That title is from a Mother Mother song called “The Stand”.

Anyway, I love “shuffle”, because that song was followed by Bob Marley and that was awesome because it’s Sunday and I love Bob Marley on sunny Sunday mornings. I realize that by the time you’re reading this it’s not going to be morning but for me, it’s only 12:40-ish as I’m writing this right now and that’s like morning for me because I pretty much got out of bed, made sure Madison was busy and didn’t need anything, realized Blake was at hot yoga and would be for like, another hour I think, the coast was clear to sneak a bowl before we go geocaching in the afternoon with Alex.

Ronny hurt his back a few days ago :o(. So he’s probably not coming but Alex said she would and that is awesome because trampsing through the bush with Alex today with the sun shining and the kids being excited to find “WONDERBALL” the awesomest cache I think near us that we’re going to have found so far  today is exactly what I want to do when I’m coming down from the giant bowl of whatever the fuck I smoked this morning was.  Does that make sense? I hope so because whatever the hell this is, it’s good stuff. You only need a tiny bit to get completely fucked up and the high lasts a long time. I have no idea how it was grown or created or whatever. I don’t watch Weeds anymore so I’m unclear as to where my pot came from, I’m not a weed nerd who knows like, every type of sativa silvanus whateverus was ever hydroponically created vs the natural shit coming out of places like Mexico where they grow it in fucking fields or something right?

Anyway, it was 4/20 2 days ago, we got some, it’s awesome. It’s awesome because you only have to smoke a tiny bit and everything is just great. I’m in a fantastic mood, I’m listening to good music, I’m warm in only a t-shirt, I’m sitting cross legged in my chair listening to Mother Mother again (“Ghosting” this time, excellent song). The furnace is on but it’s not annoying like I find it most of the time. The dogs are passed out somewhere, not needing attention. I have zero responsibility right now except to feed myself, but I will and when I do it’s going to be two Eggo waffles with a LOT of margarine and about a half a cup of real Maple Fucking Syrup.

Know why? Blake and the kids went to the Elmvale Maple Syrup Festival on Saturday and  got us TWO giant bottles of Real Fucking Maple Syrup (which would be an awesome brand of maple syrup if a maple syrup farmer had the balls to print the labels LOL). One is considered “dark” maple syrup and one is considered “light” maple syrup and I think the difference is how long they “cook” it for because all maple syrup is, is boiled down tree sap right? At least that’s, I’m pretty positive, how my Aunt Betty and Uncle Bill always made it, I don’t remember them ever adding anything else to it, they’d just pour the sap into this big huge VAT type metal container that had a flame under it, like a fire, and that boiled the sap. I remember my Aunt Betty once boiling sap on the stove for like, “instant” maple syrup and I think that’s how Blake’s friend Charissa does it, I mean, tapping trees is easy if you have a lot of them.

I remember growing up in Stouffville, which was a pretty big town, like its down town core, when you’re like, I dunno, in grade 3. I think to Wes, Elmvale feels like a big place because it takes “so long” to walk anywhere and he hates having to walk home from school. I understand where he’s coming from because I used to think the same thing when I was in grade 3 and lived in Stouffville when it was small. Anyway I’m straying from my point; when I used to walk home from school when I lived in Stouffville in grade 3, there were people who were tapping trees in their front yards all throughout the neighbourhood we walked home from school through. We didn’t live in that neigbourhood, that’s just where I got babysat, but you would never see tapped maple trees in a front yard in most subdivisions anymore. I don’t even know what kind of trees they plant in the front yards of subdivisions anymore but it’s always just 1. And is it a maple tree? Probably not the right kind to make good maple syrup, if it is. Back when they were planning the neighbourhoods that were in Stouffville when I grew up, they planned the houses AROUND the trees so everyone would have nice big, mature maple trees, the good kind that our country up here had just EVERYWHERE naturally, I think anyway. And I think that’s awesome. It’s too bad subdivisions now, unless they’re really expensive, are clear cut and then replanted so people can’t enjoy them in their lifetimes. Again, unless you’re like, Oprah rich and can have full grown trees shipped in. (If you live in an area they can live in.)

Anyway, it would have probably have been beneficial for me to go to the Maple Syrup Festival with Blake and the kids but I had to work yesterday and I like to have some time to myself before starting my 9 hour shift. I know 9 hours is only 1 hour more than a “normal” workday but right now a “normal” workday, doing what I do, is really really hard (especially when you’re on the kind of drugs I’m on for my health issues). You are stuck in a chair all day, the e-mails come in faster than you can conceive of doing anything artistic so all you can do is maybe follow Twitter since it’s slow on a Saturday night most of the time, maybe follow a conversation on AIM on a Saturday night but the only two people I talk to on the weekends on AIM are work people and they have lives so they don’t always have the time to talk to me. Anyway, my job is like, high attention because certain things are big deals on weekends and I can’t slip up because a big slip up could cost our company a lot of money down the line and believe it or not, I take my job pretty damn seriously because I know what it feels like to not HAVE a job and being able to work from home and be with my family and stay ahead financially is a huge thing in this life, not just this economy where a lot of people don’t even have jobs, and being able to work on a schedule that’s really really good for me – that’s a blessing. So I take my job really seriously. Plus, I actually really like my bosses and I actually really care about the people I work with. It’s all good. :o)

Now Jay-Z is on. Now Beck. “Loser”, how appropriate for my current state of mind. Have you ever really listened to the words of this song? What was HE on when HE made this song or is this just a byproduct of $cientology?

It’s 1:19pm. “My time is a piece of wax, falling on a termite, who’s choking on the splinters”. Genius or insane? “Get crazy with the Cheez-Whiz”? I love it, I don’t know why I love it but I do. That’s the anthem of a generation, not “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

And while I’m harshing on the 90s, we watched SNL last night with Daniel Radcliffe and while I think he did a good job, for the most part SNL seems to be like…cool mostly for telling square 20-somethings what’s cool. Lana Del Rey? Um what was that obnoxious band I saw again on Ellen, oh yeah “Karmin”. omg what? They were terrible! I can’t even remember right now what other stuff I’ve seen on SNL recently because it’s mostly just mediocre (except for last night’s) with bits of Kristin Whig and Bill Hader thrown in. I don’t even know the names of anyone else on the show right now except for those two and Keenan Thompson who’s been on the show too long.  I realize all the sketches can’t be gems since they write these sketches, I think, in a very short period of time and ideas, solid ones, don’t just happen because they need to happen, that’s not how ideas work.

There was this cache I found on geocaching.com sort of near us, at least on the way to Barrie. It’s apparently a “book cache”, which isn’t an official category of cache as defined by the site, but I think it’s a good idea and I found a couple of books, including the How To Get Ideas book I was reading last week, that would be good for a kind of cache like that but the cache itself is apparently in bad condition if it’s even there at all at this point because now that everyone knows it’s ruined just by reading the comments, no one’s going to go out and look for it. Well, the way I see it is, it probably got ruined because of moisture because the comments say that the contents are moldy. Well, books + moisture = mold. So it could have been the container or it could have been that someone didn’t CLOSE the container properly. So I wonder what the container was and if it’s something that IS watertight, like an ammo box or something, and someone just didn’t close it properly, then I say we go out there and get a free ammo box so we can replace the cache and keep it as a book cache because Blake and I think that’s a good idea. The guy who placed it has placed a few caches in the area but hasn’t seemed to have maintained them, or an internet presence, in over a year. So who knows, maybe he got sick? Or maybe he died?

I LOVE METALLICA.

