Menopause” and I can’t figure out how to fix it. I used the crackle paste for the myometrium and it’s white, so when I did a wash of “Terra Cotta Coral”, which is my default myometrium colour, it looks really coral or salmon instead of pink and if I paint it with straight paint, I’ll lose the crackle effect. I did a wash of “brown iron oxide” over top of it to tone down the orange tones but it didn’t do much to help. I may do another wash of that before I call it finished just to see what happens. I think I can only get away with one more before I’ll lose the crackle effect. Honestly, I just can’t wait for that painting to be done already. I had the idea to do it before “Menarche” so I feel like I’ve been working on it for months when it’s really only been about a week and a half. Really all I have to do is finish the forget-me-nots, which I’ll probably do today, do the final wash, varnish it and call it a day.

Doing about a million tiny dot flowers on a 30 x 30 inch piece of work is not my idea of fun anymore. My arms are killing me because you have to hover right above the panel to do them while holding your palette in your other hand and it takes every single muscle you have to do it properly, there’s nothing to lean on or you’ll fuck up your flowers because they’re fresh blobs of paint and you have to go at it with military precision or you’ll paint yourself into a very uncomfortable corner.

The painting I’m going to be doing after “Menopause” is also going to have dot flowers, but not as many of them.

Onto other things…

So what the fuck is going on in Wisconsin, eh? Ain’t that some sexist bullshit? Here are some quotes that SHOULD  piss you right off and turn you into an insta-feminist if you don’t already identify as one:

“Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.””

“Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.””

I want to light this fucking asshole on fire. This is another thing Blake and I talked about in depth last night because I never really understood wage discrimination or wage parity or whatever it’s actually called. He said that it’s fucked up because (well, partly because) say a man and a woman start at the same job at the same place making the same amount of money. The woman after a year, goes on maternity leave. In Canada, that’s for a whole year (or you can split it up between husband and wife 6 months/6 months because we’re awesome like that). So in that year, say the dude gets a $5,000 raise. The woman doesn’t get the same raise because she’s not there and when she starts back after maternity leave, it’s kinda like she’s starting back at square one. Say she goes on maternity leave again, that’s two setbacks while her male counterpart is still in the field getting promotions and raises. Another thing is that cpmpanies may not want to hire women of childbearing age *because* it’s assumed they’re going to go on mat leave which costs the company money. I don’t know what the solution to that is. I don’t think women deserve raises and promotions when they’re not there, but there shouldn’t be this crazy wage gap either.

Another thing Blake said was that when women go in for a job interview, they often lowball themselves because they have low self-worth whereas men are often full of themselves so they highball. A company is probably going to hire the woman who will work just as hard and do the same job for $10k less than the man. That causes wage disparity.

That one we can fix. We can raise girls to have high self-esteem and self-worth and hopefully close that part of the gap within the next generation or two, but we can’t work on closing that aspect while creating fucking LAWS that widen the gap in other areas like we see happening in the US right now.

There’s this author that I like named Cathrynne M. Valente who wrote these two books called The Orphan’s Tales Volume I and Volume II. They’re these award-winning fairy tales that all flow into one another and they are fucking fantastic. I loved them. In fact, that reminds me, Madison would probably like them. I highly recommend them.

Anyway, she also wrote this post on Live Journal yesterday about the War on Women happening in the US (THAT IS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HAPPENING DON’T EVEN DENY IT) that’s also well worth reading. If I could make that link flash and blink and appear 10 feet tall, I would, because you have to read it. I cannot stand it when I hear women say things like “I’m not a feminist, but…” or “I don’t call myself a feminist because it’s such a dirty word”. It drives me up the fucking wall. (Hey I wonder if that phrase comes from The Yellow Wallpaper…) The word “feminist” is something that you, as a person, define in your day to day life. It is the RADICAL NOTION that women are people too. I argue this constantly. It’s nothing more, nothing less. Yes, it encompasses other issues, like gender issues or race issues, a lot of the time, but that’s as it should be. Women, gay people, people of colour, people with mental illness, people with physical handicaps etc etc etc, we are all minorities and if we don’t stand up for each other and become a vocal MAJORITY nothing would ever get done and we’d still be stuck in the fucking dark ages.

Blake told me last night that something truly disturbing came out of Madison’s mouth a little while back that is really getting under my skin today as a result of Cathrynne’s post and the fact that, AS A FEMINIST USHERING IN ANOTHER GENERATION OF WOMAN I should be vigilant about things like this, but I guess Blake and Madison were talking about politics or something and Blake asked her what she would do if she were called to vote on a law that was good for the majority of people, but bad or discriminatory for a small amount of people, like gay people. Wanna know her answer? “Well I just wouldn’t vote.” OMG HOLY SHIT WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS CHILD AND HOW DO I CHANGE IT BEFORE SHE IS OF VOTING AGE? YES I AM YELLING I AM ANGRY. I feel like we’re parenting failures because she said this vile thing. Blake has been talking to her about women’s issues and gender issues and gay rights since she was 4 years old, why is she so…I dunno what the word is, wishy washy maybe? She has opinions but she’s too afraid to voice them. She has strong feelings about right and wrong but she doesn’t assert herself. She has low self-worth. She’s a people-pleaser. I don’t get it. Where have we gone wrong and like I said, how do we fix it?

Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughter and for the most part I love who she is becoming but I wish she was more like me and my mother and even my grandmother who were/are all feminists just by being. It’s like, we have all these strong, mostly independent women generation after generation and then there’s Madison who’s like, the weakest link in this respect. We went backwards. Why? Is it because sexism in her life is not overt? Hell, it’s not even really overt in MY life so it’s not like she sees me having any great feminist battles like my mom and grama had.

For those new to the group, my grandmother (my mother’s mother) has owned a furniture store for most of her life. Not even most of her adult life, she started working in her father’s furniture store when she was a kid and then opened her own when she got married. Back then, women didn’t do this. But you don’t tell a Crittenden woman that she can’t do something (unless she’s Madison).

