The Other Stuff I Think About

The Weddening Part Two: Food

2016-01-17T12:43:00.000-08:00

This is the second and last part of the "I GOT MARRIED" posts, but the food-stuff merited it's own thing... So here ya go.

Due to concerns about allergies, we were pretty unwavering on wanting to know exactly what ingredients would be used in the foods. We asked to meet with the chef, which is a generally normal wedding thing anyway…

We were told “Oh, there’s no reason to be concerned!”
So we reiterated that despite that, we would feel a lot better speaking directly to the chef.

The response was, “Do you want to call other people with different allergies who ate here?”

No, we don’t. We want to talk to the chef about the ingredients and OUR list of allergens. Like, great that you didn’t kill a completely different person in a totally different scenario?
This went on for months.

It was a clusterfuck of upsetting.

Finally, we got a, “I gave your list to the chef, and there are some problems. Can we do a meeting?”

The. Fuck.

Did I mention we didn’t like our wedding planner lady?

Have I mentioned (a thousand times) that I’m recovering from a food phobia and I am pretty damn delicate about not wanting to be poisoned from my many REAL allergies?

Just picking the menu was a bigger hassle than it should have been. She told us to circle everything we could possibly want on the menu, to then edit down later.

So we did that.

She panicked and said, “You chose a lot of stuff guys…” Right. Like you said. We were not intending to actually eat all that. (Also, take the fucking chocolate fountain off of the list for the tenth time, you lunatic.)

The first chef wasn’t a bad guy, and I’d like to say he made great food, but I’ll never know.

He insisted he would only make a special plate, instead of altering his recipes for the people paying him to cook. “So yours will be terrible and tasteless”

…Right.

That tasting was a lot of everyone around me explaining how I can’t eat ANYTHING and must be SO MISERABLE ALL THE TIME. Mind you, I did this to myself in one regard.

When I listed off my food allergies, I included things that will straight up kill me if ingested, right along with stuff I’m just intolerant to, like things that make me a little physically uncomfortable, thinking that I’d rather not run to the bathroom at my own wedding.

I included soy on this list though it probably shouldn't have been there. I used to have a HUGE PROBLEM with soy way back in the day. Not a hive-gonna-die reaction, but a running-to-the-bathroom-and-praying reaction. Now, I can generally eat things that contain soy. I really can. REALLY, I can.

I’m still not going to eat a brick of tofu any time soon, but if something is made with soybean oil, I’m totally fine.

But, yeah.

I didn’t correct anyone when this was treated like my actually dangerous allergies, because it was a matter of principle and trust.

If I now let this go, what else would they think was okay?

See, again, we weren’t originally even going to get a tasting of any kind, because we didn’t count as important.

This woman even said OUT LOUD, “We aren’t making the margins that we typically do.” Like… did she… Did she think we don’t know what that means?

What?

So that first chef, what we have is a super-hip know-it-all who apparently isn’t actually that talented if he CAN make separate food just for me special, but can’t figure out how to make it delicious, so I’ll get a special plate.

I didn’t want a special plate. I wanted to feel normal. For one damn day of my life. I wanted hope that I might have that feeling more than once.

I had been dealing with this food phobia for over three years.

I just wanted to feel like a normal person during my own goddamn wedding. I just wanted to feel safe AND be able to eat what everyone else was eating without fear. We didn’t understand why we couldn’t just have what he put in front of me for everyone else.

We were eventually asked to do a 2^nd meeting with no further explanation where we were introduced to the NEW chef who had no problem making the entire menu without using anything off the allergen list.

And the desserts! Trying to find a nut-free cake was a giant pain in the ass. Every place we found that said “nut free” was also everything-else free, and so would wind up using other things that make me sick, if not could kill me.

Totally unhelpful.

A lot of those places also seemed to be doing that out of a fad-thing rather than with allergies actually in mind.

Finally, I found a freaking “Living With Allergies” help board online, which led to finding a woman in the area who works right out of her kitchen.

She was able to provide us with a nut-free cake (bottom layer was chocolate with strawberry filling, the middle was a yellow cake with Oreo filling, and the top was chocolate with a mixture of the two fillings).

Of course, we were meant to pick up and drive this cake to the wedding, so admittedly that was harrowing. It was a lot of screaming and “WHY IS THE ROAD BUMPY??” but the cake was perfectly fine.

Given that this cake was a post-apocalyptic cake… with flowers? We were a little confused when we first picked it up.

But I love the topsy turvy shape, and that’s all that really mattered to me in the end.

This same woman was able to make vegan cupcakes, gluten free cupcakes, AND sugar free cookies for all our guest’s dietary needs.

We had the place make special labels for each item, both here and for the buffet.

They stated what the item is and what ingredients were used. Super useful right?

Except for that one where they totally failed.

Not entirely getting the point led to our planner-lady interrupting me while I was getting food to say, “OH you don’t want that!”

At first I was like, “Is this bitch calling me fat on my goddamn wedding day???” Turn out, there was a last minute change to the menu, and one item had… something?

Dude, if you can’t do what I asked you to do, just cut it out. DO NOT endanger people by having the once useful sign now functionally worthless.

Given my food-phobias that I was really super determined not to freak out about that particular day *BREATHES* I was furious, and scared. I managed to still eat macaroni, but I didn’t actually eat anything else. Anything. Because she ruined it. She burned my hard earned trust away. It was gone.

…

Okay, “ruined” might take it a bit far. The party was still awesome and continues to be talked about as, “The Best Wedding Ever” so suck it!
We even got to dress the bartenders up as mad scientists! Did I mention that?

Every wedding has those oh-my-god-no moments, and ours went pretty well by the end.

Sooo I would still recommend the venue, warts and all.

By The Way, I Got Married

2016-01-06T20:27:00.000-08:00

2015 was pretty busy.

Along with giant strides made in my emotional and physical health, I did a lot of art-stuff!

