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.

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! 

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

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

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

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

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

~*GROCERY STORE & DINNER BREAK*~

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

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

Hoover Dog.

Lucky Dog.

Blake also bought me pink daisies, behold!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m listening to “Boys Wanna Be Her” by Peaches. Such a good song. Here it is if you don’t know it:

It was recently used in a car commercial starring sumo wrestlers, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever and it was a terrible ad since I don’t remember what kind of car it was. OH! Speaking of ads though, I want you all to see the Sasquatch ads my friends The Perlorian Brothers did for Hyundai! They are SO funny! They aired during the Superbowl here and I didn’t see them live but The Perlorian Brothers tweeted the URL during the game so I saw it then and laughed my ass off. Good stuff.

Oh and one more thing about advertising…The other day I got this e-mail from a marketing company saying that their client was interested in purchasing a text link from me  so out of curiosity, I replied with “who’s your client?” I didn’t even sign my name because I didn’t expect to really get a reply since I figured it was a form e-mail they sent to a lot of people. But I *did* get a reply and it was a Canadian pharmaceutical website that would pay me $70 to write a health-based post and insert one link to their website into it. I politely declined because I wouldn’t ever support a site like that, but I found it interesting that twice in the last little while, I’ve been approached by marketing companies for product placement in my blog. Does that mean my little piece of internet real estate is starting to get noticed? Why the interest all of a sudden? Fluke? Definitely strange. (And believe me, if I ever got paid to promote something in my blog, you would know I got paid to promote it because I would tell you.)

Speaking of product placement, they’re making Bottle Caps again and I couldn’t be more thrilled. These are Bottle Caps:

Bottle Caps are soft drink flavoured candies and they are pure awesomesauce. One of my favourites as a kid, they either stopped making them or selling them in Ontario for the longest time but in November-ish we went to this specialty candy store where I found a big box of them, the same as the one pictured. Then on Wednesday when we went to Clover to get my weekly Skittles stash (Skittles get me through my 9 hour shift on Saturdays – I liked Crazy Cores and Fizzy Skittles the best) and I saw Bottle Caps there too so I bought the box of them pictured, which I’m enjoying right now. The cherry ones are the best because they’re softer and they dissolve in your mouth, followed by cola, then orange, grape and root beer’s last because they’re actually kinda gross. The cola and root beer ones are really close in colour though and I always get them mixed up so half the time I’m expecting to taste cola, I’m surprised with the nast that is root beer Bottle Caps. Having said that, I love them and I’m glad they’re back. Thanks Wonka! Big fan over here!

The weekend was pretty mellow. Saturday I worked, which I do until 11pm and then we watch SNL together (Blake and I and sometimes Madison). Wasn’t Jack White fucking phenomenal on SNL this week? Holy shit is that man ever talented. We paused SNL halfway through to talk about life and the world for a couple of hours because lately I’ve been feeling really stupid. My world just seems so small. I can’t even comprehend big numbers like $36 million, like what a movie may gross and how much of that is spent on advertising. They pay so little in advertising compared to how much they profit and I used to think ad dollars were huge. But I can’t even comprehend how much money the Toronto Maple Leafs makes in ad revenue or how much one hockey player may make in endorsements. Those numbers just don’t mean anything to me. I never used to think a million dollars was very much money until Blake showed me that I would never earn a million dollars on my lifetime. And there are people making $25 million (*cough*JuliaRoberts*cough*) for ONE movie that took like, 2 or 3 months to film. $25 million fucking dollars for 3 months of work. How is that…? What…? I can’t even…! And like, we know someone personally who has that kind of money. I can’t say who but there is someone in our sphere of people who has like, $50 million and who is a total prick about it which is another thing I can’t even comprehend. If *I* had $50 million I would probably be extremely generous with it. Or at least with the interest of it. I would gladly buy my kids houses and educations and pay for big weddings and funerals. It’s like in the movie The Descendants (which I loved btw), I would give my kids enough to do something but not enough to do nothing. This person we know who’s like, super rich? Gives his kids next to nothing. Wouldn’t even pay for their educations in full. I just don’t understand that mentality at all. It is beyond my realm of comprehension. As Blake put it, this man buying his kid a house would be about as much effort as their kid buying him a Christmas present.

