Steph dislikes Dooce for the same reason I do.
(Basically, we were here first.)

She also hates The Bloggess.
(Because we’z playah-hatin’ beyotches.)

I find this hysterical.
Enjoy!

Charlie pointed it out to me this afternoon, but someone on Twitter just mentioned it too so I thought I’d link Mashable’s article on it.

Sometime recently, like within a day or two, Pinterest added a bit in their help section with some code to prevent people pinning your stuff. It says this:

What if I don’t want images from my site to be pinned?

We have a small piece of code you can add to the head of any page on your site:

[CODE]

When a user tries to pin from your site, they will see this message:

“This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”

So there ya go. If you don’t want anyone pinning your work, you can add that code so they can’t do it. Theoretically people could “right-click/save as” your work and upload it to Pinterest but why would they do that? I mean, honestly, why would they even do that? I could be wrong, but I doubt anyone cares that much, especially if the artist themselves have voiced disapproval of the act by embedding this code and having the pop-up tell them so.

I still think Pinterest needs to stop copying and uploading high-res versions of people’s work as their pins, I don’t see that as being necessary when a low-res version would do just as well, but we’ll see what happens.

As a fan of Pinterest but also as an artist, I’ll keep you updated. (Although the only people who pin my stuff are like, me and my mom haha)

Oh also, I’m no longer updating Chagrinterest. It was fun for the first couple of weeks but after that it was just tedious. People were sending us stuff that I thought was actually pretty legit and not in the vein I intended the site to be so I stopped updating it. I’m going to leave it up for a while and if someone sends me something exceptionally funny, I’ll post it, but I don’t see that happening. Sorry!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway…onto other things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think Pinterest should do more to teach the pinning community how to properly pin things with attribution,” says Crittenden. “Did you know Pinterest saves a copy of each image that gets pinned, creating a duplicate and therefore competing copy of each image? The reason for this, I think, is due to bandwidth, and that makes sense. But I really wish Pinterest would save a smaller version of each image, more like a thumbnail, so it’s not a competing image and the pinner is forced to go to the original source to view a larger version.”

READ THE WHOLE THING HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Thanks, Scutterman, for the heads up on bandwidth! :o))

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Piss Off

Go back to where you were.

Go back into her arms.

No one needs you here,

all you do is harm.

I hoped you were in a ditch somewhere.

I hoped for blood and gore.

I hoped that you had killed yourself and

your little whore.

I wished that you were starving,

And didn’t have a home.

I wanted you to know great pain,

I wanted you to roam.

I prayed that you had been beaten,

I prayed that you were dead.

I thought that you were staying there,

and you’d stop messing with my head.

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

Than I ever thought I would.

I thought that you had finally left,

finally gone for good.

I wished that you would disapear,

Or shrivel up and die.

But you’re still here living happily,

and I still wonder why.

Why couldn’t you have been a good boy,

And slit your fucking throat?

Nothing I would love better than to

watch your dead body bloat.

Can’t win them all I guess,

But I can always hope.

If you ever want to kill yourself,

I have lots of rope.

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

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

Too funny!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I got up at 6am this morning and decided to clean up my Twitter feed a bit and get rid of people who either don’t post anymore (they can still read my posts if they so choose and if they speak to me directly, I can re-add them) or who bug me immensely (*cough*) and because TweetDeck is bugged, I was doing this through the actual Twitter web interface. Something I didn’t realize is that Twitter now shows you your most recent uploads to TwitPic, which I’ve only done once in the last 210 days. What was 210 days ago you might be asking? The day I went to the hospital complaining of stomach pains and they hadn’t yet told me I had pancreatitis or anything.

A day or so after these pictures, which I hadn’t seen until now, my systems would begin failing and I would come closer to death than most people my age ever get.

“I’ve spent the day at the hospital. Waiting for test results.”

“The big one is “fluids”, the small one is morphine.”

“I have to keep a record of my pee…”

“Breakfast, lunch & dinner.”

“FUCK I hate IVs.”

“FUCK I love my shoes!”

(That’s morphine for ya haha!)