My mother had me when she was 15 years old. She had to fight to get her high school diploma because in 1979 the school wouldn’t allow her to be pregnant and attend. She had to write her exams in a janitor’s closet. But she still graduated, with the help of a tutor she’s still friends with to this day, and teachers who worked with her, despite the school’s rules and she’s been an independent business-owner since day 1, first with her wallpaper store and now with her art business. She is the most goddamn stubborn, opinionated woman I have ever met and I’m glad I grew up with that.

Feminism was never a topic of discussion in my life growing up, it was just a fact of life. Crittenden men don’t last long. They die, they get divorced, Blake was brave in taking my last name, let me tell ya. It’s the women who are the trunk of our family tree.

So with Madison is her lack of WHATEVER just because she’s been talked at instead of shown by example? Like, for example, the books she reads, we deconstruct those in this house like crazy and point out how the main characters are or aren’t good role models or good feminists. Most of the time they are though so I’m thinking that maybe there’s less sexism in her life so it just doesn’t register with her? And I think that’s a problem. That makes people lazy. That’s how bullshit like what’s happening in Wisconsin happens! How do I convince my daughter that her voice matters and is important?

I am going to be on her after school like a fly on shit now that I know she said what she said because to me that is absolutely unacceptable. I don’t know what I’m going to say but I’m going to be showing her Cathrynne’s post and going from there.

It kinda bugs me that Oprah has never really used her voice and influence to come out and say that, “yes, I am a feminist” and put a newer face on it. And if she did, I must have missed that episode.

Speaking of Oprah, my mom and I go to see her next Monday. My mom posted on Facebook on Sunday (I think) that she watched the Oprah’s Lifeclass Tour that morning when they were doing it from Radio City Music Hall and that by the end of it she was bawling. To be honest, I don’t really like Oprah’s Lifeclass because I find all that so-called inspirational stuff to be really boring and after watching a bit of the St. Louis Lifeclass Tour last night I’m wondering what the hell I signed on for. I like Oprah, I may even love Oprah (how can you not love Oprah? the woman’s a saint), but the rest of them like that Bishop guy and Deepak Chopra (especially Deepak Chopra) are just going to drive me nuts, I’m pretty sure. I am no longer a spiritual person. There is nothing guiding my life except me. I don’t care to hear otherwise. Science saved my life, not prayers (but thanks for them all the same, I mean, while I don’t believe in that stuff I don’t think it can hurt).

The other thing I’m worried about is that it’s going to be a lot like going to the Leafs game and I’m really worried that I won’t be able to do it and I know my mom won’t want to go alone. Plus, it’s not like I’m going to know beforehand if I can handle the crowd or not, I won’t know until we’re there. And my mom’s hardly sympathetic to my situation either, she’s of the “ull yourself up by the bootstraps” kind of person so if I’m having trouble being there, she’s probably not going to be of much help. I really should have gotten 3 tickets so Blake could have come and I’m wondering if maybe there are scalpers there we could pick up a third ticket so he could come. I know he doesn’t want to come with us, he doesn’t want to touch this thing with a 10 foot pole, but I really want to be there and I’m scared I won’t be able to do it without him.

Some feminist role model I am. I can’t even leave my fucking house.

Anyway, so my mom said on Sunday that the Lifeclass Tour, which is what we’re going to, had her in tears so last night we went to Wal*Mart so I could buy waterproof eyeliner and a smaller purse because they aren’t allowing big bags into the event and I currently use a laptop bag to haul my crap around. The purse I got is okay, I guess. It’s pretty…old person bag…but I didn’t really have a whole lot to choose from. It’s plain black faux leather with two pockets at the front that do up with silver buckles and then on the inside there’s a main part and a little zip up pocket for tampons and lipstick. It has visible white stitching. It’s the pursiest purse I’ve ever owned, I think and it’s definitely NOT me at all AND it cost me thirty goddamn dollars. At Wal*Mart! I wanted to get a new wallet too because mine sucks but that’ll have to wait for another paycheque because those were like, $30 too. Highway robbery.

The waterproof eyeliner I got is by Hard Candy, which is a brand I’m not familiar with but they had some pretty neat stuff. Like glitter pencil eyeliner in a million different colours (I got pinky purple, turquoise and silver, mostly for Madison to use next year when she’s in high school) and this neat face illuminator stuff that I didn’t get because I was on a pretty tight budget. I did get a new thing of mascara because I haven’t had a new one in a year and I think you’re supposed to replace that stuff every 6 months or something. HOWEVER, when I got home and opened the package, I realized that I got non-waterproof stuff so I’m going to save the one I had before for Oprah-like ocassions and use the non-waterproof one for every day use. I got Maybelline’s The Falsies mascara in case anyone cares because I really like it and it’s only like, $6 at Wal*Mart. I also got a tube of Maybelline’s new 10 Hour Super Stay Stain Gloss because it looked pretty cool and it really is. The stuff is totally a gloss but it does not budge. I put some on last night when I got home and slept with it on and here it is the next day and it still looks more or less the way it did when I put it on, just faded. Highly recommended if you like a gloss look with the staying power of a lipstick. I think next paycheque I’m going to try their new 24 Hour Lipstick since the gloss stuff is so good.

Hard Candy doesn’t test on animals according to their packaging but I don’t know about Maybelline. I know for a fact that L’Oreal tests on animals and while I really like their products, I’m trying to find alternatives for that reason.

I also got ponytail holders because mine all get lost. I usually use itty bitty ones because my hair’s so thin, like ones that slip on my fingers, but they didn’t have those so I had to get bigger ones. Oddly, Wal*Mart had a really small selection of hairbands which is another thing I went in for because I only own one of those and it’s leopard print and it looks pretty stupid.

