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

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

………….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t wanna talk about it. Just am.

Today Siske said my wound is leaking too much so now I have to have a nurse come in and change it daily because going back to the vac isn’t an option considering they took it back on Monday. Apparently it costs $300/day to have them in the home so they don’t like to have them out if they’re not being used and apparently there’s also a waiting list for them. I’m back on the waiting list for it but I won’t know if we’re going back to the vac until I see Dr. Hanrahan on Wednesday. Siske only works every other day so tomorrow Janice is coming and Blake has to go to work so I have to deal with her all by myself, which has me really really nervous.

This is what my dressing looked like this morning, it was changed on Monday:

Gross, right? You should have smelled it.

This is what my cheese pizza wound looked like today.
To the right is my bellybutton.
The pink stuff at the edges is new skin. It’s very very smooth.

We still haven’t heard from the surgeon who will be doing the pseudocyst procedure. I’m really curious to know if they’re going to snip it and let the fluid just drain into my abdomen or if they’re going to insert a needle and suck the juice out of it. I thought we would have heard from him by now and the fact that we haven’t makes me nervous because that could mean that he maybe can’t do it because my guts are all twisted up. Dr. Hanrahan said that was a possibility.

I have to get a new binder because the one I have is too big/doesn’t hold my guts in tight enough and my dressing leaked all over the one I have, staining it, so I can’t take it back. There’s another $50 down the drain. Thanks to some generous friends I’m a little less stressed out about this expense than I was before but it still seems like such a waste.

Halloween. Madison is going out as Nyan Cat and Wes is going out as his own creation, “W Boy”. Over the summer when they were in Michigan, the kids went to camp and at Wes’ camp they made him this “W Boy” costume that’s just a white t-shirt that says “W Boy” on it that he coloured himself and a cape with a silver “W” on the back. The kid practically lives in it.

Over the weekend we did pumpkins and by “we”, I mean “Madison” because she did them all, I just roasted the seeds which are my favourite part of Halloween but apparently they make me throw up. :o(

She made Blake a Burning Man pumpkin:

She made Wes a Nyan Cat pumpkin (it has ears but you can’t see them in the dark):

She made me a Hello Kitty pumpkin:

And she made herself an Angry Birds pumpkin:

I thought it was weird that Wes is obsessed with Angry Birds but Madison made HER pumpkin Angry Birds and Madison’s being Nyan Cat for Halloween but she made Wes’ pumpkin Nyan Cat. What a weirdo.

And last but not least, I got into Touched By Fire this year.
They chose “Black & White” for the show.

Oh and in case I forgot to mention it, my Etsy shop is open again.

Now I’m going to bed.

It was an innocent invitation and Ronny, please don’t feel bad about this, you didn’t know…

It was an innocent invitation to go see Sucker Punch tonight with Ronny and Alex and their friends Christina and Joseph, who I met at Ronny & Alex’s wedding.

But see, I can’t go to that. And it makes me really really upset that I can’t go to that because I really really want to see that movie.

They’re going to the big theatre in Barrie, which is panic-inducing at the best of times, but at a prime time showing on opening day with people I don’t really know? That’s impossible.

So I said we couldn’t afford to go (which is true), but Ronny said they’d pay. And I just said I couldn’t do it because that’s what it boils down to.

I can only go see movies at times when I know the theatre is going to be almost empty OR if we can get there (minimum) half an hour early to claim our seats. That’s the only way I can go see anything and it also pretty much has to be the Midland theatre because the Barrie one is too panic-inducing and NEVER on opening weekend unless it’s something I know no one else would want to see.

Dott, my co-worker, said “Well hopefully they understand.” But the thing is, and this is what I said to her, “if they did, they wouldn’t have asked”. And this is not to make Ronny feel bad for asking but the invitation and then further insistence when I said no, has thrown me in a 4 Ativan + 2 Klonopin tailspin that required a call to Blake at work because I was/am freaking out completely.

I would LOVE to be able to go to see a movie I really want to see on opening weekend. I bet there’s even a GetGlue sticker if I go. Maybe even a Foursquare deal. But I *CAN’T* and it’s very very fucking frustrating and upsetting to be reminded of that. It’s like, I’d imagine, having no legs and your friends asking you if you’d like to come swimming.

Ronny obviously didn’t mean anything by it, but he said, after offering to pay, “we owe it to you guys for all the steak and potatoes and treats you have given us at your house!” But he didn’t stop to think that there’s a reason we have steak and potatoes and treats at my house, it’s because there’s no other alternative.

And again, I’m not mad at Ronny, this is not to be negative toward Ronny in any way, the invitation was extended with nothing but good intentions, it’s just that I can’t go, even though I’d really really like to and that’s extremely upsetting to me.

(And don’t comment with the fact that I’m not “missing anything” because I would have to rip off your head and shit down your throat if that were the case.)

Edited to add:

“To be fair, Ronny asked me if we wanted to go but acknowledged that he wasn’t sure if it was a Sunny acceptable thing. Knowing that Sunny really wanted to see the movie, I asked him to check with her since I was uber busy.

So I think this is more my fault.

On that note, I stopped at Lush in Newmarket and got some of those fresh masks that you can’t get online then headed out and got a video game, Despicable Me and that Anne Hathaway boobie movie so we are totally going to have a pampering night in.”

- Blake

So last night, Blake and I started watching this show “Shameless”, on HBO OnDemand. I’d watched the first few episodes of the British version a long time ago and thought it was funny in that “haha Britains are funny” kinda way so I thought I would probably enjoy the American version.