I finished Volume 1 of Oh Hell, Donna!
Those pages are going to post one at a time every Wednesday.
Meanwhile, I’ve already done the first chapter of the second volume.

Deddrie is oddly still going. …for some reason.
I have finally made the choice to post a comic every other Thursday for that, rather than just “whenever I feel like it,” so let’s see if I can keep that up.

I finished Unicorn and fixed up Venus. (The plan is to put together a little Fantasy-anthology type thing...)

My Knight in Pinstripes and I went to a few conventions and did pretty well there.

I was in that Bubbline book… Was that 2015? Jeez.

I’ve even got my next projects lined up, and I’ve started showing some of the character designs on Tumblr, DeviantArt, and Facebook. …and Twitter. I’m on a lot of sites these days.

I also have been in my not-art job for almost a year now.

OH and we bought a house.

SO that was the year that just ended… PLUS THE WEDDING.

Riiight right. We got married.

Our wedding was crazy and planning for it was more-so. Like, this was the Save the Date:

Actually, let’s start off by talking about the wedding planner who came with the venue. We liked the venue, but had no need of a wedding planner.

The place was beautiful. See?

OH by the way, THIS IS MY FACE.

But yeah. We didn't want a planner, because we had a clear set of ideas for what we wanted.
We tried to make that clear… but again, she came with the place.

She was horrible.

Anytime a family member had to get involved, they’d say the same thing. They’d say they really liked the place… and not her.

I’d like to say she meant well but I don’t think she actually did.

The first meeting we had with her, we talked about how we wanted to just call it a “family gathering” to celebrate our union, since we’d already be legally married by that point, there would be no white dress, no flowers, no DJ...

This was our DJ:

And no pretty-much-everything that makes something a typical wedding.

I mean... THIS was on our invites:

She took this to mean that we either weren’t going to be married at all, or that we were tricking her.

Every now and then, she’d say, “This is starting to sound A LOT like a wedding…” and look at us suspiciously. She’d give us an outlandish suggestion that we’d either turn down or think about, but if we said we liked any part of it, she’d panic and say, “GUYS THIS IS GETTING REALLY COMPLICATED” and act like it was her idea to do whatever it is we wanted to do in the first place.

We were already complicated on our own. My party was the Scorpion Gang:

and his was The L10N5:

The idea was that his group had been underground when the bomb went off, and mine was above ground as raiders and such...
WEDDING.

At one point, we even filmed our friend for the purpose of having a screen project the image for the audience… We cut that later.

Mind you, we still did A LOT.

We had boxes and boxes of stuff for the tables, and I labeled each bag for each one…

We made the Nuka Cola labels ourselves, and Rob even made Nuka Cola caps, though those were ultimately not used for the wedding.

Rob nearly mutilated his own hands to help me make my shoes...

*Stained with human blood*

We chased people for RSVPs, including people we saw all the time or people who had actually complained about that themselves for their own wedding, as well as family members we didn’t have any addresses for to begin with…

OH and since we moved right before the wedding, I lost my carefully planned out bad of day-of stuff, including all of the jewelry I had planned to wear and even scorpion tattoos I was going to put on all my brides-people.

Rob lost his ties, including the one for the wedding.

We did a kind of scavenger hunt to replace the items just in time, and I have since found my bag, but HOLY BAJEEZUS I did not need that extra stress.

And yet…

She, the "planner" was the worst, most difficult part of the whole shebang.

The tables were neat though.

Yeah! Let’s talk about the tables.

Each had their own theme.

Guests were encouraged to barter, bargain, trade, and steal with other tables. My favorite common saying of the night was, “They stole my monkey! I mean, I stole it first, but I stole fair and square!”

Each guest knew which table they had to go to via our “escort cards”…

Which were “wedding survival kits”…

These included a band-aid, some aspirin, a teeny tiny glow stick, gum (my father loves this gum), and a neat little keychain thing that has a compass, a light… and apparently a whistle.

I didn’t catch that last part until people… until DRUNK people started using them.

“WHO GAVE THEM WHISTLES” quickly turned to realization that, “We did. We gave them ALL whistles…”

By the way, my dad freaking loves this gum:

OH and the tables all had cameras on them (JEEZ I’m jumping around) so that we could get candids beyond what our actual photographer would get.

AS an aside, we did have a good camera-worth of totally unusable photos. Dude wasn’t even someone we know. He was a +1 of a friend. WHO TAKES DICK PICS AT A STRANGERS WEDDING??? They weren’t even in the bathroom! That shit was by people’s grandmothers under the table!
There were no faces, but given that everyone was in costume, we know it’s you.

*Ahem*

People kept clinking their glasses for us to kiss.

We’d see folks come over, trying to take a picture of us doing so, but they evidently always failed.

Every shot of that is either right before or right after.

We had little nervous pecks more than a romantic kiss in front of a hundred people.

OH YEAH we had a "sweetheart table"

Which was still close enough to the Tank Girl table for my party,

And the Vault 13 table for his.

But at one point, there was clinking… and no husband.

He was off being useful and fixing the music, but the point was that it left me going, “WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO? WHO AM I SUPPOSED TO KISS??”

Thankfully, a couple of our friends stepped in, causing husband’s racist, homophobic grandpa to get a front row seat to two men kissing rather romantically. Then another friend came in and slapped one like he was a scorned lover. It was all incredibly entertaining.

Speaking of entertaining, did I mention the battle that occurred between tables 12 and 14?

See, because each table had a theme, we DID want people to mingle. We didn’t realize it was cause an impromptu social experiment.

I can't even begin to explain what happened, but everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

We had a card-bomb for well wishes and such.

When we broke it open, there were a lot of “TABLE 12 RULES/SUCKS” and so forth. We could also tell when people started to really start drinking, because nice date ideas turned into lewd non-sequitors.

Oh, those skeletons were a gift from our cousin (ha! "Our" now cause marriage so she's my cousin now too! I'm so tired.)

