Do you ever have those days where you just don’t feel like you fit in anywhere? I’m having one of those. You see, I’m an artist, or at least I try to be but a year ago I wasn’t much of one because I was afraid to use my imagination. Literally.

You see (and I’ve told this story a million times before, so those who have heard it bear with me) what lead to my bipolar disorder diagnosis was psychosis where I lost complete touch with reality, had to be hospitalized and given heavy doses of anti-psychotics for 10 days. Even after those 10 days, I just wasn’t “right in the head”, as they say. It took the anti-psychotics about a month to set me right.

It was the scariest fucking thing in the world and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

At the same time, I was hyper-creative during psychosis and super happy, psychosis for me was much like being stuck in my imagination which was fine for the first couple of weeks and then it got scary. Really really fucking scary.

It wouldn’t be until I my shrink and I found the right medications and the right doses where I felt okay to create again and to use my imagination. It was almost 3 years after I was hospitalized.

Where I found my inspiration to create was YouTube. On YouTube there was Suzi Blu and Willowing and the two of them made videos on how to art journal or draw faces and feeling good about yourself in general. So, when Suzi Blu started her Ning.com community and offered a class called “Les Petite Dolls”, I was right there to sign up and that’s when I started creating again. I made friends in this community, including Suzi Blu, and as far as I’ve been able to tell, that’s the whole point of having a Ning community. That’s why you have a friends list kind of like Live Journal.

Through the course though, I discovered other artist communities on Ning, namely Willowing’s, then Milliande’s and finally Gary Reef’s.

Well, I’m not interested in taking any more online art classes right now, namely because I don’t have the time for them, nor can I afford them, but I joined these communities anyway as a lot of my friends from Suzi’s Ning seemed to overlap within these other sites.

But I didn’t last very long in Milliande’s community because…well, I don’t know how to say this in a nice way even though I mean it in a nice way but Milliande’s community was a little too wishy washy for me. I respect what they’re doing over there, but I like a little edge, I’m not always prone to making “safe” art and that community is clearly meant for women who smile and menstruate quietly. Honestly, it reminded me of a nunnery.

And that’s cool. Obviously some people enjoy that and they enjoy their community and like I said, that’s totally cool, but it’s not really my scene. So I left Milliande’s community. I never even got to the point of filling out my profile and uploading a userpic. (Although I do follow Milliande on YouTube, she’s very creative and an incredibly nice person. I just don’t fit in with the community that surrounds her.)

So then I joined Willowing’s community because someone over there had made a post about how to convert files from the classes we were all taking between all of these artists into a format that could be put on your iPod and after that I stuck around and watched people chat and read some of the threads and Willowing’s built a nice little community there. But still…it’s a community that focuses on “whimsical art”, which again, is totally cool and I do whimsical art sometimes too, but I can only take seeing so much of it before I want to rebel and paint a coat hanger abortion.

Also, I was totally on board with Willowing and I watched her videos on YouTube but then recently in one video she did something in a painting that I consider cheap and sinful and it just kind of soured me on learning from her. And again, I’m not trying to bash anyone here, I think Willowing is a lovely woman and I like her a lot – she’s genuine, real and caring and I love that about her – I just didn’t like one thing she did and I’m picky so it bothered me. I don’t even want to say what it was because I don’t want to argue about it with anyone. It was just something I would never do in a million years because I think it’s tacky and more importantly not acid-free, not archival and not fade resistant. And it was something that could have just as easily been done with paint, but she cut corners and I hate that.

With that bit of sourness said, Willowing must be an excellent teacher because I saw the student gallery from her first class and just about everyone created beautiful pieces that they should be proud of. If you’re looking to do art journaling, you should consider signing up for her next class which begins June 8th.

So, it was obvious I didn’t really fit in with Willowing’s crowd either, although I’m still a member there, so off I went to Gary Reef’s Ning community to see what was happening there. Well, a LOT is happening there. His is the smallest of the communities I’ve talked about here, but next to Milliande’s, his is probably the most active. In fact, his is so active, I have a hard time keeping up.

First and foremost, I dig Gary. Certain folks had spoken badly of him lto me before I joined his community and none of the things I’d heard have turned out to be true. He’s a nice guy who genuinely loves art – all kinds of art – and his community is run sort of like what I imagine art school to be like. There are monthly challenges, which is where I can’t keep up, like last month for example, was Georgia O’Keefe month and the challenge was to paint like her. Before that it was…crap, I forget. A dude.  Klimt! That’s it!