Except I didn’t, really. Well I sort of did, but I watched it in a completely different way, like it was a documentary or something. Before I go any further, here’s the trailer for the show:

William H. Macy as a total fucked up, trailer trashy alcoholic, I mean how could you go wrong, right? But the thing is, the show made me kinda sad. We only watched the first two episodes but they hit so close to home that here I am, thinking about them the next day.

William H. Macy? The dad? That’s Rob’s dad. That household is Rob’s parents’ household after Carole was institutionalized. Don’t know who these people are because you’re new around these parts? Rob is the biological father of my daughter, who I had when I was 19. I started living with Rob’s family when I was 16. Rob’s dad was an alcoholic, still is, Rob’s mom was a bible-banging schizzo-affective disorder lady who was in and out of psychosis. She now lives in a halfway house. Due to them, it was me, Rob and Rob’s brother Jason who basically ran the house and made things livable. Throw in Rob’s crazy Aunt Donna who rented a room from Rob’s dad Darrell, as well as other tenants who rented rooms, all of whom Darrell abused and there’s most of my teenagehood. Oh but we can’t forget my Aunt Heather, who was on welfare for 11 years until they kicked her off and banned her from social services for life for collecting welfare for her kids even though one didn’t even live with her anymore and neither of them were still in school. And then there’s all the people that surrounded her. This Shameless show is so eerily close to how my life used to be that I felt sick watching it the whole time. My brother used to say that Trailer Park Boys reminded him of our childhoods but at least that show as funny whereas this is way more dead on. Like scary dead on.

We stopped watching it at 10pm and went to bed soon after, but the show kept me awake until at least 11:30pm, or not the show, but the memories that resurfaced as a result of watching it. I do plan on watching the rest of the season because I do find the show interesting in how close it is to how I “came of age” but I don’t think I could ever laugh at it because I just don’t find it funny. It’s too tragic to be funny, when you’ve grown up with the reality.

~*SPOILER ALERT*~ In the 2nd episode when William H. Macy goes missing? That really happened to us. Darrell went missing for 3 or 4 days and we called EVERYWHERE trying to find him because it wasn’t like him to not come home and pass out on the couch after having dinner (at 4am) and then on the Tuesday afternoon, he waltzes in with this woman and introduces us to her and tells us that it’s Gordon Lightfoot’s daughter. For days after that, Rob and Jason would ask their dad where he’d been and he would reply with “in Gordon Lightfoot’s daughter!” and they all thought this was the funniest thing in the world. He dated her (can’t remember her name, but she was an alcoholic too) for a few weeks, trying to get money out of her, just as William H. Macy’s character begins to do with Joan Cusack in the show in episode 2, but I guess it wasn;t successful because he stopped hanging out with her after a few weeks. ~*SPOILER OVER*~

But that’s what I mean about how it reminds me of that time in my life and while it’s sort of okay to laugh at it now, I guess, I don’t think I’m there yet or I don’t know if I’ll ever be there yet.

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind today. I’d better get back to work.

If you’ve been reading my blog for any great length of time, you’ll know that I’m not very good with birthdays. My own especially, but also other people’s. This year was no different, despite everyone’s best efforts.

First of all, last night Blake and I were screwing around with this pink aluminum baseball bat that I bought in the states last night and he had one end and I had the other and we were fighting over it in the dark (don’t ask why, it doesn’t matter). Long story short, I ended up getting nailed really hard with it, right above my right temple and today my head is literally mushy. My hair hurts. It hurts when I chew. We’re fairly certain I was/am concussed. I cannot deal with my emotions right now, like I have to control over them whatsoever. I woke up in much more pain today than when it first happened even and I basically spent all day crying.

I’ve been chowing down Tylenol 1 and Naproxen like it’s candy and that’s helped a little but but I think I’d be screaming if I wasn’t drugged up to the tits.

So that set up my birthday and made me a very unhappy person all day.

Then I had to go to metabolic clinic, which I really didn’t want to do because I really didn’t want to get out of my pajamas and make the time up on the weekend when I already have to work an extra 8 hours this weekend because of the time I missed for the funeral. But I went anyway. It was a module on stress and was mostly unhelpful, but at one point we had a 20 minute discussion on smoking and…

…after the class was over, I told Blake to stop at a store because it was my birthday and I’d smoke if I goddamned well pleased and I goddamned well pleased. So we had one in the car and I said I was just going to smoke today but when we got home I felt guilty and flushed the rest of the pack. Smokes are $10.25 a pack now, by the way.

After metabolic clinic I had to work for another 2 hours, so I did that and when I was finished, I told Blake I needed to sleep because all day, and this can apparently be a concussion thing, I was extremely drowsy. Like, I could barely stay awake during the metabolic clinic because the lights were off and they were doing a Powerpoint presentation. I actually closed my eyes during it a few times and kinda jolted awake.

So I slept from 6pm-7pm and then Blake went to get dinner (Chinese food), we ate, I felt sick, I took Gravol and then we did presents with the kids. Wes got me the next 2 Buffy the Vampire Slayer books for “season 8″, Madison got me a laughing Buddha cone incense holder with some incense and my step-mom sent down a small gift with Madison which included a $25 gift certificate for Starbucks, a leather journal, some neat sparkly nail polish and some lip balm. (This may or may not be common knowledge but I’m a lip balm/chapstick hoarder due to chronically chapped lips. It’s been an issue my whole life.)

Oh and before I go any further, I gained 2 lbs this week but lost an inch. This is what happens every week, I either gain or lose 2 lbs and gain or lose 1 or 2 inches on my waist but never at the same time. Also on the way home from metabolic clinic we checked the mail and the CD Blake ordered for me a while back finally came (Bossanova by the Pixies so now I have them all). The birthday card my mom sent me last Wednesday had not arrived yet, but it’ll probably be here Saturday when Blake checks the mail next.