I think we’ll wait and talk to some of the pros at this big event in Midland in June to do anything about it to see what the actual protocol of doing something like that is (the cache is apparently exposed now due to logging in the area too, so the cache location may have to be moved). I don’t know the official channels on geocaching.com you have to go through to do something like this. It’s just a thought we had.

Wow, so this post was a little all over the place haha. To wrap up, because Wes is home and I still have to eat my waffles and it’s like, 1:40-ish and Blake should be home soon; weed is controversial, music is awesome, maple syrup is awesome and I know an awful lot about it so I hope by Blake and the kids going to the Maple Syrup Festival, they learned a little bit about maple syrup too. Alex is awesome. I am awesome. You are awesome. Have a fantastic Sunday. :o)

I love the Beatles. I’m not totally familiar with every song they’ve ever done but I really really love the ones I know. I love how, if everything is totally fucked and you just don’t know what to do with your life, your day, your minute, you can turn on the Beatles and just be like, “well whatever, fuck it” and everything will just be absolutely okay.

Is that just me? The Beatles are like, the safest music choice in the world because everyone loves them and the ones who don’t love them are just fucking crazy anyway so fuck those people because you believe with all your heart that “all you need is love”.

And kids love the Beatles too so it’s like, totally a nice, safe, family friendly band but not in a lame way because John Lennon was and will forever be one of the World’s Most Awesome People. Just look at this quote my cousin Haylie posted on Facebook last night or this morning or whenever the hell I checked FB this morning was:

For those who can’t see my images at work because my site’s blocked due to ~*PORNO ADVERTISEMENT*~, this is the quote:

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy”. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” – John Lennon

Feel free to pin that on your Pinterest inspiration boards!

Speaking of Pinterest, I read an article in Forbes this week that said Pinterest is worth $7.7 BILLION. That is fucking crazy. It’s such a simple idea and they have no REVENUE yet so how are they worth that much? Same with Twitter and Instagram. Why are these companies worth so much when they have no revenue? What is their value to investors? What are their investors paying for? I feel like I should know the answer to this, but I don’t. This is like, beyond my knowledge base.

Anyway, I’d link the Forbes article but I tweeted it a few days ago and now I can’t find the link. Google it, it was interesting!

After seeing how much Pinterest was worth and that how “the little guy” means nothing in comparison and therefore my copyright claims are a gnat on the ass of an Elephant I think it’s time to not give a fuck about copyright on the internet. This may seem like a big “no duh” thing for a lot of you reading this but it’s an epiphany I’m just having so ride it out with me.

By someone pinning my art on their Pinterest inspiration board or even their DIY board, all that’s giving me is traffic and, since I think my girls are recognizable, a bit of a name. I don’t think my work is easily FORGED which is different than “copied”. Sure someone could copy my concept and if they’re satisfied with their work in the end then what do I care? That person wasn’t going to buy one of my paintings anyway.Them doing that doesn’t take away my right to make my girls or my rights to my girls’ images or any of those things. And if that person ends up making paintings like my girls for a living, who cares? Do you know how many people there are in the world to buy paintings? Like, a lot. She’s still not infringing on any of my rights. Etc etc etc. See copying is okay. I don’t see any issue with that, all artists do it and anyone who creates anything is an artist. The “truly original” person is a fucking MYTH.

If someone was forging my paintings, that would actually be pretty cool because that would mean I’m successful enough that people would actually care to do that. And that level of infamy is rare. I mean, I’m a normal person. I don’t have a degree in art. Here are the “contemporary” artists that I know of off the top of my head:

- Damien Hirst
- Andy Warhol
- Jackson Pollock (because of the movie)
- Jean Michel Basquiat (because of the movie)
- Frida Khalo (because of the movie)
- Pablo Picasso (because he’s fucking Picasso)

I only know that these are “contemporary” artists because I read that on Wikipedia in the last 6 months. The only one of MY lifetime (so to speak) is Damien Hirst and he only became popular when I was in grade 9 but I’d never even heard of him before 2 months ago.

So that is my “art knowledge”  as a regular, every day person with only a grade 9 education and the ability to use the internet. I think that’s pretty typical, the only real difference is that most people wouldn’t know that any of these people were popular within the last 100 years. Most people have no idea that Michelangelo and Picasso were of totally different eras (and I’m not talking about you guys, I’m talking about the average person in my town who also doesn’t know what a “blog” is).

That’s SIX PEOPLE in the last HUNDRED YEARS who I KNOW OF who have made any kind of money making art for a living in their lifetimes. Again, do you know how many people there are in the WORLD? Like over 6 billion. Do you know how many of them make art? Like, tons. Yet in a hundred fucking years, I can only name 6 who didn’t starve as a result. Does that make me ignorant? Absolutely. But can you also see why people are so afraid to try and be an artist and live their passions? This is why there are all these workshops by Willowing and Suzi Blu and all the people in the book I’m reading that really boil down to the same mantra: you are an artist. Have no shame in that.

Blake calls me utilitarian. And I am. But he also gets upset with me because I can’t relax and just BE. I have to be doing something productive or I feel completely unsuccessful and then that makes me feel like shit. Selling a painting is the BEST feeling in the world for me. Selling a painting means that what I do with my time isn’t completely worthless. And that makes me feel good because I’m utilitarian.

Pre-going crazy, I had no trouble whatsoever calling myself an artist and using my imagination. Post-going nuts I became afraid of my imagination and also of what people thought of me and I had a hard time calling myself an artist because “artist” was a fancy way of saying “unemployed”. That’s where Suzi Blu came in. I saw her videos on YouTube, encouraging me to be silly and funny and weird and quirky and an ARTIST and that was exactly the encouragement I needed. I could trust my medication so that I didn’t need to be afraid of my imagination anymore and this confident woman with the less-than-perfect-teeth-but-still-beautiful was practically shrieking at me and thousands of others on YouTube that it was a-okay to call yourself an artist and yes, you can make a living from doing this. Suzi Blu practically invented the art of the online art workshop via Ning that so many other artists have copied in the last few years. If you want to make a living by being an artist, is the message from Suzi and the mixed media artists online like her, then be a teacher. because “slinging paintings” as Suzi called it one night in chat, is not the way to go about it. That route is HARD. You have to have gallery representation and you have to kiss a lot of ass.

Or do you…?

How has the internet changed that dynamic or how is it changing that dynamic? I have galleries on my site, right here, where you can see my entire oeuvre and I can guarantee that more people are looking at those than I would get at any gallery in Toronto so why would I bother with a gallery in Toronto, especially when they would take 50% of my money for that privilege? I mean, in the age of the internet, who’s really doing all the work here, the artist or the gallery? The artist, if they want to stay authentic (that means writing your own tweets and updating your own Facebook fan page – there’s no reason a gallery should be doing that).

#Hashtag Gallery, the brand new gallery I’ve been watching for the past couple of weeks, tweeted the other day something to the effect of, “which local artists would you like to see at #Hashtag Gallery?” and I said something like, “why would you want local artists when your gallery is named after a component of the internet? you have the whole internet!” To which they replied “good point” and rephrased the question. They’re super green, but they’re learning. I really wish they’d get a goddamn website up though; you’re named after a major component of internet life and you don’t even have a website? Come on, shit or get off the pot. I still maintain that if your gallery is getting more foot traffic than your website, you’re doing something wrong.

The Square Foot Show signups started yesterday. It’s $20 to enter and you can submit up to 3 pieces, each 12 inches by 12 inches, and they’ll put your work up at AWOL Gallery in Toronto along with 600 other artists. You have to get your signup in SOON because space is limited and this year is their 10th anniversary.