Even they got a little lewd by the end of it.

Our dance floor was The Thunderdome.

Bride and Groom enter.

A married couple leaves!

When it was time for our first dance, my father fled for the bathroom… followed by Rob.

I mean, they didn't go together.
It was just that after Dad came back, my husband had vanished.

I truly believed neither would come back in time…

But they did! YAY!

Rob and I danced to a David Bowie cover of “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys.

Then Dad and I/Rob and his mom danced to “Something Stupid” by Nancy and Frank Sinatra.
This means that when someone asks, I can now say, “God only knows… Something stupid” and sound super sarcastic and uninvolved. I find this hilarious.

Gaze upon our awkward prom photo:

OH and we did something special for everyone on the dance floor. :-D
Once enough people were up and having a good time boogie woogie-ing, we had a Daft Punk tune get cut off by a record scratch, leading the way for Rick Astley.

That’s right. We Rick Rolled over a hundred people.

OH LAI;FKLJhijkldjf The bathroom!

So. Okay. The tables each had their own post-apocalyptic thing...

That's right.

The bathroom was Demolition Man.

After the wedding, we had a bonfire. The fire didn’t really exist well, but everyone had a good time joking around. I was startled when she-bitch appeared behind me like the Devil in a 1920’s silent film. She said, WAY TOO CLOSE TO MY FACE, “Was it everything you ever dreamed of?” I nodded, nearly pissed myself in fear, and spent the rest of the time just praying she wouldn’t manifest herself again.

Then we went inside for gifts and whoever managed to stay up that long.

And I got my shark.

I love him.

~~I want to beat our planner with this shark.~~ Look he has a friend!

Lastly, we had our next-morning-brunch. That went well. In line for food, my aunt asked me, “What did you guys do last night? …Well, I KNOW what you did last night, but aside from that.” Heeey let’s not talk about my sex life right now, yeah? Ya weirdo.

Meanwhile, Rob’s grandfather just loomed behind to say, “You’re gonna regret marrying into THIS family.” Okay. So. Was that a joke, or a threat? Both?

Yaaaaaay marriage! Well, part one.
I didn’t talk about the food-stuffs here because that deserves its own post.

BUT YAY!

The Big Three Oh

2015-11-18T22:30:00.000-08:00

I’ll be doing a blog post all about the wedding (that happened) and the move (also happened) soon enough.

I thought I’d start with this.

See, I turned thirty on November 17^th.

My dad likes to say, “You can’t trust anyone over thirty, or people who work for the government.”

I’m both.

He’s kidding, but I started to think about how different thirty is now than it was in the 60s.

Mostly, I just don’t feel like an adult yet. I don’t think that has much to do with my age though.

I like that I can still enjoy what I’ve always enjoyed.

Gaze upon my Bat-Belts! This isn't even half of them.

I wear these to work. No one cares! Or notices.

I like that I can play.

I’m proud that I HAVE come as far as I have, regardless of trauma from all directions for so long.

That being said, I still have a long way to go. I’m aware of that.

I know there are things I still don’t like about myself, and those awful things are going to be the hardest to overcome.

I’m happy with my body now, and my confidence is so much better than ever before.

I’ve learned to stand up for myself, though I still struggle with that from time to time…

I’m eating better and better every day, while still being careful about my allergies.

I can BE careful without it ruling my life, even when I'm scared.

…and that’s just really cool.

Still though, there are so many times where my imagination takes over and goes from “being creative” to a true sign of the mental illness I’ve faced for so many years.

The dark, mirrors… I’m actually terrified of a lot of things to an incredibly embarrassing degree.

I’m thirty now, and I still take the whole Bloody Mary thing too seriously. It’s another level of sad.

Now it’s a matter of not wanting to see the endless darkness that may or may not reflect something that I just can’t perceive when the lights are out…

I already told you about the time as a kid where I left a bathroom like the little chicken I am during the era of Spice Girls and pogs.

(As a side note, we were doing a dance thing in a PE class once, and I was elected to be Scary Spice as I was the darkest one with curly hair. That’s how bleached white our fucking middle school was. Fuck. Sure. “Close enough.” … These days, I would take it all as a compliment, though I’m not sure how she would have felt being played by a Slavic Jew. Really, I wanted to be Posh anyway.)

Seriously though.

Under the bed was scary enough that I just put my bed straight onto the floor to avoid having an under-the-bed at all.

The closet… Ugh. Especially when the door was just slightly open?

All the way open or all the way closed. That’s what it had to be.

My sister solved this problem for me by simply tearing the doors off of my closet in a fit of unbridled and seemingly entirely random rage.

Doors slightly open at all, ever… For whatever reason, my brain immediately goes to, “Yeah, but what’s looking in?”

Why is there ANYTHING looking in? What??

Walking to the bathroom at night encompasses all of these things in some way or another, especially that first mirror-in-the-dark bit.

This was all before the food thing became… a thing.

The worms and ants almost-phobia may have to do with the hidden nature of them, just as the dark poses for everything else.

And yet again…

Ants though… They’re like the Borg.

And worms like maggots, eat the dead.

Realizing I’m very much alive, am I just afraid I’ll find out the hard way? I’m more afraid of my own reflection in the dark than seeing someone other than myself… Maybe it’s all existential.

Fear and phobias are interesting things when they start to rule your life.

I was always super anxious about everything, but I very rarely expressed this openly. I felt like a had to keep myself with a steely expression for my family, so that no one would know that I was scared or in any pain.

That may have been a fear too. I didn’t want to be a burden, and I didn’t want them to feel bad.

So… I just pretended I was fine for as long as I could.

This led to weirdly humiliating moments, because it translated as being shy when I wouldn’t just speak up and say, “This is really shitty.”

Good example?

That time I had a mat in my hair.

Why my parents didn’t just take a fucking scissors to my hair is beyond me. It was in the back and under all my other hair. No one would have noticed.

The whole thing was kind of my own fault anyway because I didn’t want anyone to touch my head.