This month, as I understand it, the challenge is simply to create art every day for 30 days. It should also be noted that Gary teaches classes too, but unlike Suzi and Willowing, he purposely goes for smaller classes because he wants to give his students more one on one time. This is another reason I dig Gary Reef, he doesn’t appear to really be doing this for the money and as I understand it, he’s already a somewhat  recognized artist in the “art world” so he’s not really doing it for the fame either. He’s just doing it, as far as I can tell, because he loves art and he’s a social guy. And that’s awesome!

However…as I said, I can’t keep up with the challenges. I simply do not have the time. They were all doing an artist trading card exchange that I really wanted to be a part of, but again, I couldn’t find the time because of this Hypercube contest. I tried to keep up with the blogs and make friends but aside from the people I already knew from the other communities, I didn’t really feel welcome. I uploaded one painting, the “5 O’Clock Abortion” one (because I thought they’d dig it with Gary & Suzi being basically mortal enemies and that painting was kind of a rip on what Suzi was doing at the time with her “Rodeo Girl” workshop) and where it got rated 4.5 stars by like, 250 people on Suzi’s Ning, it got voted like a 2.5 on Gary’s. Not that I care about ratings necessarily, but it seemed…snobby. And then I got looking around the forums in the community and some of the conversations that were happening were, well, snobby! Like art snobby. And I’m just not into that. I find those conversations amusing, but I don’t want to be a part of them.

While I like Gary and I kinda like his community, I just find it way too intense for me. I want to participate, but I feel like I have to have a PhD in art history to participate in the conversations…and I consider myself very much an outsider artist in that, I know fuckall about art history, I know fuckall about “the masters”, I’ve never been to a museum in my life, I only know like, 5 famous paintings and maybe the same amount of famous painters and to be honest, I kinda want to stay ignorant because I don’t want all of these things that have already been done to influence what I’m doing. (Not that what I do is all that original.) Maybe that’s a bad attitude, I don’t know, but I didn’t go to art school for a reason and Gary’s community feels like art school and I don’t fit in.

So where does that leave me? Well, there’s still Suzi Blu’s Ning right? Well…not so fast. This afternoon my friend Marylin and I sent out a mass e-mail to all of the friends we’d made on Suzi’s Ning over the past (almost) year (50+ for Marylin, 70+ for me) – using Ning’s feature to do so – trying to get support for me with this Hypercube contest, particularly because the contest is about being creative and in my case, that means ART but also because the friends I’ve made there know all about my agoraphobia and my plans to start immersion therapy in the spring and I thought they’d appreciate the update. Also, other women on the site send out mass e-mails to people constantly pimping out their blogs, Etsy shops, giveaways on their websites and hell, in March, my friend KY Kelly sent out a mass e-mail asking her friends to vote for “Shutter Sisters” in a contest where they could win $50,000 for a dream project – and these “Shutter Sisters” weren’t even a part of our community! And no one said ONE WORD about that. I even voted for them and know others did too!

But, several hours after Marylin and I sent out our messages, to OUR FRIENDS about something important that would change my life and the life of my family for the better, Suzi sent out an e-mail to all members of the community saying that we were only allowed to send messages to our friends if it was about one of her classes or about art.

Well, for me that was the last draw. In the winter Suzi dismantled all of the groups people were participating in, essentially destroying the community that was forming on her Ning (honestly, I forget why now) so now there’s not much of a community there anymore aside from the blogs and in the mass e-mail she sent today, which was definitely slanted towards me, she said “I invite u to start your own ning and make videos of yourselves and share your life everyday. Then u can tell your people whatever you want!” The “share your life everyday [sic]” bit, I’m pretty sure, was referring to the blog post I made in the community about how my immersion therapy was going, which Marylin and I linked to in our mass e-mails. So I guess I would interpret that as we’re not supposed to be sharing our lives in our blogs on her site either, only class or art related things.

Suzi’s Ning has been going downhill since early winter and personally, I’ve only been sticking around to get to the end of the “Be Divine” class which seems to be taking forever to conclude. (It started in November and was only supposed to be like a 10 or 12 week course!) I paid good money for that class, I am a student of that class and I’m going to download all of the videos and course materials that I paid for or I’m going to e-mail PayPal for a refund. I have no intentions of taking any more classes from her because I just don’t agree with some of the things she does,  I don’t feel I have anything else to learn from her and there’s little to no community left, so I guess there’s no reason for me to stick around there either. And now I’m not even allowed to send a message to all of my friends there – using Ning’s “send a message to all friends” function to do so – to say goodbye when the “Be Divine” class is over and I leave.