But even more than money, which I don’t think I’ll ever understand because I’ve never really had any and I probably never will, I just don’t understand how big the world really is. Like Blake’s dad lives in Vail, CO and there’s a mountain there and you can stand at the bottom and not be able to see the top. I’ve never seen anything like that before, not that I remember anyway (I went to Banff with my mom when I was 2 but that doesn’t count because I don’t remember). Something that big is literally beyond my imagination. I can understand the concept, I guess, but not the actuality. And that bothers me immensely. It makes me feel close-minded and small.

I’m probably not even making any sense. I just feel like everything is so much bigger than me and it’s not that I’m feeling insignificant or anything like that, it’s that my mind isn’t open enough to comprehend large concepts. Like I’m too stupid to understand. Like it could be explained to me until a person was blue in the face and until I saw or experienced it for myself, I wouldn’t be able to understand but because I’m nothing I’ll never experience things myself and therefore I’ll always be small and stupid and unimportant.

So that’s how I’ve been feeling lately.

On Sunday afternoon, we all watched the movie Hugo, which Blake and I really liked, and they all worked on their submissions for The 4 x 6 Exchange (still 116 slots left!). Madison and Wes finished theirs but Blake’s still working on his. He has today off so maybe he’ll work on it this afternoon. For the exchange we need to send self addressed, stamped envelopes but they have to be US stamps since the exchanged pieces are going to be mailed from NYC.  Well, the store I talked about in my post last week that I’ve been working on pretty hard is a Zazzle shop and they let you make US stamps out of your work there. SO, I made stamps out of all my girls – or at least the ones I had here to photograph – and I’m going to order one sheet of them to be used for the exchange. I’m pretty sure I’m going to go with “Strawberry Ice Cream” because she’s my 4 x 6 submission and I like that she’s pink.

(Just a note about the Zazzle shop, I’m not officially launching it until I can afford to order some of the products myself and see how the quality is, so if you order anything from there NOW, yourself, it’s at your own risk. I’m 99% sure I have my resolutions alright and everything on MY end should make quality products, but I have no idea how their stuff is so I can’t say for sure. If anyone does order anything, let me know how it turns out!)

Here’s Wes’ submission for the exchange:

And here’s Madison’s:

I think they both did a really good job but obviously Madison’s is better because she’s been practicing her drawing pretty consistently over the past several months and I think it really paid off in this piece. So way to go Madison! I gave Wes watercolour pencils to do his and I don’t think he really understood the concept. But it is what it is and I think he did a good job too.

All weekend I’ve been reading Gwenn Seemel’s blog because she is an art marketing whiz kid and has a ton of good advice for artists trying to make a living from their work. (She also has endometriosis like I do, which I found very interesting.) She’s a really different artist than I am, she’s really serious about her art whereas I’m more casual. This is probably because she needs to sell her work to eat and I don’t. (Well, I do, but not to the same extent she does because I have a part-time job that I love and my husband is also employed full-time etc.)  She does a lot of her work in series and she has gallery shows and stuff. I don’t do that, obviously. I’d like to do that, don’t get me wrong, I just don’t know how. She says you need to send proposals and applications to galleries and stuff if you want to exhibit your work there but I still don’t know for sure if I even want to do that. I like the idea of it, but I’m not so sure I like the reality of giving a gallery so much of my money when I’m not charging that much to begin with. The easy solution to that is to raise my prices, but I’m not selling pieces at the prices I’m charging now and once you go UP, you can never come down, which I absolutely agree with, so I’m not sure I want to go up unless someone really recommends it.

BUT!

One thing Gwenn does that I never thought about doing myself is payment plans. I don’t know what kind of payment plans she does because she doesn’t specify on her site, but she does them and I was thinking that that might be a possibility for me. I would do something like, 50% up front and then take payments say, once or twice a month for 4 months or something like that and in doing that, I would take that piece off of Etsy because I would consider it “spoken for” and when they were done paying for it (+ shipping), I would send it out to them. If they didn’t pay for it in full by the agreed upon time, it would go back on Etsy and I would keep the money they paid toward it. What do you guys think of that? Does that seem like a good, fair system? Because I do. But then again I suck at money so…the other thing is that I would need to make a contract for a payment plan like this but how do I get someone to send me a contract with a signature on it? I don’t have a fax machine. I have a printer that has wifi though could I make it a fax machine somehow?