I don’t know whether or not I should do this because it’s $20 and I’m slowly but surely learning the value of a dollar. You have to proce your work for $255, which would be totally fine by me because that’s what I charge for a 12 x 12 inch painting anyway (with shipping), but the gallery takes 50% of your money if you sell anything so I can’t figure out what the point is to doing this. To get “exposure”? Again, I don’t need “exposure”. I have a website. 3,000 people per month come look at it. The Square Foot Show isn’t going to compete with that. It’s not like they show your name with your painting or anything, people buy it purely on whether they like how it looks or what it says. I kinda like that aspect of it, I just don’t like parting with 50% of my money when it’s going to cost me so much to be in it. ($20 to enter, $15 to park at the event, $10 in gas, a day to prepare to go, a night to actually go to the gala, $25 to have dinner out if just Blake and I go.)

So I dunno. My mom thinks I should do it. She thinks she might want to do it. I’ll do it if she does it, I guess, then we can all go to the gala together and that would be worth it for me, but I don’t think I’ll do it any other way. Another benefit of doing it is to put it on my resume because the more gallery showings you have on your resume, the better your chances of getting a grant are.

I got turned down, again, for the OAC grant this year, which is no surprise and I’m actually glad I didn’t get it because I’m not doing my girls anymore and that was my entire artist statement. And if you don’t do what is in your artist statement within a year of receiving the grant, you have to give the grant back. I would hate to have to do girls when I wouldn’t want to just to get some money. I mean, I would have done it because $5,000 is a lot of money, but I wouldn’t be very happy about it at all.

That’s why I don’t think I’ll be applying next year. We’ll see how things go when the time comes around to do it and where I am artistically, but I think I’m still trying to figure out who I am right now and what to paint as a result and I don’t think I’ll have that figured out until after Squam and after Squam is too late to make enough pieces to enter for grant purposes. But we’ll see how it goes.

Getting sick and almost dying really messed with my world views and I feel like I’m on really shaky ground right now because I don’t know for sure how I feel about certain things. When you realize just how short life really is (and how long and condensed at the same time), I think it’s natural to need a while to figure things out.

The last thing I have to talk about, because I have to start work in like, 42 minutes, is the fact that the kids and I signed up for The Sketchbook Project 2013 and I think that’s pretty awesome. I’ve decided to (really this time) not treat my art supplies as being “precious” and I’m going to give them access to everything I have for their sketchbooks just to see what they’ll come up with. I know Wes has big platypi plans for the cover of his sketchbook and he’s been practicing in his *other* sketchbook in the time between signing up until the books actually arrive, but Madison has been quiet about her plans. If she has any. *I* certainly do not have a plan for mine.

I sent in my Sketchbook Limited Edition sketchbook a couple of weeks ago. I think I did a fucking great job on it, considering what I’m going through artistically right now. I think you guys are gonna really like it when it’s digitized. :oD

Tomorrow we’re going geocaching I think, after Blake goes to hot yoga for the first time. He’s got all next week off of work and he plans on going to hot yoga every day since the membership was like “$X for unlimited classes for the 1st month”. He’s gonna get even hotter and sexier when he starts doing hot yoga and then I’m gonna look like a fat, old goat herder beside him. :o( He just gets sexier by the moment though, even preparing for his venture into hot yoga. I mean, check this out:

That is Blake at the grocery store with his stylish new headband for hot yoga for all the soccer moms to drool over. In the background is Shaun/Sean/Shawn, our favourite Foodland employee.

Anyway, I have a million personal e-mails to go through so I’d better get on that before I have to start working on work e-mails. I hope you all had a fantastic April 20th yesterday and an even better 21st!

PS. I wrote this in an e-mail to Charlie yesterday, what do you guys think?

Y’know. I kind of envy your career. Not like, what you actually *do* for a living but the pace, the responsibility, the ability to manage underlings, the travel…if I wasn’t married with kids, I would probably have a job like that. Advertising was a lot like that but with less travel and I really enjoyed that. I want “projects”, dammit. That’s kinda why I think I want to start doing small commissions.

I think I want to paint in as many styles as I’m capable of to see how I really make art because I’m honestly not sure how I make art. I don’t think I have a signature style or themes or anything. I guess I “sort of” did with my girls, but that was more a marketing thing than an art thing, I think. I’m not saying that they weren’t or aren’t art, I just mean that they’re more decoration than “art” art.

I just think maybe doing commissions would open me up a little bit. Blake says they’re a bad idea because I’m terrible at deadlines and I end up hating what I do in the end (not the product but the process) but I think I’ve kind of evolved a little bit since the last time I took on a commission type project and I see art differently than I used to. I don’t really see it as a “commission” but as a collaboration. Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol had students and assistants doing the grunt work *for them* and they both also took/take commissions. I bet there’s a ton more examples of famous painters taking commissions.

I also think it’s a good way to practice techniques without it being “work”. (Like Suzi Blu had us make a grid on a piece of paper and draw eyes in each square. I did this for 10 pages. That was WORK and very very boring. Totally effective in the end, but still work.)

So what do you think? Would YOU commission me?

So I’m pretty sure I mentioned the whole geocaching thing, right? I’m gonna recap in case I didn’t:

Madison is a resource hog. She occupies 90% of our family time and prefers to think of herself as an only child most of the time. She is definitely her mother’s daughter in that she is an absolute attention whore. As a result, Wes doesn’t get as much of our time as we would like for him to have, Blake in particular.

Wes’ “thing” is video games. None of us are really hardcore gamers and I don’t play at all so we can’t really spend time with him doing that. His other “thing” is Pokemon, which none of us can really relate to and even that he’s slowly growing out of (thank god).

The other thing is that over the summer, while the kids were playing “grandparent bingo” and I was in the hospital, the kids got spoiled with food a lot we think and Wes’ weight shot up like a rocket. He was, as they say, a porker. He’s been doing Wii Fit and watching what he eats and he’s lost most of the weight he gained over the summer and since we wanted to encourage more of that and being active, Blake and he started going on “adventures” down the many trails near our house and in Barrie.

After a day of going down these trails and taking pictures and stuff, they came home and Blake said something like, “I wish these adventures could be more interactive” because Wes wasn’t as engaged as Blake would have liked. That’s when I said, “Um, why don’t you try geocaching?” and then Blake called me a genius, which I am, and that’s how they got started.

Blake just downloaded a GPS app for his phone and they’ve been using that on Saturdays while I’m working my long (9 hour) shift.

While it’s Blake and Wes’ “thing” to do together, Madison, at Wes’ request, has been invited to come along – at least to the local caches they’ve been doing. The original plan was that if Blake and Wes were going to be driving out of town to cache, Madison would stay home but now that we’ve made it a family thing, she and I are welcome to come and we’re going to do it on Sundays because that’s one of my days off.

Wait, before I go any further, I guess I should explain what geocaching IS for those who don’t know: Geocaching is when someone hides a “cache”, usually a camouflaged container of some sort, in public, usually in the woods or in nature, and you find it by using the GPS coordinates of the item. Inside the cache is always a logbook to sign your name (like a guestbook), sometimes a pencil to do so and the bigger caches (which are harder to hide) have items in them like dollar store toys, flashlights, coins, semi-precious gems (like amethyst or quartz) and stuff like that. When you find a cache that has stuff in it, you can swap items out that are equal or greater than the value of the item you are taking.

Some caches are really simple, like a small container hooked to the backside of a tree that only contains a logbook (although finding one of those micro caches in a pine tree can be pretty tricky, I’m told), some have really elaborate puzzles to get to them with codes and stuff and some of the caches themselves, like the containers, are really elaborate which I’ll show you next week because on Sunday we’re going after one called “Wonderball” that is just fucking amazingly well done.