In other news, I gained 3 lbs according to Wii Fat last night and I’m not buying that crap about body fluctuations because  I have a stomach flu (again) and I just took the mother of all shits right before I weighed myself so if anything i should have been DOWN some weight, but no, I gained  lbs.  This really sucks because as a family we’ve been tracking calories with MyFitnessPal and it says I’m only supposed to be eating about 1200 calories a day. Then at the end of the day when you’re finished logging, it says “if every day were like today, you’d weigh blah blah blah in 5 weeks” and the majority of the time I’m right at or just a little above the 1200 calorie mark so it’s been saying that I should be 128 lbs or so instead of the 135 I am. I’m supposed to be losing weight with this thing, not gaining. BUT as Blake pointed out, counting calories has slowed my weight gain considerably so that’s a good thing. I’m okay with being 135 lbs, I don’t mind being a healthy weight or even a little bit overweight but I can’t go over that without having a serious hit to my self-esteem and my surgeon really doesn’t want me to gain any more. I guess we’ll see how things go. I’m going to give it another month of calorie counting alone and trying to do better with coming under my 1200 (or at least not going over) and if I gain any more weight aft6er that then I guess I’ll be forced to use the dreadmill. It’s just such a goddamn waste of time, I can’t even stand it. I do not, in the slightest, take even an ounce of pleasure from physical activity. I was probably a sloth in my past life. I liked yoga though, but that’s not really an option for me right now and I never lost any weight doing it.

Okay I think that’s all I’ve got for today (as if that’s not enough) and I think I need to go have breakfast because I’m sick and haven’t eaten yet today and then finish this goddamn painting.

THE END.

I’m listening to Adele’s album 21 which I’ve had for a long time but never really listened to in its entirety until today. I’ve gotta say, it’s leaving me less than inspired. This is old fogey music. American Idol crap. I like “Rolling in the Deep” of course and I like whatever the second song on the album is, but the rest is like…Whitney Houston-esque garbage. This is adult contemporary, middle age “safe” music, the likes of which you find on easy listening stations and is TOTALLY ABSOLUTELY 100% NOT MY THING AT ALL. I love her voice and I really really wanted to like her but this is just…blah. Rainy day wallpaper. Blah.

So anyway yesterday I finished another self-portrait:

Self Portrait #2
12 x 16 inch mixed media on watercolour paper

The jewel-as-trache-scar was Charlie’s idea. It was a good idea so I used it.

Right now I’m working on my second 30 x 30 inch panel and a 12 x 12 inch wood panel. The 30 x 30 is the one with crackle paste on it and if I’d have known via Golden’s site how crackle paste really worked instead of relying on the instructions on the jar, I would have done a much thicker layer so I would have achieved bigger cracks. As it is, I can’t really afford any more crackle paste and the cracks are very small. I guess I’m going to try working with the cracks that I have now by applying a wash of colour with the idea of the watery colour gathering in the cracks but if that doesn’t look right I guess I have no other choice but to buy more crackle paste because it’s really important for the piece to be super duper cracky. Deep, fissure-like cracks is what I need, like a dry desert floor. I’m going to need to get one of those things that I don’t know the name of…one of those things that artists use that looks like a little flat trowel. Maybe it is called a trowel, I don’t know, but I need one whatever they’re called, if I’m to apply a second, thicker coat of crackle paste.

The really shitty part of this situation is that I’m probably going to have to either sand or scrape off the layer of crackle paste that’s there already, which also means that I can kiss my flawless basecoat goodbye. Not good when I’m using a discontinued colour and I only have one bottle left. WOE IS ME. #firstworldartistproblems

The 12 x 12 inch wood panel I’m working on is actually something called “gessoboard” which is *like* a wood panel but it uses that compressed, cardboardy fake wood that they make office furniture and cheap shelves out of and it’s primed professionally with gesso for a super smooth surface. Paint just glides on these fuckers. This is my first time using one and I’ve gotta say I’m a fan. The problem is that they’re pretty pricey, $18 + tax for a 12 x 12 when I can get 3 canvases of the same size for about the same price. But they are soooo nice and I can use my triple thick gloss glaze varnish on them without the fear of it cracking if mishandled. It probably wouldn’t work as well to glue heavy stuff on like the watercolour paper I use for my girls, but it’s PERFECT for flaming, glittering uteri. ;o)

So the absolute worst thing for me is a lack of ideas. It is not my natural state AT ALL and these days, while productive, I feel like I’m in a big of a creative rut. I realize that probably doesn’t make any sense since I’ve been posting lots of artwork but for the most part, these are all old ideas that I’m pulling out of my sketchbook and making real, I’m not really coming up with anything new.

So, I’ve been reading this book that I’ve actually had for years, since I was in college, called “How To Get Ideas” by Jack Foster and it’s a really simple book with a lot of good ideas like, how to look at things and really see them, doing morning pages (essentially), giving yourself deadlines and the space to come up with terrible ideas because sometimes terrible ideas are actually really good ones and this part really struck me:

“”And idea is delicate,” said Charles Brower, the head of an advertising agency. “It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.” 

I think this is why many people seem bereft of ideas. 

They’ve run into too many sneers and yawns, they’re heard to many quips. And so they’ve said the heck with it and don’t even try to come up with ideas any more.

The fear of rejection shuts down their idea factories.”

When I was in night school for copywriting, my first copywriting class, my teacher said the same thing, that you can’t be negative in any way during a brainstorming session because if you are, people will clam up and not want to stick their necks out with terrible yet potentially genius ideas.

I can’t really say that this has ever been my experience though. This part of the book is 100% me:

“I used to teach a three-day seminar on advertising in Chicago. One of the assignments I gave each student was to create, overnight, an outdoor board for a Swiss Army knife. Most of the students would come in the next morning with the required billboard, but several of them would say that they worked for hours and couldn’t come up with anything. This happened three years in a row. 

The fourth year I tried something different. Instead of asking for just one billboard, I asked each student to create at least ten billboards for a Swiss Army knife. And instead of giving them all night, I told them they had to do it during their lunch hour. 

After lunch everybody had at least ten ideas. Many had more. One student had 25. 

I came to realize that when faced with a problem most people look for the one right solution because that’s the way they were brought up. All through school they had to answer multiple-choice and true-or-false questions, questions that only had one right answer. And so they assume that all questions and problems are like that. And when they can’t find a solution that looks perfect they give up. 

But most problems aren’t like exam questions in school. Most problems have many solutions. And as soon as I forced my students to realize that, they found those solutions.”

That is me to a tee. (T?) I am afraid of bad ideas. I think that everything that tumbles out of my brain should be genius and I tend to think things are “precious”, even ideas. I’ve written before about how I’ve been trying to overcome my art supplies and projects as being “precious” but I think I need to do the same thing with ideas too or else I’m going to make myself insane. I have to allow myself to come up with 100 terrible ideas because within those 100 terrible ideas, there could be 1 or 2 really good ones.

