Last night Judy watched the kids and we spent 2 grueling hours in a packed Wal*Mart doing the bulk of our Xmas shopping. This year I/we decided fuck it, if you’re a grown up who can buy your own crap, I’m not even gonna bother hazarding a guess as to what you DON’T already have, so (and hopefully none of them are reading this, but I guess it doesn’t matter much if they are) all grown ups in our lives are getting pictures of the kids and gift certificates. Blake got almost all of the gift certificates yesterday on his lunch and only has one more to get today and then we are DONE.

Today Madison and I are going to clean the bathroom, then tomorrow after work Blake is going to vacuum and then my house will be presentable enough for when my mom, her boyfriend John and his son Chris come over to have Xmas with us on Boxing Day. I didn’t get John or Chris anything for Xmas because my mom basically told me not to, which was a great relief because we’re in the poorhouse as it is and my poor Visa is dangerously close to its limit. We decided not to defer our mortgage payment this month, but instead do all of our Xmas shopping on Visa and pay it off when Blake gets his bonus in March. If anything comes up between now & then, like say the car blows up, then we can defer a mortgage payment if need be and have it taken care of.  Now that we’re done our Xmas shopping, the only “big ticket item” we have to worry about is getting all of the animals their shots in January and then getting their township tags.

After we got home from Wal*Mart, Blake made a great steak dinner that I couldn’t eat because right now I’m pretty fucking sick and the only thing keeping me sane is Advil Cold & Sinus. I thought it was just a cold when it hit me on Friday but I’ve had a fever off & on all weekend and yesterday, my whole body aches etc. so I’m putting it more in the flu category. I am SO SCARED to get any of these friggin’ kids sick (ours + Courtney) that I reek of hand sanitizer and there have been no bedtime hugs. I just do not want to deal with 3 sick kids during the 2 & a half week holiday break, especially not if I’m sick myself.  I feel really bad that I felt too bad to eat the dinner Blake made us last night. :o/

We (well he) ate while we watched the Leafs vs Sabres game I started recording while we were at Wal*Mart and when food was done, I got started on wrapping presents. We got Madison this cute makeup bag that’s turquoise patent leather and her first set of makeup. I went way way way overboard in hooking her up with a good variety of stuff (like 6 bottles of nail polish, 3 compacts of eyeshadow…) and I wrapped each thing individually and put it in the bag, with cotton balls on top, zipped it up, then put the bag in a box and then we wrapped the box up. Annoyingly, Blake left a bag on my chair this morning with my hoodie over it which contained makeup removing facewash and mascara that should have gone in the bag with everything else, but I thought all of the cosmetic type stuff was in the bag I was wrapping from…soooooo I wrapped up the mascara & taped it to the box and the facewash I’ll just put in her stocking or something.

And that’s all I got wrapped last night because rapping all of those teeny tiny things took me the entire hockey game and when it was done I was exhausted so I just went to bed. What kills me about wrapping presents is how bad I suck at it. I make all these cute little girls with cute little paper dresses and I’m a whiz with scissors etc. but when I wrap presents, it looks like it was done by Wes. In fact Wes probably does a better job than I do. That’s why every year I usually get Blake to do all the wrapping but this year there won’t be enough time for that so I have to pitch in. While we were at Wal*Mart I bought gift boxes so at least some stuff I won’t have to wrap.

The next thing on my blogging agenda is that my cat is fucking retarded. Every single year for Xmas I buy her a treat or a toy and every single year she wants no part of it. Last year it was a laser pointer, she wanted nothing to do with it. The year before that a mouse or something, I can’t remember but she didn’t want anything to do with it. The year before that I bought her like, 5 different kinds of cat treats but she wouldn’t eat any of them. She just likes her cat food and that’s it. A few weeks ago someone on Facebook linked a YouTube video of all these cats getting stoned on catnip in a garden and I thought HEY WE SHOULD TRY THAT because I’ve never seen a cat actually high on catnip before. So last night, I bought some and it came with a little heart-shaped toy to put the dry catnip in. So I filled it up and got the cat and got her to sniff it and…she wanted no part of it. The toy then split apart and I spilled dry catnip all over my office floor so I picked a bit up and got her to sniff it and no dice. I thought maybe, just maybe, after we went to sleep she’d start getting all stoned on the pile which I left on my office floor for her but when I woke up this morning, it was undisturbed. So I give up. The cat no longer gets anything for Xmas and I guess Alex’s cats have a new toy and a big bag of catnip. Someone remind me next year that my cat sucks and not to get her anything because I know I’ll forget (or maybe it’s denial).

Blake & I weren’t going to get each other anything for Xmas this year due to money, but when we were at Wal*Mart I picked myself up some makeup because I’m running low on the essentials and this was an excuse to replenish my stock. We also happened to be going down the aisle with all the sports stuff and Blake pointed out Leafs jerseys….that were PINK & WHITE. Obviously not regulation, being pink & white, but NHL sanctioned and so Blake got me one for Xmas and I got him a Leafs home jersey (not regulation either). One day I will have a regulation Leafs home jersey to go along with my Leafs 3rd jersey but since they’re over $100, we’ll make due with Wal*Mart jerseys for now.

The rest of the stuff we got was mostly odds & ends, like I was out of incense so I picked up a bunch of that and I wanted to get a plastic “boot mat” for under the dogs’ bowls because they make such a mess and there’s constantly dog food all over my kitchen. (Lucky eats laying down and if Hoover’s eating too, Lucky will pick up his bowl and eat in the living room.) I also wanted to get Madison some yarn because I know she’s getting crochet hooks for Xmas and books about how to crochet, so we picked up a bunch of that too. She also needed pajamas and bras so those went in the cart as well.

We didn’t really get anything for Wes at Wal*Mart because Blake had gotten him stuff at Toys ‘R’ Us yesterday afternoon (Lego, some plastic dragons, I forget what else), but we did pick him up Lego Batman for his DS and Blake had already gotten him a few pairs of pajamas and some clothes so he’s good.

We got my 4 year old sister Raili some Barbies and my 10 month old sister Rachael a set of Little People. We got Courtney next door a DS game of Deal or No Deal. What else? I don’t even remember and you probably don’t care anyway. Long story short, after Blake picks up a couple of things on his lunch today, we are done our Xmas shopping completely. I plan on spending all afternoon today and tomorrow wrapping things and getting the house clean and after that we should be good to go.

Blake called my dad on Sunday and asked him to clean up the garage for the dogs, which he said he’d do and that takes a lot off my mind. What do the dogs get for Xmas? Well my dad hunts and I’m not sure what he hunted for this year, but usually it’s deer and moose and occasionally bear but whatever he hunted for in the fall, he gets the butcher to save him some of the bigger bones for his dogs and mine to have at Xmas.

I also have children’s Gravol to give the dogs before we leave so they don’t puke in the car on the way up. (And yes we called the vet and yes you can give dogs half of a children’s Gravol if they’re the size of mine.)

So I guess that’s it, we’re on track for Xmas. I had more to say but I think I’ll just end things here and start wrapping presents.

We’re supposed to get a crapload of snow in Sunnyland tonight and tomorrow, 10cm each day with whiteout conditions from snowsqualls. To those who don’t live near a giant lake in The Great White North, a snowsquall is kinda like a snowy thunderstorm, minus the thunder & lightning (most of the time…on the odd occasion we get both & it’s pretty cool, lightning in winter is green). Snowsqualls, apparently, are a result of the wind & snow crossing the lake and we’re close enough to Lake Huron (it’s only 10 mins from me) that we get these storms. Often during the winter, our road is closed because of them, although I doubt that’ll be the case tonight (and I also doubt we’re going to get as much snow as they’re saying.)

Anyway, this afternoon the snow looked really cool, it was coming down slowly and softly like a white curtain and I tried to take video of it but I think the framerate on my camera is messed up somehow because when I came back inside and looked the the video, the snow was falling much faster than it had been in person. Regardless, I uploaded it to YouTube anyway and if you care to see it, here it is…it’s only 40 seconds:

This morning I had to get up early to go to the lab and get a blood test done, which had be thrilled beyond belief because needles and veins and blood are just my favouritest things in the whole wide world! Almost as awesome as getting up early in the morning! They chastised me for taking my pills with about 6 mouthfuls of Coke Zero instead of water (some of the pills I take are capsules with powder in them and I find taking them with water really gross because the damn things dissolve REALLY fast and then the capsules feel like they’re stuck in my throat, for some reason this doesn’t happen if I take them with something carbonated) because they claimed it would affect my cholesterol reading. Truthfully, I’m not sure I believe them and they almost wouldn’t do the test but I told them it was my last day to do it, that it was Blake’s last day of vacation and that my doctor’s appointment was on Friday so if I didn’t get it done today I was screwed, so they said they’d do it but to make sure I told my doctor that the cholesterol results might be a little off because I was a VERY BAD GIRL. I’m not really worried about it though.

