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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Onto adult things…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a great weekend!

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

MY MOM AND I ARE GOING BECAUSE I AM MOTHERFUCKING AWESOME!

I just happened to be looking at my Facebook feed when they announced that they were adding a second show to Toronto. I didn’t even know there was a FIRST show! I didn’t know anything about it! So I looked at the page and read it and the way it was worded, I wasn’t sure if Oprah was ACTUALLY going to be there or if she’d be like, announcing the other guys via Skype or something so I asked and the OWN moderator replied that YES, Oprah will absolutely be there in the flesh so I SPAZZED and immediately ordered two tickets for my mom and I to go for Mother’s Day! 10 minutes later, they were sold out!

We’re in the “festival” seating (read: nosebleed), but WHO CARES? Um, hello, WE’RE GOING TO GO SEE ~*OPRAH*~ ~*FUCKING*~ ~*WINFREY*~!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can’t even believe it!!!!!!!!!

So I survived yesterday, barely, which was my birthday. The truth of the matter is, I’m just not good at birthdays. Not mine, not other people’s. The only good birthdays I can ever remember is my 4th birthday when we had a Strawberry Shortcake birthday party and again when I was like, 20 maybe, and Nicole brought me a bunch of flowers and an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen because I hadn’t had a birthday cake SINCE my 4th birthday – that I could remember anyway.  Nicole believes you should have a birthday cake every year.

Last night we went to Swiss Chalet for dinner where we had ribs (they were alright, not great but alright – Wes got pizza and mashed potatoes) and then we went to Cold Stone Creamery where I got strawberry ice cream mixed with real strawberries and chopped up Skor bars.

Cold Stone Creamery is a neat place. There are only a few locations so far because they just started up but what it is, is this place where you pick your ice cream flavour and as many “mix ins” as you want and then they mix it by hand on a frozen slab with these sharp metal spoons.

Blake got one called “sweet cream” with cookie dough and sprinkles in it, Madison got straight up cookie dough, and Wes got mint ice cream with sprinkles and gummi bears.

I got mine to go because I HATE HATE HAAAAAAAAATE eating in the car *and* I hate eating in Tim Hortons (where Cold Stone Creamery is located inside of) but we only live 10 minutes away so it was fine. I just came in and put mine in the freezer for later. I actually had it for breakfast this morning.

For my birthday, Wes got me a bear Beanie Baby, which I collect and Madison got me Skittles (my favourite) and a bouquet of spring flowers. Blake got me HUGE fairy wings for Squam but realistically they’re too big so I still have to find a decent pair before September. The ones Blake got are really nice though, I’ll use them for something, just not for Squam.

In the mail this week, there was a card from my mom with a gift certificate for Michael’s and yesterday I got a card from Phaedie that was chock full of TOTALLY AWESOME DINOSAUR STICKERS!!!!!!!! (And super wicked Starbucks cards that we’re probably going to put to good use later today.) And then there was an Amazon package from Charlie that had stuff in it for me and Blake and the kids! We now own Midnight in Paris, which Blake and I loved and Wes now owns Puss & Boots! That was a surprise!

I spent the day pretty mopey, but looking back on it, it wasn’t all that bad. I don’t know why I’m so ungood at birthdays, I wish I wasn’t, but I am. :o/ Maybe that’ll be next year’s New Year’s resolution: to be better at birthdays.

And that was more or less my entire birthday…except for one thing: SQUAM FUNDS!!! I got a bunch of Squam donations yesterday which means we are now 63% OF THE WAY THERE!!!  How exciting!!!!

I’ve been thinking about Squam a lot the past few days because a friend got me two books: Painted Pages, which is by the two teachers I’m going to have at Squam, and Creative Pilgrimage by Jenny Doh, formerly of Somerset Studio, which features both Squam AND one of the teachers I’m going to have while I’m there.

So I’ve been reading both books and thinking about Squam these last several days and how great it’s going to be.

