So, Wednesday night we busted out the miracle berry tablets and kicked off our New Year’s festivities by eating a ridiculous amounts of citrus fruits and salad dressing and eventually drinking our faces off.

Behold, the lone video of our initial foray into the mysterious world of miracle berries:

(I apologize for the shitty quality of the video. My video camera is a piece of crap and editing video is apparently not in my repertoire of skills.) I only took a little bit of video during the first few minutes of miracle berry madness because it’s hard to video tape other people while indulging yourself and I was giddy to try everything. So I set the video camera down and we all dug in.

Behold our bounty:

From left to right, front bit: Frozen grapefruit juice and margarita mix, cream cheese (none of which we actually tried), goat cheese, bowl of limes, oranges and apples.

Middle: Sour gummi bears, lemons and grapefruit (pink & red), watermelon, kiwi and pineapple, miracle berry tablets, super sour gumballs.

Back: Guinness Extra Stout, malt vinegar, plain yogurt, salad dressing, all dressed chips, sea salt & malt vinegar chips, dill pickle chips, salt & vinegar chips, ketchup chips, limonade, Keen’s mustard, tangy dill pickles.

Not pictured: Large jar of antacids.

To be totally honest, I didn’t end up being as into the miracle berry experience as I thought I’d be. To me, the lemons and limes still tasted sour, but with an aftertaste of intense sweetness that I didn’t particularly like. To me it was like the difference bewteen aspartame and sugar, it just wasn’t quite right. I’m also an absolute sugar junkie though, drinking my own weight in Coke and candy daily since teenagerhood, so maybe my sweetness receptors are off.

Ronny on the other hand, is diabetic, and things tasted ultra-sweet to him, so maybe because he’s not as seasoned to sweet things as I am. Blake and Alex seemed to like the effects well enough, as evidenced by the following pictures of them eating limes and lemons.

(Alex eating a lime.)

(Alex showing off her mad lime skillz.)

(Blake eating a lemon.)

(He likes it! Blakey likes it!)

Salad dressing did not taste so good, even with the effects of the miracle berries:

In my research online, people said that vinegar tasted like Coke - and they lied. It could be because I bought malt vinegar instead of balsamic, but we all agreed that vinegar still tasted like vinegar.

(Blake after taking a shot of malt vinegar.)

(Pixel Cat wonders WTF we’re doing.)

All in all, it was an interesting experience. Here’s a run-down of everything we tried and how it tasted:

- Lemons tasted like sugary lemonade.
- Limes tasted like lime candy.
- Watermelon tasted like watermelon (which I figured it would, I just got some to help us cut the acid in our stomach from all the citrus fruits).
- Sour pineapple was amazing, probably my favourite.
- Under ripe kiwis were probably my second favourite, they tasted like the most perfect, ripe kiwis I’d ever had. To Blake they were too sweet.
- Salad dressing and vinegar were both *thumbs down*.
- Grapefruit was great!
- To me the chips all tasted like chips, but the others found the sea salt & malt vinegar ones to be sweet and the sour cream & onion ones to have no flavour.
- The goat cheese tasted like nasty old goat cheese to me, but Ronny thought it tasted like creamed sugar.
- The super sour gumballs just tasted like super sweet gumballs.
- The Guinness Extra Stout tasted like absolute ass to me and not “chocolatey” as promised, but Ronny seemed to like it.
- The oranges were super sweet, like the best orange you ever tasted.
- The granny smith apples weren’t tart at all, they tasted like the apples in apple pie.

- The dill pickles apparently tasted like sweet pickles, but I despise dill pickles and even under the influence of miracle berries, I wasn’t trying them.
- If I recall correctly, the Keen’s mustard - a hot mustard - still tasted like mustard. (Blake tried that one.)
- Gin & tonic tasted sweet!

We promised the kids that they could try the miracle berries the next day, after the adults tried them and deemed them 100% safe, so they kicked off 2009 trying all of this stuff too.

Here’s Madison waiting patiently for us to get set up:

Wes and Madison waiting for their tablets to dissolve (no one liked the taste of the tablets):

Alex & Blake decided to give it another go too, so here’s the two of them eating a lime and grapefruit:

Trying V8 juice, I forget what they said it tasted like:

Madison trying a lemon:

Madison gnoshing on a lime:

Madison trying grapefruit, which she normally wouldn’t do because she doesn’t like it:

Ketchup chips are Madison’s favourite:

They tasted sweet!

