I couldn’t decide whether I should varnish her or not. If I varnished her, the background would really pop and sparkle but I would have to varnish around the skirt and I wasn’t sure if that would look okay (I really should have added the skirt after varnishing but I jumped the gun). I think it looks alright without the varnish though, so if anyone buys it, I’ll leave it up to them as to what I should do. Another option is to spray varnish the whole thing, which might work as well. Hmmm.

I’m actually thinking spray varnish may be the way to go…

And as per my New Year’s resolution, I had Blake take my picture with her so here’s the least terrible one according to Charlie:

Okay I’ve decided. I’m going to go spray varnish her and hope like hell for the best. Wish me luck that I don’t fuck her up horribly!

Also, I am going to look pretty snazzy in this:

Scutterman sent me money for my birthday and Blake said we’d split the difference so this morning I ordered the last small! Now I have to find a mini-dress to wear under it because it’s actually pretty sheer. But whatever, I’ve wanted it since the fall and now it is MINE! Thanks, Scutterman!!! <3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family! God!

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

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

Onto other things…

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

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

My piece for The 4 x 6 Exchange is finished! I didn’t really do anything special, just a girl. I wanted to use pink because I so rarely get to give them pink dresses since the pink paper turns orange when I varnish them and this piece wasn’t going to be varnished.

So here’s the deal: I make a piece of art that’s 4 inches x 6 inches and send it to Art House Co-Op with a self-addressed, stamped envelope by March 31st and they send me back a piece of someone else’s 4 x 6 inch art. And it’s free!

They’ve actually started The 4 x 6 Exchange 2 because there was so much demand for the first one. There are only 2000 spots total so if you want to do it, you should sign up now! Blake and Madison just finished signing up and I think Wes wanted to do it too.

Anyway, here’s my girl. I hope whoever gets her, likes her. :o)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vegan cheese is terrifying…more on that later…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like the shape of them. :o)

Here’s what they look like finished:

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

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

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

Here’s my dinner:

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

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

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

Oh, 5am. Hello there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stupid Cheryl. Grrrr. >:o(

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

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

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

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

I haven’t painted her skin on yet.

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

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

Anyway, kwish.

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

I’m not happy with yesterday’s girl. I was totally happy with her and then I added whiskers which look like a mustache. It looked better in pencil, I swear! Now she looks like a high school boy! :o(

I suppose I can edit out her whiskers in Photoshop when I scan her properly but still…it bugs me. I don’t DO second drafts, ever, I get it right the FIRST TIME and it REALLY BUGS ME when I FUCK UP.

But whatever…another one down, only like, 30 more to go or so. I haven’t decided how long the colouring book is going to be, I just figured I’d draw until I got sick of doing it and then price accordingly. I’m hoping to have about 40 pages in it but that’s a lot of drawing so we’ll see.

Mine and Blake’s sketchbooks for The Sketchbook Project 2012 are now part of Art House Co-Op’s digital library! You can see mine here and Blake’s here and then if you wanted to see them in person, the books are all on tour right now, so look for your city HERE. Someone checked my book out yesterday! (I get a text message every time someone checks my book out.) I thought that was pretty cool. I would love it if it got all worn out from people touching it. :o)

My cover looks like crap but that’s okay. I didn’t have time to put a girl on there.

Now I have to work on my sketchbook for the Limited Edition thing because my mom signed up for it too and this is going to be the only time my mom and I get published together so it’ll be extra special. I think I have to have that finished by April 30th. Yikes! That’s pretty soon. :o/

Speaking of “soon”, my birthday’s in a week and a half. I feel like we should really celebrate this one, being the day that I was given life and all, but we probably won’t. For anyone who cares, my wishlist is here but what I really want is Curry’s gift certificates (if you need our address, just e-mail me) and money for Squam. Don’t get me wrong, I want DVDs and stuff too, but the other two things sorta take precedence. Oh and I’m going to be 33. I feel like that’s a lucky number because it has TWO 3s! And 3s are VERY lucky!

Does 33 make me old yet? I’m still closer to 20 than 40, so I don’t think so. (That’s “Wayne logic”.)

~*PAUSE FOR LUNCH*~

I just had the best lunch: a HUGE Caesar salad with real Parmesan and bacon bits and then strawberry frozen yogurt with frozen strawberries on top for dessert. I am in a food coma right now. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so satiated in my whole life!

Blake just changed my dressing before lunch too, which is why I had to pause mid-post, and I took like, action shots of the order of operations for changing my dressing but I don’t feel like editing the pics and you guys probably don’t care anyway so I’m not going to bother with it.

I think I definitely need new glasses. I spend way too much time squinting at the TV and my computer screen. My diabolical plan is to get new lenses put in the glasses I already have and then getting another pair so I’ll have 3 total and theoretically insurance should cover all of this + the eye exam. At least that’s my theory anyway.

When I got glasses last time, they had a pair of blue ones identical to my clear pink ones and I really really want them because I love my pink ones. They fit amazingly well and I think they look good.

 I made a new banner for my site. I don’t like it all that much so I made a better version of it this morning that I’m going to use, but I have to wait until Blake’s not busy so he can put it up because I don’t even have an FTP program and while I’m pretty confident I could figure out how to put it in the code, I don’t wanna mess anything up by trying to do it myself.

I want to make buttons for my site for people to link me with but I don;t know what the standard sizes are. Does anyone know off the top of their heads? Also I was thinking about making my site bigger, like physically bigger/wider (well I guess not physically, they’re pixels…) but I wasn’t sure what the current design standard is. My site’s still optimized for 800×600 and I know things have gotten bigger now so that can’t still be the standard. My resolution is 1366×768 for my laptop and 1280×1024 for my big monitor and those are relatively small compared to a lot of monitors so 800×600 can’t still be the standard.

Okay Blake says he’s going to take a crap and we’re going to finally watch The Walking Dead from Sunday while I draw my next girl for the colouring book. I’m working on a glamour puss and she’s going to be fabulous with her fake eyelashes and slinky gown. :o)

Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful Tuesday and I’ll talk at you all tomorrow!

Why Photographers should Stop Complaining about Copyright and Embrace Pinterest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway…onto other things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I’ve been playing with this Photoshop technique. What do you think?