First of all, I’m going to get to spend a lot of time with my super awesome mom, which I never get to do and second of all, I’m going to get to finally meet my friend Belinda in person, who has been so supportive of Squam I absolutely cannot thank her enough. She’s rallied the troops and donated a lot of her own personal money to make this happen for me and more than a few times it’s brought a tear to my eyes. She is such a good friend and I only wish I could be half the friend to her as she is to me.

And of course the creativity! The creative energy is already buzzing through my body like you would not even believe! I’m nervous as all hell to create in a classroom environment because I’ve never done it before, like, sharing supplies and stuff is a totally foreign concept to me, but at the same time, I’m really looking forward to trying new things. The first class I’m taking is a photography class so that’s not going to be as hands on to me as painting the next day will be but both classes will be full of new things! I have absolutely no idea how to use Blake’s Rebel and I’ll bet you $50 that I’ll end up using my point-and-shoot in the end anyway because I think it’s better than the old Rebel, which is long out-dated. (I wish I could afford to get a new camera for Squam, but it’s just not in the cards.)

Painting the next day is going to be different for me because it’s a different type of mixed media than I’m used to. The teacher uses a lot of techniques I’ve never thought to use before and I’m not sure I would normally use so we’ll see how that goes.

I dunno, the more  I think about it, the more nervous and excited I get. I’ve decided to take the next few days off just to soak up the Squam vibe from the books I have here and the Squam blog. Oh and by the way, I’ve given up on The Artist’s Way. Again. After I got to the artist dates part and those went so well, I just kinda gave up on the rest. Right now I have way too much on my plate for any more inspiration!

The day before yesterday I did my toenails. It was time. I hadn’t done them since just after I got out of the hospital and they were about 1/3 of the way grown out so it was time, like I said. You’re probably thinking “I don’t care, why is she telling me this?” and the reason is because I did them all fancy-like, using my Konad stamps.

This is a plate with the designs on it. I chose the diamond pattern:

So what you do is you put nail polish on the pattern you want to put on your toes, then you scrape over it with this thing so the excess is scraped off and only the pattern remains:

Then you quickly press the fat part of the stamper onto the pattern so the nail polish transfers onto it:

Then again, very quickly, you press the stamper onto your nail and press hard, making sure to get the stamp over the whole nail:

Then you take a Q-Tip with some nail polish remover on it and you very carefully scrub off the excess pattern. Then you let it dry completely (I waited about 5 minutes after doing all of my toes except my baby ones) and very softly and carefully you apply a clear topcoat. If you’re not careful in doing the topcoat, your pattern will streak. Voila!

This is only the 2nd time I’d used the stamps and I think I did okay. (The first time was on Madison.) My right foot turned out better than my left foot because my left foot was the practice foot. It’s definitely tricky though so to do it nicely, it’s going to take a lot of practicing so I think after school I’m going to offer to do Madison’s nails with them.  I’m sure she’ll be thrilled, she loves getting her nails done. Then maybe I can convince Blake to let me do his nails because sometimes he lets me.

And that’s literally all I’ve done the past couple of days. I need to get my act back in gear soon and start working on the colouring book again but I just haven’t been feeling it the last couple of days so I just took those days off and tried to make it as stress-free as I could. Not that the colouring book is stressful, taking time off is stressful to me. Not being productive is stressful to me.  Not accomplishing things and “wasting” days really bothers me.

Tonight Madison and I are having our eyes checked and theoretically we’re getting new glasses. My diabolical plan is to take in all 3 pairs if my current and past glasses and have them put new lenses in them and then maybe insurance will cover a 4th pair. That’d be cool. There’s a blue pair I have my eye on, which is the same as my pink pair. I’m getting deja vu so I kinda think I’ve already told you all this.

After that we’re going to go to Michael’s and maybe Curry’s and maybe South St. Burger and definitely Starbucks.