More info can be found here.

Wes is having the time of his life with geocaching. He’s pretty much stopped talking about Pokemon and now all he talks about is geocaching (but we had some issues in the beginning with that, with him having to keep the locations of all the caches secret from his friends). Because he’s having so much fun with it and Madison and Blake are too, when I sold my painting “Sunny Rays” over the weekend, I used the funds to buy them a GPS unit and I took them out for dinner (just to McDonald’s, nothing fancy) after we were caching on Sunday. The reason I bought a stand-alone GPS unit is because using GPS on your phone drains the batteries like crazy (like, we’re talking in 2 hours kinda crazy and you don’t want to be stuck in the woods without a phone – none of us know how to make smoke signals!) and phone GPS isn’t precise enough to place caches, which is what *I* really want to do.

But before we place caches, we have to find a lot more to see how they’re done. I think Blake and the kids have found 23 caches and I’ve only found 3 because I just started on Sunday.

The other thing with geocaching you can do is TRACKABLES. These are items that have codes on them that you input into the Geocaching.com website and you can see how far they’ve traveled. These items are called Travel Bugs, Geocoins, or Geopatches. The geocaching bug has hit me HARD so I bought 4 trackables: a Travel Bug decal for our car, a Canadian Travel Bug that I haven’t activated yet, a trackable patch for my bag and one for Blake and the kids’ geocaching bag.

This is what the Travel Bug on our car looks like and this is what the Canadian one looks like (it’s like a dog tag, in fact you CAN get trackable dog tags!).

For the car one, if you see it “in the wild” you would either take a picture of it or write down the tracking number and when you got home, you would go to Geocaching.com and log that you saw it. Then your entry would be added to the Travel Bug’s log and it would be counted toward its mileage.  Same with the patches on our bags.

With dog tag Travel Bugs and Geocoins, they usually have a goal. Like, say the goal for the Travel Bug was to reach all 50 states. I would put it in my cache here in Ontario and with it, there would be a note that says what its goal is and probably a checkbox with all 50 states on it so when it reaches that state, the person can tick it off so there won’t be any duplicate trips. I’m honestly not too sure what happens when it reaches its final destination, like if it somehow finds its way back to the original cache or keeps traveling or what. I *think* it just keeps traveling.

Oh and usually a Travel Bug dog tag is attached to something else, like a stuffed animal or a keychain or something like that.

This is where you guys come in though: I’ve decided that I want my Canadian Travel Bug to start its journey in Utopia, Ontario (which is where I wish we could live) and have it travel to as many oddly named places as possible, such as Zephyr, Ontario; Snowball Corners, Ontario; Egypt, Ontario; Ragged Ass Road (I forget where that is but it’s in Canada somewhere, it’s also an album title but I forget which band); Moose Factory, Ontario; Kalamazoo, Militiagan; Hell, Militiagan etc etc etc. But the thing is, I don’t know the names of all the weird towns and places in North America, let alone the world and while I don’t need the names of ALL of them, I’d like to include a bunch of examples in my Travel Bug’s info sheet that goes with it. So! If any of you guys know of any strangely named places, PLEASE leave me a comment so I can include it!

And this is what we’re going to attach our Canadian Travel Bug to: A USB thingy! The idea was Blake’s and what people would do is that when they found the Travel Bug, they would upload their photo to the Travel Bug’s log on Geocaching.com but also to the USB thingy so the next person who finds it would see the photos on the USB thingy and  do the same.  Also we would put the instructions/info sheet ON the USB thingy as a .txt file (or maybe a PDF so they can’t edit it?) and that way the two parts would never get lost.

I think that is definitely going to be in the very first cache we hide, which we can now do since I bought the GPS device.

I have no idea how to actually do the geocaching though, like how to get the files to my phone and then how to open them and run them. So far Blake’s done all that. Adding to the confusion is how to work the GPS unit. We just got it yesterday and so far only Blake’s played with it so I’m not sure how it works. We also had to register it to a premium Geocaching.com account so we registered it to Blake’s since his is for him and Wes and this is really their activity. Madison has her own account and so do I, but only Blake and I have premium accounts.

Last Saturday there was a geocachers meeting at Steeler’s which is a restaurant in our town. Blake said there were a lot of people there, like maybe 40, and obviously he and the kids went. Then in June there’s another meeting for adults only in Barrie that Blake and I are going to (at another restaurant) and also in June, there’s a Spring Fling in Midland, about 20 mins North of us, and they’re expecting like, 700 people. We all plan to attend that one.

There are 2 caches that I know of within 5 minutes of our house. One is in Heritage Park (and I know approximately where it is) and one is in the park across the street from us but I have no idea where it is, I just know what it looks like because Blake told me.  My goal is to be able to find those 2 caches on my own, which will be a very layered experience:

- Wash hair.
- Get dressed.
- Locate socks.
- Figure out how to download the geocaching file to my phone.
- Put all my junk in my bag.
- Go outside.
- Walk to the park.
- Figure out how to work the GPS.
- Walk around like a lunatic following the arrow to the cache. 
- Find cache.
- Log cache.
- Come home.

OH! And some caches are called “letterbox caches”  and they’re a whole other thing. In a letterbox cache, there’s a rubber stamp, usually hand-carved, and a marker, like a Crayola marker. You rub the marker onto the stamp and then you stamp your letterbox book. Think of it like an autograph book except for stamps from caches! How cool is THAT?

I found an old journal that I’d never use for actual journaling to use as my letterbox book for stamps. I may swap it out for a different one though because I don’t like that it has lines on it and I haven’t used it yet so there’s no issue in not using it and getting a different one.

I’m pretty sure that our first cache is going to be legendary! I want us to have a crazy container of some sort. I want us to have clues leading up to it, like a puzzle (Blake and Wes will be good at that part). I want it to be a letterbox hybrid and I’ll carve the stamp myself since I have stamp carving tools, I just have to get a lino block because I don’t think I have any kicking around anymore. The cache will be chock full of SWAG and finally, it will contain our Canadian USB Travel Bug.

I AM STOKED.

When I ordered the Travel Bugs and the patches, I also ordered a little capsule-like container to use to hide a small cache somewhere but I wanted a green one and since they only had black ones, the lady sent me a free mini capsule in the green so now we have TWO containers to use as mini and micro caches!  I have some teeny tiny little gemstones that I can use for the bigger of the two.

So that’s what us Crittendens have been up to.

Yesterday I walked to Heritage Park by myself and I stayed there for about 5 minutes. It was cold and I wore my Shape Ups shoes which was a terrible idea because my legs hurt by the time I got home but I survived and Blake got me an apple danish at the bakery for my efforts. It was delicious. Know why? Mennonites.

Oh wait, I lied. Blake starts “hot yoga” on Sunday and I signed me and the kids up for The Sketchbook Project 2013.

And that’s all I have to say.

So I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this or not, but a while ago, like maybe 2 months ago, Blake was looking for an activity he could do with Wes so they could spend some time together without Madison (Madison is a resource hog and thinks she’s an only child, so Wes doesn’t get as much attention as she demands), just the two of them, and they started going on “adventures”. These “adventures” were just walking along trails near our house or in Barrie but something was missing from them, Blake said, so I suggested that they start geocaching.

So that’s what they’ve been doing on Saturdays while I work. So far they’ve been bringing Madison with them, but when they venture outside of our town to find caches in other areas, they’ll be leaving her at home.