Or maybe even none.

But I won’t know unless I try and it’s actually a HELL of a lot more difficult for me than I thought it would be. I’m known for being really creative, creativity is what I’ve got, but for someone who supposedly has a creative mind, ideas sure are hard to come by when I get in ruts like this. They’re rare, but they happen.

And the book addresses ruts. The reason they happen is because of repetition and I think that’s definitely true in my case. I don’t leave the house. I watch the same movies over and over again. I listen to the same music over and over again. I go to the same stores over and over again (Michael’s and Curry’s). There is little to no surprises in my life unless you want to count catastrophe and you would think that I’d have some residual “stuff” to work out because of everything that happened this summer but I honestly don’t think I do. Besides, I’m not sure what a pancreas even looks like or necessarily where it’s located. And I’m not good at drawing bodies so my wound is kind of out of the question. Maybe I’ll go there some day but right now, I don’t think, is the time. Plus, since I don’t really remember anything that happened, I don’t have a whole lot to work with.

Anyway, that’s where my head is today. I only have 2 & a half more hours left of work and then I plan on coming up with terrible ideas for the next 2 days that I have off.

Tomorrow I’m going to be making a honey spiral ham with potatoes, corn on the cob and asparagus but it’s just going to be us so there will be lots and lots of leftovers.

OH! GET THIS! So on Facebook I’m friends with one of my father’s sisters and Lisa tagged a picture of her daughter on her photography business’ fan page. So I went to the picture because I didn’t even know this kid existed (I barely know this aunt) and in the album is pics of Phil’s brother’s daughter too. This leads me to believe that there was some sort of family get together recently which is interesting because Phil never gets together with his family because they don’t really talk. But this is the exact type of thing, like my own grandfather’s FUNERAL, that I wouldn’t have been invited to. Lisa’s pissed off that I didn’t want to invite them to our anniversary party, for legitimate reasons, yet it’s PERFECTLY FINE to not include me in my own grandfather’s FUNERAL or ANY family reunions. How the fuck does that work?

Just something that occurred to me yesterday while I was clicking around on Facebook.

Oh and for those who were concerned, Ana Voog is home from the hospital and is okay. She’d been withdrawing from an antidepressant which caused suicidal tendencies and she ground up Xanax in a coffee grinder and tried to OD. Then she ran away from the house at some point and the cops had dogs out looking for her. She also had a gun and she shot a gazebo. That’s all she’s really said about it other than the fact that her shrink was going to be retiring but changed her mind so Ana can still see her and I guess she had to go in front of the courts and prove that she wasn’t a drug addict and didn’t need rehab or something. I dunno, the series of events wasn’t crystal clear. All I know is that I’m extremely happy that she’s okay and that she now has a new lease on life.

Happy Zombie Jesus Celebration!

“O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.“

Not one single ant on my desk today. GREAT SUCCESS! I WON THE WAR! In your FACE Nature!

Now that that’s out  of the way, I bring you (finally) “Menarche”.

Menarche (pronounced “men-ar-kee”, like “men-o-paws”) is a girl’s first menstrual period, which occurs usually around age 13 (that’s the global average).  This painting was inspired by Madison’s menarche experience and not my own. Mine was very negative because it happened very early (age 9) and I didn’t know what was going on, my Aunt Heather had to tell me and since I didn’t want to tell my parents, she provided the pads (I also used my mom’s o.b. tampons sometimes when I was about 11).  Like many girls who started young, I thought there was something very wrong with me when I noticed the spots of bright red blood in my underbums. And that’s the thing with menarche, usually the blood is bright red as opposed to the brownish blood you get as you age.

Yes, that’s glitter.

With Madison’s menarche, I was ready for it having had such a negative experience with my own. I started telling her about periods when she was about 4 years old and the dialogue continues to this day. When Madison came to me one day last year (luckily it was *before* I went into the hospital, I believe it was April) and told me that she thought she was having her first period, I asked her to come into the bathroom and show me her underwear. Lo and behold, there was bright red blood in the crotch of her panties, so I gave her some disposable pads to use and called Blake to pick up more on his way home from work.

That day, I think I made a friends-only or filtered Live Journal post about the event because somehow my friend Deanna knew about it and she contacted me to ask if she could go halves on a Lunapads teen kit for Madison, which I accepted and which Madison has been using ever since. Lunapads are reusable menstrual pads and I think they’re amazing. Since switching to Lunapads myself, I haven’t had any yeast infections which I used to get all the time.

I love my Lunapads and (not that I’m getting periods these days because of medication/being sick) would never give them up, but Madison came to me last night and asked if she could switch to either disposable pads or tampons and while I didn’t tell her this, I was really disappointed in her decision because I thought with starting her off with Lunapads to begin with, I was starting her off “right” and that she would always be period positive and she IS period positive, she just sees it as a fact of life and deals with it but she finds the Lunapads bulky and she thinks disposable pads would be less bulky. She’s absolutely wrong of course, and I told her that, so that’s when she asked about tampons.

I have less of a problem with disposable tampons than I do with disposable pads because tampons, as long as they don’t have an applicator, are nowhere near as bad for the environment as pads are with their plastic liners. Tampons, essentially, are just cotton. They still take a really long time to break down in the environment, but not nearly as long as a disposable pad. My issue with tampons though, is that they cause irritation and for me, they caused bladder and yeast infections roughly every 3 months, not to mention the fact that they made the pain from endometriosis that much worse.

Madison doesn’t have bad cramps or endometriosis so that’s less of an issue, but I did tell her that if she wanted to use tampons, I would be okay with her using o.b. tampons without an applicator as long as she promised to never flush them down the toilet, that they were disposed of properly and that she promised me that she would be very careful about leaving them in too long. The only caveat was that she would have to buy them herself with her own allowance because we already bought her perfectly good Lunapads, disposable tampons are not a necessity they are a luxury.