Remember last year when my GP freaked out about my cholesterol and put me on cholesterol meds? My shrink thought/thinks he was being a bit extreme because apparently my levels weren’t really anything to be worried about, especially since I wasn’t taking the medication that caused the spike anymore and while I’m still taking the cholesterol meds because I figure I might as well, I’m not worried about the 6 mouthfuls of Coke Zero I had this morning skewing my test results one way or the other. I am a little interested to see how my cholesterol looks since I began eating all these eggs though. Oh, did I mention I lost 2 & a half lbs last week? That’s almost 11 lbs total since I started eating eggs for breakfast 10 weeks ago. w00t!

After my blood test, Blake & I went to the post office where there were two packages to pick up. One was an Amazon box for the kids for Xmas from Blake’s mom & Charlie and one was a book called the Artist Trading Card Workshop by Bernie Berlin from Lia! THANK YOU LIA! I flipped through it when I got home, but then I got sidetracked and haven’t had a chance to pick it up again. It looks pretty wicked though, so many different kinds of cards! I plan on spending some time with the book later tonight. Again, thanks Lia, you’re awesome!

And of course, speaking of artist trading cards my first 8 are almost finished. They just need arms and a coat of varnish and then they’ll be done. And I guess when they’re “done” I have to figure out a way to put my name & stuff on the back…honestly, I’ll probably just write it. My printer is slowly but surely dying and there’s no way it would print labels nicely, even if I had any. I could also glue my business card to the backs of them, but I don’t really want 40 “internet people” having my home phone number. I’ll figure it out. Anyway, here’s a group shot I took of the 8 after I took the books off of them that were drying them flat:

Throughout the rest of this post, I’ll show you some of them close up. All images can be clicked to enlarge.

Doing the smaller girls has definitely been a lesson in trial & error. For the 8 that are almost finished, I screwed up just as many because like I said in a previous post, drawing them so small is actually kind of hard. I’m getting the hang of it though, and last night I started a sheet of 15 more, which I’ll work on while these ones’ arms and varnish are drying. Once the 15 I started yesterday are finished, I only have 1 more card with gold sparkles to do and then that stack is finished. The rest either have iridescent or silver sparkles.

While I’ve been doing these, because this is just how my mind works, I’ve been thinking about the ones that I’ll be selling and I’m not sure how I’m going to do that. I know that each card is going to be $30 + $2 shipping, but I don’t know if I’m going to sell them on my site or the site I linked a while back where all they sell is ATCs (or more properly ACEOs) in an Etsy-like setting. That site, from what I’ve been able to tell doesn’t take a cut, so I don’t have the issues with it that I have with Etsy and eBay, but I don’t know how popular it is or if the artists actually sell their cards. Another thing with that site is that you have to scan each individual card and list each one separately, which I guess makes sense, but that’s a lot of extra work and if I can avoid extra work and achieve the same result, I’m more inclined to do that. Selling on my site I have 2 options: scan, post and make a PayPal button for each one or DON’T scan them all, just show examples of each colour and then the card(s) the person gets would be left to my discretion. What do you guys think? I’m thinking that I’ll sell more if I scan each card and post them all with their own PayPal buttons, but I’m torn as to whether I should do that on my own site or on that ACEO site that just sells ACEOs. I suppose I could sell some on my site, like all on one page, and then on that page say that there’s more for sale on the ACEO site and give people the option to buy them there too, if the card they want happens to be there. I really really suck at the business of art, seriously.

Another thing I thought I could do, if I ever sell a freaking painting & actually have some money, is I could matte (mat?) and frame say, 3 cards and sell them as one piece. I have no idea how much framing costs though, so I don’t even know if that would be realistic or if I’d end up ripping myself off in the end because you can only price something like that so high.

Maybe it’s tacky that I think about selling things as I make them, but I’m a really utilitarian person and my grama, aka The Antichrist, is/was an artist’s worst enemy. I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but when I was Wes’ age, I would make things and sell them in my grama’s furniture store and that taught me early that you only get to create things if you’re going to sell them. Even when I was an adult and we were living above her store and I started painting on canvas, I’d show her what I’d created and her response would always be, “Okay so you made it, now what are you going to do with it?” and when I’d tell her I was going to sell it, on the internet, because I knew that was the “right” answer, she’d say “Well who in the hell is going to buy that?” (This was back when I was going through my “fetal phase” and fuck you, grama, I sold every goddamn piece!)

While my mother definitely raised me (at least until I was 15), I spent just about every weekend of my life with my grama and the attitude that you can only create to sell is very deeply ingrained in me. The only thing I’ve painted for myself, in the 8 years I’ve been painting, is the covers of my sketchbooks and even those are extremely hard for me to do because as I’m doing them, I’m thinking that I could be spending that time and those supplies on something that’s going to potentially make money.

And back to the utilitarian thing for a second, I’m not a keeper on “nicknacks”. You will find very very few of these in my home and the ones I do have were given to me as gifts, I would never in a million years buy anything like that for myself because I think they’re a waste of money. They just sit there. Also the only pictures adorning my walls are my failed attempts that I don’t really know what to do with.

It would be lovely to say that I have this fabulous home and studio full of inspirational things, but I really just don’t. It’s the same thing with the way I dress, I mean people expect artists to be these crazy dressers with crazy hair & all that, but I’m pretty plain & boring. Today when I went to the lab, I wore grey trackpants, a brown t-shirt and a grey hoodie. Other times I just would have worn my pajamas because A) I live in sleepwear and B) I just don’t care. If I’m dressing up to go somewhere, whatever I’m wearing is usually pretty simple and usually pretty black. I suppose sometimes my hair, when I dye it crazy colours, is more conducive to the artist stereotype but it’s never really a conscious “oh I’m creative so I must look the part” thing, it’s just “hey I feel like having pink hair this month.”

I was actually reading about this very thing in the book Living the Creative Life a couple of months ago. Most of the artists who were interviewed for that book were like me when it came to dress and a lot of them said that they’d rather put their creative energy into the things they created than into looking the part of the “creative artist”. I couldn’t agree with that more, obviously, and it made me feel a lot better hearing it from other artists. I mean, why the hell wouldn’t I paint in my pajamas? I have nowhere to be, no one to impress and y’know what? I’m gonna get paint on them! And it won’t matter!

So there ya have it, my take on living the creative life.

Something else I’ve been doing this week is taking pictures and video for the background tutorial I keep being asked for. Today was the last step. I’m still not going to post it until after the new year because with Xmas & Buttercup & everything else I have to do these days, the tutorial is fairly low on my priority list. And actually, in writing this down, I’ve realized that I have one more picture to take for it and then all that’s left to do is edit everything together and make it into a post.

What I will tell you about it though, is that the background I made for the tutorial is the same as the black & gold ATCs on this page and the girl that’s going to be going on the painting is going to be a BEE GIRL wearing a tutu. I haven’t drawn her yet and I’m not sure if the tulle I have is tea-stainable, but she’s in my mind and I’m really excited about her. Again though, I’m not going to start working on her until after Xmas when things have died down a bit.

As per usual, all things Xmas have me stressed out beyond belief. I know I’ve explained this before, but every year for the past few years, we’ve gone up north to my dad & step-mom’s Xmas Eve, stay there Xmas Day, have Xmas dinner across the road at my uncle Paul’s house and then have to drive home Xmas night to do it all over again with my mother on Boxing Day. As I also explained in a previous post, last year my dad really disrespected my dogs by not cleaning out the garage and it upset me quite a bit. I didn’t sleep at ALL on Xmas Eve because I was worried about the dogs and felt sorry for them, only having the space of a blanket to lay down or move around on that wasn’t flooded or full of my dad’s van.

This year, to avoid all that, the original plan was to have my neighbours come and let the dogs in & out while we were away but as we get closer to actually having to do it I’m having a hard time dealing with it. Agoraphobia is the fear of the outside world, yes, but part of it, at least for me, is a fear of letting people into my inside world and the idea of people in my house while I’m gone really bothers me. I mean, I trust Wayne & Judy to look after the dogs, but I don’t know if I trust them not to take a tour of my house and inspect how clean my toilet is.

Last week I was really considering staying home with the dogs and not going to my dad’s at all because honestly, that sounds like the perfect Xmas to me – no Xmas at all – but even that stressed me out because like it or not, there are all of these societal pressures put on people during Xmas that you either have to adhere to or people will think you’re a shitty person. If I don’t go up north for Xmas, I’m a shitty daughter and a shitty mother (even though my kids couldn’t care less if I was there or not) and it’s going to look weird when they go over to Paul’s for Xmas dinner and I’m not there. People are going to expect Blake to explain and there really isn’t an explanation that would make anyone happy or us to seem less weird (when they already think of us as pretty fucking weird).