THE END.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. :o) I woke up to sunshine streaming through the front windows of the house, I was warm, I was alone (for the time being) because Blake was at work and the kids were at school and I just knew it was going to be a good day.

Around 9am, Cheryl, one of my nurses, was scheduled to come do my dressing, which the night before I was really pissy about because I didn’t want to get up early but I was glad for it when I saw the sunrise. God I love sunrise.

As I was looking out the window at bliss, the phone rang and it was my mom. She said that I should check my e-mail very carefully because she got her Squam registration e-mail. I checked and checked and checked but I didn’t get one yet. My mom said hers said that I was her roommate and that we were staying in the Longhouse, which I know is a 13+ person cabin. Let the games begin! I cannot even imagine the fights to use the bathrooms haha I will most definitely be bringing my Lush “No Drought” dry shampoo! Since my mom’s e-mail said I was her roommate, I’m assuming my e-mail will be coming shortly. So excited!

After I got off the phone with my mom, Cheryl came and that was pretty uneventful. Cheryl is a smoker and she tries to cover up the smell of the cigarettes with perfume, which just makes it worse. When she leans over me to change my dressing, it smells and I can’t stand it. Also, she comes early and I hate that, whereas Janice and Siske come in the afternoon (and they don’t smoke). BUT since I had such a great day yesterday, I’m thinking getting up early isn’t a totally horrible thing to do on “office days” (days where I stay in my office the whole day making art, as opposed to the living room/computer).

After Cheryl left, I made waffles with the REAL maple syrup my mom got me for Christmas, which is one of my favourite things in the world (if you’ve never had real maple syrup, I truly feel sorry for you because it is one of the Earth’s most wonderful treasures) and I brought them into my office and started flipping around to see what was on TV. I watched Wife Swap, the UK version, which was nice and trashy but as always, one of the moms had a revelation that her life sucked and they all became friends and it was heartwarming.

After that, I took my plate into the kitchen, filled up my drink and came back to my office to make some ~*SERIOUS ART*~ (not really) while I watched…something. I honestly don’t remember what. Something that was an hour long and was probably a talk show. Whatever it was, I worked on Argent’s painting as I watched (or more to the point, listened). Argent’s painting is turning out to be a royal pain in my ass and I can’t wait until it’s finished and out of my house! EVERYTHING I’ve tried to do with it has failed miserably and I’ve had to make corrections like crazy. It’s making me mental! But it’s almost finished and I think he’ll be happy with it and that’s all that matters.

Once Argent’s painting was in a state of “no touchies”, I started working on my girl who will be on my last page of the Sketchbook Project sketchbook.

I think I watched Ellen while I was doing this and Colin Firth and the little dog from the movie The Artist were on it. Colin was very animated and talking about Gary Oldman being “hung like a water buffalo” and the little dog was very charming. Truthfully though, I can’t see myself seeing either of their movies. Just not interested.

After that, was The View. I like this show a lot, I’ve always been a Whoopi fan, but I don’t normally watch it because when I was working, I didn’t watch TV at the same time, and after I got sick and now that I’m home all day with my thumb up my ass, I spend most of my time in front of the computer which is something I’m hoping to change and yesterday was the first step.

(Paper peony)

On The View, the women did their hot topics but they weren’t all that interesting or I’d be able to tell you what they talked about. I know there was a story where Sheri was on a plane and Courtney Love was there with a short skirt and no underbums and she caused quite a ruckus. Their guest was an old guy from that Tom Hanks/911 movie I have no interest in. I just listened and worked on my girl.

Then it was Dr. Phil and boy, what a show. o_O They had on there a guy who was into infantilism. He liked to act like an 18 month old, sleep in a crib, play with baby toys, act like a baby, eat in a high chair and wear diapers. He had a regular job at a “big box store” working nights, but when he got home in the morning, he’d put on his onesie, hop in the high chair and his poor girlfriend would feed him and change his shitty diaper. I felt so bad for her. She was doing everything for him and he never did anything for her, like nothing, and Dr. Phil was like, “are you having a relationship with an 18 month old or a 24 year old?” and the answer was an 18 month old. And she said she wanted to marry this guy and have kids with him one day, but only if he could “tone things down”, which Dr. Phil said would not happen no matter what the guy said. And it wasn’t even a sexual thing, the guy didn’t get OFF on being a baby, that’s just how he felt naturally. Which I think is weird, but fine, it’s not hurting anyone EXCEPT your significant other who you’re lying to about it and basically using. He needs to find someone whose thing in life is wanting to take care of an adult baby and that girl needs to run away as fast as she can in the opposite direction because he will never change and things will only get worse as he takes it farther and farther.