Having said that, I did offer her another solution: we would buy her a DivaCup. A DivaCup, being an insertable, has all the benefits of a tampon but none of the risks and none of the environmental impact. It is a cup that you put deep inside your vagina which collects the menstrual blood and then when it’s time to change it, you carefully pull it out, empty the blood in the toilet or sink, rinse it and re-insert it. As an added benefit, the DivaCup has no risk of Toxic Shock Syndrome, or yeast infections and you only have to empty it every 12 hours so she wouldn’t have to empty it at school, whereas with tampons they should be changed every 4 hours. The DivaCup is also only $34.99 whereas a box of tampons is like, $9 or $10 with tax and you may need more than one box per period. I believe the DivaCup is supposed to last 10 years so compare 3 or 4 DivaCups per lifetime vs a lifetime of tampons and financially the DivaCup is the obvious winner. Healthwise the DivaCup is the obvious winner. Environmentally the DivaCup is the obvious winner. Conveniencewise the DivaCup is the obviously winner. Obviously, she chose the DivaCup option and one will be purchased for her soon.

While initially I was disappointed in her wanting to use disposables from now on, I’m proud of her for not being squicked out about a few tablespoons of period blood and choosing the DivaCup instead of disposable anythings. This shows me that I did start her off in the right direction, even if it were a direction I hadn’t really anticipated. (I didn’t think she’d be comfortable with insertables for quite a while. She’s turning 14 in May.)

So that was last night’s period conversation with Madison. She didn’t want me to name this painting “Madison’s Menarche” but she said I could post all that I just did just to explain why I painted it the way I did. I just wanted it to be bright and shiny and sparkly and happy and “new” feeling, like the beginning of a brand new woman should be.

“Menarche” will be available for sale on my site soon.

Like I’m pretty sure I mentioned earlier in the making of this painting, it’s actually one in a pair but I haven’t even started working on the other one yet so there won’t be pics of it for quite a while. As I also think I said before, it’s going to involve crackle paste though, which I’ve never used before and I’m kind of geeked about.

In other art news, yesterday I edited video I took of me drawing a few weeks ago but I don’t really like how it turned out. The angle is all wrong. The reason I bothered editing it is to show that taping myself drawing or painting “right side up” is pretty much impossible because with that angle, you can’t see what I’m doing because I’m right handed. The only way I could show you how I draw or paint from the left side is if I had the camera around my neck because I work sideways or at a sideways angle all the time and to work straight up and down would feel completely unnatural to me and I doubt I could do it. Anyway, here’s the video:

I kinda think I like making process videos. It’s interesting for me to watch myself because I don’t even really think about what I do, I just do it. I also think, maybe, that a person might be more likely to buy a painting if they can see the process by which it was made. Do you think that might be true too? That’s another reason why I was taking pictures of myself holding finished paintings (which I forgot to do with “Menarche”, oops), it’s like…proof that I made it or something, like a signature. Especially since 1/4 of the time I make something, I forget to sign my name before varnishing and then it’s too late.

I was really good at advertising and marketing when I was in college, probably at the top, or pretty damn close to the top of my class. The guy who thought he was at the top had like, this fucked up rivalry with me that always annoyed me because I’m not really a competitive person, my philosophy is that we’re all in this together and the more we get together, together, together, the more we get together the happier we’ll be. Anyway, he took me out for breakfast this one time and was like “how come you can never come to class yet be so damn good?” and the only answer I had was – well first, that I actually wasn’t that good – that it might just be instinct. The problem though, is that I have extremely low self-esteem with most things, my own work in particular, and I find it incredibly difficult to market myself.  And then I think, because I have such low self-esteem probably, that since I’m unable to market myself well, maybe I wasn’t so great in college either. But then I think of that breakfast and think that no, I’m just crazy and have low self-esteem. I’m also on a lot of drugs and haven’t flexed my advertising muscle in well over a decade so I’m just not the shark I once was. In fact, I can’t remember a single thing from college because I just stopped caring about advertising all together. I know good when I see it and I can make good when I want to, but don’t ask me what the tenets of marketing are because all you’d get from me is a blank stare because that shit’s boring. Instinct is where it’s at.

Anyway…

Today was a dressing change day and I took a pic of my wound for you guys since I haven’t done that since February:

As you can see, there are only 3 little areas left to heal, the two smaller ones are about the size of dimes and the middle part is about the size of a toonie. After those spots are healed, I’m still probably going to have to have a covering over the scar tissue because it’s brand new tissue and as a result it’s very very fragile. Even having it brushing against my clothing would likely reopen the wound.

And I think that’s really all I had to say in this update. Madison got her grad dress today and it is absolutely gorgeous but she’s forbidden me from showing you pictures of it and the only other thing I wanted to share was this article about Madonna’s Truth or Dare, which is out on Blu Ray as of yesterday I believe and which also happens to be on my wishlist if any generous third parties were interested in buying it for me. :o)

That’s all the poop that’s fit to scoop, enjoy the video and have a wonderful evening!

PS. My Oprah tickets came today! That’s the other thing I meant to mention! On the back of them it says you can’t bring STICKS! GLAD I READ THE BACK! BOY WOULD MY FACE HAVE BEEN RED IF I’D HAVE BROUGHT MY STICK!

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~
I’m 72% toward my goal and could really use your support! 

This had me SOBBING. But in a good way:

I’m working right now but if anyone can find anything else by this woman, I’d really like to see it.

I searched YT & found lots. She’s amazing.

Her name is Staceyann Chin.

Blake is on the phone right now; a meeting for work. I have to be super quiet but all I want to do is blare A Tribe Called Red and glitter my uterus. You heard me. GLITTER MY UTERUS. Then I have to glitter some BLOOD for my EXTRA SPECIAL, ONE-OF-A-KIND PAINTING. WHY AM I TYPING IN CAPS?

But seriously, I really want you guys to listen to Electric Pow Wow by A Tribe Called Red. Here’s the link again. Listen. They combine pow wow music with fucking dubstep or whatever and the result is nothing short of brilliant. Plus they’re Canadian so they’re extra super awesome.