The other thing Gwenn does that I’m considering is commissions. I used to be really afraid of commissions because I didn’t know my boundaries but as I’ve practiced over the years and I’ve gotten to know myself and my style better, I have a better idea of what my boundaries are and what would and wouldn’t be negotiable.  I’m also a more confident artist than I used to be and Gwenn says that is crucial to the commission process because I’m supposed to be the expert guiding the client through the art-0buying-making experience. She also has a really good article for buyers on how to commission an artist that’s worth checking out.

Reading her blog has really opened me up to the idea of commissions, I mean, as far as painting I’m not really doing anything right now. I have ideas but none that are critical as far as getting them out of my head and onto canvas and there’s no reason, really, why I can’t make my own ideas and a collaboration with someone else at the same time. It’s true that I only have so much space, but Blake’s said we can find a solution to that if necessary, and it’s true that I’m a slow painter, but that’s why you have a contract in the beginning so the client understands that it’s not going to be an overnight thing. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to take payment plans on commission work though, what do you guys think? I’m just thinking it would be a bad idea because say the person didn’t end up paying the full price by the agreed upon timeframe, then I’m stuck with custom work that I may not be able to sell because it’s custom. I got screwed on two commissions a few years ago and I’ve only begun speaking to the person who screwed me over because I’ve decided to just let it go. However, I don’t want a repeat of that, which is why there would be a contract and why I would need 50% up front.

But yes. I think once I get the pricing and the contract thing figured out (input seriously needed and considered here, guys, because I dunno wtf I’m doing) there will be a commissions page put up on my site and I will be open to other people’s ideas. I have no idea if I’ll actually have any clients take me up on it but I never will if I’m not open to it and I’ve had at least 20 people over the years ask me if I’d do a commission and I’ve always said no because the prospect scared me. NO MAS!

So that’s what’s been in my little Sunny brain all weekend. It feels good to get it out. Now I’m going to go work on my sketchbook for the Limited Edition Sketchbook Project since that’s due in 2 months and I haven’t even started yet. My theme is “The last word ever spoken” so I’m going to go back to my roots and make girls holding words. Right now I’m working on another “ennui” and then it’ll be “beloved” because to date those are two of my favourite paintings I’ve ever done and it’s super important that I include them.

Okay, I’m off! Happy Monday!

Edit: DAMMIT! I was having trouble checking out and this was the problem:

Hello Sunny,

Thanks for your reply.

Currently Zazzle Custom Stamps are only available for design or purchase at www.zazzle.com. Attempting to ship stamps outside of the United States will result in an error during the checkout process as we are unable to ship stamps internationally at this time.

We understand that this may be an inconvenience for you, however Zazzle currently only produces stamps in USD ($) denominations and our policy is geared to prevent accidental misuse of U.S. postage by Zazzle customers living outside of the United States. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

Simply removing stamps from your cart should allow you to check out. Thank you!

Wanna know a secret? Okay so it’s not so much of a secret. Blake and I will have been married 10 years on July 8th of this year. And we’re going to have a party. And I’m very very excited about it. :o) We just decided on the party a couple of days ago and after working out the few kinks there were to be had, all systems are go and this is going to happen.

It’s going to be held at Haugen’s, which is where Blake and I go every year for our anniversary to get ribs and fresh strawberry pie, which is world famous. We figure the party is kinda like the wedding reception we never had and we’ll be inviting about 20 people. After dinner, we’ll be going back to our house to drink our faces off with anyone who wants to drive that far. I think it’ll be a good time.

I also think I need to buy a dress for the event, but don’t tell Blake that because he complains that I have too many clothes as it is. :oP I want this one so so badly and there’s only one left in stock. :o( Maybe I can convince Blake to go halves on it with me or something. I’ve been coveting that dress since I saw it in the fall and I’m afraid that if I don’t get it soon, it won’t be available anymore. But that’s what I want to wear to our anniversary party. My birthday is in a week. If anyone wanted to get that dress for me, I’m a small. A SMALL, DAMMIT! Blake said I could order it! w00t! <3

This morning while I was cutting an apple, I sliced my thumb open on one of our new knives and it won’t stop bleeding. That was over an hour & a half ago! Enough already! Plus I’m eating pistachios right now (an apple & pistachios for breakfast, I’m awesome) and I keep getting salt in it. Nice.