This morning they went to a breakfast with all the other geocachers in the area and met a lot of new people, learned a lot of new terms and found a whole whack of new caches that were all linked together specifically for the event. Apparently in June, in Midland which is about 20 minutes North of us, the whole geocachers of Ontario or something like that are having some sort of festival type thing with games and stuff like that and I guess there will be about 700 people there. Obviously Blake and the kids plan to attend.

At the meet this morning, they met a couple who had a “travel bug” on their car, so Blake came home and logged that he saw it, which I thought was pretty cool. Apparently the whole idea of travel bugs is that they, well, travel! So you would get one of these and put it in a cache and when the person finds it, they will see a note or something that says “I want to get this travel bug to Italy” and that person might think “hey I have a cousin in Italy” and send it to them and then you can track your travel bug’s progress on the Geocaching.com website.  I thought they were pretty neat.

Since they do it while I’m working, I haven’t seen any caches yet myself, except the ones that they’ve taken pics of to show me, but when they start creating caches, I plan to be fully involved. But I think that’s a ways off. :o/ At the meet today, the people who were really really REALLY involved in geocaching said that to place caches, it’s preferred that you have an actual GPS unit or whatever instead of using GPS on your phone because I guess the GPS on a GPS thing is more accurate than a phone. We can’t afford a GPS unit though but Blake’s thinking maybe for Xmas next year or something. It sucks to have to wait that long to place caches though because I think that’s the fun part. I’d rather make things for people to find than find things. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to wait. I have a million ideas for caches though, I just don’t know where to place them yet. Anyone else out there geocachers?

There are a LOT of caches in our town and a ton of them in Barrie too, mostly placed by the same few people. I think Blake and the kids have found around 20 of them so far.

So y’know how Blake and I had a talk about my agoraphobia the other night? I got thinking about it and I’ve decided to make something similar to the “date night jar” that I posted about a while back, but for agoraphobia. I would paint tongue depressors different colours by level of difficulty and write “missions” on them and then when I was feeling brave, I would pick one based on my level of bravery and do what the stick says.

I figure there will be 4 levels of difficulty: easy, medium, hard and black.

I started making lists today of things I could do and tomorrow I’ll start making the sticks. I also have to find a jar. Here is some of what I have so far:

There are very few places to go in this town because it’s so small. There are 3 parks in town, one across the street from us that I’m not including in my lists because our neighbours would wonder what I’m doing over there by myself and that would drive me bonkers so that’s not an option, one down the street about 2 or 3 blocks away with a pavilion and picnic tables and a concert stage called Heritage park and another one that’s connected to the one down the street by the Trans-Canada Trail called Bishop park. These parks are going to feature prominently in my “easy” and “medium” columns because they’re not too far away and during the day, during the week, there wouldn’t be too many people around.

Then in town there is a dollar store that I’ve never been to and a coffee shop called Coffee Time (it’s a chain) that I’ve only ever been in once.  Those will be in the “hard” to “black” categories with the grocery store and the post office in the “medium” to “hard” side of things.  I also have the flower shop on the list, which is almost outside of town, and that’s on the “black” list and the challenge is just to get flowers. I have another challenge to get flowers from the grocery store but that’s on the “medium” list.

Actually, here’s what I have so far…

Easy:
- Put some tea in a travel mug and journal at Heritage Park.
- Write a letter at Heritage Park.
- Mail a letter to yourself or someone else. (Send me your address to Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com and maybe I’ll mail a letter to YOU!)
- Photograph 3 different animals.
- Photograph 5 different flowers.
- Pack a lunch and eat it at Heritage Park.
- Get the mail.
- Mail something. (And get the mail.)
- Put some tea in a travel mug and draw pictures at Heritage Park.

 Medium:
- Mail a package to someone.
- Go to the grocery store and buy a croissant.
- Go to the grocery store to buy an apple.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a bag of rice cakes.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a box of Thinsations.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a magazine.
- Go to Mac’s to buy a magazine. (This one is slightly different than getting one from the grocery store because I know everyone at the grocery store and Mac’s is full of strangers and is more fast paced. It’s a convenience store.)
- Walk Lucky down to heritage Park.
- Buy grocery store flowers.
- Pack a lunch and eat it at Bishop Park.
- Buy stamps.
- Go to the pharmacy and buy a card.
- Put some tea in a travel mug and bring a book to Bishop Park.

 Hard:
- Go to the grocery store to buy potato or macaroni salad and eat it at Bishop Park while reading a book.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a sandwich and eat it at Bishop Park with a book.
- Walk to Coffee Time to buy tea.
- Use the ATM @ the bank before going to Coffee Time or the grocery store.
- Walk Lucky down the path to Bishop Park.
- Go to the dollar store and buy $5 worth of stuff to use to make a gift for someone else.
- Get a book from the library.
- Get a movie from the library.
- Go to Clover (convenience store that’s far from my house) and buy a movie. (They have used movies for about $2.99-$4.99)
- Go to the pharmacy and buy a gift for someone.

Black:
- Write a letter at Coffee Time and mail it on the way home.
- Go out for breakfast or lunch.
- Walk to Coffee Time for tea and read a book while you drink it.
- Walk to Coffee Time for tea and journal while you drink it.
- Deposit a cheque.
- Buy flower store flowers.
- Go to 3 Foursquare mayorships.
- Go to the new convenience store (that’s far from my house) and buy a movie.
- Buy a card at the pharmacy, take it to Coffee Time to fill out and mail it on the way home.
- Pick up prescriptions. (I’m not sure if I’m going to put this one on a stick because obviously if I don’t need any rx’s I can’t do this one.)

And that’s all I have so far. I’m welcome to suggestions if anyone has any, although I know it’s hard when you don’t know the layout of the town or what we have here. We are on Google streetview though if you really think you might have some creative ideas! Blake won’t let me post our address though so you’d have to look at the middle of town (Elmvale) and see what we have to get ideas. It’s also hard to really gauge what would be hard or easy for me because it’s hard for me to really describe criteria but if you guys had any ideas, I could list them under whatever category they are. I’m looking for as many ideas and variations as possible, but mostly I’m looking for easy ones to start out with.

I’m also thinking that since the post office plays such a big part in all of this, that maybe you guys could send me mail too? It can’t be all at once though, it would have to be every now and then. Blake said that he’d bring home big packages and Camwhores cheques for me but that he’d leave little packages and letters in the box so that when I pull the stick that says to check the mail, that it’ll be worth my time. That is, assuming someone would actually send me mail. As it is, all I get is coupons and those are NO FUN AT ALL. If you would like to send me mail that I would be able to carry home on foot (so no big packages, but packages that would fit in a laptop bag would be okay) that would be awesome, just e-mail me (Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com) and I’ll send you our address. If anyone wants to start any like, land mail art object exchanges or knows of any, please let me know because I would probably be into that.

I figure once I’m better at leaving the house I can find the local geocaches that are around our house that I can get to on foot using my phone, then if we get a GSP unit thing, I could place them and that would be extra fun because then my kids could find them. Honestly, I’m pretty geeked on the idea of making and placing caches. I would gladly spend an entire paycheque making elaborate caches with neat stuff in them. Like ATCs would be cool to put in them.

Oh another thing is that in the beginning I’m only going to be pulling sticks on days Blake is working from home because that way if I freak out and can’t move (it happens), he can come get me. Or if something bad happens, he can come fix it or whatnot. Or if Lucky takes off on me because he’s the worst mental health support animal in the world, Blake can help me find him.