I was little then… Elementary school I guess?

And my head was an unruly mess of curls and tangles.

Dad would (jokingly?) chant, “Rip tear! Rip tear!” as he tried to brush my hair.

I have since learned to either start from the bottom

or just cut it all off.

So there we were at the hair stylist.

The lady gathered everyone around to see.

So, there I was, SURROUNDED by random people staring at my head.

“IT’S A PERFECT DRED!” she kept saying.

I did not do this on purpose. I mean, good to know, but having all those people stare and touch me, and have to sit there in silence pretending I wasn’t scared and embarrassed…

Ugh.

You know what? I’m exhausted enough, let’s stick to the hair for a minute.

Lemme tell you ‘bout my hair.

I found my first single grey hair in middle school.

Since this was the era of being called “Witch Girl” and being made fun of anyway, I decided to be how I wanted to be.

Fuck ‘em.

I’d rather be poked at for things I choose than the things I have no control over.

Cue my Rogue-style blonde chunk right in the front of my head.

This was then blue for a while, various shades of “strawberry”, and green for a very short while.

It’s hard to keep green without it becoming a variety of snots.

Eventually, I dyed the underside of my hair red, so when it was up in a half-ponytail you could see it…

I very rarely did that though.

Finally, there was the black and red stripes.

“Make it look like it’s bleeding.”

When that proved too hard to maintain, straight red or maroon happened.

There were some mishaps, such as the orange frizz…

And some disappointments.

“We have… semi demi purple? It’ll wash out in a day or two.”

I have since stopped dying my hair due to a combination of fear, lack of funds, lack of time, and straight up laziness.

I have a few more grey hairs now though.

You know.

Cause I’m thirty.

Strawberry (and Chocolate Milkshake) Fields Forever

2015-09-07T03:45:00.001-07:00

I am by no means a "food blogger," nor do I intend to become one.
However, I am thankful that Rob went from setting the stove (electric, no less) on fire while boiling water, to making delicious things mostly in the name of my recovery from the food phobia.

I trust him, which means I eat the things he makes without serious panic about my allergies.
It is pretty awesome.

So, while Rob DOES also make lovely actual food-food:

and this has probably saved my life...

I'm also partial to his desserts.

We'll start off with the Oreo milkshake. It was in celebration of the Fourth of July, so we were picturing making it red and blue...

We'll get to that later.

All you need for this is some vanilla ice cream, Oreos, and milk.
Obviously, the cookies could be replaced just as easily as the other stuff can be replaced with lactose-free varieties.

I can't even give you exact amounts to use of what, as we just kinda...

"Whatever. Blend it." "More of this?" "Yeah, sure."

So much blending...

More blending...

Add more cookies...

AND BLEND.

Forever.

Eventually, you will have a milkshake that may or may not bring all the boys to your yard.

As stated before, we experimented in food dye...

It made it kind of pretty?

But didn't really work in the way we were hoping...

So fuck it. Just stir that up.

Delicious.

*****************************************

And now for my favorite thing he's made so far (and we have strawberries in the house... Can this happen today?)

THESE THINGS.

All these photos probably could have used some photoshop, but I'm an honest person, damn it. This food ain't plastic.

*ahem*

The ingredients you'll need:

Cream cheese in either tub or stick form...

Strawberries...

I prefer my strawberries GMO and bigger than my head. Feel free to not.

A metric ass-ton of sugar...

SPOON

And a plate, if they make it that far.

Once everything but the strawberries are mixed together, you'll have something like this:

Now for coring! Just cut out those little strawberry innards.

Then fill with the mixture...

And arrange.
Here's what the steps themselves look like:

...and devour.

YAY!

The Long Con

2015-03-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

Team Manticore attended the Central PA Comic Con two weeks ago, and then we went to another convention this past weekend.

The first went really well. We made connections, sold some stuff...

The second one was just a series of mini-terrors wrapped in terrible luck.

There was blood.

Confused cat.

So, let me start by going back to that first con.

Like I said, we were pretty successful, and we even sold the last of the Shuffle comics!

This was super exciting to me, because I had the chance to sign some stuff and feel like... I drew that thing that I drew.

There were a lot of awesome costumes, and it was great to see such diversity.

Also, like eighty Black Widows.

That is NOT a complaint.

I made some cats while we were sitting there, because they were selling faster than I thought they would.

...Some came out a little wrong.

So, now we know what it looks like when a large head is put on a small body...

Like a UFO cat.

Oops.

In any case, people were pretty happy about the up-cycled comics and "dead records", because we're making things that are otherwise going to be thrown out into something new.

Here's another shot of the tiny kitties:

We also sold a surprising number of teeth, and got some neat suggestions for Walking Dead inspired jewelry.

Good times. Good times.

The head-crab, sadly, did not find a new home that day.

Go home, Head-Crab. You're drunk.

The second con...

You know what?

Here:

Before even setting foot instead the building, I set knee inside of asphalt.

See, it was the second day of Spring, so I slipped on some ice, because New York.

It hurt like a bitch, but once I could stand at all, I realized that nothing was broken.

That was enough for me.

And honestly, I was more concerned about my hand than anything else.

So, I'm limping along...

Kinda walking bow-legged...

And I feel this cold trickling down my leg.

I figure, "It can't be blood. That would be warm."

The other problem was that I was wearing these pants:

(Post fall, hence the hole and caked-on dirt)

So I couldn't actually tell the real blood from the fake blood, because why would there be real blood when all I did was fall down wHAT??? SHUT UP I'M FINE.

At this point, I became a giant baby.

Rob ran around for first-aid stuff...

Thankfully, a week later, THIS works just fine:

I was FAR more concerned with cleaning off the extra blood, than actually tending to the wound itself.