So where does that leave me? Well that leaves me without a Ning community to be a part of. As I said above, I like Gary Reef’s and Willowing’s communities, but at the same time, I feel so burned by my experience with Suzi Blu’s community that I’m reluctant to go in there and make friends and really try to be a part of things. My preference would be to hang with Gary’s crowd, but I just don’t feel like Gary’s crowd wants anything to do with me. Some people were welcoming, but I got the chills from others.

So I guess I’ll just be a lone wolf from now on. I did just fine before without all of these Ning people, I’ll be just fine afterward, I guess. (Although taking a class from Willowing, should she do another that focuses on faces and bodies and animals, isn’t out of the question. I just have no interest in art journaling.)

Some people during the course of this past year have asked me if *I* was planning on starting a Ning community – because quietly, beside Twitter, Ning has become an in thing – and some have even suggested that doing so would be a good idea…but I don’t want to. I don’t have the time to maintain one, for starters, and also, I have nothing to really offer. I’m not qualified to teach a class in anything, I don’t know art history or anything like that. And when people suggested it, they meant a community built around me, like the community of folks I have on Live Journal, but if I already have a community based around my Live Journal and Twitter and Facebook and this site (although the comments don’t really reflect that, bastards!) then what the hell do I need a Ning for?

I dunno. I’m just a little bit sad tonight. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong in Suzi’s community, I just thought I was sending a message to the people who have requested my friendship and with whom I’ve made  connections with. Rather than message them all one at a time, I messaged them all at the same time…which Ning has a function for. I used it as it’s intended and as far as I knew about Suzi’s community guidelines, I wasn’t doing anything wrong because I wasn’t promoting anything that competed with what Suzi does.

But then again, she’s known for changing the rules without warning, so who even knows what’s right or wrong in that community anymore.

Again, I dunno. As I said, I’m fine with being the lone wolf, but I’ve been the lone wolf for most of my life and I really wanted to find a place where creative people would accept me for me and bring me into the fold. But I don’t think I’m going to find that on Ning. I put my toes in the water of several communities, as I said, and it didn’t work out so I guess there’s nothing left for me to do but paint my heart out and keep to myself over here. And who knows? Maybe I’m the asshole here. Maybe I’m the problem and these communities are just fine & dandy. It’s hard to say.

Anyway, sorry for the bummer post. I’ll leave you with pictures of Princess Pixel sneaking a drink from my brush basin last night. (The side she’s drinking from is clean water, the other side is painty water.)

PS. When I make posts on my site, most of the time, unless the post is really picture intensive, I cross-post it to Live Journal and that’s generally where the comments are posted and the conversations take place. I really only post things to my site to either save my Live Journal friends from having 20 million pictures on their friends page and so people who don’t have Live Journals have a place to post comments as well. (My Live Journal is set so that anonymous folks can’t post comments and people who do have Live Journals but who aren’t on my friends list, their comments are screened and I post them manually. This is due to past trolling behaviour.)

I’ve been in a strange mood over the last few days. I know a lot of it has to do with being turned down for the arts grant, which I know shouldn’t get me down, but it did, although at the same time it’s pissed me off and I’ve done nothing but work on canvases ever since.

ART

On Thursday I started the process of making backgrounds for 4 different paintings that will be a series and as of today, I’m finished, and now it’s time to work on the girls that will make up the 6th layer and this is all I’m going to tell  you about them:

• One will be a ballerina on a metallic pink, white and silver background with silver sparkles.
• One will be a princess on a light metallic blue, white and silver background with silver sparkles.
• One will be a flower girl on a metallic white, regular white and silver background with clear, iridescent sparkles.
• One will be a cheerleader on a metallic red, white and gold background with gold and red sparkles.

They are all of these things, but with a twist that I can’t tell you about. It’s a surprise and one that I think the majority of you, especially some of the ladies who come to this site, will really appreciate. ;o) Here are pictures of the backgrounds I took this morning, although I didn’t bother taking one of the flower girl background because the metallic white and sparkles don’t show up until it’s varnished so I didn’t see the point:

These paintings always take me forever because there are literally 5 layers that go into the backgrounds and as a result, there is a lot of waiting around for things to dry, particularly with the 4th layer, the splatter layer, because you wet the canvas down with a spray bottle of water, then you do your splatters on top of the water so they’ll sort of “melt” onto the canvas and you don’t get any hard edges and then you spray it down again to soften the edges of the splatters even more, so by the time you’re done, there’s about 2mm of water sitting on top of the canvas that has to dry naturally (meaning no hair dryer). That can take anywhere from overnight to dry, if I put them in front of the furnace, to 2 days or more to dry if it’s in the middle of the summer and humid.