I’ve tried to end this post about 100 times today – I wrote it while I was working and started it at like, 2pm – and can’t think of anything else to say so I think I’m just goin gto end it here and see if anyone has any ideas for things I could do outside, on foot, with varying degrees of difficulty. I definitely think I’m going to include geocaching in the mix once I know how to do it and figure out how to download the files onto my phone.

Oh, that’s another thing, I have to figure out how to use my phone as an MP3 player. Blake’s going to have to show me how to do that because earphones are people-repellent and that’s a very good thing.

And that’s all I can think of at the moment, so to recap:

- Outing suggestions welcome
- Send me your mailing address! (And if it’s not apparent how I know you, please introduce yourself!)
- E-mail me for our address so you can send ME stuff, which I can then go to the post office and get MYSELF! (And keep in mind that I won’t be checking the mail daily, just when I pull the stick that says to do it, so don’t get mad at me for not acknowledging your letter or whatever right away!)

And I think that’s it. Have a great weekend. I’ll probably update tomorrow when we’re making the sticks.

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.

“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! 

Ugh. My head hurts and I feel sick. All weekend I was sick as a dog with massive diarrhea and just general weakness and ickiness and all the rest that comes with stomach flus (flues?). That’s not why I feel like crap right now though. I feel like crap now because I just ate an assorted sub from Mr. Sub and sometimes when I eat those I feel sick afterward. I get them because for a small one, it’s only 290 calories which ain’t too shabby for a lunch. They *are* high in salt though so I try not to get them very often because that’s not good for my kidneys. I did get a root beer to go with it but that was like, almost 300 calories so I opted not to drink it and I’ll give it to the kids as a treat after school.

Sunday was Wild Rumpus Day. I felt like crap so I didn’t do any rumpussing but I did wear my fluffy horns all day and Blake and the kids dressed up and went a-rumpussing in the field across the road from our house. They took Hoover Dog with them and Lucky whined and cried the whole time they were gone.

Here are some pics of Blake and the kids with their ears on:

Madison is wearing a kitty cat hat that Chali made, Blake is wearing his uncle John’s hat with ears he cut off of a stuffed horse and Wes is wearing the wolf hat I got him for Xmas.

He’s so handsome. I just want to fuck the stuffing right out of his guts.

While they were rumpussing, I made a painting. Actually, I started the painting Friday night but didn’t finish it until Sunday. It’s a self-portrait and if you know me at all, it should be pretty self-explanatory.

It is 12 x 16 inches, acrylic and cardboard on watercolour paper.
You can have it for $300, just e-mail me if interested.
More pictures can be found HERE.

I made a video of the making of this painting but I’ve got to admit, it’s pretty terrible. Blake says it’s fine but I think it goes too fast and since it took me 4 hours to save the damn thing, I didn’t want to go back and slow it down further. Movie Maker is an awful program, I’ve decided. Is there anything out there that’s better? (Don’t say iMovie, I use a PC.) When I was working on editing the video, I thought I was missing huge chunks of video because I guess in preview mode, like while you’re working on something, it only shows you SOME of the video. All day I was pissed off because I thought the Flips I was using to make it had failed to record huge chunks of time when in fact it was this awful program not showing me everything. I didn’t realize this was happening until I reviewed the saved video a few minutes ago.

I wish I had an actual video camera or at least an SLR that recorded video. It was really hard to record myself painting because the Flips only have 1 hour and 45 minute – 2 hour batteries (one has an hour & 45 min, the other is 2 hours) and they take that long to charge so I would have to take pretty long breaks while the Flips recharged (I wonder A) if you can use regular rechargeable batteries in them and B) how big their hard drives are) and that really cramped my style. My digital camera only takes 10 minute clips so that was out of the question and if I had the Digital Rebel that takes video (which is on my wishlist *cough*), I could just leave it set up on my desk and turn it off if I needed a break or needed to wait for paint to dry or whatever and recharging batteries wouldn’t be such a hassle. I have a feeling that the hard drives on the Flips are pretty small since they’re only designed to take an hour and a half’s worth of video. If I had the new Rebel that wouldn’t be a problem because I’d have a 32 gig memory card which could fit the entire video.

Anyway, here’s my shitty attempt at a process video:

In other news, this Mexican drug lord thanked all the presidents of my lifetime for his billions of dollars due to the “war on drugs”. He’s responsible for about 30,000 deaths in Mexico since 2006 (I believe was the statistic), but he is the 701st richest man on Earth, according to Forbes magazine. Thanks to Zombie Bunny for the link. If this isn’t proof that the whole “war on drugs” thing is a fucking sham, nothing is. I don’t know if I think *everything* should be legal, because where do you draw the line and who’s to say Xanax isn’t recreational for some people? Big pharma, like them or not, need prescription money to make medical breakthroughs.

Anyway…I have nothing else to say and it’s pretty much my bedtime, so hopefully you like the video and if you do, maybe I’ll do more. (But I think if I do more, I’ll have to use licence-free music. Anyone have any leads on what I could use?)

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

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

I am so in love with my husband it’s entirely ridiculous. I really only think about two things these days: Blake and painting. I’d like to be able to say that I’ve been in love with him since the day we met but that wouldn’t be a true statement. I was in lust with him since the day we met, but when we met I had a boyfriend so I didn’t/couldn’t act on it, however, the day my boyfriend dumped me (long story, we’re still friends today yadda yadda) I said to my friend Nicole, who was also friends with Blake, “what do you think Blake is up to?” and she FORBID me to go out with him. We, of course, ignored her, and we’ve been joined at the hip ever since.

Blake says that the very first time he saw a picture of me online (Naked Fan Fame on the Scratching Post website), he said to Nicole (the lead singer of Scratching Post) that he was going to marry me one day and obviously he made good on that. :o)

Anyway, ever since I got sick, or more to the point, ever since I started recovering from being sick, Blake’s been on my mind pretty much constantly because I’ve been so worried about him. It’s like…I remember going to the hospital in Midland because I had the worst pain in my stomach I’ve ever experienced in my life (child birth x 1000 kinda pain) and then basically all I remember is waking up in a different hospital and being told what had happened to me. More to the point though, I woke up and my husband was an entirely different person. He wasn’t the happy, positive person I’ve always known him to be, he’s been irritable, emotional, downright miserable at times and just unhappy in general as he finally has the chance to process the events of the summer when breaking down was simply not an option.

Slowly but surely he’s coming back to me but the problem is that he doesn’t know how to have fun anymore and we don’t really know how to have fun together. And to heal, we need to have more fun in our lives, more fun together, outside of the kids. I’m not talking about “putting the spice back into your marriage” kind of stuff (although we’re trying that too, not out of necessity but out of a sense of “why not?”), I’m talking about like, board games, going out for dinner dates and stuff we haven’t even discovered yet. The artist dates were not a part of that, that was for me and Blake doesn’t really have the greatest time on them because he finds buying art supplies really boring (because he’s crazy, obviously…).

On March 18th, for example, we’re going to see the TIFF Game or Thrones exhibition in Toronto. I saw an ad for it in this free movie magazine we get from our cable company and told Ronny about it so he could call the number and get us tickets because I knew Alex would want to go too. I thought that that would be something that didn’t cost us money (okay there’s gonna be lunch and parking) and something that would be adult fun with our adult friends. That’s the kind of stuff that I’m trying to incorporate into our lives to help Blake recover from my almost dying this summer. Fun things for us to do together, both large and small (and if anyone has any suggestions on things we could do, I’m more than happy to hear them; the cheaper the better because we are b-r-o-k-e).