Normally I don’t watch Dr. Phil because I think it’s pretty trashy and only a few degrees away from being Jerry Springer, but if there’s nothing else on or if the topic is interesting, I’ll watch. Yesterday’s was interesting.

By then it was 4pm and the kids came burting through the door just as a Roseanne rerun came on. They asked me what the show was about and I said it was about a family a lot like ours. They decided to watch it with me and they wanted to know who in the show was like who of us in real life. I said that I was Roseanne, Blake was Dan (obviously), Becky was Madison and Wes was DJ. I also told them that it was probably the best sitcom to ever grace the airwaves. Wes was really into it (it was the episode where it was Dan and Roseanne’s 20th wedding anniversary and he took a part-time job to pay for her present) and Madison not so much. Right after the first episode there was another episode so we watched that one too and in that one, Darlene and David break up because Molly kissed David and Madison got more into it because David is on Big Bang Theory and apparently so is Darlene. This, along with Mayim Bialik, makes me think I should give that show a second chance because when I first watched it, I just wasn’t into it but everyone I know loves it and the various clips I’ve seen online of it, I really liked.

Anyway…after Roseanne, it was Golden Girls, which I knew the kids wouldn’t be so much into (although I was into Golden Girls when I was their age) but they watched it with me anyway. The two episodes we watched weren’t very good ones (one where they were remodeling the garage and Rose is dating Mr. Terrific and the other was where Rose’s boyfriend retires and wants to sail around the world) but I explained to Madison, who’s very interested in gay issues and equality, that the Golden Girls was an extremely progressive show for its time because Blanche’s son was gay and they had some episodes dealing with that, but also the show itself was about women at a time in their lives that you just didn’t – and still don’t, really – see on TV. This made her more interested in the show, but only snippets found on YouTube, not the actual episodes. I’d still really like to get the whole series on DVD or Blu-Ray. It was probably my 2nd favourite sitcom of all time.

By the time the Golden Girls was over, I’d finished my girl and stuck her in the sketchbook and today I’ll give her arms, sew the trim on her dress and give her a quote. Then all I have to do on the sketchbook is a girl for the cover and then I’m finished! YAY!

The only difference between this pic and the one above is that I inked her hair and legs/feet.
She’s just so damn pretty, I wanted to post her twice!

After Golden Girls, Wes went into the living room to watch Pokemon, which he’s obsessed with (by the way, his birthday is in 3 weeks if anyone was planning on getting him anything – e-mail me if you need our address), and I flipped around channels to see what I could find. Blake and Madison were going to the high school for like, a parent/teacher transition night type of thing  so I took that opportunity to watch something Blake would never in a million years watch with me: Toddlers & Tiaras.

I can’t help it. I love this show. I never know when it’s on, so I don’t watch it all the time or anything but every episode I’ve seen I’ve really liked. I think that show falls into 3 categories: ones where the kids are total brats to their parents on camera and therefore the episode is funny because it makes their parents look like losers, ones where the kids are really into the whole pageant and they’re just cute as hell and ones where their parents look like monsters and you feel sorry for the kids. Yesterday I saw 2 of the above.