So after a lot of inner debate, the original plan stands, that the entire Crittenden family, those on 2 legs and 4 (well, minus Pixel who gets a nice vacation from all of us for Xmas), are going up north for Xmas and Blake’s going to call my dad personally and tell him (in nicer terms than I’m gonna put it here) that if that goddamn garage isn’t fit for MY dogs, we’re turning around and coming home. Blake also called the vet today to see if you can give dogs Gravol and yes, yes you can (1/4 of a children’s one, apparently), so this year we won’t be pulling over on some back road to clean up Lucky’s vomit with a box of Kleenex because that’s all that’s in the car.

To make matters worse, ALL of our Xmas shopping is being done on Thursday’s paycheque because we haven’t been able to afford it until now. And even then, and I’m sure Blake will love me for posting this publicly, we’re looking at deferring this month’s mortgage payment to even have Xmas this year because we simply don’t have the money to give the kids the kind of Xmas they’ve enjoyed previous years. Also, everyone who isn’t under the age of 12 this year is getting gift certificates because I just don’t know what the hell to buy anyone. When I’ve asked, I’ve been told gift certificates, so that’s what everyone’s getting. Our kids are getting clothes because they need them and we can’t afford to do “fun stuff” and clothes, so that’s just the way it’s going to have to be. My sister Raili  (aged 4) is getting Barbies and my sister Rachael (aged 10 months) is getting Little People because that’s what was asked for.

Also, I don’t even know for sure what the hell is going on with my mother this year and I’ve been too afraid to ask. The “tradition” has been that she comes here Boxing Day and we do presents and have dinner, but with her moving in with John, first of all, I don’t know if he and his son will be coming (which means extra gifts/extra food) and second of all, now that my mother has an actual HOME, she may want to start doing Boxing Day there like we’ve done for most of my life. The thing is though, with going up north and all the bullshit associated with it, we don’t want to have to do more traveling on Boxing Day and if she comes here, I hope she’s fine with pizza or Chinese food because I’m NOT leaving halfway through Xmas dinner at Paul’s house to make it back home in time for me to get enough sleep to cook Xmas dinner the next day for my mother.

Have I mentioned how much I fucking hate Xmas? Seriously, it kills me. I wish it was never invented. I wish I could sleep through the whole thing. I wish I could stay home, with my dogs, watching bad movies and pretending it wasn’t happening.

On a more positive note, did anyone see the Leafs game last night? Was that fucking beautiful or what? My throat is still sore from cringing/yelling at the TV.

And with that, I’m out and you’re probably thinking “thank god” because this post is 3,100 words long.

PS. My review of the new Sims expansion is up on Buttercup for those who were waiting for it.

PPS. I stand corrected about the snow. I just went outside and we got at least 15cm in the time it took me to write this post.

And I don’t give a damn if you don’t like me
Cause’ I don’t like you cause you’re not like me

- Shut Up by the Bloodhound Gang

Sometimes I don’t blog because I don’t really have anything to say. I figure it’s better to just say nothing than to ramble on about the weather or the local sports team, don’t you agree?

Honestly, not a whole hell of a lot has been happening in Sunnyland. As I mentioned in Live Journal (which I update much more frequently than my site, FYI) I’ve lost almost 9 lbs in 5 weeks and the only thing I’m doing differently is eating eggs for breakfast every day. Apparently protein within 2 hours of waking up kickstarts your metabolism and causes your body to “run” faster, burning more calories and fat. It appears to be working for me and at the rate I’m losing weight, if this keeps up anyway and doesn’t plateau on me, I should be back to my normal weight by my birthday (March 1st). This is happy happy news.

In less happy news, Blake did not get the job he applied for 2 weeks ago, which means that our dream house is probably not going to happen. After Xmas is over with, though, we’re going to be working on getting our house ready to sell because the second Blake gets a position in Scarborough, it’s going up and the search for another house will begin. We’re still going to look for a house in Cookstown because we really like the town, but basically most of Southern Ontario is a possibility so among all the little towns, I’m sure we’ll find something just as perfect as the house we were looking at. And hey, who knows? Maybe the house in Cookstown will still be on the market by the time we get our ducks in a row. It’s been on the market for over a year and keeps dropping in price, so who knows how this will all play out? Anyway, I’m not worried about it or bummed out or anything. Everything works out in the end.

I haven’t been painting. Basically, I have a very small house and until I sell some of the paintings that are already finished, I don’t really have much room to create any more. The one I’ve been working on over the past couple of months (that I’m not happy with) keeps getting moved from the coffee table in my office to the washing machine and back again about 20 times per week because it’s constantly in the way. I think to get that one done, I’m going to have to take a trip to Michael’s and while I do have a little money set aside for that, we just haven’t had the opportunity and I haven’t had the desire to actually go. It’s just discouraging to have 8 finished pieces up for sale and no buyers. Not that I create art just to sell it but I definitely get inspired and I stop feeling like I’m crap from people buying. I know it has more to do with the economy than my worth as an artist, but when people have said negative things about you as far as the latter, it’s easy for those little negative thoughts to take over and the only cure I’ve found for those thoughts is a sale.

Xmas is going to be here soon and I don’t even want to think about it, but the neighbours keep bringing it up because they actually like Xmas (wtf, crazy people) so it’s been on my mind. I’m just not looking forward to driving 2 hours to my dad’s house on Xmas Eve, being bored out of my skull up there for most of Xmas Day and then having to leave before dessert is served after Xmas dinner because we have a 2 hour drive back home and I have to get up early to cook the next day for my mother (and this year, probably my mother’s boyfriend and his son). Also this year we’re not taking the dogs up north with us and while I thought that would cause me less stress (the neighbours are going to feed them and let them out because they’ll be home), I think it might be causing me more stress because I don’t like people in my house. At the same time, last year I was so pissed off at my dad because the dogs have to stay in the garage when they’re up there and he didn’t clean out the garage for them. They only had the space of a large blanket to move or lay down on, the rest of the garage was full of a van or flooded. My dogs are a part of my family and my dad knows this and it really bugged the shit out of me that he couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t take the time to accommodate them. I didn’t sleep most of Xmas Eve last year because I was worried that my dogs were unhappy, and rightly so, they practically had to sleep in a puddle.

But I should probably not even worry about it. Wayne & Judy will take care of my dogs as if they were their own. They know how much my dogs mean to me and everything will be fine. I just worry, especially when Lucky’s separation anxiety is so bad that he’s been known to break through windows trying to find us. He seems to be fine as long as Hoover’s here, but I’ve never left them alone in the house as long as we’ll be gone over Xmas so I can’t help but worry that we’ll come home to a broken window and no Lucky. I’m thinking I might keep the dogs in my office over night just so that won’t happen but I can’t figure out if that’s cruel or not. (It *is* a big office…) I dunno.

The good thing about Xmas is that I’ll finally be meeting my youngest sister, Rachael. I think She’s 9 months or so now and I’ve still never met her! I have to start working on a painting for her for Xmas like the ones I did for Raili and Madison last year.

I got an e-mail from the Ontario Arts Council about applying for a $5000 arts grant but I deleted it. I got turned down last year because I could only come up with $1500 worth of things I’d do with the money and I can’t even fathom what I’d do with $5000. They want a detailed, itemized list of your plans and I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I run my art business on a budget of like, $100 every 3 months (if I’m lucky), $5000 would last me YEARS. But they don’t want to hear that, they want to hear that you’re going to do fabulous things and spend that money within a year and I’m just not capable of doing that…yet. I’m doing these girls for right now but really, I haven’t found my niche as an artist yet, I’m still working on that, and until I do, I can’t really plan for that kind of money. I mean, I couldn’t even usethat money to like, outfit my “studio space” because my “studio space” is basically a 2nd living room where my only work space is my desk, which needs clearing off every time I start a project because it gets used for daily stuff, and the coffee table. There’s an elliptical in here and a million laundry baskets because the dryer is in here too and there just isn’t room for something like a canvas rack or anything like that. So whatever, I’m not applying for the grant this year, or any other year, until I have a proper studio space and have justification for $5000.

Wrapping up…a few weeks ago, Blake and Judy taught Wayne and I how to play euchre and now I’ve become a euchre fiend. Tonight we’re going over to Wayne & Judy’s to play and I’m really looking forward to cleaning Blake & Wayne’s clocks.

So that’s life right now. Not good, not bad, just…life.

I’m up and I’m thinking.

Maybe because my mom’s moving, moving’s just on my mind. Or maybe not because moving is almost always on my mind.