After presents, we finished watching Big Love and then I started to watch last week’s Jersey Shore when suddenly I panicked that I couldn’t smoke again after today for a whole other year because the rule Blake and I made in the car was that I would only smoke on my birthday. So I popped 3 Ativan, grabbed my wallet and keys, put my shoes on with no socks and drove to the store where I paid another $10.25 for a pack of smokes. That’s now $20.50 for smoking today, for those doing the math.

Now Blake’s gone to bed and I’m staying up a little later than usual (I usually go to bed around 10/10:30pm) because I want to make the most of this smoking thing and also because if I’m tired tomorrow I can start work at 11am and finish at 7 because my work is flexible like that. My lungs feel like they’re on fire though and before I go to bed I’ll be flushing the rest of this pack and if I want smokes tomorrow I’m shit outta luck because I have to work and there’s no way I’m walking to the store. Plus, I’m a non-smoker again as of midnight so I’m just not going to go there again until next year.

In other birthday news, my treadmill from Charlie is going to be here this Saturday and my step-mom is taking the elliptical. To go with the treadmill, Blake bought me a new pair of shoes for my birthday, which I’m in love with. These ones:

Yeah I know, Shape Ups are supposed to be bullshit and they don’t do what they claim to do (tone your legs, give you better posture and some other stuff – I haven’t watched the DVD they came with yet) but I don’t care about that, I didn’t want them because they were Shape Ups. I wanted them because I love them and because there are no laces to do up and I don’t have to put on socks to wear them. I can throw them on with bare feet in 30 seconds, go on the treadmill for 10 minutes between answering e-mails, throw them off, continue working and repeat throughout the day. The metabolic clinic people want us walking 3k steps a day but I can only do a little less than half that just walking around the house, so my first goal for the treadmill is going to be that per day in small increments, working my way up to more and more.

Oh and Blake’s also getting my Team Canada jersey lettered with Sidney Crosby. :o) It’s at the pro-shop right now being done. I’m very excited.

Chali also got me a gift certificate for Lush, so any day now another Lush box is going to be at my front door waiting for me and I started planning both front and back yard gardens with Ruggedo yesterday.

So “stuff”wise, I made out like a bandit for my birthday and I’m very grateful for everything I got, it was just a bummer of a day and I’m glad it’s almost over.

The next thing I wanted to write about is sleep. My shrink gave up on giving me benzodiazapines for sleeping (although I’m still taking clonazepam) and she gave me an anti-psychotic instead, called loxapine, which seems to be working. She said there was a small chance that it would increase my appetite and if that happened to stop taking it but it seems to be having the opposite effect and I’m just not hungry these days.

Also helpful is this thing Kevin got me, it’s called a Wake Up Light (watch the video in that link, it’s sorta cool). I was really really skeptical when he suggested this thing but I’ve gotta admit that after a week or so of using it, it really is working. How it works is that you set it for when you want to wake up, in my case that’s 9am. So at 8:30am, the light comes on dimly and starts getting brighter and brighter until 9am when these little birdies (or radio) start chirping. I have my phone set for 9:15am and 9:30am as a back up but this week I’ve been getting up about 10 minutes before the birdies come on and it’s a totally different morning because the way you wake up feels like you naturally woke up (which I suppose in a way, you did) and you don’t hate the world because of your fucking alarm. At first I resented the birdies as much as the roosters (my phone’s alarm, which is the most obnoxious thing in the world) but now I don’t even hear them. This morning I woke up 3 minutes before the birdies because I think a part of me fears the birdies. But still, it felt like I woke up naturally so I didn’t wake up hating the world (well I did, but it had nothing to do with the birdies). I definitely recommend this Wake Up Light to anyone who has sleep issues or a hard time getting up in the morning, especially if you sleep in a pitch black room which I mostly do.

Anyway, I love the thing. It makes me a much nicer person and I cannot thank Kevin enough for being such a huge nerd for even knowing about stuff like this. And for getting it for me because he knew I’d never buy this for myself in a hundred million years.

I’m still struggling to get back into the swing of things after being in the US last week. My routine has been disturbed and when that happens, it takes me a long time to get re-acclimated. Before we got word that Blake’s grandma was going to go any second, I was actively working on Cammity Jane, which some of you know about and some of you don’t and I’m not going to re-explain it because you’ll just have to read it when it’s finished. I was going pretty full tilt on it though and I was actually really impressed with my own dedication to it because I never really finish anything when it comes to writing, especially anything good and in my opinion, this is good – or at least it’s going to be. Charlie’s helping me with continuity while I just get the story down and HOPEFULLY my friend Robert will edit my punctuation when I get it finish. (Robert, will you? I’ll even pay you to do so.) He’s an English teacher and knows more about grammar and punctuation than anyone I’ve ever met. I haven’t worked on it since we got back but I haven’t really had the time. I’m hoping to work on it from Charlie’s notes on what I have so far starting tomorrow though.

I’m also about halfway finished my Valentine girl who I really do believe is my best work to date. I’m really impressed with her and plan on not putting her up for sale. Right now she needs arms, her Valentine placards, varnish and corset stitching, then she’ll be finished. I meant to work on the placards tonight but got distracted by everything else.

So, I’m being productive, or at least I will be once I get back into the swing of things in Sunnyland and as soon as my head stops hurting, which will hopefully be soon.

One more thing before I finish this post: Charlie Sheen. Holy shit right? Check out this site, it’s hysterical. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Goodnight internets, and thanks everyone for everything. <3

“In rare instances, this medication may increase your level of a certain chemical made by the body called prolactin. For females, this increase in prolactin may result in unwanted breastmilk, missing/stopped periods, or difficulty becoming pregnant.”