Y’know, back to the anniversary party for a minute…part of the reason I didn’t want to have a wedding was because I felt like I didn’t have enough people in my life to invite and I felt like a loser. Plus my step-dad and my mom couldn’t be in the same room together and both of them would get mad at me for not choosing the other. But now things are good and I have 20 people in my life that I’m close enough to to have a party like this and who genuinely love me. That’s a pretty good feeling, y’know. Especially because really, there’s 40 people I’d like to invite but we can’t afford to. Maybe for our 20th we’ll do it bigger and invite everyone! That’d be cool. I guess we’ll see where we are in life in 10 years.

We’ve really come a long way though, from living above my grama’s furniture store and living on Blake’s wages as a pizza delivery guy. Now we own our own home, as of yesterday we’re completely out of debt, we both have good paying jobs, we’re both relatively happy, we have good kids (except when they’re not). I like our dogs. The cat’s alright. The only thing I think would be better is if I had my own car. I’d also like a nicer house but I know that’ll come in time so for now, we’ll just make do with what we have and be happy with it.

Speaking of my grama…so when I was in the hospital, so was my cousin Janet with what they now know was cancer, which ultimately killed her. Apparently the whole time Janet was sick – and again, this is at the same time I was in the hospital dying too – my grama would bring her mother, Eunice, casseroles and was on her ass like a dirty shirt. My grama never once offered to bring my mother anything. I don’t know why this is. Is it because it was me? Why would she not do that? It just reaffirms my decision to never have anything to do with that woman as long as I live. She just wasn’t there for my mother at all during the worst time of her life and that’s just not cool with me. She should have been on my mother like glue unless my mother said to back off. That’s just what you do for your kids. I don’t understand that woman.

And since we’re on the subject of family, my brother never replied to the e-mail I sent him months ago. He still has no idea I was ever sick.

Family! God!

And let’s go there, shall we? I really really don’t want to invite my father to our anniversary party. (Lisa can come though. I love Lisa.) I am and I will, but for the record, I don’t want to. It’s not that I don’t want him there it’s that I know he’d rather be elsewhere. All I do know is that my sisters will not be invited and since they so rarely get babysitters, I’m betting they won’t even come since that’s the case. I just don’t want my sisters there, it’s not going to be that kind of party. Plus I just don’t want to pay for their dinners when chances are they’re going to ruin mine by being bratty. I’ve never been in a restaurant with them, but I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that I bet they don’t know how to behave in one. They can be very sweet, don’t get me wrong, but they can also be very terrible and I just don’t want to deal with that. My kids weren’t invited to Phil’s 50th birthday party last year so I’m sure they’ll understand and if they don’t, then they don’t come. Fine by me.

And that’s all the bitching about my family that I’ve got in me right now. Lucky for you guys, huh?

Onto other things…

Honestly nothing interesting has happened since yesterday so there’s not a whole lot to report. Today’s plan is to have a nap after Cheryl leaves, then work on the colouring book some more. The colouring book was put a bit on the back burner the last couple of days while I worked on my girl for The 4 x 6 Exchange, but I’m back on track as of today.

And that’s all the poop that’s fit to scoop! Have a lovely weekend! YAY!

Veganitis is running rampant through our household and we’re loving every minute of it!

I don’t know how it came about but Madison is going vegan for the week just to see what it’s like or if it’s something she’d like to do long-term. Blake’s been 5/6 meals vegan since just after Xmas after we watched Forks Over Knives.

Because of that, last night we went to what Blake calls “the health food store”, which isn’t really a health food store at all but a vegetarian grocery store. I wish I’d have had my camera with me so I could show you this place but I found it really really impressive. Have I ever mentioned that I love grocery stores? Apparently I love ALL grocery stores.

Ours is called Nature’s Best and it’s in Barrie and when you look at it from the outside, it doesn’t look like much but when you get inside, it’s like an itty bitty grocery store with carts and everything.

The first thing we put in our basket was this, for Charlie, because he said a long time ago that if I ever saw this anywhere that I should get him some, so I did:

I don’t even want to know what’s in there. This is not something I would eat if my life depended on it. Blake would probably eat it though but he said he had enough steel cut oats for right now so we didn’t get him any.

From this point on, this stuff isn’t in the order we got them, they’re in the order we put them away when we got home.

Next up is Tofurkey brand “cheese” pizza which actually looks pretty good on the box. And Wes was too cute in his new little hoodie that I had to include two pictures, I hope you don’t mind:

Rice Dream was on sale, so we got both chocolate and vanilla, which the kids were really excited about. They tried a bit of each and declared the chocolate Rice Dream better than chocolate milk. I haven’t tried any yet but I’m going to just to see if they’re right. And honestly, they could be because they don’t really make chocolate milk anymore, it’s chocolate beverage and it’s fucking gross.