It was pretty bad. Approximately this:

A week later, it looks more like this:

The fact is that while kids will skin their knees, that's really just a scrape.
I actually, literally, SKINNED my fucking knee. SKINNED IT.
TOOK THE SKIN OFF OF A CHUNK OF MYSELF LIKE MY KNEE WAS SOMETHING OUT OF HELLRAISER.

...and it hurt.

...and Rob got really frustrated by the fact that I was semi-in shock and just would not stop talking about my knee.

Putting up with each other is half of love.

Going to work, I refused to bring my cane.
I have one.
My father gave it to me.
It has served me well.

I don't know why I decided that I didn't need it... Cause... I did.

So, fine.
We didn't really sell anything, due to the timing of the con.

We got REALLY bored.

I made a bunny out of stuffing.

Dusty the dust bunny.

Here is Rob's creation photobombing.

Dusty's butt.

We are classy folks.

OH!

I got to have another injury before we left!

Yaaaaaaaay...

See, the needle broke.

BROKE in half.

Yep.

Fine.

The end.

"Bored" Yet?

2014-12-03T08:28:00.001-08:00

I don't normally pump drawings out this fast, so since this one happened in two days, I figured I'd show how it was done.

There is no progress picture of the usual "I swear these blobs and scratchy lines will be a thing" phase because I whipped through it too quick.

That being said, references would have been a brilliant move.

Oh well.

I knew that I wanted the ironing board in the middle to be wearing a suit.

The others were a little harder to decide for.

There have been a few interpretations of this piece, which makes me happy.

Didn't use any body references, but I DID look up thousands of ironing boards, surfboards, and irons.

The surfboard's design changed a bit as things went on...

...Which kind of forced the iron to change, because I either wanted all three to have a flower print, or only have the ironing board have one.

Visually speaking, Surfboard was a too busy anyway.

Inked!

Scanned and cleaned up in Photoshop!

Flat color on their clothes and heads...

Color has never been my greatest skill...

Flat color everywhere else...

Decisions were made about Surfboard.

SHADING! (Well, very minor shading.)

...Background?

And that's it!
...Mainly because I don't feel like working on it anymore.

Yay!

The Wrong Turns

2014-10-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

Realizing that I have not yet explained how much of a pain getting my license was...

Let's do that now.

The first test went wrong for a number of reasons.
For one, it happened that the guy looked like an almost-assailant of mine, was WAY too cocky, and in general pretty obviously hated women.
That was fun.

I felt remarkably unsafe.

He was also very vague.

Like, Dude, don't say "Sunday driver…" without specifying if I am being one, or should be.

He claimed I was speeding and gave me a mockingly presented pop quiz at the end.
I'm a pretty cautious driver for obvious reasons, so no, I was not speeding at any point.
He also told me I was way too cautious.
THAT one, I'll believe.

He wouldn't even look at my mother, who had to basically chase him down to ask if I passed.
His response? "She needs work."

After about a month of me never wanting to try again, my well meaning parents sent me off with an instructor about two weekends before my second road test.

To clarify, I did pass it on the third try.

This particular driving lesson went so poorly that it ended with my sobbing hysterically.

Oddly enough, not at all due to driving.

Before we even started, I got a call from the driving instructor-man saying that he was looking on google, but couldn't figure out where my house was.
I did my best to explain, to which he responded, "I KNOW the area."

...Like, okay dude. If you know the area, why are you having a problem?
The houses are clearly numbered and otherwise it's kind of just us and deer, but whatever.

Anyway, he came to the house to pick me up and drove the car to the lot where he would, in theory, have me drive.

Again, the driving was not the part that flipped me out.

In fact, the only driving he had me do initially, was weaving around parking spaces.

I did this while he occasionally slapped my hand, not entirely explaining why, and then saying things like, "You looking to get slapped??" and "You wanna get hit, dontcha??" and then laughing, like this is a funny thing to say after I've already told him that, no, seriously, I'm a survivor of abuse and that's kinda entirely triggering, so please don't.

He tried to fix it by saying I could slap him back, and then holding out his hand and forcing me to slap it, even after I told him that it made me reeeaaaallllly uncomfortable.
Also, fun fact, I have cartilage where there should be bone in my wrist.
REALLY hurts when hit, even as a light slap.

Also, grabbing my hand is a terrible plan because of that.

Just sayin'.

Still did not cry here.

That part was all preempted by him saying, "I'm going to be a male, chauvinist pig for a second," and then just asking me really politely if I know how they train for football.

Dude, you wouldn't have come across as a jackass if you had just asked the question or talked about the training outright, without announcing that you are, in fact, a jackass.

I must have done something right though, as he then had me go on to phase two.
Keep in mind, the first HOUR of instruction was him driving around town mumbling things as he thought of them, calling this a "demo" like that would at all be helpful to me.

I chalked it up to the fact that he is probably eight thousand years old.

Part two involved him making me FLOOR the gas and then wait until he told me to STOMP on the break.

Everything about this was terrifying and extremely dangerous, yet I managed to not cry at this point.

I did, however, consider calling someone to pick me up, or just the police, because clearly I was trapped in a car with a lunatic.

He said this was to teach me what it felt like, in case it ever happened.
…Wouldn't I know what it felt like if I ever had to do it?
And WHY do this for the person WHO ALREADY SAID SHE HAD BEEN IN MULTIPLE ACCIDENTS???

And yet still, I had not cried.

At this point, he decides I'm ready to drive home.
Two hours have almost passed, and I have done NOTHING that I wanted to do, such as things that are actually on the road test.

By telling me I'm going to drive home, what he meant was that my feet would control the gas and break, but his hands would never leave the steering wheel…

So, this old man is like, draped across my freaking lap to control the car, questioning why I'm trying to fight him when we are veering on top of the line on my side, and otherwise coasting with the wheel RIGHT next to the line…

I'm just waiting for the left mirror to get clipped off, really.

THIS is when I start crying.

A lot.

He tells me not to be embarrassed, and that HE isn't scared.
If he was scared, after all, he wouldn't have let me drive home.