- Ziprasidone pharmacy fact sheet

Gee, we’ve only DOUBLED my ziprasidone since my last period…think the two things might be related? I LOVE BEING MENTALLY ILL. IT’S SOOOOOO AWESOME.

My great grampa was an alcoholic. He was also mentally ill and likely had severe liver problems. No one knew if he drank because he was depressed or if he was depressed because he drank. He committed suicide by eating the end of a shotgun.

Our family has a long history of not doing well with alcohol, as I detailed in a post a while back, and this is part of the reason why I’m sensitive to how people use alcohol and why I only drink maybe twice a year myself, and almost always at home.

Tonight Blake brought home a mickey of Canadian Club because I can’t sleep and it scares me more than I thought it would. Pharmacology isn’t helping me. Someone e-mailed me today and suggested I smoke weed, but I’ve been down that road and only bad things come of it, for me.  This is my last resort.

It scares the hell out of me though. Am I going to end this with a shotgun in my mouth? Is this path really worth it?

I don’t have an answer. Just a bottle of Canadian Club and the inability to function.

Last night I wasn’t able to sleep for some unknown reason (like I ever know the reason) and then today I was in a lot of endo pain so I was on heavy painkillers and that made me sleepy as fuck and the whole thing resulted in me only working a half day today, which sucks, because I’m going to have to make it up on the weekend, which I already work anyway. And while we’re on that subject, working weekends for the past 3 weeks non-stop really has my nerves frayed but there’s nothing I can do about it because I need the flex time for the metabolic clinic. As soon as that sucker’s over (the end of March), I’m taking a weekend off.

So basically I slept a lot today, then I went to bed tonight around 9pm, but only slept an hour and now here I am, unable to sleep again. When I see my shrink on Friday, I am going to MAKE her rx me sleeping pills because this scenario happens far too often and now with me working weekends too, I don’t even have a day off to recharge so I’m going to burn out very quickly.

The metabolic clinic yesterday was the first of two modules done by the dietician and what I basically took away from it was how your plate is supposed to be set up. Half your plate is supposed to be vegetation, 1/4 is supposed to be a starch and 1/4 is supposed to be protein.

Actually, that class was actually kinda boring so let me fast forward to the exciting part: before each class, they weigh us, take our blood pressure and measure our waists and while I’m not going to tell you my stats, this week I lost 3 inches on my waist. It was student nurses who did it this time and I was convinced they didn’t measure properly so I had the head nurse measure me again after class and low & behold, I’d lost 3 inches. I haven’t lost any weight though, but apparently before the weight starts dropping, your body starts to rearrange your fat so that’s what’s going on.

So whatever, yay me.

Creepy nurse boy was there this time and…he was weirdly animated, unlike the first class (he wasn’t there last week). He high fived me at the end of class and kept giving me sideways glances and he’s either got a crush on me or I had something up my nose or something. The first class his staring freaked me out but now I’m just kinda humoured by the whole thing. And who knows, maybe I’m reading way more into things than what’s actually there. (I still theorize that he’s maybe seen me naked on the internets or can’t figure out where he’s seen me before and it’s online…*cough*)

Well, that’s all I really have to report. I should get back into bed and hopefully get some sleep because morning comes early and I cannot have another day like today, tomorrow.

PS. The dietician liked my latest kwish recipe (ham instead of bacon, diet cheese instead of full fat cheese, broccoli instead of onions) and I madce copies, with caloric breakdown, for everyone in the class. It was very well received.

Hi Everyone. This is Blake. Sunny asked me to make a post about last night for her because she’s having a really hard time with it.

As I’m sure just about everyone already knows, we had tickets to go see the Leafs play the Washington Capitals last night and as I’d assume you also know, Sunny has a difficult time going to places with a lot of people. Most times we have plans to go to an event of some sort, for however much time that leads up to it, she will often burst out with statements like, “I don’t want to go” or something similar. Then we talk about it for a while and in the end, after much calming conversation, we end up at the event. To be honest, with the initial reaction that Sunny had when we got these tickets, I thought we might not even have that, but it started to creep in a couple weeks ago.

Yesterday started pretty smoothly though.  Sunny had to work until 4:00 and we were planning on leaving at 5:00. She finished work and got ready and we headed out.  She was very quiet in the car, but she was keeping it all together. It took around 2 hours to get there and find parking, but we made it. We walked into the ACC and were directed to our section.  While we were navigating the crowd, I could tell that Sunny was really uncomfortable and she said as much.  I thought that once we got to our seats and sat down, she would get into the game and would start enjoying herself.

When we got to our seats, there was about 5 minutes or so left of the first period. We checked in on foursquare (obviously) and watched a little hockey.  The intermission started and we watched some little kids play a bit of hockey and then Sunny turned to me and said that she needed to go.  I looked in her eyes and I could tell she was starting to lose her grip.

We headed for the doors and back to the car as fast as we could and then she broke down. On one hand, the crowd was too much for her, but on the other hand, she felt absolutely horrible that she couldn’t make it through the game. She wanted to. She knew that other people wanted her to. She knew that I wanted her to. Despite all that, she couldn’t do it and she felt like a failure.

We headed home and have talked a lot. She felt like I would be mad at her because I didn’t get to see my first Leafs game. She feels like her mom and John will be mad at her for not staying for the whole game when they got her such an awesome present. She feels like the whole internet will think she’s weak and a failure for not being able to do something as simple as going to an event that she wanted to go to in the first place. She feels like she wasted the tickets by not giving them to someone else who would have gone to the game and enjoyed it. She said she’d never actually realized how bad her agoraphobia was until last night.