Blake’s job in Barrie isn’t the most secure job in the company. Layoffs are happening left, right and center and we worry constantly that he’s going to get the axe. For those who don’t know, he works for a national telecom in the Barrie office as the on-site IT guy. His primary job, and this is my interpretation of it because I don’t totally understand all the things he does, is to fix computers and site. If someone needs a mouse, they come see him. If someone needs 50 computers moved from one end of the call center to the other end, he gets out his trolley and does it. If someone needs Powerpoint on their computer, he takes ahold of their computer remotely and installs it for them. (I’m only using Powerpoint as as example because it’s the only software he installs where I actually know what it does, heh. Also there are “at-home agents” out of the Barrie office and he services and troubleshoots their machines, as well as installs software for them.) But this is probably only about 5% of his job, from what I understand. The other 95% is helping teams across Canada do what they do which is stuff on a nerd level I can’t even explain. Database and Oracle crap. Fixing problems that some teams themselves haven’t been able to solve, problems that he doesn’t even technically have clearance for but he knows the answers so they  come to him anyway.

Technically, his team is in Scarborough, which is an awful, filthy place just north-east of Toronto, so their stuff comes first, but honestly, just from talking to him after work, it seems like he does much more stuff for the teams out west…and gets paid the least for doing so. It’s possible that the powers that be would decide that they don’t need an on-site IT person in Barrie and just send someone up from Scarborough once a week to change tapes (I don’t know what that means but it has to be done once a week, something to do with the servers) and while they’re there, do the on-site grunt-work. The at-home agents can be serviced remotely. This is what I mean by his job not exactly being the most secure.

The other thing is that in his position, I kinda think he’s making all he’s probably ever going to make. And with every minor raise they give him in his current position, that actually makes his job less secure. Or at least this is how I understand things to be by what he’s told me.

As a result of all of this, he’s been keeping his options open and networking with people within the company to hopefully get a better position…somewhere. The thing is, as I said he works with teams all across Canada and the teams that he’d like to be a part of are mostly out west. Working for a large Canadian telecom means that where things stand right now, we can literally choose where we want to live – anywhere in the country – and then he can apply to be on the team located there. Our other option is for him to physically join the Scarborough team and we move to one of the surrounding suburbs, which just so happen to be the towns I grew up in (and all but fled from when we moved here).

I’m grateful that we have a house. I’m proud that we worked hard together to sacrificed and save up money for this house and were homeowners before most of our friends. (Actually, now that I think about it, all of them and in my case, I was a homeowner before the age of 30.) But the thing is, I don’t like our house. It’s a functional house, it’s a roof over our heads, it is not the house I want to spend the rest of my life in. All of our bedrooms are so small that they fit a bed and a dresser and that’s pretty much it. We have to keep our towels in Wes’ closet because there’s nowhere else to put them. There’s vinyl siding on the biggest wall of my office because it used to be an exterior wall. Our kitchen disgusts me on a daily basis. All of our baseboards are made out of compressed cardboard and we had to remove the ones in the bathroom because they BLEW UP with moisture because the fan doesn’t do shit for ventilation. There is mold on the bathroom ceiling because they didn’t use mold-resistant paint in there. Our bathroom needs gutting in the worst way. Literally the only two places to put the cat litter in this house is in the bathroom, where it makes a mess (and is currently) or between the furnace and the dryer (where she won’t use it because of noise). The washing machine is in a hallway that serves as the “laundry room”, while the dryer is by the back door in my office. The fenced-in backyard is nice & all, but the chain-link fences – ours and both of our neighbours’ – are literally collapsing under the weight of annual snowdrifts. Our driveway needs repaving and re-tarring (???) because it has dips and grooves that makes it a real whore to get out of in the winter no matter how well you shovel.

I could go on for like, 3 more paragraphs. The fact is, this house was a fixer-upper when we bought it, we’ve fixed things up here & there but since we don’t intend on being here very long and don’t really have the money, we haven’t done a whole lot with it. As I said, it’s a functional house, it’s not a pretty house with any nice architectural features. It’s a white box with a bunch of boxes inside it and badly outdated everything. This is not the house we’re spending the rest of our lives in.

The original plan, before learning that Blake’s position could magically go “poof” at any moment, was to stay in Elmvale. We were hoping that in his current position, he’d be able to make enough money for us to sell this house and move into either one of the nice brick Victorians downtown or one of the nice old farmhouses outside of town. But now we’re thinking that looking elsewhere is the better idea.

If he got a position in Scarborough, we have a lot of choices as far as where we could move. There’s always Stouffville, where I grew up, which would be about a half hour to 40 minute commute, but the property taxes are really high there as the town grows into a city so living in town would be an impossibility. That leaves the smaller towns surrounding it which adds more time onto his commute. There’s Uxbridge, where Madison and I lived for the first 2 years of her life, but my fear with that one is that Madison’s father has family there and none of them are mentally stable and that could cause problems for us. Same with Port Perry. That’s my triumvirate. I would like to live in any 3 of those places but they all come with their own problems.

There’s a tiny town (village?) outside of Newmarket and Aurora called Snowball that we’ve been keeping an eye on because his commute would only be about half an hour and it’s in the middle of nowhere with plenty of pre-1930’s farmhouses. Not to mention the fact that it lays within roads that I know and would potentially drive on and is close enough to Stouffville that I could go into town and do stuff rather than sitting at home. But the thing is, we’d have to decide where we’re moving to before he applied for a position in Scarborough.

The other teams he could potentially get on are in Alberta and British Columbia. I really don’t want to move to Alberta. Alberta is full of redneck Conservatives and by all accounts, I would not enjoy my life there should that be our final destination. Alberta would always make me miss home (I’ve lived within 2 hours of Toronto my entire life) and I see absolutely no benefit whatsoever to living there. They have worse winters than here, less sunshine, less everything.

Now BC, I would move there. I would love to be near the ocean (as much as I think salt water is gross), I would love the fact that it barely snow there, I would love the fact that they get more sunshine than here and there are certain communities that I wouldn’t mind living in. But the thing with BC is that the cost of living is much higher there than here and I’m not sure how that would work out even if Blake got a raise. We were looking at houses there last night on Realtor.ca and as things stand now, we can’t afford any of them. And the main community I would like to live in, called Salt Spring, which is an island, is too far of a commute for where Blake would be working, so that’s out.

And again, I don’t want to move until we find what I’m referring to as our “forever home”. I don’t want to bounce around and never set down roots. I want a fucking house that I care about enough to actually paint and fix up because we’re going to be there for the rest of our goddamn lives. I only want to move one more time – ever.

And then there’s our little issue of not agreeing on where to live. I want to live in the middle of nowhere, Blake wants to live in a neighbourhood. His argument is that a neighbourhood is better for the kids because they’ll be able to walk to their friends’ houses and if we live in the middle of nowhere, we’ll constantly have to drive them to their friends houses. Well, the thing is, we live in a neighbourhood now and while there are 3 girls on the street that Madison plays with on the weekends, none of them are her friends at school. And Wes has no friends on our street. So even though we live in a neighbourhood RIGHT NOW, we still have to drive both kids to see their actual friends from school. This is what happens in Ontario, no matter where you live because kids get bused in from all of the rural communities and your kids make friends with who they make friends with. They don’t usually become best friends with a kid on their street just because they’re there.

The other thing is that I want LAND. You don’t get LAND in a neighbourhood, you get a postage stamp sized backyard and that’s it.

So I’ve pretty much won that battle and we’re looking at houses in more rural areas in every province we’re looking at.

I’m just sick of feeling like I’m waiting for life to begin. It’s hard to be a homemaker when you hate your fucking home, when you hate your fucking town and when you know that none of what you have right now is permanent. The kids function, Blake functions, but I so obviously do not thrive here and I think it’s time to set the wheels in motion for change to happen before Blake loses his job and we’re fucked and before I lose my goddamn mind again.

The fact is, I’ll never have friends here. Yes I hang out with Wayne & Judy and I like them and everything, but they’re much older than us and while yes, they are friends, we wouldn’t invite them over to have any political conversations ever. We wouldn’t invite them over, period, because they like their house better because they can smoke in it. Blake has friends at his work but I have this weird thing where I’m not comfortable mixing work people with our life outside of work. I don’t think that’s right. So they’re his friends and he goes to their parties.

I…have no one. I have Wayne & Judy and the internet. That is my social life. And that’s all I’m ever going to have because we don’t fit in here. Yeah we have Ronny & Alex too, but I see them so rarely, they might as well be internet friends.

So it’s time for change, but I don’t even know where to begin.

There are three things right across the road from our house: a small park with swings, a small slide and teeter-totters, the Trans Canada Trail (which is mostly used as a snowmobile trail that conveniently ends at the titty bar in Phelpston) and fields and fields of nothing that are going to soon be a subdivision full of homes worth $250,000+. 300 of them.

Last week we took the dogs down the trail and into the fields just to see what was there and to get out of the house. I of course, took pictures and these are the ones I like best.

THE END.

As Warren Ellis would say, “Good morning, sinners”, here’s this morning’s playlist, which the “I don’t like rap” crowd won’t be too fond of, but meh, whatcha gonna do? Can’t please everyone and this is honest to god what I woke up to this morning. My neighbours, by the way, kinda hate me sometimes.