I got a can of Blue Sky cola because it looked pretty neat. It’s made with cane sugar, has no preservatives and no caffeine. I don’t like that it has no caffeine but I tried it anyway and it was really really good. Highly recommend!

Vegan cheese is terrifying…more on that later…

I think the plan for the rice pasta is to make spaghetti with it. Like, we have veggie spaghetti sauce and then we were going to make meatballs out of TVP (textured vegetable protein).

What kind of vegans would they be without tofu? (Blech.)

Now this really interested me. I love butter (margarine…to me, same thing). I put it on everything. So I was curious to see how this stuff stacked up against my Becel olive oil margarine, which I love. After dinner Blake made popcorn on the stove and he put this stuff on top and I thought it was okay but there should have been more of it in there. I just don’t think Blake put enough in there because there was barely any on my pieces. The few pieces that did have it, I liked though, less greasy than margarine, more like an oil. I’m going to have asparagus for lunch, I think, and I’ll be using this stuff on top so I’ll let you know how it goes! (If I have that, plan B is Kraft Dinner using it so we’ll see.)

This grocery store had all organic produce and so much of it was so so beautiful, like these strawberries:

Those strawberries smelled to fucking amazing. I’ve picked strawberries from the field and eaten them and they were not like these. Not at all. And for strawberries in the winter, these were particularly good. Exactly the same taste as if they were grown in July. I ended up eating the first half of the pint sliced up with strawberry frozen yogurt (hey, I’m not vegan…) and then I had the rest for breakfast this morning. I think this is the first time where I’ve bought strawberries and every single one in the pint was edible and just as good as the ones on top. So impressed.

Something else this grocery store had, which I liked, was they had like, single-serve portions of certain veggies, like these turnips:

I wouldn’t know what to do with a whole turnip. I don’t even know if I like turnips! But I got these because I was planning on making beef stew this week (which I started about an hour ago in the crock pot) and that was the perfect amount for that. And apparently turnips are really good for you too, according to Martha Stewart.  I actually had some left over so I thought maybe when Blake makes his black bean soup he might want to add these or something.

Organic red cabbage for my salads! I’ve been eating a lot of salad for lunch since I got sick and I thought this would make them a little more interesting. Again, it’s about 1/3 of a whole cabbage which is the perfect amount for my little salads. Again, I wouldn;t know what to do with a whole cabbage and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like it cooked.

And this is what I’m eating right now as I type this entry! An organic Fiji apple which is BY FAR the nicest apple I’ve ever eaten! The apples at the shop looked SO GOOD that we all chose one. Wes got a golden delicious, Madison got a MacIntosh and I forget what Blake got but everyone really enjoyed them.

Now for the boring stuff…kidney beans, black beans and that TVP stuff that I’m kind of terrified of.

The last picture is the TVP. I guess you soak it and it grows or something, like into stuff you can mold into whatever you want. Like meatballs, which is what we plan to use it for. The stuff kinda freaks me out to be perfectly honest, but I said I’d try it and I will. I still have a chicken nugget Hungry Man in the freezer if it’s gross.

And finally, what vegan shopping trip would be complete without getting VEGGIE BURGERS!?

Our grand total for all of that was about $60, which is actually less for the amount of food we got, than we’d spend at our regular grocery store AND everything we got was 50 times healthier than what we would normally buy anyway, right? So win/win!

We decided to have the veggie burgers and sweet potato fries for dinner. This is what the patties looked like:

I like the shape of them. :o)

Here’s what they look like finished:

But next came the vegan “cheese” because Blake wanted a cheeseburger…*shudder*…

When the slice fell, it kinda SLAPPED the cutting board with a wet sound…

Madison tried a little piece of it and almost threw up. Blake had it on his burger and he said it was “alright” but I got the feeling that it wasn’t his favourite. I also doubt this stuff would melt if you tried it because really, it’s just cheese flavoured, orange tofu. Gross. It even smells nasty. :o/

Here’s my dinner:

I ended up eating about half of my burger and then giving the rest to Blake because I didn’t put enough ketchup on it. Apparently those patties suck up all your ketchup. I also didn’t like the whole wheat bun. I think if you’re going to have me eat a fake burger, you gotta give me a white bun because the taste of the bun and the taste of the burger were pretty similar. The patties are apparently wheat-free, but all I could taste was wheat so I dunno what they’re using instead but that’s what it tasted like to me: wheat and spices. And I didn’t like the seasoning. It was okay, I mean, I’d eat it, I’d even eat it again, but I think there’s gotta be a better brand out there.