Last night we went to The Stag Shop in Barrie, which is an adult store full of rubber dicks and various other sex paraphernalia. The reason we went was two-fold (and I’ve okayed talking about this with Madison): Madison has expressed an interest in a vibrator and I wanted to get flavoured condoms so we could engage in an act that was purely focused on Blake.

Now, obviously getting an almost 14-year-old a vibrator could be seen as controversial, I understand that, but she asked for one and I’d rather her do things the right way than to do what one of her friends did (stole her mom’s “back massager”, which by all descriptions appears to be a Hitachi Magic Wand LOL), or what another one of her friends has been doing (masturbating with Sharpies…) or doing what I did and start using mine when I wasn’t around because that’s gross. (She can’t use our showerhead like I did when I was her age because the hose isn’t long enough.) She’s 13, she’s masturbating. In fact, she started masturbating when she was like, 7 or 8, in full view on the couch in front of us and we had to have a talk about privacy – kids masturbate. Some parents don’t want to hear that but it’s true! So why wouldn’t you want them to do it in the safest, healthiest way possible?

So I chose for her this little pink vibrating bunny. I threw out the box already so I can’t link you to the exact one we bought but it’s literally a bunny figurine made out of that jelly stuff they make vibrators out of. It’s meant for clitoral stimulation and I did this on purpose because I don’t think, for reasons that I won’t get into, that she’s ready for penetration yet. She won’t even use a tampon. This bunny is pretty unassuming and when I gave it to her she genuinely seemed to like it. I made sure to confirm that she knew where and what her clitoris is and told her how I would use it if it were mine, but that she would need to experiment with it to find the best possible way for her to use it. We also told her about keeping it in a place where Wes wouldn’t find it, washing it after each use and in general, just how to take care of it. Oh and batteries for it, from this point forward, are to be purchased with allowance money.

All in all, I think we did a pretty good job with talking to her about it maturely and not embarrassingly, and that she came away with it with healthy curiosity. This is what I wish my mom would have done with me. If sex hadn’t been this totally mysterious, dirty thing I probably wouldn’t have made a lot of the choices in life that I did regarding it and I would have had a much healthier sex life than I’ve had most of my life. I think masturbation is the foundation for a good, healthy sex life and I feel that it’s important that my kids know how to do it and how to do it “right” in that, you do it in private, you do it with the appropriate things (ie. not Sharpies or electric toothbrushes) and that you don’t let it flow into other people’s lives (ie. you don’t leave your jizz socks in the family laundry hamper for someone to stick their hand on when doing laundry!).

Anyway, it’s something that you don’t really think about when they’re really little (well, I did…but most people don’t) but it’s something that I think parents need to be totally prepared for. And I’m not saying every girl needs a vibrator – although I do believe that, in theory! – you can have the same type of discussion with them and only talk about hands and fingers. It’s just that I told her a long time ago that if we could afford it, when she decided she was curious enough about sex to want to experiment with a vibrator, I would buy her one and yesterday I made good on that promise.

And before someone freaks on me for talking about this publicly, again I have Madison’s permission to do so. She thinks this is a totally healthy thing and that every girl should have a mom like me. She sees the girls in her class and how curious they are but how stifled that curiosity is by their parents (most of them, anyway) and she’s glad she’s not one of them.

Onto adult things…

Like I said, we also got flavoured condoms because I will not give a blowjob to completion. I think semen is fucking disgusting and I do not want it anywhere near me. Traditionally, I use my oral skills for foreplay and then we finish off by having sex. That’s how it’s always been my entire life with every guy I’ve ever been with, but right now with my stomach muscles all over the place and this big ugly binder I have to wear and the fact that I have this giant wound on my abdomen so I can’t shower (I use washcloths and baby wipes, I’m not a dirty pig haha), actual intercourse is few and far between. And intercourse is about the two of us as well, which is all fine and dandy but sometimes, a lot of the time actually, I’d rather just focus on Blake because I’d just like to make him feel good. He does so much for me in all facets of our lives and while I’m an agoraphobic freak and have limited resources, a blowjob I can do! But not without flavoured condoms. Soooo that’s what we picked up yesterday and we tested out this morning with GREAT SUCCESS!

Once Blake explained to me recently that sometimes he just wants to have an orgasm without having to do anything, something clicked in my brain and I was like, “I can make that happen!” and now I’m all gung-ho to do things that’ll make him happy. Because he deserves to be happy and I want him to be happy and he’s been so UNhappy that it just breaks my heart so if I can take 20 minutes out of my day and blow his mind, I’m going to do that. Sex is how adults play, so let’s play! Y’know?

I also got this Doc Johnson vibe, which I’m really really excited about but haven’t used yet.

Also yesterday, my Curry’s order came in and my big, beautiful 30 x 36 inch behemoth of a canvas is now sitting on the coffee table in my office, base-coated in “Surf” by Martha Stewart which is this gorgeous light aqua blue colour. Originally I’d painted the canvas with Americana’s “Spa Blue”, which is almost identical to “Surf” but a little lighter and a little more blue (but like, so close it’s almost imperceptible to anyone but me) but when I went to Michael’s last night to get more “Spa Blue” to do a second coat and to have another bottle on hand to paint over mistakes, I found that Americana doesn’t even make that colour anymore! In fact, which was really really fucking obnoxious Americana doesn’t make ANY of the colours I needed anymore so I had to improvise mostly using Martha Stewart paint instead of Americana!

I’d made a really detailed mock up of the painting I want to do with colour swatches and the whole works that I brought with me to Michael’s and I’m extremely glad I did because without it I would have been lost. Since it was so detailed, I could hold paint bottles up to the colours I’d chosen for things and could re-choose colours based on that.

In the end, I got all of the colours I needed and in fact some of the colours I got from the Martha Stewart line were being discontinued (I think) so they were on clearance for $1.49! Score! Plus honestly? I think I like the Martha Stewart paint a lot better than Americana. Americana has more colours but that’s to be expected since they’ve been around forever and Martha’s line is pretty new. Martha’s paint just seems to be thicker and more pigmented than Americana, which it should be because the price difference between the two is pretty outrageous. For non-metallic Americana, it’s $1.99 a bottle and for non-pearlized Martha Stewart colours, they’re $3.99. For the same size bottles. BUT I’ve been to Michael’s like, every week for the past 2 months and the Martha Stewart paints have been on sale for 30-40% off the entire time and they’re just better so that’s what I’ve been buying. Don’t get me wrong though, both companies are essential for what I do. For example, Martha’s only metallic (sorry, “pearlized“) red is called “Holly Berry” and DecoArt’s (the company that makes Americana paint) metallic red is called “Festive Red” and while the difference between the two is very very subtle, there is one and “Holly Berry” is slightly more blue than “Festive Red”, which is a true red. So that’s why I would need both lines for what I do.

Because so many of the colours I needed were on clearance for $1.49, my total for paint was only about $23 when I’d originally estimated that I’d need about $50 worth of it to complete the project, so that’s good. However, I kinda blew my savings when we went to Curry’s to exchange some of the brushes I’d ordered online because the bristles were this awful scratchy stuff instead of the white, soft bristles I’m used to. I just ordered the wrong ones by accident. I’d ordered three large flat brushes starting at an inch wide and going down slightly by size and I exchanged them for two large flat brushes and a 3/4 inch angled brush that I’ve been coveting for a while now and decided I needed for this project. However, the brushes I’d ordered online were cheaper than the ones I wanted in the store (the kind I normally use, it’s not like I was going crazy buying brushes or anything) so I ended up going $15 over my brushes budget. But it’s a big canvas so I needed big brushes, what can I say?