So that’s the plan.

Have a wonderful weekend! I hope it’s filled with sunshine and rainbows!

Why hello there.

Some folks have mentioned that I’ve been kinda quiet the past few days and that’s because I’ve been very very busy doing super top sekrit stuff that I am SO excited about but I can’t reveal what it is just yet because I have to do some testing first. I can give you a clue though! Ready? Set! GO!

Okay so my clue is really obvious…I know. I’ve decided to do some merchandising. I finally figured out a way to photograph my paintings so I can make prints out of them and I’ve spent the last 4 days creating branded items in a 3rd party shop. I’m not going to officially launch the shop until I order some of this stuff and make sure the quality’s actually good, so don’t get too excited yet, but if everything goes as planned, BE EXCITED because some of the stuff I’ve made is really really cool, like I’m astounded at how good my girls look on some of this stuff and I intend to spend my entire first paycheque on my own items both to see how they are quality-wise, but also just to own some of it for myself.

But that’s all I can say about that.

In other news, “Tiki Girl” is 100% finished and for sale in my Etsy shop! I ended up spray varnishing her in the end and she turned out really nice (if you like orange).

I am *so* tired and I don’t know why. I went to bed last night at 9pm and fell right asleep and then I woke up at 4:15am to go to work and I’m just dead on my feet. Dunno what’s up with that.

So Madison lasted 4 days as a vegan. It was pepperoni on her brother’s pizza that did her in. What kills me is that we bought her all these vegan groceries and she was like, “Wes can’t have any, he’s not vegan,” which we squashed pretty damn fast, but then when Madison wants Wes’ pepperoni, he lovingly and willingly gives it to her. That’s just the glaring difference between the two of them. She’s selfish and he’s selfless.

Something that’s really been bothering me the last few days is that I’ve lost it. My perspective. 10 years ago I was in ad school and I was really good at it because I had this really great perspective and the ability to read people because I knew such a diverse group of people and could easily put myself in their frame of mind. I mean, that’s all advertising is, really, the ability to know your opponent, so to speak, which I was extremely good at. Well, being so sheltered the past 10 years has completely ruined that perspective. I no longer have the interactions with people that allow me to put myself into their shoes and therefore I can’t write decent copy that sucks people in and sells to them. (I’m not even explaining this properly…grrr.) Writing the copy for the descriptions for my new shop has been killing me because it’s all so bad. If any of my ad school friends read this stuff, they would scream “hack!” and wonder what the hell happened to me. Agoraphobia happened to me. And I don’t know how to fix it.

Like, a long time ago, when Madison was a toddler, I lived above my mom’s wallpaper store in Uxbridge and during the day, I would hang out in her store with her for most of the afternoons, just about every day and as a result, I got to know people outside of my peer group and I learned to read them very very well. This was good for ad school because their demographic happens to be the largest purchasers or influencers as far as most household goods and services. Even down to cars. On top of that, I had a pretty healthy social life and lots of friends so I had a huge pool of knowledge to work from when it came to making ads and writing good copy.

Since I had no intentions of going into advertising, I let all that fall by the wayside. I let the agoraphobia take hold and my social life melted away. I no longer have friends the way I did back then and I don’t have this huge well of imagination the way I did before. I no longer have the ability to read my audience. In fact, I have no idea who my audience is. I couldn’t create a primary prospect profile for my average reader if my life depended on it and I used to be extremely good at those. (What a PPP is, is a document where you basically lay out who your primary target person is. It would be 3 or 4 paragraphs long as it would be like, “Sandy is a married 42 year old mother of two, with three dogs and a cat. She is a dental hygienist who makes origami art on the weekends in her art room, which her husband. Jim, renovated for her in the spring of 2011. Together they make $90,000/year blah blah blah.” They are very detailed and I was good at creating them.)