And apparently I still hate sweet potato fries ever since we went out for dinner with Charlie to a vegan restaurant and that’s what I got and I barfed them up for hoooours. So no more sweet potato fries for me, thanks.

Annnnnd that was our vegan adventure! We’re all trying to eat a more plant-based diet. Blake is doing 5/6 meals vegan, Madison’s going all out vegan and Wes and I are sort of in the middle.  We’ll see how this progresses as time goes by…

Wes had a pretty good birthday, he says. He got like, 5 Pokemon figurines, a Pokeball that has a Pokemon that fits inside and it like, launches when you throw it from an elastic on his wrist, Pokemon cards and a black Angry Bird that makes sounds. Oh and some Silly Bands. Then today he said he got a whole bunch of Valentines but I haven’t looked at them yet.

Here’s Wes blowing out his candles. Madison played “Happy Birthday” for him on her keyboard instead of singing:

Today was pretty lajfgbalwefvwle…I had to get up at 4:30am so I could start work at 5am but despite TRYING to go to sleep at around 10pm, I didn’t end up falling asleep until around 12:30am so when I got up this morning I was exhausted.   I dunno why I couldn’t fall asleep, I normally don’t have any trouble with that, I think maybe I was just nervous about working. And then this afternoon we had a work meeting and it’s done via Skype and I HATE being on streaming cam so I was nervous about that too and just couldn’t fall asleep.

After work (8am) I fell asleep on the couch until about 11am and I’m still pretty tired so I think I’ll be okay to fall asleep tonight. I hope so anyway. I just have to get used to this routine. I thought it would be easy because I’ve been getting up at 4am on my own for like MONTHS, but apparently it’s not so easy to just do on my own. This morning I was just on autopilot, I barely even remember anything about it. Tomorrow will be better.

The good thing about my work hours and only working part-time is that I have lots of time to work on the colouring book or paintings or the shadowbox or whatnot so that’s a major plus for me. When I was working before, I was burning myself out and a lot of it had to do with me feeling like I didn’t have time for anything else, especially art. I’m a person who NEEDS to create so not being able to really really makes me twitchy. Soooo this schedule is pretty perfect for me, I just need to actually get on this schedule and not be a zombie blob during my shift in the morning.

After the work meeting I watched Dr. Phil and worked on my angel drawing for the colouring book. The way I’m attacking this project is just to draw as many girls of a certain size and within 3 months I’ll just pick the best ones and that’ll be the book. It’s been taking me a day to draw a girl and then another day to ink her so so far I only have 3 finished and one needs to be inked better (the fairy). Truthfully I’m thinking I probably won’t use the fairy but we’ll see where I am in June when I’m scanning and putting it all together. Being a hand-drawn colouring book, the inking is not going to be perfect but I think that’s to be expected. I’m not going to edit the images on the computer at all, aside from maybe using the clone tool to erase pencil lines that wouldn’t erase all the way.

Anyway, here’s a preview of the 3 girls I have finished for it so far:

As I mentioned, the fairy is going to need re-inking because when I did her I couldn’t find my 08 Micron.

Anyway, that’s what I have done so far.

Blake’s stopping off at Lush on his way home to get me a Catastrophe Cosmetic fresh face mask and I am so friggin’ excited because I haven’t had one of those since like, last May or so? And they are so so nice. That one smells phenomenal and it just brings back memories of a better time. He’s going to be home late so I’m having a Hungry Man TV dinner for dinner and I’m not sure what the kids are having. I’m thinking Kraft Dinner or something along those lines (since Madison’s cooking it for them).

It was a pretty uneventful Valentine’s Day but then again, it usually is. I gave Blake and the kids Hello Kitty Valentines and of course, Blake bought me my flowers on Sunday and a MYSTERY PERSON *did* send us that gorgeous chocolate heart that the kids are still enjoying, so all in all I’d say it was a pretty nice holiday for me. :o)

There was something else I was going to say but now I cannot, for the life of me, remember what it was…guess it wasn’t important.

My dinner’s ready. Happy Valentine’s Day!