So, last night I got thinking some more about this Nissan Cube thing. I’ve made two posts now where I’ve made the claim that winning the Cube would help me in my immersion therapy, but I haven’t really explained my immersion therapy or how the Cube would fit in. If I were the judges, I probably wouldn’t want to award the prize to an agoraphobe, or at least I’d be reluctant to, because they want these Cubes driven and seen and well, an agoraphobe by definition wouldn’t do that, right?

I can’t find the link to the official rules at the moment, but if I recall correctly, the winners of Hypercube won’t be receiving their Cubes until July, which actually fits perfectly into my immersion therapy timeline. So perfectly that it’s actually a little eerie in that “sign from God” kinda way. (Dramatic, I know, seriously this seems more & more like a fate thing the further I get into it.)

Anyway, here’s my immersion therapy timeline, as set out by myself and which will be adhered to with the help of a caseworker:

March: Going to the end of the driveway every day to get the paper until it’s no big deal. Well, it’s no big deal anymore, so I’m already ahead of the game there.

April: Once it gets warmer, like the second week of April or so, my task is to harness my dog Lucky, whom I got to be an emotional support animal, and walk to the end of the block and come back until it’s no big deal anymore. Once that becomes no big deal, Lucky and I will walk to the end of the next block and come back until that’s not a big deal anymore. Which should bring us into May…

May: About 3 blocks away from my house is a park with an ampitheatre and at the back of it is a long trail that leads to another park in a neighbourhood. Halfway between the two parks, down the trail, is a bench and a picnic table. My goal for May is to walk to the first park with Lucky and back until it’s no big deal. Then make it to the bench and the picnic table and back until it’s no big deal. May is also the month I start working in my garden, which is extremely difficult for me due to being so exposed, so that’s another goal, to be able to work on my garden during the week, all by myself.

Also during the month of May, Blake is going to take me out so I can relearn how to drive. As I’ve tried to explain in previous posts, I have a licence, I used to be a good, confident driver, I just haven’t done it in so long I don’t feel like I have control of the car and I’m afraid to go more than 50 km/h.

June: More of me & Lucky (and maybe Hoover too) going to the park, this time taking a book and/or a picnic lunch with us and actually staying in the park for half an hour to start and ideally increasing that time to up to an hour. June is also for testing my own limits by either taking my son (6) with me to the trail in the park to take pictures or Lucky to the grocery store in town (the park is about halfway between my house and the trail) to buy dog treats. (Grocery stores are really hard for me.)

I’m also supposed to be (theoretically) walking to both the library and the post office but I probably won’t,  especially if I win a Cube, which I’ll get to in a minute.

June also means more driving immersion therapy with Blake and because I used to actually enjoy driving, I think by the end of June I’ll be golden in that respect.  Should I win a Cube, as long as I stick to my plan, I’m fairly confident that it’ll be me driving it off the lot. (Except I might chicken out because I KNOW how to drive our car and our Nissan dealership is in the south end of Barrie, which means driving on the 400 which I’m not sure I want to do in a car I’ve never driven before.)

July: I’m home with the kids, making my therapy a little different. I also may be the proud new owner of a new Cube, which would also alter my therapy. So I’ll give you both scenarios.

Immersion therapy in July without a Cube: The kids and I (and Lucky who’s technically undergoing immersion therapy himself for separation anxiety)  walk to the library every two weeks to either get books or return books. The kids and I walk to the 2nd park down the trail in the neighbourhood, again, with Lucky and maybe Hoover too.  (I’m not sure I can walk both of them, that still remains to be seen.) The kids and I are supposed to walk to the post office and the grocery store, but I don’t foresee us doing either because I get and send a lot of large packages and we won’t be able to carry them home, so what’s the point when Blake can just get it all before or after work or on Saturdays? And the same thing applies to the grocery store too, I mean why go if we’re on foot? It’s not like we can actually do groceries and it’s a long walk and it’ll be hot and we’re not gonna wanna lug home bags of food.

I think July and August without a Cube is only going to be the library every two weeks and the park when and if I get up before 2pm. (In the summer I tend to do most of my sleeping during the day because there’s no reason to be awake during the day and the nights are cooler and kid-free so I can actually get stuff done.)

Immersion therapy in July WITH a Cube: The kids, the dogs and I could go to the post office and actually bring home and mail large packages. The kids and I could actually go to the grocery store and – get this – buy the week’s groceries so Blake doesn’t have to fit that into his busy schedule anymore. The kids and I could actually go to the variety store and rent movies on rainy days. I could take the kids to McDonalds for lunch (every now & then…I kinda have a hate on for McD’s and feeding it to my kids, but we could do it!).

Night time drives around the general vicinity of Elmvale by myself in the Cube with nothing but my thoughts and my iPod. And maybe my friend Jesse who lives close enough to still be in Elmvale, but not close enough to walk to his house.

I could go to the GARDEN CENTRE. Holy crap!

During July, I think sticking to our little town of Elmvale would be best. I won’t know until it is July if that assessment will be correct, but as per my own timeline, I probably won’t be ready until August to do the bigger stuff.

August: Again, home with the kids.

Immersion therapy in August without a Cube: Pretty much the same as July. In fact, I can’t think of anything that would be different than July. Elmvale’s a small place with only so many options when you’re on foot. McDonald’s is too far for a 6 year old to walk to in that kind of heat, so is the store with the movies (which we’d want to do on rainy days anyway, so no walking). So I guess it’s just the library and the park still, except in a much hotter month.

Immersion therapy in August WITH a Cube: This would be a big month. By August I would be used to how the Cube drives and I would be more confident driving it. This means I could drive to two very important places: Barrie and Wasaga Beach.

Along with all the stuff I outlined in July for us to do, the kids and I could go to Wasaga Beach for the day on a Wednesday, pack a lunch and stay all day rather than sweat in this heatbox of a house. We could do this every single day if we wanted to. (As long as I sell enough paintings to keep us in parking money!) We could also drive to Barrie so I could buy art supplies at Curry’s and Micheal’s and guess what happens to be in the same industrial park as Micheal’s? STARBUCKS, which we could pick up and bring Blake at work on our way out of Barrie.

Something else I could do in August is go to the Wal*Mart in Wasaga Beach and do the back-to school shopping in the middle of the week, with the kids, so we don’t have to go on weekends with Blake when it’s a ZOO.  Also? If I did win a Cube and this all wasn’t just me dreaming, I could even do our groceries at Wal*Mart where things are cheap instead of Elmvale’s IGA which is tiny, never has what I want and charges much more than anywhere else. Being a family living on one income, this is a huge deal.

And know what else I could do in August? Well for one, I could drive to Barrie and pick my friend Alex up, who doesn’t drive, and we could either hang out at my house (and I could drive her home!) or we could have adventures. We could go to the drive-in as there happens to be one in both Barrie and Elmvale. Or we could go to the regular movies. OMG I JUST REALIZED! I could take my KIDS to the movies! I’ve never done that before!

God, I’m so excited by these possibilities I’m on the verge of crying.

September: At this point I don’t think it would even really be immersion therapy for the agoraphobia. If all goes as planned and I actually win a Cube, by September I won’t be a textbook agoraphobe, but I’ll no doubt still have generalized anxiety about talking to people and being out in public, so I’m still going to call it immersion therapy.

If I don’t win a Cube, my progress won’t be anywhere near what’s outline here. It’ll be slow, less fun and more painful. :o/ I won’t be driving to Barrie or Wasaga Beach. I probably won’t be driving anywhere.

Immersion therapy in September without a Cube: The same as June, except I may be so frustrated at doing the same thing over & over & over again it’s quite possible I’ll start not leaving the house again. One thing I do want to do though once the kids are back in school is photograph Elmvale. I want to show the world the main street that’s dying a slow death, but has so much potential. I want to show the whole world the alley beside the bank where kids sneak smokes. I want to show the shed behind the hair salon where feral cats live and have kittens. I want to show everyone our seasonal homeless man who looks like Santa in the off-season.  I won’t be ready in April, May or June to do any of that and I can’t really do it with kids in tow and by October I risk the possibility of losing my light, so September it’ll have to be.

Immersion therapy in September WITH a Cube: Again, I could actually do the groceries. At Wal*Mart. I could drive to Barrie to get my art supplies and with the cargo space in the back of the Cube, I could easily fit in bigger canvasses than our current car can hold and that means growth as an artist, which excites me. I could drive to Barrie and have lunch with Blake on his lunch break. (Hey that rhymed! Uh, sort of!) I could take the dogs to one of the private beaches along Wasaga that I know about and take pictures. Hell, I could just drive around with the dogs and take pictures all over the place. I love September light.

I could start my Christmas shopping. I could also feel confident in submitting art to local art shows because I have a way (besides mail, which is more expensive than driving, especially with the Cube’s fuel efficiency) to get my art where it needs to be and I have a way to actually GET to the art shows and take whatever date I want to take with me. Not that I don’t love Blake or anything, but it would be cool if Alex or Jesse could be my +1 sometimes.