I’m not bummed that I’ve lost this ability or anything like that, just surprised by it because it’s something I carried with me for so long, it was the one thing I was really good at and kinda like, my backup survival skill. Not that things ever would go bad, but say something bad happened and Blake left me, moved back to Militiagan and told me to fend for myself; advertising was what I planned to fall back on if something bad like that happened, but I guess that’s out the window now so let’s hope he sticks around!

Anyway, it just surprised me with how bad I was at writing these blurbs so when I do launch this new endeavor, please don’t laugh at my descriptions! I tried! (Okay, not really…)

Honestly, nothing’s really been happening around here aside from working on new products and fucking around in Photoshop. I wake up, I work, then I spend all day working on my new shop until it’s time to go to bed.

There actually IS something sort of major happening in Sunnyland, but I promised I wouldn’t put it on the internet so I can’t really talk about it, unfortunately. Just send good vibes in the direction of Florida, okay?

Thursday’s my birthday. 33. Yippy. Send presents and Squam money. Thanks!

Okay that’s all I’ve got in me today. Maybe I’ll write more later. Honestly, I’m just exhausted and as soon as Cheryl leaves, I’m going back to bed. Goodnight!

Oh, 5am. Hello there.

I have cramps like fucking crazy and it makes me wonder if I’m not going to have a period. I haven’t had one since July, so I guess we’ll see. Not having one, yet having all the pain of one all these months, is really disconcerting for me.

Last night I had that crazy pain in my pancreas again. I can’t even describe the pain really, not in a way that would do it justice. It’s like…a sharp pain right kinda under your solar plexus that radiates through to your back. It is incredibly painful, like an 8 out of 10. The only thing that helps it is a mixture of 800mg of Ibuprofen and two Percocets. Then I have to take the Percocets for the next few hours to keep the pain at a tolerable level.

My surgeon says that this could be a permanent thing. :o/

This morning Cheryl is coming to change my dressing. I hate Cheryl. I’m sure she’s a nice person but she’s so so sloppy. She takes shortcuts and it really pisses me off. Like, my wound is big enough that it requires one Mesorb (like a big maxi pad) and one piece of 4 x 4 inch gauze to cover the whole thing before putting the tape on. She will put the Mesorb on in the middle with the wound poking out on either side so the tape sticks to it and can cause breakdown. The other thing is that my belly hangs down and pulls DOWN so the crappy Hypafix tape they use for it comes off at the top and rolls down so we have to put a piece of drape across it horizontally so that doesn’t happen. Except for the longest time, Cheryl argued that I didn’t need that until when Blake was in MI and I showed her how necessary it was when Blake wasn’t there to do it after she left. Then she’s done it ever since. But any excuse to take a shortcut and get outta here as fast as possible and she’ll take it. It’s sloppy and sloppy people bug me. Also? She smells like cigarette smoke and Obsession perfume and it makes me nauseous.

Smokers? Don’t try and cover up your cigarette smell with perfume, it just smells 10x worse than the smoke would have.

Plus I don’t think nurses should wear perfume anyway.

The other thing about Cheryl that I hate is that despite the fact that we’ve told her we don’t like it and they’re supposed to work around our schedule, she comes at 8:45am-9am, which was bullshit until I got my job back and was up at that time anyway.

Stupid Cheryl. Grrrr. >:o(

So yesterday I drew my colouring book girl and here she is:

I’ve been leery of putting jewelry on the girls because I wouldn’t want to mess up someone adding jewels of their own later but this girl looked too plain without the necklace. I tried to make it small enough though, that someone could put a jewel on top of it and the ink shouldn’t show on the sides.

I signed up for Art House Co-Op’s 4×6 Project at the urging of my mother. You take a piece of 4×6 inch paper or cardstock or other flat media and you make a piece of art out of it for exchange with another person who has done the same. You have to send them a SASE when you send in your artwork and it has to have US stamps on it but I don’t know where to get US stamps. My mom’s boyfriend says you can get them at the post office but I kinda remember not being able to once when I had to before and I had to get them off the internet somehow. Like through a 3rd party website. I forget now but that’s going to be an issue.