The first one I watched was where the theme for the pageant was Groovy Girls. Or maybe that was the pageant’s name, I’m not sure. Either way, there were 3 categories in the pageant: beauty, costume of choice and one other one I forget the name of and the pageant was “full glitz”, which means that the girls had acrylic nails, spray tans and “flippers” which are like fake teeth. In this episode, all of the girls were actually really into the pageants and they were old enough to choose that this is what they wanted to do. The mothers weren’t overbearing at all, they were just supportive and this was just what they chose to do with their daughter, like any other family would do hockey or soccer. I *DO NOT* like the spray tanning and acrylic nails and fake teeth, I think that’s dumb, but it’s part of the competition, just like shin guards and helmets and sticks and shoes, so as long as the kid’s okay with it, and all these ones were, I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t have a problem with the makeup either, a lot of little girls like to play with and wear makeup. And as long as the kids are GOOD winners and losers, I don’t have a problem with it. In this show, two of the girls who apparently compete a lot and win and lose to each other all the time, are actually friends. I liked that.

Anyway, seeing the girls in their little bell bottoms and vests and sunglasses and go go boots and stuff like that was sooooooo cute. I especially liked seeing like, the 18 month – 2 year olds all dressed up in their little costumes, they were just adorable. And really,  thinking these kids were cute in their costumes is no different than Halloween. The whole show was just cute little girls being cute little girls and I enjoyed the show immensely, enough to watch a new episode that aired at 10pm.

The one I watched at 10pm was vastly different than the one I watched earlier. The one at 10 had horrible parents pushong their kids to do this when they really didn’t want to do it. The one little girl was SICK and feeling like crap but her mom made her compete anyway because the grand prize was $10,000. This mom made the poor little girl not wear her glasses when she was on stage and then belittled her when the little girl didn’t do her routine – which she’d only learned 2 DAYS prior – because the girl couldn’t see the judges or her mother in the audience telling her what to do. Then another mother, who was a hardcore Russian immigrant, was just a monster. He would withhold her daughter’s favourite stuffed bear, “Micha”, and only give it to her when she had to do pageants because apparently when the little girl held and played with Micha, her thumb would go in her mouth and this is how they stopped it. The little girl, Mia, would only get to play with Micha at pageants and seeing the reaction of the girl, who was only 4, when she got to see Micha, it was just heartbreaking. I almost cried. She was just so happy to see her friend again. Then in one of the cutaways, Mia said to the camera, “I want to do good at the pageant because that’s how I know my mommy loves me” or something like that and I *DID* cry, it was just so horrible. And worse? When Mia was on stage doing her beauty routine, she wasn’t listening to the emcee who was kinda like telling her to get off the stage but nicely and Mia’s mom flipped out and started screaming in their hotel room that the emcee hated Mia and that they had to “forget about it” (winning) and that they should just go home. In the end, Mia won a high title and $500 and the FIRST THING she wanted to do when she won was to show her mother and her mother PUSHED HER AWAY. OMG my poor heart. :o( That woman was just a horrible person and she was so blessed to have such an adorable, loving little girl and she didn’t even appreciate her in the slightest. If I can find a clip, I will show you this awful woman so you can wretch with me.

In between episodes of Toddlers & Tiaras, I actually watched a show called “I Cloned My Pet” which was the most pathetic hour of television I have ever watched in my whole entire life. These people were all fucked in the head. There was literally nothing else on except a rerun of the same Wife Swap I’d watched in the morning and that’s the only reason I watched this extremely stupid show.  EXTREMELY stupid.

After that my choices were a show about hoarding or American Idol and because hoarding shows just piss me off because the world just does not need that much excess, I chose American Idol because as much as that show bugs me, I have to admit, the auditions at the beginning of each season are always entertaining.

As I watched American Idol, I started working on an art journal page that uses vellum as bubbles which is a technique I’ve used before and I’ve always really liked, but the only vellum I had on hand was green, yellow, orange and red so my bubbles actually look a lot more like polkadots (hmmm, polkadots are also apparently two words OR one word and they have their own Wikipedia entry). It’s not finished yet and it was night by the time I started working on it which meant that the light in my office was garbage so I figured I’d work on it again today and take pictures of it tomorrow when it was finished. I have absolutely no idea what to write on the page, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnd that was my (mostly) internet-free day yesterday in support of the SOPA protest! I will say one thing though: I didn’t tweet yesterday because Twitter was supposed to be part of the black out but I had TweetDeck up just out of habit and I was really disappointed by some people who I *know* knew about the blackout and who tweeted inane bullshit anyway. Some people retweeted SOPA-related things instead of posting which was better than what other people were posting, I guess, but posting at all is the opposite of the concept of a “blackout”. I really, truly thought my Twitter feed would have been completely dark yesterday but it wasn’t and it’s making me evaluate who’s on my feed and why. There are some folks I have on there who I’ve kept just to be nice, but they’re not nice to me back or they don’t interact with me so I wonder why I bother. Soooooooo, I think over the next few days, there are definitely going to be some cuts. Hopefully people won’t make a big issue about it.