I can’t really speak for everyone else, but I have a different perspective on all this. First and foremost, I think that an event that is important carries more stress than something that is not. This game was a HUGE thing for Sunny and because of that, going to it carried a lot more anxiety than something like going to the post office. On top of that, there was a lot more crowd to wade through than any other event we’ve been to in years. There was also no back corner to hide in away from the crowd, which is usually what we do at events. And lastly, the lights were all on.  I think all these factors made this a much more stressful situation than others things that we’ve been to in recent years.

I give Sunny a lot of credit for getting her shit together, getting in the car and eventually getting all the way to her seat. I’d call it giving up if she said, “This is too hard, so I’m not going to even try.”  I have a lot of respect for her that. Despite having so much anxiety about it, she actually got there and gave it a shot and I think the internet will feel the same way. I mean, it’s easy to look perfect if you only do easy things. Taking risks means that everything won’t always go as planned and you need to take risks to grow.

I hate seeing Sunny so down on herself for something that she can’t help. I saw her completely fall apart when she had her psychotic break. I saw her so apart that I was worried she’d never put herself back together. I’ve never been so scared in my life. Since that time, I’ve seen her struggle through a metric shit tonne of adversity and take huge steps to get her life back together. She’s quit smoking, she quit drinking regular Coke and adjusted her diet to much more healthy eating habits. She’s started making art more consistently. She’s been writing more consistently. She’s doing all that with a full time job that contributes so much to the wellbeing of our household. I could go on and on about successes in her life and I have to give her full credit for all of them. She decides on something, focuses herself and takes action to achieve whatever her goal is. Not least in her list are the steps she’s taken to get out of the house.

Every year she’s doing more and more things to get herself out in public and some of those times are without me. The Leafs game was the step that was a little too big, but at least she gave it a shot. I told her that I have no problem waiting until she’s ready and then we can try it again. It’s not something that we’ll accomplish this week, but we’ll get there eventually. Yesterday wasn’t a failure to do something she wanted to do. it was a success for making the effort rather than just wimping out and not even trying. She got to her seat, she watched some hockey and that’s certainly an accomplishment.

I told Blake an hour ago that I was coming to bed but I got engrossed by this Salon article about “Mormon mommy bloggers” and now it’s 12:30am.

My head is killing me, my glands are swollen, my throat is sore and my eyes are burning with fever so I know I’m getting sick and I should get some sleep, especially since I have to work tomorrow (oh yeah, I work weekends now, which I’m absolutely not thrilled about, but adjusting…) but this article really got me thinking about my own blogging habits, especially since Madison learned CSS today and is creating a site of her own. (And no, I’m not telling you where it is, although some of you may have a pretty good idea and I’m pretty sure it’s Googleable. If you find it, please be respectful and remember that she’s 12, okay?)

So these Mormon ladies who blog…they have impressively designed sites and take really nice pictures (well, a few of them do, a few in the article not so much) and it’s all very aesthetic and I’m really really jealous of this. Hell, I’m jealous of non-Mormon ladies who blog and have all of those elements too because I don’t.

In the beginning, when I blogged on a website I created myself with a mix of hand-coding and Dreamweaver, with graphics I created myself in Photoshop (I was especially proud of my SunnySlut.com burlesque design that I was going to link in this post but apparently the index.html page is missing so all that’s there now is a useless index full of eBay crap my friend Nicole asked me to host in 2001), but blogging that way was difficult, especially since I was updating the site and Live Journal at the same time, eventually getting a paid Live Journal account so I could embed it into my site with javascript that never worked properly with comments and then finally I gave up because I was doing 5x the work fixing code instead of actually writing and living my life and that was when I made the move to WordPress (2007). WordPress themes are CSS and I don’t know CSS and I don’t have the time to learn CSS (but I wish I did) or the mental aptitude for retaining such nerdery so I rely on Blake’s skills to shape this blog into…what it is, which is extremely bare bones, yet functional, while I use a premade theme on my Live Journal, which gets a billion more comments and conversations on it than my WordPress blog ever does. (WordPress blog = SunnyCrittenden.com.)

Which brings me to the next thing: my site (blog, whatever) apparently gets on average about 2500 unique visitors, if I’m reading the Google Analytics correctly, so why the fuck aren’t any of them commenting here? The only comments I really get are from casual passers-by or ladies I know from art circles who come here every few months and catch up on my adventures in bursts. And the trolls of course, but they’re useless – yet dedicated! my biggest fans! – whose comments I don’t let come through because they’re just trying to negatively affect me. Admittedly, sometimes it works, but i still won’t give them what they want, which is attention, which I also suppose I’m giving them now. *sigh*

Moving right along…

So I’ve been doing this blog thing for a decade. And a lot of people have been following my antics for that long and I think that’s sort of a weird accomplishment. It kind of pisses me off to see these hipster mommy bloggers, Mormon or otherwise, get featured in things like Salon articles or The Huffington Post or the New York times and all these other places when there are so many of us who have been doing this longer and (I’m not necessarily including myself here), better. In the comments of the Salon article I linked, there are a lot of people saying that the Mormon ladies’ blogs are glossed over and not true portrayals of their lives and after reading a few of them tonight for a while, I think I’m going to have to agree, whereas myself and the ladies I chill with, we show the good, the bad and the ugly, right along with the joyous events and happy things (another confession: I know in the past I’ve been very negative in my writing because I was depressed, don’t forget that I’m A) a human being and B) a mentally ill human being). I think out of all of the lady bloggers I know, I’m probably the biggest over-sharer of the bunch.