Also from Curry’s, I ordered my gel medium for Squam and I got a good pencil sharpener for Squam too since I don’t want to bring my electric sharpener. I got spray fixative as well, which I’ve never used before. Spray fixative is this stuff, kinda like varnish, that you spray over something like watercolours so you can do a layer over top of them. Or at least that’s what I’ll be using it for. I’ll explain that better: Okay so I use watercolour pencils in my work a lot (although you’d probably never know it). So if I used watercolour pencils as layer 1 and I allow them to dry but I want to do something over TOP of that layer, I would spray fixative on it, which would enable me to do a second layer of watercolour over top of the original layer, without it affecting the original layer. Does that make sense? Because if you let your original layer dry and then tried to do a second layer over top, it would disturb the original layer and you’d probably end up with a brown mess. The fixative I bought is made by Krylon, who makes the spray varnish I often use, but fixative *isn’t* varnish. You can still work on top of fixative whereas you cannot with varnish. Varnish is the final layer, a protective finish.

At least that is my understanding of fixative. I could be wrong but that’s what the directions indicate and that’s how I plan to use it. You can also apparently use it on top of charcoal, chalk and pastels.

Okay, I’ve been up since 5:45am and the only productive thing I’ve done so far today is give Blake a blowjob so I think it’s time to watch Doctor Who and tackle this canvas. Today is my 9 hour workday so it’s gonna be a long one.

Have a great weekend!

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

The spambots have been working overtime on my site. I have Askimet or whatever it’s called so it catches them and puts them in the spam folder but still, there’s been like, over 30 a day lately. This is another reason why I screen comments.

On Monday Blake and I went to Michael’s so I could spend the gift certificate my mom gave me for my birthday. After Michael’s we went to Quizno’s for dinner, then to Zehr’s (grocery store) looking for big bags of Fizzy Skittles, which we never found and then we checked Wal*Mart for Ritz Chips, which we never found either. After that we went to Staples where I drooled over the new Martha Stewart home office products and I bought rub-on letters.

The gift certificate for Michael’s was technically for gel medium for Squam, but at Michael’s gel medium is $21.99 but at Curry’s it’s $10.99 for the exact same thing so that’s why I didn’t get it at Michael’s. Rule of thumb in Canada is that if it’s a “serious” or “professional grade” art supply, you don’t buy it at Michael’s because you’re going to pay like, double for it at least, so you buy that stuff at Curry’s. Always. Even brushes, unless they’re on sale, which, they were at Michael’s when we went. I had a 40% off coupon so I got 3 acrylic-handled brushes. Just a tiny round brush and 2 angled ones, which I use when I’m shading my faces and the round brush I use when doing their makeup.

I of course got hung up on the Martha Stewart paint, which I do every time because it’s just so goddamn beautiful I cannot even stand it. It was 30% off so I got a few bottles of it:

Something interesting to note is that I bought 4 bottles of purple paint and one bottle of yellow. Two of the bottles of purple paint are glitter, one is metallic (pearl) and one is satin. The bottle of yellow paint is glitter paint. Right now my toenails are yellow, purple and turquoise. And then one of the other things I got at Michael’s were these:

These are itty bitty rolls of ribbon and rick rack (I think it’s called?) that are like, 1/4-1/2 an inch wide and the rolls are 3 feet long. They were $1.50 and PERFECT for what I do, the top and bottom ones are velvet and so so soft. But notice the colours. There’s yellow and purple again! I totally did not even do that on purpose, I just happened to buy those colours and then I noticed I did it when I was putting everything away when I got home. Soooo I guess a painting in the very near future is going to be purple and yellow! But aren’t those little rolls of ribbon genius? I think they are.

My Sketchbook Limited Edition theme is “The last word ever spoken” so I got these stickers at Michael’s too:

The sticker pack is actually 3 times as long as in the picture but I couldn’t get all of it in the picture and still have the words be legible. I think they’re pretty neat and they were only $5 for something like 90 different words.

These are the rub-on letters I got at Staples:

Pretty straight forward, you peel back the backing paper and place the letter down on whatever you’re putting it on, then you rub the back of it with a stylus or something until it transfers. These were recommended by one of the teachers I’ll be having at Squam so I figured I’d try them out in my sketchbook.  Blake and I remember *something* like these from our childhoods but we can’t remember what, anyone have any ideas?

I’m still trying to work out the bugs in my whole contract/commissions/payment plans idea. What I can’t figure out is how to protect myself from people who don’t pay me within the agreed upon timeframe. I think that if the contract says “you must pay $X within 4 months, $X every 2 weeks” and 5 months rolls around and they still owe me like, $50, that I should be allowed to keep their money and sell the painting. If that’s what the contract says and that’s what’s been agreed upon, then that’s what I think should happen. However, Canadian law says that if the consumer has paid 2/3s of the price of the item, I still have to give it to them and I think that’s fucking bullshit. But it’s worded to say that I can’t repossess the item, I can’t take it back, but what if I haven’t given it to them yet? The only thing I can think of to save my own ass is to get 50% up front as a non-refundable deposit and then if they reneg on the agreement, all I would have to reimburse them for would be whatever they paid above that…right?

I hate that this is more complicated than it needs to be.  A contract should be a contract and the person should have to do whatever it is that was agreed upon.

“Sunny Rays” is finally finished and for sale in my Etsy shop! It’s pretty different from what I usually paint and I was wondering what you guys thought of it? If you hate it, let me know! If you love it, let me know that too! I have mixed feelings on it. I definitely like my girls better but I’d been drawing that painting since grade 4 or 5 and had to finally get it out like, not doodling! Anyway, here it is:

I know I say this about all my paintings, but this one looks a LOT better in person. The “whitespace” (that’s actually orange) isn’t nearly as prominent in real life. I don’t know why it is in pictures.

Okay, I think I’m going to go check e-mail and paint until Cheryl gets here and once she leaves, I’ll be able to take my nap. I am so tired.

Oh, btw…the new Sims 3 expansion, Showtime, came out yesterday. Did anyone get it and what do you think of it so far? I didn’t get it because we don’t have any money, but I did add it to my wishlist and hopefully I’ll get it eventually but I’m still dying to hear about it so if you could crawl out of your Sims bunker long enough to tell me how it is, I’d greatly appreciate it! Thanks in advance! Happy Wednesday!

PS. I suppose I should say a few words on the Lisa defriending fiasco…Madison summed it up nicely for me last night: We don’t blame Lisa for defriending us, I told the truth, she read it, she didn’t like it, she defriended us. There’s nothing to really “understand” there. But the key thing here is that I told the truth, just as I always do and it goes back to what I’ve been saying for years now: if you don’t want shitty things written about you, don’t do shitty things. It’s not my fault they were shitheads this summer while I was literally dying.  It’s not my fault that their kids are spoiled brats. It’s not my fault that my dad treats Lisa badly. Etc etc etc. They know I have this site, they know that I blog every little goddamn thought that pops into my head and I don’t make special rules for special people unless I’m specifically asked not to blog about something and there’s a good reason for it. I’m sorry she thought they were somehow immune to this but them’s the breaks, cupcake.

So that’s how I feel about it. I’m honestly more annoyed by it than anything else because it’s just a stupid action to take. There are reasons to defriend people, which is essentially disowning them, and a few dumb blog posts, to me, isn’t a good reason to just write off a whole family, especially a 13 year old kid who never did anything to her. But whatever, they only want anything to do with us on Xmas and Father’s Day (LOL) so it’s not like it’s any great loss and I guess it saves me the agony over whether or not to invite them to our anniversary party this summer.