Blake busting out the onions:

Onions were ungood:

Wes tries a lemon:

It’s still sour! (I don’t think he got the berry *all over* his tongue like you’re supposed to.):

But he kept eating it anyway!

Despite the face, Wes really liked the grapefruit:

Wes tries a lime:

Still sour!!!

Wes thought the kiwis were the bomb and ate most of what was left himself:

Ultimately Wes decided to hell with these crappy fruits and settled for the sour cream & onion chips for the rest of the party:

So all in all, it was an interesting experience for all of us and a good time was had by all. The miracle berries, to me, weren’t as miraculous as advertised, but they were still pretty neat and given the chance, I think everyone should try them at least once.

As an aside, I ended up taking over 60 pictures of our experience, but due to wanting to save bandwidth I didn’t post them all here. If you’re interested in seeing the rest, the gallery can be seen by clicking here.

And that was our miracle berry party. Happy New Year!

The paintings I was working on for my daughter Madison and my sister Raili are finally done! I was afraid that with my dire illness over the weekend I wouldn’t be able to finish them in time, but I worked through it and got ‘em done.

Taking decent pictures of them was a whole other thing I didn’t have a lot of time for though, so these will have to do.

Here’s Madison’s:

And here’s Raili’s:

And here’s a blurry pic of both of them to show how they sparkle!

So there ya go. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday!

Ooooooooh I should be in bed like a good little Sunny, but as per usual I’m up puttering around and waiting for paint to dry. Instead of sitting here twiddling my thumbs, I decided to take some pictures of what I’ve currently got on the go. Normally I don’t like to show works in progress because I’m superstitious and once I’ve let the cat out of the bag, I tend to not want to finish things, but I decided tonight that I would do it anyway.

The first thing I’ve got going on is two paintings of girls for my sister Raili (who’s almost 4) and my daughter Madison (who’s 10) for Xmas. I’m making these paintings partially because I want to - my daughter’s been drooling over my recent work over the past few months - but partially because I’m broke as fuck and Xmas is on a serious budget this year.

The one on the left is for Raili, who’s blonde herself, and the one on the right is for Madison, who’s a brunette. These girls are going to both be holding the word “Imagine” and their dresses will have matching fluffy trim along the bottoms once I cut them out and adhere them to the canvas.

The canvasses, which I forgot to take pictures of, are white and crackle based, with splatters of metallic colours corresponding to their dresses with glitter paint over top. Silver for Raili’s and gold for Madison’s. It’s hard to tell in the pics, but the cardstock their dresses are made out of are metallic as well.

Obviously their slippers are encrusted with glitter as well, which corresponds to the colour of glitter on the background of the canvas. Both canvasses are 8 x 8.

I’ve also been sketching boys in the hopes that I’ll have time before Xmas to do one for my son, in metallic blues, of a boy wearing a crown and holding the word “Inspire” as he’s been drooling over my recent work as well and I don’t want him to feel left out. Since these paintings are taking so long for me to get done, I’m not sure I’ll have time to do it, but his birthday is in February so if I don’t get it done for Xmas, he’ll get one then.

The other piece I’m working on…I was really leery of sharing this one because I’ve been reluctant to work on it for some reason and I was afraid that if I put it “out there” I’d definitely run out of steam. But then I thought maybe if I put it “out there” someone will say the right thing to get me wanting to work on it again.

Behold the mermaid:

Her canvas is 20 x 16 and her background is metallic blue “waves”, done in a wash, and gone over with silver sparkly paint. The sand at the bottom of the painting is actual sand, made into a paste with gesso and sand coloured paint and painstakingly applied (which wrecked one of my favourite brushes :o(). I’m actually unhappy with the colour of the sand, so I think I’m going to repaint it with a lighter colour of brown.

In this picture, you can kind of see the glitter in the top left hand corner of the painting. As you can see, she’s going to have purple jeweled nipples to match her eyes and tail.

Her tail is a paisley pattern with crackled “scales” applied over top and accented with metallic purple paint. Once the piece is finished and varnished with Triple Thick Gloss Glaze, the crackle should “pop” a little more and become more prominent.

And finally, this is what her original sketch looked like, which I’m probably only going to change slightly:

I’m probably not going to bother with the seaweed and if I do, it’s probably going to be made of frilly scrapbooking fibres. I’m unsure as to whether or not I’m going to include the fish, but if I do, they’ll be made of patterned scrapbooking paper. The hooks in the sketch are going to be actual fish hooks, which I’ve already purchased from good ol’ Wal*Mart and the hearts are going to be made out of this glittered red cardstock I found at Micheal’s. She’s also going to be wearing pearls around her neck.