But most importantly, in September? I can actually pick my kids and the neighbour’s kid up from school so they don’t have to walk almost 2 km home and get home at 4:30pm (an hour after school ends) because there’s no bus for them.

October: It’s gonna start getting colder and darker that’ll make walking places harder.

Immersion therapy without a Cube: Honestly, I don’t see a lot going on. I’m definitely going to be sick of the park by then and it’ll be cold and I won’t see a reason to leave the house. I think without a car, my progress will flat out stop at this point and resume again, pretty much from scratch, in the spring. Blake’s still going to have to do the groceries, he’s still gonna have to drive home from Barrie to pick me & the kids up, drive back to Barrie so I can buy art supplies and then we get home late enough that it’s 8:30 by the time we’re eating dinner. He’s still going to have to try & fit in getting the mail and mailing my paintings before or after work. The kids are gonna have to walk home from school. And I’m gonna be stuck in the house being miserable because there’s not much of an alternative and I’ll know that it’s going to be another 6 months of it.

Immersion therapy WITH a Cube: Along with groceries and mail and day to day stuff, I could take the kids to buy their Halloween costumes. I could also take them to Rounds Ranch to pick out their pumpkins. If accepted to Touched By Fire again this year (an art show in Toronto at the Gladstone Hotel), I may just have the bravery required to drive my own pieces down to Toronto.

Something else that never even crossed my mind until now is that starting in September, Blake won’t have to take vacation days to take me to my shrink, doctor or dentist appointments anymore. he won’t have to take vacation days to do the same with the kids, I can take them.  These are all huge things.

So I guess I’ll end this at October because it’s just going to get repetitious beyond then, but my point is that, if I win this Nissan Cube, it’ll really change my life and get me back on track to being a productive member of our family again, not to mention society as a whole. There’s no better incentive than freedom and that’s what the Cube represents to me. I just turned 30, I’m heading into a new chapter of life, a creative, productive chapter and it just makes sense to have a new ride that fits that new life.  The Cube is it.

(X-posted to Live Journal)

This is not a good time of year for me and like clockwork, I find myself particularly mentally fucked these days. My shrink, whom I saw yesterday, has upped my medications slightly to help compensate, but I’m not optimistic that it’s going to make a difference.

My mind is all over the place and I’m angry with myself. I just want to shrivel up and cease to be.

You may recall that part of my plan for immersion therapy (to overcome agoraphobia) was to get my dogs harnesses, Lucky in particular because he has separation anxiety and I can’t leave him tied up outside of stores or anything because he slips his collar and runs away, causing me more anxiety and the whole point of having him with me is to relieve anxiety. ANYWAY…the harnesses are here, in Canada, thanks to my friend Ronny whose address I had to use to order them because this particular kind was only available from a company that doesn’t ship to Canada and they’ve been here for oh…about three weeks now. And I’ve known this. And Blake can pick them up from Alex’s house at any time, but I haven’t told him to and figured we’d get them the next time we see Alex & Ronny because what’s the hurry? And honestly, I think I’m stalling on picking them up because I’m afraid of what the harnesses mean. The harnesses mean that I have to take my dogs outside in the big scary world for a walk. The harnesses mean I no longer have an excuse not to, except for fear. Just writing about the harnesses and walking the dogs makes me feel sick to my stomach. And I’m mad at myself because getting the harnesses and using the dogs as part of my therapy was my own idea, I paid for Lucky, who was to be my “emotional support animal”, with my very own money made from selling paintings.

I also can’t seem to create and I think the reason why is in the same vein. My plan was to paint and sell paintings all winter and save the money for the spring so I had money to take with me on outings, such as going to the grocery store with Lucky to buy him treats, or working up to going out for lunch or going to the dollar store (which actually closed a couple of weeks ago) and maybe even eventually working up to being able to drive the car to take the kids strawberry picking in July so we can make strawberry jam. But I’m stuck, I can’t paint and I think the reason why is because I’m afraid to. Paintings means money and money means, again, that I have one less obstacle to overcome in order to begin my immersion therapy and I am so pathetically afraid of immersion therapy I’m frozen in place. I can’t do anything.

All I do these days is eat (which is a friggin’ joke due to this high cholesterol/borderline diabetes shit), sleep (a lot and sometimes not at all) and think and it’s probaly that thinking that’s causing all of this trouble. I can’t paint, I can’t even journal. I feel like I have no outlet because letting it all out means admitting things I don’t want to admit, like the fact that I’m terrified of getting better or even trying to get better.

And I’m sad. I am so fucking sad. I’ve been in Suzi Blu’s chatroom the last few nights talking about my past and my current issues and I think I’m in mourning for the person I used to be. I mean, 6 years ago I was a single mom, driving to Toronto on major highways in my own car to get to college, managing my own money, doing my own groceries, paying my own bills. I’ve been on my own since I was 15 years old, taking care of myself and then eventually, my kid. Up until 6 years ago I was a force to be reckoned with, totally independant and absolutely fearless. I met every challenge dead in the eye, with bravery, and succeeded in everything I tried. And I wasn’t afraid to try!

And then I married Blake and it was like…before I married him, I couldn’t afford to lose my shit because if I did, i was fucked, but marrying Blake meant that I didn’t have to carry all of these burdens alone and I could finally relax. Except I ended up going from one extreme to another and maybe that’s just my bipolar nature, I dunno. There has to be a balance though, right? Somehow? I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to live in this world anymore. I’m lost. And that scares the hell out of me. I don’t know how to fix me.

And worse (and I realize I’m starting a lot of paragraphs here with “and”) I don’t know what kind of life I want to live. I’m lucky in that I’m pretty much free to choose, but the thing is I can’t. I don’t know what my perfect day would be. I have next to no direction beyond the walls of this house.

And something I’ve realized is that, living outside of the real world for so long, I’ve lost my sense of time and that just makes things infinitely worse. Like, say I wanted to go downtown in my little town for lunch. I don’t know what time I’d have to wake up or how long it would take me to get ready to go. And I don’t know how long it would take to walk to the restaurant and I don’t know how long it would take to get my food and eat my food and walk back. And I don’t know what time I’d have to leave the house to do all of this so I’d be back home in time to be there when the kids comes home from school. I can’t even begin to estimate. All of those steps appear to be an all day affair in my best estimation, even though I know that’s wrong.

And it’s so frustrating because I used to be able – nay, I had to – fit so much into my day before when I was a productive-ish member of society. I used to have no choice but to fine tune my time management skills, especially when I was going to school for advertising.

Yesterday on my way to my shrink’s appointment, I saw our town’s new homeless man for the first, and probably the last, time and I wanted to scream and cry and kick my feet because there’s a version of me inside me somewhere who would have told Blake to pull over and that version of me would have given the man whatever was in my wallet and asked if I could take his picture. God, you should have seen him…he was like the battered soul of Santa Claus in the off-season and the light was perfect. I’m in serious mourning that I missed that shot, I’ve been kicking myself ever since. Hell, the version of me who would do that would probably also be able to drive myself to my own shrink appointments, if we had a car for me to do so.

Last night while watching The Daily Show, I decided, y’know, I want to be the kind of person who reads the newspaper. I used to really like reading the newspaper when I went with my aunt to the coffee shop every day, even if the paper did happen to be the Toronto Sun when I prefer the Star. So, in trying to define the kind of days I want to have and the kind of life I want to live, I decided that starting my day by maybe eating something (which I don’t normally do) and reading the newspaper – or at least parts of it – was something I’d maybe like to do. And then I got thinking, the first step of my immersion therapy is supposed to be going to the end of the driveway and back every day until it’s not a big deal anymore. If you’ve been following my blog, I was assigned that particular duty in, oh, September or so, and thus far I haven’t made it out there. And the reason I haven’t made it out there is because I feel like an idiot walking to the end of my driveway for no real reason and I feel like the people in the cars passing by are all wondering what the fuck this crazy person is doing at the end of her driveway. But if I had a REASON for going to the end of the driveway, I could probably do it. Like say, to get the paper. So I went to The Toronto Star’s website and found their subscription page and did the math and a 7 day subscription to the paper is like, $233.00 plus tax. Our budget just doesn’t allow for that so once again, me and my big idea is thwarted.

And it really sucks because in my head the newspaper became central to other scenarios. For example, if I took one of the sections of the newspaper with me to the restaurant in town or the coffee shop or the park or wherever, there would be something to focus on, something that would tell others to leave me alone and something with a time limit. So the newspaper could grow with my degrees of immersion therapy.

But maybe that’s a stupid idea and maybe that’s just another excuse, like Lucky and the dog harnesses. I don’t know. At the very least, it would get me to the end of the driveway, even if I ultimately holed up in my house and read it. But it doesn’t matter anyway because I don’t have enough money to be the kind of person who reads the newspaper.