Okay, going to go to my office now…WAIT, one more thing! Apparently my posts aren’t always showing up on peoples’ LJ friends lists for some reason and I don’t know if it’s my x-poster or if it’s Live Journal but I’ll x-post an entry and it’ll go through fine, but when I go to edit a post via WordPress and click “update” it’ll tell me that my password for LJ is wrong (it’s not!) and it’ll only update the version on my site. So I dunno what’s up with that. Also when I go to a Live Journal entry and manually edit a post’s userpic and mood, which I do with everything I post, I’ll come back a few hours later and the post will be back to my default userpic. The mood will still be set to what I changed it to, but the userpic will be default. So I dunno WHAT the hell is going on but if you guys on LJ don’t hear from me for a few  days, either check my actual LJ or my site. I *think* the error is with LJ because they were having a lot of problems over the weekend so I’m just waiting for them to fix their shit before I investigate further.

NOW I’m going to my office! Happy Thursday!

~*Please donate!*~

So I’ll admit I’ve been a pretty awful denizen of the internet and didn’t really know what the whole SOPA deal was until about 5 minutes ago. It’s really fucking important that you read his if you don’t know what it’s about either because if it passes, it WILL affect you.

Not that it makes a lick of difference, but my site will “go dark” tomorrow in solidarity with the other sites that are protesting this bill. That means I won’t be updating. I also won’t be tweeting or doing anything considered as providing content because that’s exactly what’ll happen if this passes, sites you care about will go dark. The bottom line is that this will affect the internet as we all know it. Like I said, read the above link for a breakdown on it and see for yourself and do me a favour? Really click the link and read it. Because if this breakdown is all true, and I have every reason to believe it is, then we could all be in very deep shit if SOPA passes. I can’t do a damn thing from my little bunker in Canada but you? You reading this? I bet YOU can. So do it.

Sunday morning. Only Wes and I are awake at the time I’ve started this post. He’s playing his new video game (Bolt, purchased with a gift certificate from the Playstation Store), I’m listening to a new playlist and talking to Korpsy on Twitter about miserable movies. Yesterday Madison and I watched The Notebook, which is the second most miserable movie in the history of the world, and the little shit didn’t even crack a frown at the end, meanwhile I was a snotty, sobbing, toilet paper clenching piece of shit. I swear that child has no soul. (The first most miserable movie on the face of planet Earth is Life Is Beautiful, in case you were wondering.)

Last night was pretty miserable. I know I don’t really post about Blake very often, but I’m really worried about him. When I woke up from the nightmare of pancreatitis in Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie, I woke up to the love of my life being a changed man and I don’t like this change. He can’t help it, I know, but he’s not well and I want more than anything for him to be better. He needs to talk to someone about what happened this summer and soon, I think, before this change in him, this sadness, becomes permanent. There’s just no joy in his life anymore, he doesn’t laugh as easily as he used to, he mopes, all he does is work to avoid everything else…he just goes through the motions of living, he doesn’t actually do more than exist. And that worries me a great deal. Last night we just held each other and cried. For hours. Things are not okay. Not everything is getting better.

………….

For the last couple of days I’ve been playing with an idea that I want to run by you guys to see what you think. I think I want to put a 24/7 spycam in my office, overlooking my desk and part of the couch. I say it would be 24/7, but really we would probably turn it off sometimes, just not often. Really, the only time it would go off is if there was any sexy/naked private time going on, which I know ruins half the fun, but I don’t do sex on cam, never have, and there are legalities in place that say a cam like this couldn’t be sexually explicit if children were to also appear on it from time to time.