Anyway, here’s the beginnings of mine. It’s just going to be a simple, plain girl on watercolour paper:

I haven’t painted her skin on yet.

Well, I’m starving so I think I’m going to go make some kwish considering bacon was on sale this week so we got some. YAY bacon!

Oh, speaking of bacon, Madison’s going vegan for the week just to see if she can. Today was only day 1 and she did fine so I think she’ll be able to stick with it for the week but I kinda doubt she’ll stick with it for the rest of her life. I guess we’ll see.

Anyway, kwish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway…onto other things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Last night Blake and I went to Curry’s so I could get two more black Micron Pigma pens (08) for the colouring book because I only had one that was that size and I’m paranoid that it’ll run out in the middle of the day when he’s not around or something and that would piss me off greatly.  So we got some. I also got two more of these really neat Staedtler  (goddamn right I spelled that correctly on the first try!) pens that are like..triangular with a nice, fine brush-like tip that are really nice to write with.  They’re called Staedtler Triplus Fineliners and they’re only $1.45. I got a magenta one and a light aqua one. One for my pink journal, which I’m working in now and one for my blue journal, which is what I’ll be working in next.

After Curry’s, we decided to go out for dinner and we wanted steak so we decided to go to The Keg, which neither of us had ever been to before.

Well.

The Keg is a lot fancier than I ever remember it being. I mean, I’d never been there before, but it’s a chain, so it never even occurred to me that it might be fancy so there I am, in my overalls with my hair in a very messy ponytail (thank god I’d thrown on some makeup before leaving the house) and Blake was in jeans and a yellow, plaid button down shirt and we stuck out like sore thumbs. But whatever. I mean, I’m at a point in my life where I honestly do not give a fuck about what random strangers think of me. I almost DIED this summer. There are WAY more important things to worry about than some asshole who’s going to judge me for not putting on a skirt on to eat charred cow flesh en masse.

I ordered a “Keg sized” strawberry margarita, which was awesome but ultimately too much for me because I apparently now have the alcohol tolerance of a 5 year old. To start we ordered garlic bread and when it came, it was phenomenal. Like, they used garlic oil on it or something, it was super super garlicky and the cheese was almost fluffy. The bread was crusty but soft and chewy in the middle. It was fantastic. Then for our main meals, Blake got the prime rib, which I think looked disgusting (but then again, I hate prime rib) and I had a filet mignon and we both chose twice-baked potatoes as our potato. And we ordered a plate of asparagus for the table.

My steak was really really really good but I got the 10oz one instead of the 7oz one and that was way too much meat for me so I ended up giving about 1/3 to Blake. He liked his prime rib but liked my filet better. Oh and my filet was wrapped in bacon. He loved his baked potato but I didn’t like mine because it didn’t come with butter and I didn’t want to bug the waitress to get me some.

For dessert, we both had strawberry shortcake, which was fucking great and just the perfect amount of dessert after such a huge meal.

This dinner was the anniversary dinner we didn’t get to have because I was in a medically induced coma. It only made sense to celebrate it by putting ourselves in a food coma, y’know? Plus we were celebrating Blake’s bonus at his job, which, combined with our tax refund, will get us completely out of debt. On top of that, it’s rumoured that Blake will probably get a raise too, so yay! We’ll still be poor, just not as poor as we have been. And that’s a very good thing.

After The Keg, I was feeling kinda sick from so much food so we just decided to go home (we were going to stop at Shopper’s Drug Mart to get some stuff but decided not to) but when we got into Elmvale, we stopped off at Clover to rent the movie 50/50 because Blake hasn’t been able to find it online in a format compatible with my Blu-Ray/DVD thing. As he was at the back of the store, I was going through the movies they had for sale because I always do (they often have new releases for like, $2-5) and I asked Blake if I could borrow some money so I could get a few. He said “yes” so I picked a few but ultimately decided to only get one: Blue Valentine for $4.99.