And I know I posted about this, either here or in Live Journal, or both, but I still haven’t found a decent messenger bag and this item is integral to my leaving the house. Of course, the only place we’ve looked is Wal*Mart, but I don’t even know where else to look. Do stores even exist that just sell bags? Like at the mall or whatever? (And if it is at the mall, then that’s a problem because I can’t do the mall thing.) Any websites that SHIP TO CANADA would be helpful.

I’m just scared. I have winter depression, which sucks, but at the same time I’m so fearful of spring and having to leave the house that it’s like spring’s coming too soon. I’m not ready! :o(

At the same time, I’m so totally frustrated with my current life and my current incarnation that I feel like I spend my days gagging on it. The frustration and anger at what I’ve become consumes me.

And of course, my birthday’s in 18 days and every year my birthday is cause for extreme stress, but this year it’s worse because it’s my 30th and I am FREAKING THE FUCK OUT. Not about getting older, that doesn’t bother me, but what to DO for it. I fear that if it goes uncelebrated, I’m going to ultimately regret it, but I’m out of ideas. I did want to get a tattoo but for one, it’s probably not a good idea so close to surgery and two, we don’t really have the money to do it. Or at least…the money would probably be better spent on other things. I don’t want to get drunk. I don’t want a party. I don’t want to go anywhere. I maybe want chinese food…that’s all I’ve got. I do want presents though, so once again, if you’re inclined, here’s a good place to start.

I don’t even know what to do about this surgery and Dr. Dickhead. Even my shrink thinks I should probably get my family doctor to refer me to someone else but for some reason I’m so afraid to do that. At the same time, i don’t trust this Dr. Dickhead to either botch my surgery somehow on purpose or say that he didn’t see any endometriosis and thus, there’s no reason to refer me to the specialist in Toronto and my shrink says if I have these feelings I should probably go to someone else. And she’s probably right but I’m scared to. This man has made me afraid, he beat me down. I’m scared to go through that again and I’m worried that the next doctor won’t have the contact(s) in Toronto for me to have laser surgery done. Dr. Dickhead was a) hard selling me on Lupron, b) being completely condescending and c) trying to scare me out of surgery altogether in favour of Lupron. I’m scared that he’s going to like…make me wish I chose the Lupron. I just don’t trust him. But like, I already signed stuff and the surgery date is already set and evertything and I’m not a boat rocker, so I don’t know what to do. It’s eating me alive though, I’m so stressed out thinking about it. I’m not strong enough to even deal with this., but at the same time, it’s not like anyone can deal with it for me. My surgery’s scheduled for one month from tomorrow, so I feel intense pressure to make a decision as soon as possible and I just don’t know what course of action to take from here.

So I think that’s pretty much it, I think I’ve laid it all out there. I don’t feel any better for having done it but it’s easier sometimes for me to blog these things and have Blake read them so we can talk about them than to explain verbally. Text really is my primary means of communication.

The inability to create is what’s really fucking me up though because no matter what, I’ve always been able to turn to that as an outlet, brushstrokes and pencil marks calm me, but I just can’t right now and it’s killing me. I’m supposed to be getting this boy painting done for Wes’ birthday on Friday and I just can’t bring myself to finish it. He’s still without arms, he’s still in the state he was when I posted pictures of him last week. So not only do I feel like a total failure as an artist right now, I’m a failure as a mother too because this is what Wes wants the most for his birthday and here I am unable to deliver.

I just can’t win when I am my own worst enemy.

And with that, I’m done.

*sigh* There is so much to say and I don’t even know where to start. So let’s start by jumping on the Obama bandwagon…

Is anyone else completely glued to CNN? (Or your 24 hour news channel of choice.) The US election has me totally captivated and not that it matters because I’m Canadian and don’t get a vote, I will say that I’m an Obama supporter and I it kills me some of the stuff people are choosing to believe about the man. He’s a socialist? No. Canada’s a fairly socialist country and I don’t see anything in his plans that are even close to what we have here. A Muslim? Well, he’s not, but so what if he was? The last I checked, you folks down south had that whole “freedom of religion” thing going for you, so why should that even matter? There’s nothing that says the President of the United States has to be a Christian. I wonder what people would say if he were Jewish? He’s a Marxist? Honestly, I’m not even really sure what that is and I’m betting the majority of Americans don’t know either. Regardless, from what I’ve been told by people smarter than me, he’s not.

Something interesting happened when I went to vote in Canada’s big election last month and I was kind of shocked by it. When Blake and I were standing in line for me to take my turn at the “voting cardboard” (voting machines? pffffft. We vote with a pencil and a paper ballot behind a piece of cardboard akin to what one would use for a science fair project!) there was this guy in front of us who was probably voting for the first time. I’d peg him at between 18 and 20. He overheard Blake tell one of the ladies at the polling station that he was American and thus, not voting and then he overheard me pointing out another lady who was counting a pad of unmarked ballots, showing him how ours are really simple (make “X” here, with 3 or 4 choices), compared to Blake’s crazy-assed absentee ballot for the American general election.

The kid in front of us thought this was funny and he said something like, “For you Americans it should be easier, all you have to choose from is an old guy and a black guy,” but the way he said “old” and “black”, it was like both of those things were negatives.

Now this was a month ago and it’s still stuck in my mind. I was floored by the fact that someone so young would have that kind of attitude, but then again, I probably shouldn’t be surprised living in a Conservative riding, in a town of farmers with a population of 1700. Still, it kinda broke my heart a little to hear this Canadian kid spew such an “ist” view. Until that moment, I just kind of assumed that Canadians, being as liberal as we generally are, were all, well, more open-minded and good natured than that.

Seeing that, or rather hearing it, made me imagine just how bad the attitudes must be in certain places in the US right now.

People may disagree with me on my choice of candidate – or rather Blake’s, since he’s the one who voted for him- and that’s fine, but I truly wish good things for the American people, I love them, and I really believe that Barack Obama is going to provide the US with all the good things they deserve. I’m actually a little bit jealous that we don’t have such charismatic, progressive politicians with good ideas for real change in my own country. I believe that Obama’s going to do good by my friends to the south and I’m going to be genuinely happy for our neighours should he win the presidency.

Y’all have had a really rough 8 years under President Bush and I have hope that Barack Obama will be able to relieve some of the stresses that’s put upon your country. More than that, I think he’s going to progress the US in a good direction, an innovative direction, that will repair the country’s reputation globally and make the US a country to emulate.

Like I said, I’m jealous. I wish our leaders in Ottawa would drink Obama’s Kool-Aid.

I’m probably not the only one, but I keep having nightmares about Barack Obama being assassinated at one of his outdoor rallies or during his presidential acceptable speech. Every time I see him on TV, especially when he’s outside, I’m always looking behind him for the guy who’s got the gun or I’m expecting “pink mist” at any moment. Morbid, I know, but you have to admit that it’s a possibility.

Aaaaaaaaaaand that’s enough about politics that don’t even really affect me.

This afternoon I got my acceptance package from Touched By Fire and I had a slight freak out because “Mania in the Key of Psychosis” (pictured left) needs to be made hangable and with it being so big and heavy, I wasn’t sure that was possible. Blake assured me that it was, however, and brought home a hanging kit made specifically for large, heavy pieces.

The other thing making me freak out is that they want me to mail my art to them, at my expense, and I have NO fucking money whatsoever. I have $200 coming in from a commission, but I need that to buy something to WEAR to the event, which is going to end up doing double-duty by being my outfit for Steph the Geek’s wedding a couple of days later. My lowest estimate to ship “Mania in the Key of Psychosis” is at least $70, plus the cost to ship “Hope” and “Dream” as well would be another $20 – and those two are sold, so I wouldn’t even recoup my shipping costs by selling them. Luckily Blake has offered to drive them down to the office of The Mood Disorders Association in Toronto for me next week, because we figure a tank of gas and half a day’s driving will cost less than shipping everything.

In my Touched By Fire acceptance package, there was an invitation to a pre-event gathering the night of the gala event, that starts at 6:30pm and then the show opens (by invitation only) at 7:30pm-11pm. When I read the invitations to these two things, I immediately had to take an Ativan. I am terrified of this thing. I looked at the slide show from last year’s event and there were all of these strange people there, most were middle-aged (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and they were all eating hors d’oeuvres and sipping win or champaigne and the whole thing just didn’t look like my scene AT ALL. Not that I really HAVE a scene, but if I did, it wouldn’t be that.

And then there’s the fact that it’s a juried show and I’m terrified of winning. Well, that’s not completely true, I think it would be cool to win, but the idea of all these people looking at me and like, maybe having my picture taken for the newspaper, that shit’s totally scary to me and if anything makes me not go, that’ll be it.

Oddly enough, I did my tarot tonight and for “Hopes and Fears” I got the Six of Wands, which says: “The Six of Wands augurs public acclaim or acknowledgment of some kind. This might take the form of a promotion, a qualification, or the recognition of some piece of creative work.