So that’s what I’ve been working on. Exciting, no?

As I write this, I’m waiting for the glitter paint on the slippers of Raili & Madison’s paintings to dry so I can adhere them to their canvasses with gel medium and they’ll be dry by the time I wake up tomorrow when I can add their arms.

I think that’s why I’m stuck on the mermaid painting, it’s time to add her arms and that’s the worst part of doing these paintings for me because they’re a pain in the ass to paint and get the colour to match the rest of their complexion and it’s also a pain in the ass to make them the right length. With practice I’m getting better at it, but I still hate that part of doing these because it always takes a few attempts to get them right.

So that’s my paintings…

In other news, I don’t know how I feel about this new anti-depressant my shrink’s added to the mix. It’s called Gabapentin and I’m on 200mg a day and while I’m not as depressed as I normally would be at this time of year, I feel…boring. I feel like I’m unfeeling, I’m numb. I feel like I want to cry but the drug won’t let me, like it’s masking my emotions and blocking me from even really having them. I don’t have the drive or passion for things I normally do and while yes, like I said, I guess it’s good that I’m not wanting to kill myself and the grey days are easier to handle, but I don’t think I like this numbness either. I don’t like feeling blank, neutral. Truth be told, I think I like being bipolar and feeling the extremes. I miss them when they’re not there. :o/

I have no idea what I’ll tell my shrink when she calls tomorrow and asks me how I’m feeling. I’ve read about other anti-depressants and I don’t think I want to be on any of them so I don’t want her to switch me to something else, but I don’t really like this one either. What to do, what to do?

Anyway, this is getting long and I’m starting to get sleepy so I think I’ll save my other words for another time. Just as a reminder though, you can add the feed for this blog to your Live Journal by clicking here and I just wanted to mention that I’m not following comments on the LJ feed, so if you have something to say and you want me to see it, it’s probably a better idea to post it here.

And with that, I’m off to bed.

I re-read the CammityJane entry I posted yesterday and I’m not entirely happy with it, but I’m not going to go editing it until I DO like it because I don’t believe in 2nd drafts. I’ve never gone back and edited anything I’ve ever written in my whole entire life, so I’m not about to do doing that now. SO THERE.

Once it’s finished (if it’s ever finished) and I’m thinking about turning it into a book, THEN I’ll play with stuff. Right now I just need to get the story out of me and slowly but surely, it’s coming.

Fiction’s weird. I’m not sure I’ve really talked much about the CammityJane journal, but last year when I went nuts, I had this huge explosion of concrentrated ideas and it was as if I got stuck in my own imagination and the problem was that A) I didn’t realize I was “off” and B) I couldn’t bring myself out of it.

It was during that period where the story of Jane (or more to the point, the other people she’s going to encounter) came into my mind and I spent most of my time in the hospital sketching scenes in my head with these characters (none of whom have been introduced yet), but not writing down a single word.

When I got out of the hospital, I got out my pencil crayons and drew every location of every scene, maps, character sketches and right now, I guess the name of the game is moving characters from point A to point B, which is actually a lot harder than I originally thought it would be and I find as I obsess with that, my characters lose a little depth.

For example, the “strange man” Jane encounters in the latest post is seriously glossed over from what’s in my head and I know that my descriptions aren’t sufficient if the reader’s going to come away with the mental image of him I have. At the same time, I also know he’s going to show up later so that gives me a second chance and the opportunity to round him out a little more. (How he moves, for example, is important, but in the restaurant setting I had a hard time trying to figure out a way for him to move because everything takes place at one table and it was important to the over all story that Jane come to him and not the other way around.)

Anyway, this isn’t a serious project or anything, just something I work on when the mood strikes or a character walks into my dreams demanding attention, which was the case with Good Eat Part 1 and “the strange man” himself.

In other news, my 10lbs of plain ol’ grey plastiscene arrived on Monday and I’ve spent a good portion of the week screwing around and seeing what I can do with it. So far I’ve only made a really stupid looking girl with a lot of hair…

I realize the face is dumb, that part took maybe 10 mins but each “strand” of hair was hand-rolled by yours truly and took about 30 hours total.