So that’s what I’m working on at the moment. I’m not going to do all 4 at the same time from here on out because…well because I only have one pad of watercolour paper and each piece of paper yields 2 girls, so I have to finish the first 2 girls before I start the next 2 and if I’m going to finish the first 2, I might as well gel them onto the canvas and just finish the first two paintings before moving on to the next, especially since I have to flatten the girls with books as they dry on the canvas, so while that’s happening, I can work on the next 2 girls. It’s a process y’see.

CAMMITYJANE

I am aware of the fact that this project has yet to begin publicly. No one’s been bugging me about starting or anything, I just kind of had my own deadline as to when it should begin and I’m behind schedule. I wanted a fresh pair of eyes to take a look at what had been posted in 2006, so Blake photocopied my hard copy and we mailed it to my friend Marylin in Hamilton, who is also a writer. She should get it in a few days, then it’ll take her a few days to read it, I’m guessing and then it’ll take me a day or two to fill her in on the ending Blake helped me hammer out last weekend and then she can better give advice as to what should take place in the middle, which is what I’m stuck on.

Anyway, the way I see it is, this extra time gives you all a chance to sign up for Live Journal and add CammityJane as a friend for when the whole thing begins. If you’re unsure as to what CammityJane is, read the user info. It’s just this silly bit of fiction that I started working on in 2006 and I’ve decided to start working on again. You don’t really need a Live Journal to follow it, but it does make things easier.

PIXEL CAT

Sunday night Pixel Cat came home after being “missing” for 5 or 6 days. By “missing” I mean, we knew exactly where she was, she never leaves the boundaries of our yard and the neighbour’s yard and when she disappears for days at a time, she sleeps in these old sheds 2 doors down in the side yard of a condemned house. Now, she’s only disappeared for days at a time for one reason: Lucky. Specifically, Lucky wearing the cone of shame. I think it scares her.

Every other night or so that she was “missing” she’d run across the roof of my office and perch on the fence that’s off to the side of our patio stones, rubbing her cheek against the corner of the roof and generally doing that squirrely, loving cat thing. But of course when I came near her, she’d either climb back on the roof or jump down and run across the yard. She’s definitely a cat who will come in when she wants to.

So I figured whatever, she’ll come home when she gets hungry enough and Sunday night she pretty much did. She was on the fence doing the squirrely kitty act and I wasn’t buying it. I kept calling her, trying to coax her down, but she, being the princess type she is, decided to ignore me and when I took a step forward she jumped down and returned to doing the squirrely kitty thing next to the fence, well out of my reach.

Hoover Dog was standing behind me (I was half in the house and half outside the door), so I said, “Hoover, go bring her in,” and let him out. He walked out and she immediately scrambled to his side, rubbing up against his legs because the two of them truly are buddies. She even continued this while he took a whizz haha

When he was finished, I called him over to me and Pixel trotted along behind him, so then it was just a matter of picking her up, which I did and I carried her back in the house where she immediately scrambled out of my arms and into the kitchen where her food is.

I think she only came in because she was hungry and she’d used her kitty senses to know that it was going to know 3 inches the next day.

Anyway, she’s been sleeping practically constantly ever since, usually on my desk, well away from Lucky and his scary cone of shame:

HYPERCUBE

So, tomorrow (I think) I find out if I’ve made the top 500 in the contest who get to use a blank canvas on the hypercube website to garner your votes and be judged by…well, a panel of judges. And let me tell you, I AM NERVOUS. At first I felt fairly confident that I could make the top 500, but during the past week or so two things have happened:

1. The @hypercube lady has pretty much started to ignore me. :o( (To be fair, she has about 1800 people to keep track of on Twitter.)
2. People have been making crazy videos and animations and stuff that is completely outside of my skill set. I can’t compete with that.
3. I seem to be on the older end of the contestant pool and I get the feeling they want younger people driving these Cubes.

Thus, I’m nervous. :o/ Then again, I’m a paranoid person who’s not comfortable with surprises and “the unknown” so I’m just going to swallow these feelings and keep on keepin’ on, cross my fingers and see what happens.

In the meantime, here’s the second last batch of fansigns:

Moriah from the US <3s me and wants me to have a Cube.

So does Marylin from Hamilton.

And Rob from Toronto-ish.

And last but certainly not least:

Erica is a giant nerd. :oD

So that’s it for this post I think. Time to find food and veg out for the rest of the day (yeah like that’ll happen). And with that, I leave you with some Pixies:

*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