DON’T GET ME WRONG: I am NOT complaining that I haven’t been recognized by legitimate mass media or anything of the kind, it just bugs me that old schoolers, SUCH AS myself, get passed over for web 2.0ers. Y’know? Like all these YouTube “celebrities” have their own fucking Wikipedia articles that no one argues should be taken down because none of them have really “done” anything, yet my friend Steph the Geek’s Wikipedia article was taken down several times because people complained it was a vanity article when in fact, she’s done a HELL of a lot more than these YouTube brats. Cam culture is actually this huge, sort of integral thing within internet history, yet the only camgirls I know, the forebears of YouTube itself, who have their own Wikipedia articles are Jennifer Ringley, Ana Voog and Steph the Geek (who, as I said, had to fight to keep her article up, see the discussion of it to know what I’m talking about.) And for the love of kittens, I am NOT complaining here that I don’t have a Wikipedia article so please do not even go down that road. I have done NOTHING to merit such a thing and it bugs me when people in the past have suggested I have. My only real claim to fame, so to speak, is that…fuck, I don’t even know. I don’t really think I have one, to be perfectly honest.

I’m babbling, I know. I’m sick and I’m having “racing thoughts” and I totally forgot what the point of this post was.

I do know that it involved what I like to call a “site overhaul” that I’m hoping  to execute sometime in March with Blake’s help and possibly my friend Charlie’s excellent banner-making skills. The colours will probably remain the same because they are my colours and the “feel” probably won’t change, but I’m hoping to add more graphical elements and a better comment system. (Blake’s going to hate that I just said the latter because he spent a long time making the comments system I have now…) The reason I don’t have a more graphic website, as in a website with more graphics, is because I don’t know how to add them myself, which is another thing I’m hoping to remedy. For example, my sidebars are ALL text and the reason they are all text is because that’s all I know how to do. In my WordPress control panel, I have menus and buttons and shit that allow me to add links and things to my sidebars but in WordPress, I would have no idea how to add a .png in the sidebar that links to something. When my sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project gets digitized, I will have my own link on the project’s site where you can see it and where you can see my bio and pictures of my other work and things like that, so when that goes live, I would like to have in one of my sidebars a graphic from The Sketchbook Project (they are free and available), which I can link to that. Without having to ask Blake to do it.

I guess this is a resolution of sorts, to be more independent with my own…is it work? I’ve always sort of considered it work but at the same time it’s absolutely compulsive at this point so it’s just BEING. THIS RIGHT HERE is how I function, how I process my own thoughts. I absolutely cannot imagine my life without this outlet.

I don’t know if I’ve ever acknowledged this out loud, so I’m going to do so now: I think a BIG reason as to why I became a housebound agoraphobe (currently in recovery) is because on these here internets, at least in the places I frequent, I’m somewhat of a big fish. Meatside, not so much. On the internets, I have a lot of control over the environment and the interactions I have. Meatside, not so much, everything’s completely unpredictable and most of it is beyond your control. I hate that. On the internet, you can think before you speak/type (although I basically DON’T *grin*) but meatside every human interaction tends to be completely awkward, or at least that’s been my experience.

OH, y’know what? I made a phone call on Friday. To most people this is not a big deal in the slightest, people make phone calls every day, right? Well I don’t. i think the last conversation I had on a phone was with Alex maybe 2 months ago. The time before that was with Alex maybe 6 months prior to the last one. Basically the only person I talk to on the phone is Blake and I don’t even like to do that, especially now that he has his new job, which, by the way, I fucking hate because he’s not as accessible as he used to be and he’s a lot more stressed out/snippy.

And I’m totally straying from the point I was going to make in the paragraph previous to the last one, but I’ll get there eventually.

Friday I called my mom. See, I was supposed to mail my sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project on Friday because that was the deadline. I bribed Madison with Lush products to get home after school as soon as possible to run my sketchbook down to the post office before 4:30pm so it would be postmarked on time and I would have an extra half day to put the final touches on it. Since parts of my book got ruined, I was stressing hardcore Friday morning. I woke up at 6:15am because I could smell smoke in the house, as if someone had had a cigarette in my kitchen despite the fact that neither Blake nor I smoke anymore, but as it turned out there was a rogue pistachio that fell from the top cupboard into the bottom of the stove’s element and that caught on fire when Blake was making his coffee before work. I was glad though, that I was up early because I start work at 10am usually and being up so early meant that I could put arms on my girls in the sketchbook and have them be totally dry by the time Madison was to run like a crazy kid to the post office with my precious precious sketchbook.

By 9am I was stressing over this fucking sketchbook because it wasn’t perfect anymore but when I went to the project’s website to get the address I was supposed to mail it to, I saw that they extended the deadline to MONDAY. OH DEAR SWEET BABY JESUS WHO I DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN, I was SO relieved. I knew my mom was stressed out about it too because we’d been talking about in on Facebook all week (she and a bunch of her friends were all doing it too) so I posted the link to the page that had the extended deadline on Facebook so my mom would see it but then I was afraid she wouldn’t see it in time and would mail her sketchbook out anyway, so I called her in her new home with John, where she’s been living for 2 years (or maybe 1? I dunno) and where I’d never called before. And we talked for about an hour, which is the longest conversation I’ve had on the phone in YEARS. Literally. It would have been longer but I was already half an hour “late” for work (the bosses don’t REALLY care what time I start, as long as I do the amount of hours I’m supposed to during the day so it was no big deal) so I cut it “short”.

This is totally fucked up, I know, but it’s also why I see a shrink once a month, but that phone call mentally exhausted me. Like, I needed to recover from it. One meatside (so to speak) social interaction messes with me and if I have too many “things” in one day, I can’t deal so I freak out completely and need extra psychiatric medication and lots and lots of “quiet time” to come down from it. I’m strong as an ox in some respects, but a fragile flower in others. I also get obsessed with time and I have no scope of how long things take because I’ve been homebound for so long, but that’s probably best saved for another post.