…He didn't see me doing ANY driving.
NONE.
And I did NOT care if he was scared, nor was I embarrassed.

He also used the word "angsty" when I asked to pull over.

I explained to him that I was afraid of getting hit, and that was why I was crying.
He told me not to be afraid, and that no one was going to rear end us.
I explained that, no, I was afraid of HIM hitting me.

I felt unsafe IN the car.

He laughed.
Then he said he was sorry and that he didn't mean to make fun of me.

I don't even know what he meant by that.

By the time we got home, he decided not to let me do the parking in front of Rob's car, and to instead demo how easy it is.

He did what could only be described as a twenty point turn, and actually backed into Rob's car.

There was no damage, though the license plate did make a satisfying pop noise, as if to say, "HA, you asshole."
EDIT: No, his license plate did actually pop off soon after.

He then proceeded to tell me that he'd be calling my mother to tell her I did a great job (I’m a grown ass woman. I'll call my own damn mother) and he let me know that I'm totally not ready for the test and I would fail it if I took it now.

…Gee, thanks, guy-who-didn't-see-me-drive-and-instead-just-freaked-me-out.

Our interaction ended when he reminded me that we had been together for two hours and that his price is $35 an hour, but that I could pay any time, and he's not worried.

I told him I didn't think I could handle another day of that right away, and that I wanted to cancel the 9:30 for the next morning, but maybe see him for a three point turn and parallel parking sometime next weekend.

He looked at me like I was a moron, handed me a piece of paper that reads "How to parallel park for the road test" and then said he'd see me at 9:30 the next day.

I went upstairs.

Rob was taking a nap, as he still wasn't feeling well all weekend.
I tried to hook a right to the bedroom, and instead flopped down on the floor by the door and just started ugly-sobbing.

There was so much snot.

Rob didn't wake up, but Perry recognized the sound of hysterical tears, and so burst through his doorway with a box of tissues.

I literally cried on Perry's shoulder for a half hour.
He's a trooper, really.

Rob woke up around then, and I had calmed down enough to be coherent about what had happened.
This was a good thing, as Rob's instinct was to panic and think I was in some way physically hurt.

I was still hyperventilating every now and then, but not to the point of a full blown panic attack.

I contacted my parents, explained what happened, and they laughed at me, telling me to suck it up.

Rob then called my mother (Why is everyone calling my mom for me??) to explain that we would not be seeing the man again.

My parents then said, "OH! We're sorry. We just thought she was exaggerating and being dramatic. We didn't realize she was actually upset!" because my word means nothing.

…This may explain how my life has gone the way it has, actually.

So, Rob took over helping me polish everything up, driving wise, though I was kind of a wreck all Sunday.
Rob and Perry are both endlessly patient.

For the record, I did not pay the driving instructor man.
EDIT: My parents still paid him.

I did sort of get an apology from the driving man, through him calling my mother (he did have MY number, but whatever) and saying that he was sorry he upset me.

He figured it was because of the gas and break exercise.

While that was stupid and dangerous, it was not at all what freaked me out.

Which, you know… I told him.

In detail.

Seriously.

I swear I told him what the problem was.

Is there just something about me that completely invalidates
everything I say about my own anxieties? Because what the Hell?

*Ahem* So.

Good times.

In any case, I was pre-freaked out for the second test based on that instructor and the first time I took the test, so I actually went SO SLOWLY that I had trouble getting up a hill.

The third one I actually passed, and I wonder how much of that was due to the fact that
A. I just gave no shits anymore. I just wanted it done forever, and
B. the person grading was a woman about my size.

There is something extra creepy about being a survivor and then being trapped in a car with an older man and having to take all of his orders.
In essence, that was what the test was for me over and over.

BUT it's done.

So.

Good.

Driving the Point Home

2014-10-15T21:06:00.000-07:00

A question was posed in my Psychopharmacology class that I felt merited some consideration on my part.

We were talking about why someone might fail to take their medication, or continue to say they're having significant problems when they aren’t.
The question was “What is the gain from remaining sick?”
This can obviously be answered in many ways, depending on the circumstance.

I began to think about this in terms of my own life and my own struggles with my fears and with a failure to drive.

If I don't try, I can't fail, right?

This logic never worked in any other area of my life, so I'm not sure why I thought it would with driving, other than the fact that I did mostly have other ways around.

Let's face it.

I don't leave my home very often, and would generally prefer to be some kind of happy recluse, but I understand that this isn't a reasonable possibility.

I also feel guilty now that I don't live by a bus line and occasionally need to carpool or outright ask people for rides, as I can't currently afford to take cabs everywhere while in the unpaid internship...

Externship...

Whateverthefuckship.

In any case, I've been attempting and mostly failing to prioritize my health, and instead I've been obsessing over something that is generally not seen as a big deal.

More than that, it is generally seen as a wonderful thing.

For me personally, passing the test means that I now don't have to retake the permit test, which would have been embarrassing.

I don't have to have the strange looks when I have a non-driver ID instead.

I don't have to have anyone questioning how I function in life, just because they are too unimaginative to think of living without a car in my situation.

I wanted to be proud of myself too, but I'm having trouble with that.

I think the issue is that I really had no desire to do it at all, so rather than feeling accomplished, I just feel like I gave in.

I did this thing that I had no desire to do, just because someone else told me to do it.

Christ.

How much of my life has been like that?

Still, having passed is great, if only for the wait for the next one to now be gone forever.

The pressure each time was slowly killing me.

It became everything.

It took over every aspect of my life with the sheer power of not-want.

I just don't want to think about it anymore.

Passing means I don't have to worry about the test, but now I have the car I can't afford, the insurance, the upkeep, the responsibility, and the assumption that I will drive.

Now, it has become an issue if I do have the audacity to ask for help.

After all, I can drive.

Everyone involved seems to think passing the test has immediately cured me of my not-want.

It did not, just as doing any other terrible thing forever doesn't automatically make people Stockholm-syndrome themselves into loving the thing.