What you would see, on any given day, would be me sitting at my desk making art and probably watching a movie, possibly with someone (likely Madison or Blake), watching TV with me on the couch. It would not be riveting entertainment and it would not be streaming cam because that would be extremely cost prohibitive. It would be a simple, old school, 30 second refresh cam that would be on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, give or take.  We could possibly chat live on Twitter.

Now, you might be asking yourself why on Earth I would want to do this so here are my reasons:

1. I am creatively blocked in a seriously painful way. I avoid my office like the plague and when I’m in there all I do is watch movies and accomplish nothing. Maybe with an audience, I’d be more productive.

2. Maybe with an audience I’d actually make an effort not to be a scuzzy bitch. Don’t get me wrong, if this happens you will most likely see me in yoga pants and t-shirts 95% of the time, probably with little or no makeup, probably with my hair in a ponytail. I’m not aiming to look beautiful here, I couldn’t care less about that at this point, I mean making an effort to have clean hair. Changing my clothes more than once a week. That kind of stuff.

3. Maybe this will attract more people to my site and more people means more people seeing my art and maybe buying some of it. Also, I think from a marketing perspective that maybe some people might be more likely to buy a piece if they see the process by which it was created. Street artists have been working on this principle for, well, ever.

4. I think it could be fun to chat with people while they were watching me (and whoever else was in the room), live.

Now, do I think anyone will actually watch? I highly doubt it. I think the ship for spycams, unless they’re maybe nature cams, has sailed. However, I know a few friends would watch sometimes and that it would enhance our spontaneous Twitter parties and that could be really really fun. Really, the cam is going to be pretty boring otherwise.

The only drawback I can see is that the whole world will find out my big deep dark secret, the thing only my family and a few really close friends know about, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Really, the secret itself probably isn’t a big deal at all, I doubt people would care that much, but it is sort of strange and it will require an entry on the webcam FAQ I’ll have to write up to nip the whole thing in the bud.

So what do you guys think? Would you watch? Would you interact with me live on Twitter? Do you have any interest in this whatsoever? Do you see any drawbacks to this that I may be missing? (All family members have “signed off” on this, Madison even thinks it’s a good idea, Wes doesn’t care, Blake said he’d turn the cam off sometimes.) Oh and there wouldn’t be archives because archives take up server space and I’d really like to save server space for nicer pictures that I take with my camera. I would like to have something below the cam though, that said something like “3 people are viewing this cam right now”, but worded better. I have no idea how you would make it do that. Do you? I know how to make a 30 second refresh page (in Dreamweaver), so I’m good there, but I have no idea how to make a counter like that.

Anyway, just a little idea I’m thinking about. To make it happen, I would need the USB cable on my wishlist and another cam. Ideally I would use the cam I have now for the spycam and use the one on my wishlist for Camwhores, but if anyone has an extra *decent* cam kicking around that they would want to send me for this, I wouldn’t object. Blake says that as long as this thing doesn’t cost him any money, he’s totally fine with it, so this has to happen for free. (We have a little spare computer to use for this – at least temporarily, it’s technically spoken for.)

Oh but another thing about the spycam? If it bothers me, I’m taking it down. If it’s just eating up bandwidth and no one’s watching, I’m taking it down. If a family member objects to it being there, I’m taking it down. This may just be a temporary thing while I’m in this funk, I dunno. But I think it’s okay to try.

Last week Blake and I went on a date. Keith, my mom’s ex-boyfriend, sent us a $50 gift certificate for Swiss Chalet and my mom gave both Blake and I gift certificates for EB Games and at the beach they’re literally right next to each other, so we went and had perogies, cheesy garlic bread, ribs, a chicken type of thing on flatbread, a strawberry sundae and a piece of apple pie – all for 4 bucks and change! Then we went next door and bought Skyrim.