I have tried to watch that movie on The Movie Network On Demand at least 3 times now but I always get distracted about 1/3 of the way through and I’ve never made it through despite KNOWING it’s a good movie. (Don’t you dare tell me how it ends.) Ryan Gosling is so handsome. Michelle Williams is a phenom. How could it not be amazing?

I got that and a breast cancer bracelet that says “I [heart] boobies.”

So this morning I’m laying on the couch, as I often do on the days I can sleep in because the bed hurts my back (long, irrelevant story), and the case for Blue Valentine is sitting on the coffee table so I start looking at it and thinking about the concept of a blue Valentine which lead me to thinking about blue roses.

Have I told you about my theory on blue roses? I don’t think I have. So I will.

When Madison was a baby and I lived in Uxbridge, I had a roommate named Amanda (who I’m quasi-friends with to this day, she’s awesome and I love her). Amanda was guy crazy. She always wanted guys to buy her blue roses and she had like, this collection of blue rose items like, chocolate blue roses, fake blue roses, cards with blue roses on them etc…and so I asked her what the deal was with blue roses and she told me that blue roses don’t exist (which may or may not be true, they may just not exist in small town floral shops), that they’re impossible to find as a result and that if a guy really loved her, he would do the impossible for her and find her a blue rose.

Now this was the biggest load of horseshit I had EVER heard in my whole entire life and me being me, I told her so, and then she goes ahead and gets a tattoo of a blue rose. Like, wtf.

Anyway, I have since learned that this blue rose thing? Wasn’t just an “Amanda thing”. Girls all over the place, from different walks of life, all want blue roses from their men and they want them for more or less the same reason.

My theory on the blue rose phenomenon is that these girls are…well, they’re probably never going to be happy with the guy who “finds” her that blue rose because like the blue rose, the perfect guy, the one in their heads, does not exist. It’s not until they abandon the idea of the blue rose that they’ll be happy with the human man in front of them.

And what kills me about the blue rose phenomenon is that every girl I know who ascribes to it thinks they’re totally unique in being obsessed with it when really, they’re more of a cliche.

Not surprisingly, the girls who are obsessed with the blue rose are often the same girls who get married because you’re “supposed to” and they are more obsessed with having a wedding than a marriage. (Luckily Amanda’s grown up now and has – I think – grown out of the blue rose phase of life.)

So yeah, that’s the blue rose thing and I wonder if the movie Blue Valentine has anything to do with that because the main character, Cindy, in the movie, seems like she’d probably be a blue rose kinda gal. Not having seen the whole movie, I can’t really make that call, I just wondered.

Speaking of loooooove, my wedding ring no longer fits and we haven’t had the money to resize it so I’ve been wearing the bracelet Blake gave me when we were dating instead. Behold!

He got it out of some kind of machine and on the back he put “Mu”, which means “nothing” in Japanese, if I recall correctly.  I just thought it was cool and claimed it for my own so he gave it to me. You can see it in my really early cam pics over at Camwhores.

Speaking of Camwhores, I totally missed my 10 year anniversary there while I was in the hospital! I started on portal 9 in July 2001, if memory serves but I’ll write up the story of it all some other time. Right now I think I’m going to eat Caesar salad, watch Blue Valentine and start drawing another girl for the colouring book. By the time the movie’s over, it’ll pretty much be time for me to start work so that’ll be my day.

Hope you guys have a lovely Saturday! <3

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Okay so not the most creative title, I know, but I’m tired and cold and cranky and couldn’t think of anything else.