So this painting I’m working on is coming along fucking fabulously. All I have left to do is glitter the blood (I’m using fine glitter for the blood and flaky glitter for the clots haha), sign my name, paint the sides, slap on some varnish and she’s done. BUUUUUUUUUUUT – and this is going to take an awful lot of effort on my part – since it’s part of a pair, I don’t want to show you guys until both of the paintings are finished and all I have done on the other one is a basecoat so far. If I had more room to work, I could do them both at the same time, but I don’t have the space for two 30 x 30 inch wood panels. Right now my work surface is my coffee table and as it is, when I’m done glittering the blood, I’m going to be moving the one painting onto the treadmill (which is messed up, more on that in a bit) and then using the coffee table for the other. ALTHOUGH, now that I think about it, I may be able to use my easel for the one I haven’t started yet. I’m not sure how this crackle paste stuff works, if it’s really good and pasty I could use it with the painting being upright but if it’s liquidy in any way, it’ll run and I can’t have a runny, cracky uterus. Realistically though, I’m not sure I can draw a uterus upright. I work with stuff vertically and I don’t know if I’ll be able to change perspective. I kinda don’t think so. (I have no idea how people paint upright. It feels so unnatural to me.)

I can’t remember if I mentioned this before or not but when I was reading about Jackson Pollock, Wikipedia said that he was unique in that he used his whole body to paint because his canvas was on the floor and he could get at from multiple angles. I do that too. My leg muscles ache when I’m finished painting for the day because I’m squatting and my back hurts because I’m bent over the canvas/panel. I’ve dislocated two toes from squatting to do the tops of these big pieces. It’s hard to explain. Maybe when I start the other painting, I’ll do a process video. I’m not sure how to edit a video, though, which is why I’ve never tried doing a process video before. That’s at least a day away though, the lighting in here sucks during the evening, which is when I would be starting the second one. I’ll at least think about doing it, I guess. Like I said, my main worry is editing. I have no idea how to do it. I would need to add multiple segments together and cut the ends off them, speed the video up, mute it and I guess add music.

Another thing I was thinking of maybe doing was doing streaming video of me painting but I’m nervous about that for a couple of reasons: 1) trolls, 2) I don’t know where to do it. Also I don’t think I’d be a very good hostess. My friend Belinda used to do streaming while she painted and I liked to watch her but she’s a chatty person and would talk to us while she painted. I don’t think I could do that, plus my computer’s on the other side of the room so I wouldn’t be able to see the chat.  SO I’m thinking maybe streaming would be a bad idea. What do you guys think? And if I did it, where should I do it? (Don’t stay Stickam. I hate Stickam. MFC?)

~*GROCERY STORE & DINNER BREAK*~

We just got finished with having dinner. I hate about 1/4 of my steak and about  cups of green beans with butter. Now I’m eating 2o0 calories worth of sour cream & onion Crispers, which are only 10% of your daily intake of sodium. I’m 500mg below what a person’s daily average should be (2500). YAY ME. I’ve noticed that sour cream & onion flavoured things are lower in sodium than other flavours of things. Like mini rice cakes. Cheddar cheese ones are like 8% of your sodium per day and sour cream & onion is only like, 4% or something like that. I wonder why that is? Also, who knew I liked rice cakes?

While we were putting away the groceries, I took pictures of the dogs who knew there was food around:

Hoover Dog.

Lucky Dog.

Blake also bought me pink daisies, behold!

And now I’ve completely forgotten what else I was going to say in this post…oh yeah, the treadmill. Or as I like to call it, the dreadmill. The track is fucked up, like when Blake uses it, the track goes off to one side like as if one side’s stretched longer than then other or something. We got the extended warranty so they can come and fix it, it’s just a matter of actually getting it done.

Blake and Wes have started geocaching. There are a surprising amount of caches in our town and so far they’ve found two of them. I have no interest in finsing caches, but Blake said I could be involved in the making of them which I’m a little bit excited about.

I think this Sunday, which is one of my two days off, we’re going to go to Stouffville to get some fucking amazing homemade Ukrainian pierogies from the Sales Barns and then possibly Stouffville Pizza too because I just want them dammit and if I’m gonna blow my diet one day, I might as well DO IT. I just wanna go. Get food. Come home. Eat. And eat some more. And then do some more eating. And while I’m at it, I might as well eat.

And then guess what else is on Sunday? GUESS GUESS GUESS!!! I bet you guessed it!!! GAME OF FUCKING THRONES, PEOPLE!!! I’m only like, 1/4 of the way through A Clash of Kings though and there’s not a chance in hell I’ll be done before the season premiere. That said, however, Larissa on Facebook posted this and I thought it was awesome so I’m sharing it with you now.

And I think that’s all I have to say for now. I think I’m going to go read my book for a bit while my glitter dries, eat my Crispers, glitter my blood and go to bed. I wish you a happy tomorrow and sweet dreams whenever you get there. Truly.

PS. I got my US postage stamps from Zazzle for The 4 x 6 Exchange and they look awesome! Unfortunately we need $1.50 US postage for each envelope and I only got 45 cent stamps (and not enough for all of us + my mom’s 2 entries) so we’re going to have to get an International Reply Coupon for each one anyway meaning that there was really no point in me wasting my money to get the cool stamps of my work from Zazzle. The good news about that though is that I got to see Zazzle’s quality and I can say without a moment’s hesitation that I’m pretty sure everything I made in my Zazzle shop will print beautifully so GO TO TOWN.

PPS. Silver over at Camwhores who is an artist and gallery owner had some interesting things to say about my art crisis post from the yesterday. You should check it out. Basically she thinks I should stop giving a shit what other people think of my art.

If you said “eww” when you first heard about reusable menstrual products, we bring you this: eww by Kotex.

Who plays Draw Something on the iPad? I’ve had my iPad for a while, I had it when I was in the hospital, but Charlie just got me a stylus for it and I’ve been playing Draw Something today with my friends Mark and Serendipity. I don’t know what my username is because I signed up through Facebook but I think if you add me by e-mail address (Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com) it should work. I’ll play with pretty much anyone so hit me up!

Charlie also sent me the COOLEST DAMN THING EVER! Check THIS out!

It’s a Flip HD camcorder with my character Octavia from The Fiction Project on it! How cool is that? He got it printed at CafePress apparently and he also sent the tripod with it which I didn’t even know existed before and now I can make drawing and painting process videos! I’m so excited!