So back to my whole “I’m basically an internet addict” thing. As I’ve mentione din previous posts, I’ve been using Foursquare as an immersion therapy tool, the goal of which is to rank on the leaderboards against my friends and to earn stupid badges that are not even real. It’s dumb, I know, but it works and the people who follow me on Twitter (and now Facebook) seem to like following me around as I check in places. (Although not everyone is happy about it, I know Alex filters Fourquare posts out of her Twitter feed.) Foursquare is the ENTIRE reason I spent most of my first paycheque on a $700 smartphone, which probably sounds absolutely insane to most people, but you have to factor in the fact that I *am* somewhat insane and everyone told me that I should spend my first paycheque, being my first paycheque EVER, frivolously, so I did. And I saw it as both a tool for combating agoraphobia, but also as a means to take my internet friends with me wherever I went. No matter where I was, I could read Live Journal and comment, I could check my e-mail accounts, I could even watch the naked ladies uploading cam pics on Camwhores.com from a hospital emergency room when Alex’s brother lost HIS mind. (Which is still lost by the way, but that’s a whole other post and not really my story to tell so if Alex writes about it publicly I’ll just link that if anyone cares about the rest of that story.) Now that the internet was portable, I felt more empowered to leave the house because if anything awkward happened or whatever, I could tweet about it and have 5 people tell me it’s okay or give me a pat on the back for getting through it. The phone also has the most obnoxious alarm ever created which is necessary for me to get to work on time. My phone isn’t just a phone, it’s a tool of survival. Flame me all you want for being materialistic in this regard but keep in mind that prior to this year, the most I left the house was maybe, MAYBE once a month, now it’s usually every 4 days. I still can’t go anywhere by myself, but I think once life circumstances change (long story) things will improve in that area.

Having said that, a new hair salon opened up down the street from me and I’m considering, now that I’m being forced to take a 2 hour break from work every day so I can work on weekends *grumble*, having professionals dye and cut my hairs from now on as opposed to good ol’ L’Oreal Blondissmes and a prayer. Oh yeah, and letting a 12 year old cut my hair and giving me “layers”…I’ve been thinking about this for weeks but I don’t know the salon’s name or phone number and they’re too new to be Googleable or in the phone book so until I have that name and number, nothing can happen but I don’t know how to obtain that information. I supposed I could ask Madison to write it down on her way home from school. My point though, is that I’m taking steps and if I don’t do it  my way, it’ll never happen at all so people have no place to give me flack about it. (Not that anyone IS at the moment, I’m just being pre-emptive.)

By the way, my head is KILLING me and I should be sleeping. I’m not sure I can though. :o/

So these things, plus a billion more, are what’s keeping me up right now. I probably sound manic, but I’m not, just overly thoughtful and rambly and sick. It just kills me that these “Mormon mommy bloggers” are getting like, 50+ comments on each post they make and I wonder what kind of traffic they get or why that’s happening while my blog (not including posts x-posted to Live Journal) gets maybe one comment every 4 posts. Is it maybe because their blogs are connected to a network of churchy folk and mine is sort of in limbo? Like really, who IS my audience? At this point I have absolutely no idea who I’m writing this all for. I mean, myself obviously, although I don’t re-read my own posts, and Blake reads most of it and I think my mom does too and a few “internet friends” do, but for the most part, I have no fucking clue who you people are. And I’d like to, so tell me dammit. Tell me who you are. I can tell my IPs where people live, but that’s so little information as to who a person is and what their deal is and why they’re reading that I don’t even bother to look them up anymore. Live Journal people I mostly know because they of course have LJs too and at least half of them actually use them beyond reading purposes.

A few months ago, a few months in a row, my site became unaccessible mid-month because I was reaching my allotted bandwidth usage, which was a first. I asked Kevin, my good friend and site host, why this was suddenly happening and he said that it appeared as though people were going through my gallery a lot. He raised my bandwidth usage so these outages wouldn’t happen anymore, but it made me wonder why suddenly apparently a lot of people or at least more than “usual” were going trhough my gallery which really only exists because I don’t have or use ftp software. I upload things to the gallery to link in posts and that’s literally the only reason it exists. It seems to me that the only real motivation for going through my gallery would be to get to know me better which would appear to mean that maybe either new people were coming to the site who were unfamiliar with my, uh, work, or old people were…I don’t even know. Anyone got a theory as to why this might be happening? Because I haven’t the foggiest idea and found it very peculiar. Truthfully though, I haven’t looked at my Google Analytics in a long time because the stats really weren’t that interesting anymore. Hardly anyone links me because of my Camwhores connection and unpredictability/lack of filters, particularly when it comes to FUCKING language. I know a ton of girls with sites, a lot of whom I consider good friends, but my site doesn’t fit in with theirs because most of them are porn or pay-for-porn sites and their customers/viewers don’t wanna read my shit, they just want to see tits. And sometimes I show tits, which means my more straight-laces blog friends don’t link me either because their readers only want safe for work content, so I’m kinda fucked as far as linkage. Y’know what my primary source of traffic is? Steak and Blowjob Day because I wrote a stupid article about sucking cock in like, 2002, that apparently is very helpful. My site has very little to do with sex anymore and it 95% safe for work, but I keep that article and the ones like it up because those seem to be the crowd-pleaser and are a good place to put my Camwhores affiliate links.

The reason I bring up links is because links are where traffic comes from, traditionally, yet my traffic is all mostly independent; people coming here directly from my url, presumably bookmarked. I find this baffling. WHy are they so quiet? SPEAK UP! New blood comes from Steak & Blowjob Day and Camwhores and they’re not exactly looking for fairies, angels and mermaids, pictures of kids, videos of Blake doing stupid things and 4,000 word blog posts about basically nothing so I’n guessing most of them don’t stick around. HOWEVER, these people have to be the ones going through my galleries and eating up my bandwidth so WTF?