Now, I just have more questions, more pressure, and I fear that I'll wind up on the side of the road sobbing and hysterical, missing my appointments that were otherwise never an issue to get to on time.

I guess any lingering depression winds up more apparent when it's on me, rather than being able to say, "Well, better get going so my ride doesn't get upset."

I feel like I'm constantly letting everyone down either way, or that there is something significant wrong with me, beyond all the things that have actually made my life harder.

It's frustrating to note that the things I actually want to work on and struggle with are somehow not good enough to those around me.

I fully realize that I am not those people, but some solidarity would be nice.

I have found myself falling from pushing on and through and up, to just wanting to be left alone to rot.

Of course, my Knight in Pinstripes and my very good friends ARE supportive and would never let me do that to myself, as much as I may try.

Still, this is upsetting because I understand that it has all been hinged on this idea of having a car and driving and freedom in this lonely, expensive, wasteful death machine.

Again, Rob is all for carpooling and is steady in his belief that I should not have to drive if I do not want to.

He generally believes I shouldn't do ANYTHING that I don't want to do, but again, that means I would do... pretty much nothing.

Ever.

Sometimes, I pretend that I want to drive.

Sometimes, I pretend that I am already someone who drives.

It is a fun fantasy, but ultimately leaves me feeling empty, realizing I am lying to myself because I feel like I am worth less than I would be as a driver.

I feel like while I've been told I am not, I must certainly be a burden, and something to be ashamed of.

Otherwise, why would any of this have come up at all? I wind up wallowing in everything else I've been trying to fix, just to have this barrier of, “No, look. I'm too sick. I can't drive because I'm too sick.”

I've been self sabotaging and ruining so much of my health, both physical and mental, in an effort to convince those around me that I am sick enough to not do this one thing that I have never done before anyway.

All that having been said, I did face my fears.

And now, I have it, whether I ever use it or not.

These are things I CAN be proud of, because they were important to my growth as a person.

That is the most important part.

And... I actually do like the car. Well, when it starts up, anyway.

I call it The Grey Ghost, and I understand that my aversion to driving is not the car's fault.

...My tendency to personify objects a bit probably doesn't help the guilt though.

Just sayin'.

Why I Broke Up With Counseling

2014-10-09T07:54:00.002-07:00

Years ago, I felt like my life was over.

I had a long road to walk before I learned to pick up the pieces.

Well meaning people around me decided that rather than simply finding a way to still do the thing that I loved, I should just drop all of that and do something else entirely.

What was picked for me was Counseling.

I looked at this thing that was supposed to give my life meaning, and felt empty. I assumed I was the one at fault, not it.

Every now and then, I'd run off to my true passion, and I'd find myself feeling really guilty about it.

I felt selfish, because I was supposed to find meaning in being a therapist... Yet it wasn't happening.

And Counseling just kept screaming nonsense at me, so I put it with all the other stressors.

Of course, I kept getting new ones from people too,
and others just wandered in on their own...

They all looked kind of the same, so it was hard to tell which were important and which were really not. As a result, I treated each as equally important.

I ended up neglecting the ones I had put there myself.

This means that eventually, I was taking care of EVERYTHING else...

...until I stopped caring for myself at all.

Like I said, I felt guilty and selfish for not paying every ounce of attention to the ones other people told me were necessary and important.

How far down did I have to go before I realized what I was doing to myself??

I was right that it wasn't fair...
but I was wrong about which party was being neglected and hurt.

I blamed myself.

It was hard because I didn't want it. ...but being a therapist is tough even when people DO want it.

So, that couldn't be my fault, right?

Trying to fake it was exhausting at best, and depressing when I realized I still hadn’t tricked myself.

I felt guilty drawing.

As that was my main source of feeling like a real person again, it was a shame to stop.

I wanted to be passionate and to love Counseling, because I thought that all good people naturally want to do that... but not only is that untrue, it was unfair.

I've had enough crappy therapists to know that. Besides, you can't fake love and passion.

Being “good” at it didn't mean it was good for me, much like any other one sided relationship.

Finally, I looked at Counseling again.

I moved it to see what life was like without it.

I found that I felt lighter.

Away from me, I could analyze its true use, and realize that I was not the best person to take care of it.

Counseling was fine without me too.

I'm still surrounded by stressors, but some are welcome.

Others are a real necessity, and I'll continue weeding out the ones that aren't.

It has even freed up space so that I can get back to my physical health.

I've already had less panic about eating, and I actually enjoy the gym again.

The take away here is that guilt is never a good reason to live life for someone other than yourself.

I am ready to start finding out who I really am.

Adventures in Fashion: Makin' a Thing

2014-09-22T09:49:00.000-07:00

None of this is sewn together yet. It's just pinned, but you can see what the Hell it's going to be.

The idea is that I'll wear it with a white or black top of... some kind. Starts under the boob and then goes down. That's it. That's all it's gonna be.

All the Kinda Jobs

2014-07-09T17:24:00.000-07:00

So, I technically started my internship.
I also have a school-class that is supposed to… help? Somehow?
I don't know.
All I know is that I look at the homework and make a face.

Apparently part time unpaid internships plus a three credit class don't count as enough to do for financial aid, so I'm a little bitter about that.
…Also, we take our big test by week three, so what the Hell is the rest of the class for other than irritating otherwise busy, stressed, and not-paid students?
I guess to give us time to retake it if we fail.

...Hope I don't need that.

It's my first week at the hospital and already I have been able to make a lot of connections to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
I find this both comforting and horrifying.

It's exciting though.
I'm getting a calendar, I have a desk with a phone, and I'll even have a key to… things.

Now, what made this sort of Alice-like was
A. the computer system is actually called ALICE, and
B. running around following my supervisor in order to meet new people was a little like following the White Rabbit.

I found myself dragging behind and wondering if I was going to lose her in the endless maze that is those hallways.