I was so stoked to get Skyrim. I’d built it up in my head as this awesome fantastic thing but the problem was, my computer wasn’t good enough to play it so we had to get it for Playstation. #FirstWorldProblem, I know, but the thing is, I really really hate consoles. I can’t stand those little joystick things you use with your thumb to move, it just seems completely unnatural to me. I tried really hard to play Skyrim on PS3, I really did, but in the end I just got frustrated and gave up. Also the game seems way too big. Like, I played for about 2 hours and barely got past character creation.

The other thing is that these days I’m having a really hard time justifying the playing of games when I should be doing things that’ll make us money instead. Or at least things that are semi-productive. I canceled my WoW subscription because it was just stupid to keep paying for something I only played maybe once every 2 weeks and even then, I was just dicking around, farming for whelps and sprite darters anyway; I wasn’t even leveling. My subscription runs out on February 6th so I only had a month left to play it anyway because I was paying for it with Xmas money, so no big deal. I saved us 15 whole dollars by canceling a month early. *shrug*

I don’t know why I’m so unmotivated. Depression? S.A.D.? Our sketchbooks for The Sketchbook Project have to be in the mail in 16 days, I have one page to finish (I’m not finishing my whole book) and I can’t bring myself to touch it. Dunno why. Argent’s painting has been sitting on my desk, about 65% finished, but I can’t seem to push through and get it done. I have a million ideas for paintings, I’m not at a loss for those, I just have zero desire or motivation to actually make them happen. I have all the materials (although I’m running dangerously low on canvases). I have the pictures in my mind. What the fuck is wrong with me? How can I call myself an artist when I’m not only NOT making art but not selling any either? Like tits on a bull, I tell ya! Squam cannot happen soon enough!

Speaking of Squam, my mom and I damn near had heart failure yesterday when they announced on Facebook and Twitter that the spring session was full/closed already. My mom commented on the post on Facebook and after a few grueling hours, they commented back that there was still plenty of room for the fall, so we could breathe easy. *whew* We don’t think our envelopes have even left the country yet, so hopefully they get there in time!

Okay I can’t think of anything else to write so I think that’s it for now. Blake awake and making coffee so maybe I’ll get him to make me a tea too, which I’ll take into my office where the most productive thing I’ll do is stare a hole into my cutting mat. Oy.

Edit: Blake scanned my colouring contest entry. The scan kinda sucks though. The ornaments on the tree were silver and I guess the scanner’s light really washed out a lot of the colour for some reason. Like, in the original, Santa’s cheeks and nose are rosy and the package at the bottom is actually purple and lavender but it looks white and washed out. Oh well. Here it is.

So Blake and I didn’t do anything for New Year’s Eve, partly because I can’t drink, but also because we’re really really broke and couldn’t afford to feed anyone should we invite people over. He played Star Wars, I fucked around on Pinterest, boggling at some of the stuff people were pinning.

I’m not really sure how we got on the topic, but sometime around 10pm Blake, Madison and I started throwing names around for a Regretsy-inspired site about the stupid stuff we find on Pinterest and jokingly, I threw out “Chagrinterest”. Blake was like, “that’s actually pretty good” and Madison was like, “I don’t get it”, so I read the definition of the word “chagrin” to her:

cha·grin [shuh-grin] noun, verb

noun
1. a feeling of vexation, marked by disappointment or humiliation.

verb (used with object)

2. to vex by disappointment or humiliation: The rejection of hisproposal chagrined him deeply.

After that she was like, “omg that’s perfect” so after that I went to my domain registrar (NOT GODADDY!) just to see if “Chagrinterest.com” was available, it was, and in less than 48 hours we had a domain, domain e-mail addresses, a website and 16 blog posts. Welcome to…

We don’t plan for it to be a very big site. Not like Regretsy. Just a place to post all of the random, crazy shit we find posted on Pinterest so it doesn’t clog up my site and so others can participate. Blake wants to write posts, as does Jax, so that”s our “staff” at the moment…except we do have someone to introduce. A new partner for this project who hasn’t worked with us previously. Her name is Martha Stupid and she is FABULOUS! Behold!

For more information on the magnanimous Martha Stupid, please see her intro post on Chagrinterest!

So that’s what we did to ring in 2012. We’re having a lot of fun with it and we hope you might too. :o)