I just find it all very confusing. Nothing I do is linear or even all that explainable and I think I’ve always been clear about the fact that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing on these here internets. Not a whole lot of what I do is really all that intentional and as I mentioned, most of it is compulsive.

~*A FEW DEEP BREATHS & AN ATIVAN LATER*~

Usually I don’t kill myself like this trying to figure it all out, I just let it BE and most of the time I’m okay like that, but nights like tonight I just want it all explained to me. I want to know who these people reading are and why they’re reading. Maybe if I knew that I could make this a better experience for them but maybe they all remain silent because they don’t want to interrupt or make me change a thing. I have no idea. Maybe they’re shy? Maybe they hate my crude comments system? WOuld it be better if people had to register to post on my site? Like have an account? Because I think that’s possible with WordPress…somehow. Like if people could post using their Facebook accounts or their openIDs or whatnot, maybe I’d get more comments? (Does this sound like I’m begging for comments? I hope not because that’s not what I’m going for here, I’m just trying to figure out why, if so many people read my crap on any given day, they are so damn quiet. What are they thinking? Why don’t they make contact? Am I an alien being viewed from the outside of a glass bubble or what?) I just wish I had some help understanding it all. Comments, maybe introductions, would help me understand it all but no matter how many times I’ve mentioned this phenomenon, nothing ever changes. The explanations don’t come.

OH! I KNOW! E-mail me! Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com Make the subject line something topical though, like “HEY SUNNY, READ THIS!” because I delete most e-mails from people I don’t know without opening it because I don’t use anti-virus software and I’m paranoid about spam and viruses. Kevin or someone told me once that some of these e-mails I get are like “tester” e-mails where the person or company or bot or whatever that sent it would know if I clicked on it to open it or not and if I did, they would know that subject lines like that work so they’d use them on other people more often so I delete most e-mails that are suspect without opening them for that reason. Now that I’ve written that out, it sounds like someone probably fed me a line of bullshit and now that I think about it, I’ve no doubt deleted e-mails from real people who read my site. The key, I think, to getting me to open a piece of e-mail that’s legit is to use my name in the subject line or something. If anyone felt inclined yet doesn’t want to “share with the class” in the comments, totally feel free to e-mail me. I went through a phase a while back where I was getting a TON of e-mail, mostly from horny guys who had seen me naked, so I stopped replying for quite a long time to discourage e-mail, but I think I’m in a place where I’m ready and eager to begin receiving it again.

Something else I’ve been debating this week is my address. Now that I have a job, I have the means to get a PO box again, which is, I *think*, $120/year. I haven’t had one for the past couple of years because no one was sending me anything and my only income was from paintings and Camwhores, which doesn’t amount to a whole lot. My painting money allows me to replenish my art supplies and to get Blake & I Starbucks, which is right across the road from Michael’s and Curry’s (which is an art supply store that is having a 25% off canvases sale this weekend that I totally forgot about until now and hopefully I can get there tomorrow because I suddenly feel the urge to paint on irregular sizes canvases rather than square ones…holy tangent…)…and my Camwhores money is only about $20-$50/month and I usually buy my own food with it, like popcorn at the movies when Blake earns free movie passes through his work. My point is that until now, my earnings have been extremely meager and I think there are people out there who want to send me mail. It’s just this feeling I have and without going into details, I do have evidence to support this theory. SO this is why I would want a PO box.

HOWEVER.

I am of the belief that the world would rather hug you than hurt you and a large part of me doesn’t think it would be dangerous or reckless to publish not only my home address on my website but a link to my house on Google Maps so everyone can see the street view not just of where my house is but my whole town, especially if we move to where I want to move, which I happen to think is a very interesting town. My mother-in-law is probably reading this right now and shrieking in her head that this is a horrible idea and that if I do this I’m endangering the lives of my children, which is debatable I suppose; in the past she’s given us/me grief about not editing out our house number when I take pics of the front of the house. I actually DO edit out our house number 95% of the time, but sometimes I forget or I figure no one cares so I just leave it. I mean really, who wants to stalk me anyway?

At the same time, I am really really paranoid about kidnappers and stalkers. I never used to be but then I got this persistent troll whose IP is from Toronto and that made me worry a bit more. If my kids aren’t home by 4pm, I freak the fuck out and have 911 on speed dial because I know time is critical in kidnapping cases. I know Wes wouldn’t be prepared if something happened, meanwhile Madison would be because I’ve drilled it into her head that there are a LOT of strangers who know a LOT about her and that puts her at risk. I think it’s a very slim risk, but it’s still present. She and I have discussed this risk at great length and we’ve come to the conclusion together that yes, the risk is slim, and she’s fine with me sharing things about her anyway as long as she gets final approval (most of the time) and I’m getting off topic again…

So, people of the internet, do you think I should pay for a PO box that may or may not ever get used? Or do you think it’s safe to put my home address, which wouldn’t cost me any money, on my website? Is the Google Maps idea going too far? I should also mention that one of the “Mormon mommy bloggers” has her home address on her website, which I found interesting, and she’s basically doing a whitewashed version of what I’ve been doing for 10 years so…also I haven’t really discussed the address/PO box thing with Blake so I don’t have his take on it yet either. I’m just curious as to what my more internet savvy friends think of this.

And I think that’s the end of my babbling for tonight. If I continue I won’t get up in time to be finished work at a reasonable hour to make it to Curry’s to buy discounted canvases and possibly to go see True Grit AND be home in time for the season premiere of Big Love. If I don’t wake up in absolute misery healthwise…we’ll see.

By the way, this post is 4,854 words long. I think that may be a record. Kudos to your attention spans.

~*Goodnight internets.*~