Along with the Flip, the tripod and some Tara McPherson prints for Madison, he also sent me my Brown Bee Girl stamps from Zazzle for The 4 x 6 Exchange! The 4 of us are using the stamps, as well as my mom and some of her friends. Lots of exposure there! Too bad I’m not doing girls anymore…

Speaking of not doing girls anymore, I spent yesterday working on my first of two 30 x 30 inch wood panels and I had Blake take some pics while I worked just for posterity’s sake. Here they are:

My poor herniated tummy. :o(

As you can tell by the pictures, I’m painting another uterus, my hair is growing back in and my body is very lumpy. My hair kept getting in my paint so I threw on that hairband as a temporary solution. I don’t normally wear hairbands. (Although maybe I should! I just have the one though.) My hair is still really thin but it’s growing back nicely. I really really want to bleach it out and dye it pink but the new hair is so fine that I’m afraid to damage it. Plus, it’s been interesting to see what my natural hair colour is. (The pics make it looks darker than it really is. It’s an ash blonde.) The new hair is about 5 or 6 inches long.

Well, I didn’t really have a whole lot to say today so I’ll wrap this up…I hope you’re enjoying your Monday afternoon! I think I’m off to scarf down a bagel and then get back to painting this beast. I’ll probably write more tomorrow. <3

Why hello there, children.

So guess what? I got a call this morning while I was out getting my blood work done that FUCKING NIELSEN wants us to be a GODDAMN NIELSEN FAMILY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How cool is that???? That’s something you only really hear about on TV! They’re going to be sending us a scanner, so that means it won’t be TV, it’ll be groceries. You scan your groceries so they can see what you buy and when you do so, you get points and when you get enough points you can buy things from their catalogue. My ex’s family had this and it was pretty cool. We do groceries a million times a week so we’re going to rack up the points! Hooray for free stuff!

So this morning I went and had my blood work done as I mentioned, which was pretty uneventful, but I needed to fast for it because they’re testing my cholesterol too so I broke my fast with an Egg McMuffin and a hashbrown, which is like, 480 friggin’ calories! Is nothing sacred? I even got the McMuffin over the Tim Hortons Breakfast Biscuit, which is 20x better, because I figured the biscuit being buttery & all, would be more calories than the McMuffin. I was right of course, the breakfast biscuit of the gods is 430 calories, but knowing that, I would have preferred one of those to the McMuffin and the hashbrown.

But now I don’t know where to go for dinner! We’re doing our taxes at 2pm (yay money!) and then we want to go somewhere to eat but I only have 720 calories left for the day and everything I’ve looked up is really close to that (Quizno’s, who knew?). I think I’m going to go with a BLT from Great Canadian Bagel because it’s only about 400 calories, surprisingly, and that’ll leave me some leeway to have dessert later (I have frozen yogurt, Skor bits, angel foodcake and organic strawberries and I know how to use them to make a 300 calorie dessert, dammit!) or veggies and dip.

Because I’m reading A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin, I’ll probably go with the veggies and dip. I have this *thing* about eating and reading at the same time, which I think I’ve written about before. I just love doing it, it’s one of my favourite things to do. So far I’m liking the book a lot but it is SO nerdy, holy shit and there are so many damn people to keep track of that I keep getting confused, but overall I’m liking it and I’m really looking forward to the Game of Thrones premiere. Hopefully I can get the book done before the show starts but I’m a super slow reader so I’m not very optimistic about that. I procrastinate like crazy; for example I’m writing this post instead of reading.

After taxes, I’m dragging Blake to Curry’s so I can get either a 24 x 30 inch or 24 x 36 inch wood panel, whichever they have in stock and then Michael’s to get some paint for it. All I have left to do on my 30 x 36 inch is to varnish it, which I’m going to do when I’m finished this post, and then it’s finally done! I’m so excited! It’s going to look fantastic on my living room wall! It’ll look fantastic on YOUR living room wall too and like just about all things, it’ll be for sale for a retarded amount of money for your buying pleasure!

The next two pieces are going to be very different from each other and I plan on working on them both at the same time. I’ve decided that I need to step up my productivity and despite not having the space for two big pieces, I’m going to try doing them both at the same time anyway. My big concern of course is dog hair. We vacuum ALL THE DAMN TIME but it’s never enough, there’s dog hair all the fuck over my house and it gets on my artwork and it pisses me right off. BUT I’m going to inform the family that my office being vacuumed is a top priority while I’m working on these, just as an experiment, and I guess we’ll see what happens.

Well, I have to leave to do our taxes in half an hour and I want to get a coat of varnish on my painting before we leave so I guess I’ll wrap this up. I hope you’re all having a terrific day and I’ll probably talk at you all tomorrow!

It’s March 14th, which I do believe is Steak and Blowjob Day! There are a bunch of sites out there about it now and I’m no longer sure which is the “official” one, so just Google it I guess. If you’re unsure as to how to give a blowjob, please refer to my handy guide, Blowjobs 101.

So I went to the doctor’s yesterday. I’m still on the list for surgery but like, this guy is one of something like 5 specialists who can do this procedure in all of Canada so he’s in pretty high demand and they expect that I’m going to be waiting for a little while longer as a result. No biggie.

She needs to run some more tests because basically my kidneys are failing and she’s not sure why. If normal kidneys are a 90 and kidney failure is 300, I’m at around 129. I’m not sure what those numbers mean but that’s how she explained it to us. She’s not going to do anything to treat it right now but I’m not really allowed to have salt anymore, I can’t drink like, more than maybe one Diet Coke a day tops and I have to drink a lot of water.

My iron is super high so I don’t have to take that anymore, so that’s a plus.

She doesn’t want me to gain anymore weight. It’s not that I’m fat, it’s just that I’m at a good weight where I am right now so she wants me to maintain. This means that I have to start eating breakfast again (blah), I have to eat “small, frequent meals throughout the day, like every couple of hours”, smaller dinners and she wants my ass on the treadmill for an undisclosed period of time for an undisclosed amount of days per week (double blah). I’m going to start with 20 minutes 3 times a week and go from there and this is today’s breakfast:

(Blackberries, mango, an apple, watermelon)

Like I said, I have to have more blood work to see where things stand and I see her again in 4 weeks. Big fun. :o/

Honestly, I’m pretty worried about this kidney thing. Dialysis scares the ever-loving shit out of me and it squicks me out to no end that I had to have it when I was in the hospital this summer. I’m VERY grateful that I don’t remember it.