So Pinterest…my main beef with the whole thing is WHY would Pinterest need to save a copy of the pinned picture, creating a duplicate, competing image to the original? Well, Scutterman in the comments here made a very very good point: bandwidth. If Pinterest didn’t create a duplicate image, it would probably cost us a lot in bandwidth if we posted something popular or it could crach your entire site OR more to the point, they probably don’t want thousands of pins and repins on their site where the image is a giant red “X”.  That makes sense to me. I’m okay with that thinking, I really am, I just wish that we only had the thumbnail view to deal with. I wish Pinterest wouldn’t save a full-sized copy of my copyrighted image and I’m going to e-mail them saying so, rather than just writing a blog post bitching about it.

So go ahead, pin my stuff. Repin my stuff. Have a ball! Just do it PROPERLY and with ATTRIBUTION. Thank you.

That said, I added these nifty new social media buttons to my site so you can do it easier. I kinda think they’re ugly and I can’t figure out how to make them all display at the bottom (I don’t think you can), but there they are all the same.  With the same plugin I could make it so when I post something it automagically posts it to my Facebook fan page but I couldn’t figure that out either and I think you have to pay for the service. Also the app wanted to access a lot of things on Facebook I wasn’t comfortable with so I deleted it and I’ll just post things the old fashioned way.

I finished a mermaid for the colouring book and I’m really pleased with how she turned out. Behold!

She’s supposed to be holding pearls in her hands but I’m not sure if that comes across. I don’t plan on posting every single time I draw something for the colouring book (who am I kidding, I probably will haha) because I’d like there to be some surprises but I’m really happy with how they’re all turning out. It’s like this colouring book was meant to be because I haven’t screwed any of them up so far and I haven’t had to scrap any. I re-inked the fairy I did initially and I like her a lot better now. The hard part is coming up with variations of the girls because I’m working in black and white. I’ve made 3 mermaids before but they all looked different because one was dark-skinned and two were light-skinned and one had a jewel-toned colour scheme and the other two were turquoise. One was blonde, one was blonder, one had brown hair and I’m totally forgetting the big one I did, she had brown hair too but her background was blue and sparkly with fish hooks. Madison said I shouldn’t do backgrounds though, because she says she hates colouring backgrounds, so I’m not.

I mean I basically draw the same four girls in every painting I do but there are variations in colour and hair styles and skin tone and stuff so they all look different. That’s not so easy to replicate in black and white. BUT I’m trying my best and I’m having a good time with it and that’s all that matters.

And with that, I’m gonna go watch Dr. Phool and draw a goth girl. On Sunday I think I need to go to Curry’s to buy some more 08 Microns since I only have one and it’s been getting quite the workout.

Also, Juicy Fruit is delicious.

Oh and I signed up for this because it’s free and my mother told me to.  My new vintage overalls also came today (thanks Charlie!) and they are fucking awesome. They smell like ass though so I have to wash them before I can wear them. The straps also need adjusting and I’m not strong enough to do it so when Blake’s not working I’ll get him to do it.

Okay really going now.

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Wes requested a Valentine cake, so this is what Blake made! All by himself! (Well, from a mix, we don’t do scratch in this house…)

It currently has 9 pink candles in it but I took the pic this afternoon before Blake got candles.

When Blake and I went to the store to get candles (and Caesar salad mix, toaster strudels and Pizza Pochettes [my dinner, breakfast and lunch haha]), he got me my FAVOURITE THING ABOUT VALENTINE’S DAY!!! CINNAMON HEARTS!!!!

The grocery store had a big display of Valentine’s stuff and it took all I had to leave the red velvet Valentine’s cupcakes where they were because technically we had cake at home…but they were so beautiful. I should have brought my camera so you could see. And they had PURPLE ROSES!!! I’d never seen purple before!!! When all that shit goes on sale the day after tomorrow I am gonna CLEAN HOUSE.

I love Valentine’s Day so so much. I got Hello Kitty Valentines at Toys R Us with ~*GLITTER STICKERS*~ yesterday but it’s too late to mail them to anyone. :o( I’ll save them for next year, I guess.

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