How fucking fitting, huh?

The other thing in the package that made me sweat a little bit is that they want you to write a blurb on each piece. The instructions say: “Touched By Fire is a testament to the creativity, passion and resilience of artists with mood disorders. What can you tell us about this art and hot it was influenced or impacted by your experience with a mood disorder? This statement will accompany your work on display.” EEEEEEEK! I am the WORDIEST motherfucker in the whole entire world, I don’t know if I can write a simple blurb on any of them, let alone “Mania in the Key of Psychosis”. This is my project for the weekend though, I have to get it done before Blake drops the pieces off at their offices.

For anyone in the Toronto area wondering if they can go to the show and see my paintings in person, it’s open to the public Friday, November 14th and Saturday, November 15th, I’m assuming all day. It’s at The Gladstone Hotel in Toronto at 1214 Queen Street West.

As for an outfit to go to the event (and also Steph’s wedding), Blake and I are going to hit the Goodwill and Salvation Army to see if we can’t find some discarded babydoll dresses from the 90’s, to create something like they have on the Free People website, an amazing online shop full of ridiculously expensive clothes that I’d kill to actually own. Hopefully we can find something that’ll work.

In other news…on Saturday we welcomed a new pet to our family! His name is Lucky, he’s a 2-year-old husky/golden retriever mix and I already love him so very much.

After some initial uncontrollable humping due to the hormones from his neutering, he and Hoover Dog are getting along great. Unfortunately this is not the case with Pixel Cat who has been missing for the past 48 hours. :o( Blake took her to the vet on Wednesday for her yearly vaccinations and when he tried to get her out of the car when they got home, she bolted and we’ve seen very little of her ever since. Once last night, at around 11pm, we saw her under the carport and then tonight around the same time, we heard her scamper across the roof, so we know she’s a live and well, she’s just boycotting our house likely because we had the audacity to bring another dog into the family and took her to the vet for needles all in the same week. She’s very unhappy with us. We figure she’ll have to come in eventually. It’s getting very cold outside and she’s gotta eat sometime.

Lucky is going to be my “emotional support animal” as I undergo immersion therapy for my agoraphobia. he’s going to need a little bit of training before I can go out with him, but we’ll get there. He walks well on a leash, likes to stick close to you and is good in the car, which were the qualities we were looking for. He’s happy, he’s healthy, he’s a total sweetheart and I can’t even imagine what kind of idiots would just give him away. His surrender papers were a fucking joke, he was surrendered due to “destructive behaviour” from separation anxiety, but we can’t even get him to play with a chew toy or eat a dog biscuit and the most he’s done is barked when left alone, so I think they just didn’t want to look after him anymore. They also claimed he was a rescue, which is bullshit. No rescue in the world would adopt out a 2-year-old INTACT dog.

Well, it’s getting late and I have to get to bed soon. I’m going to go outside and call the cat for a bit, maybe she’ll come inside for the night, and then I’m going to bed. I had so much more to say but I’m exhausted and on a ridiculous amount of drugs (due to endometriosis) at the moment and I’m afraid that if I kept writing, I would stop making sense.

Something I *did* want to mention however, is that a friend of mine has set up an RSS feed for this site on Live Journal, so that every time I write a blog post here, it automatically shows up on your friends list over there. If interested, here’s the link. I do ask, however, that if you’re going to comment on anything I’ve written, you do so here and not on the syndication feed, because I’m not reading comments on that and won’t see them!

Also, if you’d like to follow me on regular old Live Journal, which gets updated much more often than this site, you can do so here.

And finally, all day I’m a Twittering fool, so if you’re interested in the minutiae of my day, you can follow me there too! I’m everywhere, baby!

And with that, I’m going to bed.

PS. I dyed my hair tonight and it turned out brassy. :o(

PPS. I’ve been playing a lot of Spore lately. If you want to add me to your buddy list, you can do so by searching for “Sunnybananas”!

Sumbuddy says:
“How does Hoover react to snowballs? I bet he just goes bonkers.”

About the same way he reacts to a stick:

He also likes tennis balls, 2L Coke bottles and anything else even remotely throwable (kids’ toys…anything). Including cats:

Believe it or not, Digit & Hoover are buddies and this is actually how they play (although when they were outside, Digit was so not in the mood to play haha). One day I’ll try to get video of Digit torturing Hoover, but he’s pretty stealth about it, as cats tend to be. Usually he’ll just jump on the dog while he’s sleeping and start chewing on his ears, like he’ll wrap his paws around Hoover’s head and just beat the piss out of him. Pixel usually just stays out of the way.

Anyway, trying to get the cats to like “outside” isn’t going so well, as you can see, but I figure in the spring when I’m outside in the garden, they’ll probably come out with me and end up quite liking this “outside” business. (Especially since I plan on the strategic placement of catnip in various parts of our yard. :))

After that video was taken and we came inside, both cats were sitting on my chair cleaning themselves and getting it all wet, which I suppose I deserved. :D

I was up until 5am trying to make a video response to Ditsy’s latest vlog and “bullshit” doesn’t even cover the experience.

First, I tried making the video using my iSight and iMovie because you can record directly from your iSight using iMovie, but for some reason whenever I try to do this, about a minute in, the cam will try to autofocus, freezing the frame and only recording audio. This ALWAYS happens and I really don’t know why. I’m using an iBook, which isn’t the greatest equipment for such a project, but we’ve dumped enough extra RAM in this sucker, this really shouldn’t be happening.

But it is, so I switched to plan B, which was using EvoCam and the iSight to make the video, which worked out well but was lower quality than Plan A would have given me. So I finish and go to upload the video to YouTube, but of course the file’s too big so, using iMovie, I tried to compress it for the web, which wouldn’t work because it kept asking me for my .Mac account info (???) so I used the e-mail compression option, even though I knew it would kill the quality significantly.

So I do that, the file is now 65k compared to 176MB and I try uploading that to YouTube, but it kept failing because it said the .mov file was empty. WTF? It worked on my computer??? So then I just e-mailed the file to Ditsy, but it wouldn’t work for her either.

Now I dunno wtf to do. Making videos shouldn’t be this difficult!!!!! It really really shouldn’t. I have so much video equipment, a decent computer, supposedly the right software….wtf?!?!?!?!?!

And the biggest piss-off to me is that I’ve got this $500 video camera sitting here that I rarely use (bought for a project that’s been shelved indefinitely) because I can’t get the videos from the camera to my computer without a cable I can’t afford (i.LINK cable?) and even if I could, at most I only have 10GB free on my hard drive at a time and I don’t want it clogged up with videos that I don’t have the capabilities of burning to a DVD when I’m done. (Without a DVD burner in this machine, once the vid’s on my comp, it’s a huge pain in the ass with networking & shit to get if OFF my comp.)

Fucking grrrr. *kicks technology*

Also? Last month I shot video (with the actual video camera so the quality’s good) of me, Blake, Jesse & Blake playing this Honey Bee Tree boardgame thing and Wes is sooooo fucking cute and funny and I’ve been dying to edit it into little segments, but the goddamn thing (in 2 parts) is a .WMV file and apparently I don’t have the means to convert that into the .mov I need to edit it in iMovie. I tried some online conversion thing but it just crashed my browser a billion times (probably because the video’s like, 800 MB or something stupid like that) and now I’m not really sure what to do with it.

Technology hates me. :(

In other news, last night we had a slight Hoover Dog incident. In the winter Hoover’s nails get really long because all of the pavement is covered in snow and doesn’t file them down, so last night Blake decided it was time to give them a trim.

Hoover is 85-90lbs of pure, unadulterated PUSSY, so when it’s nail cutting (or bath) time, he howls & growls & barks & whines and carries on like you’re trying to kill him long before you actually even touch him with the clippers.

So Blake’s going to town on his nails and the dog’s freaking out like he always does, struggling (you pretty much have to tackle him and hold him down) and howling and being retarded and then Blake looks down and realizes that 3 out of 4 paws are resting in puddles of blood. BIG puddles of blood. HOLY SHIT that’s a lot of blood. Big dog, black nails, big quick inside the nail and 3 of them got knicked pretty good during the struggle. We didn’t have one of those stiptic (?) pencil things or the cornstarch that Wikipedia recommended, but we did have gauze and flour, so that’s what we did.

Except Hoover wasn’t having it and he basically bled all over my studio for about 3 hours. He bled a LOT, holy crap. Sooooo, Blake & I have decided that he’s never doing that again and next time, we’ll pay the groomers the $15 they charge to do it. I’m sure they have muzzles & stuff (they’ll need it).

Annnnd as if this day couldn’t get any better, Blake just called on his lunch to say that the car’s royally fucked up and is going to cost $500 to fix.

Fuck this “life” shit, I’m painting for the rest of the day.