I’ve been on Wikipedia practically all day researching dragons, I think that’s what I’m going to make next and there’s a reason; when I was in grade 5 or 6 (hard to say since I had the same teachers and the same classroom for both grades, it was a split class) an art lady came to our school to teach us about using clay and I made this really awesome Chinese dragon, that’s now long gone, and I wanted to see if I could do it again, but better since I’m no longer a chubby little kid with chubby little fingers doing things the way someone else tells me to.

All week, when I’ve told people that I bought 10 lbs of grey plasticine, they’ve all asked the same question: “Why grey?” Well, it’s all gonna end up grey anyway, isn’t it?

The reason I got it was mostly to help me visualize certain things in 3-D and to better figure out where shadows would be (when painting) and I don’t need colour for that. In fact, for my purposes, I think colour would be distracting.

Some folks have suggested that I do stop-motion videos since I now have all this plastiscene and believe me, I’ve been thinking about it, but if it’s gonna happen, it’ll be a long time from now. I’ve got too much on the go between now and the spring and once the warm weather hits, using plastiscene is going to suck because it’ll be way too melty. So, if I ever do a stop-motion video, it’ll probably be next fall. (And if I did do one, I’d have to buy coloured plastiscene, so I’ll wait until I have a good idea first. :))

And finally, this brings me to YouTube and video blogging in general.

A few people have subscribed to my YouTube channel, which is fine, but don’t bitch about there being no context, because sometimes I’m uploading this stuff to be used for other things. For example, there’s a few videos that friends asked me to put up there, that have absolutely nothing to do with my site or blogging or anything, they just wanted to be able to share them with their own friends or post on their MySpaces. There’s probably gonna be a lot of that, so basically, if I don’t embed the video in a blog post and write about it, I uploaded it for someone or something else.

Another thing that keeps coming up is the lack of Madison (my daughter) in the videos I’ve uploaded thus far. Well, there’s a reason for that, a few of them actually.

The first is that, unlike Wes, she understands what a video camera does and as such, she tends to not “be herself” or becomes a different version of herself when it’s around (which is a nice way of saying that she tends to get obnoxious). She grew up with me following her around with a digital camera, so she doesn’t do this with stills, just with video. Wes is the opposite. If I get out the digital camera, he turns into an obnoxious little brat, but with the video camera, he acts himself because he’s too little to understand that it’s recording. He’s seen the videos of himself, but he just doesn’t understand the concept of video yet and he’s barely even aware of the internet, let alone YouTube.

The other reason is simply that she doesn’t want to be in videos that are of just “real life”.

She wants to put on plays and dress up and do fashion shows and stuff like that, which we do videotape for her, we just don’t put them online because she’s self-conscious and doesn’t want us to. We respect that. :) Basically any footage of Madison that gets put online is with her final approval and this is the kind of stuff she wants out there:

(That was from her school’s Xmas concert.)

Since that’s the case, most “kid videos” are going to be put up by Blake over at the kids’ site, Bunnies & Bees, for their aunts & uncles & grandparents to watch (and whoever else wants to, obviously, but it’s mostly a family thing).

In other news, it’s Wes’ 4th birthday on Tuesday and last week a few people e-mailed me to see if I’d gotten a wishlist set up yet, so this afternoon I cleaned up the kids’ old wishlist (deleting unavailable items/stuff they’ve kinda grown out of wanting etc), which can be found here.

And with that, I’m out.

Today I opened my blinds to enjoy it. See, I love snow and up until now we didn’t really have any and it was starting to bum me out. Mid-January? There should have been at least 2 snow days by now and there was a part of me that was kind of looking forward to chasing the dog all over town because he climbed the 8 foot snowdrift in the backyard. Right now we have just about enough to cover the grass with more to come tonight.

It’s cold as a witch’s tit and it’s already 4pm so I’m not going out there today, but if the light’s as pretty tomorrow, I could be presuaded to take the camera out because the field across the road looks like it might be full of interesting things.

It’s not high on my priority list but I really need to upgrade my snow gear. I mean, there’s the coat you have because it’s pretty (and I have that, although it needs some repairs) and there’s the coat you have because it’s warm. The thing is, I don’t wanna be stuck in some puffy, neon wonder. If there’s any animals around, I’d scare them away! Although, if it’s hunting season it could be a good thing haha

Oh yeah! My blinds! I can’t remember if I wrote about my blinds yet anywhere, but after a year of “getting to know the neighbourhood” by not having any, Sunnyland finally has some, which I hung wrong and don’t care enough to try again. :D (They’re off by like, 1/8th of an inch, just enough to drive everyone but me nuts.) The rest of the house doesn’t have blinds yet of course, but we’ll start workin’ on that once we can afford paint.