Oh and she wants us to try and find a tighter binder, which is going to be tough considering it was hard to find a binder THIS small to begin with.

My Free People dress for our anniversary party came yesterday and it’s gorgeous. My “Shine” print also came and it’s gorgeous too. I can’t currently find the link for that, though. You’ve probably seen it. I’ll make it my avatar on Live Journal for this post.

Yesterday, after Dr. Hanrahan’s, we went to Starbucks to use the gift certificates that Phaedie sent me for my birthday (thank you!!! <3) and I decided to have a “last meal” of a mini apple pie, a chocolate chunk brownie, a dream square and a vanilla bean frappuccino WITH whipped cream but i didn’t finish my drink because I felt like I was killing myself with every sip and the brownie and dream square are still in my purse because my mom made me feel like a heifer for ordering them. Maybe I’ll eat them today or just throw them in the garbage. :o(

EB Games is right beside Starbucks and I couldn’t resist buying the new Sims 3 expansion, Showtime. In this one you get to be a rockstar, a DJ, a performance artist (think Cirque du Soleil) or a magician. I didn’t really get a chance to play with it that much last night because it took FOREVER AND A DAY to install, but I made my girl, Pixie Moody, and she’s going to be a rockstar and I’m NOT GOING TO USE THE MONEY CHEAT THIS TIME. She’s poor and starting from scratch to work her way up to the highest level of the music career path GODAMMIT. (Yeah, this’ll last…)

Anyway, I got it and it looks pretty cool and 10 times better than the stupid goddamn pets expansion which sucked hairy unicorn balls.

After my momk left and Blake was done work, I cried for a while about everything I have to do now so I don’t die and then we went to the grocery store to buy kidney-friendly, low-sodium groceries. My go-to lunches are going to be cauliflower, baby carrots and cucumbers with Havarti cheese and dill dip because I’m really really sick of salad. Dinners are going to be like, a fast fry steak and asparagus with margarine, which is actually less salty than I imagined it would be (3% of your daily value per serving, I think it’s 2 teaspoons). Snacks will be air-popped popcorn with margarine (3% again) and dry chow mein noodles (15%).  No more Swiss Cheese crackers. :o( No more Ritz pretzel crackers. :o( No. More. Pistachios. :o( :o( :o(

And that’s all I really have to report.

OH! One more thing. I got new glasses. Ignore my ugly face, I just woke up:

Okay now I’m done typing. Hope your day is swell.

PS. My thyroid isn’t doing so hot either apparently, I forgot to mention that. She didn’t give me any numbers though, just said it wasn’t doing very well and that she needed to do more tests before putting me on thyroid meds.

Oh, 5am. Hello there.

I have cramps like fucking crazy and it makes me wonder if I’m not going to have a period. I haven’t had one since July, so I guess we’ll see. Not having one, yet having all the pain of one all these months, is really disconcerting for me.

Last night I had that crazy pain in my pancreas again. I can’t even describe the pain really, not in a way that would do it justice. It’s like…a sharp pain right kinda under your solar plexus that radiates through to your back. It is incredibly painful, like an 8 out of 10. The only thing that helps it is a mixture of 800mg of Ibuprofen and two Percocets. Then I have to take the Percocets for the next few hours to keep the pain at a tolerable level.

My surgeon says that this could be a permanent thing. :o/

This morning Cheryl is coming to change my dressing. I hate Cheryl. I’m sure she’s a nice person but she’s so so sloppy. She takes shortcuts and it really pisses me off. Like, my wound is big enough that it requires one Mesorb (like a big maxi pad) and one piece of 4 x 4 inch gauze to cover the whole thing before putting the tape on. She will put the Mesorb on in the middle with the wound poking out on either side so the tape sticks to it and can cause breakdown. The other thing is that my belly hangs down and pulls DOWN so the crappy Hypafix tape they use for it comes off at the top and rolls down so we have to put a piece of drape across it horizontally so that doesn’t happen. Except for the longest time, Cheryl argued that I didn’t need that until when Blake was in MI and I showed her how necessary it was when Blake wasn’t there to do it after she left. Then she’s done it ever since. But any excuse to take a shortcut and get outta here as fast as possible and she’ll take it. It’s sloppy and sloppy people bug me. Also? She smells like cigarette smoke and Obsession perfume and it makes me nauseous.

Smokers? Don’t try and cover up your cigarette smell with perfume, it just smells 10x worse than the smoke would have.

Plus I don’t think nurses should wear perfume anyway.

The other thing about Cheryl that I hate is that despite the fact that we’ve told her we don’t like it and they’re supposed to work around our schedule, she comes at 8:45am-9am, which was bullshit until I got my job back and was up at that time anyway.

Stupid Cheryl. Grrrr. >:o(

So yesterday I drew my colouring book girl and here she is:

I’ve been leery of putting jewelry on the girls because I wouldn’t want to mess up someone adding jewels of their own later but this girl looked too plain without the necklace. I tried to make it small enough though, that someone could put a jewel on top of it and the ink shouldn’t show on the sides.

I signed up for Art House Co-Op’s 4×6 Project at the urging of my mother. You take a piece of 4×6 inch paper or cardstock or other flat media and you make a piece of art out of it for exchange with another person who has done the same. You have to send them a SASE when you send in your artwork and it has to have US stamps on it but I don’t know where to get US stamps. My mom’s boyfriend says you can get them at the post office but I kinda remember not being able to once when I had to before and I had to get them off the internet somehow. Like through a 3rd party website. I forget now but that’s going to be an issue.

Anyway, here’s the beginnings of mine. It’s just going to be a simple, plain girl on watercolour paper:

I haven’t painted her skin on yet.

Well, I’m starving so I think I’m going to go make some kwish considering bacon was on sale this week so we got some. YAY bacon!

Oh, speaking of bacon, Madison’s going vegan for the week just to see if she can. Today was only day 1 and she did fine so I think she’ll be able to stick with it for the week but I kinda doubt she’ll stick with it for the rest of her life. I guess we’ll see.

Anyway, kwish.

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