Anyway, the only blinds we could find to fit this window were white. White bugs me, a lot and I don’t like staring at a wall of white all day, but obviously some days it’s preferred to whatever’s happening outside. So I was thinking…how do I make these blinds not white. Well, by sitting here smoking like a chimney all day, they’ll be yellow soon enough (gross and true and you should all e-mail me to quit…again even though I’ll probably ignore you as smokers tend to do until they’re ready), but I don’t really like yellow either and I can’t paint them (it won’t stick to the vinyl) so I think I’m just gonna cover them in stickers. I was thinking a rainbow would be the easiest, the top slats reds, the next ones down oranges, then yellows etc etc etc but I’m open to ideas.

But then I got thinking about the back of the blinds and how funny it would be to put a message there in electrical tape or something, but I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t completely and utterly tacky and/or offensive like, “At least there’s no plastic flamingoes!” which is really only funny in the summer and wouldn’t fit anyway, or “Buttsecks” because I’m immature like that. :D Meh, plenty of time to think about it.

The problem of course is that it’s gonna take a LOT of stickers and I’m not sure the project is worth more than a $20 trip to the dollar store to spiff up my $10 Wal*Mart blinds haha

Madison & Blake are in the kitchen right now (today is dedicated to Madison improving her dishes technique) and she’s telling him a story about how “this kid in my class stuck a pencil through his hand on Friday and had had to go to the office, it was so gross”, which is becoming a bigger fish tale the more questions he asks her. :D (The kid came back from the office with a band-aid and it’s more likely he broke the lead off into his finger than what she “remembers”. haha) Blake’s now explaining to her that if what she describes happened, the kid would have had to go to the hospital because he would have gone through tendons and the only reason I’m blogging about this is because it reminded me of this kid named Dave who sat beside me for most of grade 7.

Dave & I shared a love of Guns n’ Roses and art (or what we thought was art…) but Dave was a bit of an asshole. He was also the most popular guy in our grade, because he was a badass and the popular girls, for whatever reason, all had crushes on him even moreso after we all saw him do probably the MOST retarded thing I’ve probably ever seen anyone do in my entire life.

(Actually the more I think about it, the more blurred it becomes, it might have been another kid named Justin, who was pretty much the same kid only blonder & more fucked up than Dave. They were friends and both sat in my group, so it could have been either one of them.)

Anyway, we’re sitting in Mr. Sandam’s class, which for the life of me, I can’t even remember what that class was. History? Computers? I honestly have no fucking idea, but the guy preferred for us to call him Sir Sandam and now that I know what I know, I’m betting he was a closet LARPer.

So we’re sitting there and I hear someone whisper “God that is so gross” and I turn and see Dave digging the pointy end of a goddamn protractor, y’know, one of those circle drawers?, into the side of his middle finger, just below his last knuckle. Blood doesn’t bother me at all, gore doesn’t bother me at all and normally stupid boys doing stupid things doesn’t bother me at all, although I have to admit there were certain parts of Jackass Number Two I had to walk out of the room for, but pain I can’t deal with, especially when it’s right in front of me like that and beyond idiotic, so I just turned around and kept doing whatever it was I was doing.

Near the end of class, there was a bit of a commotion in Dave’s general direction, so I turned around again and there’s Dave crying, holding up his hand with this fucking protractor all the way through his finger, all the way up to the bigger metal part that meets the apex and it was sticking out the other side . The problem, and the reason Dave was crying, was because the protractor’s pointy end had a slight bend in it that he hadn’t noticed before, which was now on the other side of his finger and when he tried to pull it back out, that bend kept getting caught on his knuckle.

During the process of getting the protractor in and subsequently trying to work it back out, his finger had become hard, it was so inflamed, that even if they could turn it to avoid the knuckle, it was gonna hurt like a motherfucker to yank it out and Dave wouldn’t let anyone do it. He just sat there crying and holding up his middle finger while teachers ran around trying to find ice and trying to get his mom on the phone.

To this day there’s part of me who thinks he did it just to flip Sir Sandam the bird and not face the man’s wrath (which was the stuff of legend), but I’ll probably never know for sure.

And with that, I’m off to go be a nerd.