At one point, looking for a key for me, we went to someone higher up.
Everyone is really nice, by the way.
This is a very good thing.

This particular very nice higher up person had a bowl of keys.
My key was not in said bowl.
She lamented the fact that she was unsure as to what the keys were even for.

Someone else had handed them to her a while before.
They said things like, "Bin 2" and "Desk" but no indication of what such bin may contain or where such desk might sit.

Yep.

I have been walked around that area of the building a few times now and I still have no idea how to get from point A to point B.

All I know is that they keep the interns in the basement.

No, like, seriously.

It wasn't nearly as scary as had been described, but the hallway is sort of thin and there isn't really a ceiling, so much as exposed pipes and such.

A little Silent Hill-y, but I had no fear of Pyramid Head or anything.

Once you get into the room, it's actually very cozy.

Admittedly, it is a little odd to know I am physically replacing a previous intern.

This makes sense, but it's still a little jarring to realize that her stuff was once right here, where my stuff is.
I know she just moved on and may have even gotten a nice cushy job somewhere, but I had a sense like she was dead.

I'm pretty sure she isn't dead, but I didn't want to ask.

That seemed rude.

Either way, any worries were replaced knowing that I have those cubical walls where you can pin stuff up like a giant corkboard.
Dad told me not to cover it in Batman.

I'm an adult and I'll do what I want.

Overwhelming horror returned when I had to record not one, but THREE voicemails.
I don't like the sound of my own voice, and recording things always leads to my sounding like I have eight thousand sticks shoved up my ass.

That actually wound up more harrowing than getting a needle shoved in my arm right before then.

Oh, wait…

Did I not mention that?

Yeah. You know. The PPD for tuberculosis and such.
We had gotten my photo for my ID, and run over to the nice nurse to ask about what proof of what immunizations I'd need.

Working in a hospital and occasionally wandering into the ER makes this pretty freaking important.

Once there, suddenly my supervisor has her arm exposed like, "LET'S DO THIS" and I'm sitting there saying, "Yes, hi, I'm terrified and confused and you just took a syringe out of like a mini-fridge? and what is happening I don't even-" and suddenly a needle was happening in my arm.

Now, obviously I've had this done before, and I had actually signed the needed paperwork…
BUT HOLY CRAP PANIC.

I apparently don't like getting that kind of thing sprung on me, but in all fairness, if it hadn't gone that way, I would have had a lot of trouble mentally gearing up for it later.
This way, it was done.

Also, the thing didn't swell or anything.
Just a little bruise.

The nurse was even super cool because she used to be an allergy person at my allergy… place.

So we talked about the drops and how they're working, and she told me that since I have allergies, my skin would do exactly what it did, so I didn't freak out.

Mind you, any little red splotches are not only usually very brief, but often a creation of my own brain-pan anyway.

It's the worst of super powers.

WHEW. Okay. So. That's that.

Donna is still going strong… (www.rowyngolde.com/donna)

OH! If anyone would like to submit guest strips for Deddrie.com, send an email to deddrie@gmail.com!

Since updating that has taken a huge backseat to Donna, my internship, my class, my relationship, my sanity, and so on, I'm looking for help to fill in that gap.

It can have however much swearing, violence, and so forth.
Ideally, hand me an idea for a script/concept, and anything you'd like me to post under the comic about where to find more of your work or who you are/lwhat you do.

Woot!

Lastly, we are done the casting for EVE and are now in the beginnings of funding!
Check out www.isitEVE.com, like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/eveindiefilm), or follow us on Twitter @EVEindiefilm for more news!

!!!

Busy With All The Wrong Things

2014-06-02T08:40:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since last I updated you all on what the Hell I've been doing, so let's get down to business.

Shuffle has been published on a small scale. I'm told more will be coming? We'll see. This is a little preview of my part of it (without the final shading, words... anything):

If you'd like to purchase a copy, right now copies ARE limited, so your best bet is to email me a request at deddrie@gmail.com

Oh Hell, Donna! is still updating every Wednesday.

...And I've got a couple character designs all ready to go for a storyline that won't show up for like another year or something:

AND Deddrie is actually ALSO still updating:

I just tend to promote that less because… Well… I mean, look at him. He's ridiculous. I know what this is.
Found some older drawings that need finishing though:

AND the Society6 page is still going strong.
Soon, there will also be a Storenvy.

EDIT: STORENVY link!

AAAND I entered a shirt contest thing with THIS at welovefine, though the rating period doesn't start for a few more days:

EDIT: Contest is over. Whoops.

*AHEM*

SO

As far as the other half of what I do, I DID manage to get an internship.
Fairly last minute and coated in chaos, this internship is actually much closer to something I would be happy (ish) doing, rather than all of the other internships that were available to me.

If I'm going to work for free, I'd like to not hate it.

Getting to the interview was an adventure, and made me feel a little like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

"No, seriously, I was told to wait here. I don't want to go through that door. Please don't buzz me in again-"
And suddenly I was on the other side of said door.

Just a thought here, but if you have to BUZZ people in before they can open the door, shouldn't you be checking to see who these people are first?

What if I was a crazy(er) person?

In any case, everyone was very nice.

Training starts tonight!

…And then maybe I'll have a real post.

Maybe.

In the meantime, have a look at some of the stupid things that have been coming out of my brain this past month:

Mermaid, kinda:

This one is pretty typical of me:

Yep.

Dating the Marvel/DC Universe

2014-05-02T06:16:00.000-07:00

My relationship with comic books has become a little like a weird dating scene.

DC and I used to be incredibly close.
Any new title, I was there, being supportive and loving.
No matter what the villains did, I had faith that the heroes would be… Well… Heroes.

But…

Then DC started getting weird on me.

Darker.

Too dark.

I don't mean that I was ever that into DC's BIF! POW! phase, but at least it was charming.
This was different.

Suddenly, everyone had to be alone.

NO one was allowed to have friends.
Not even Superman.

Characters like Bruce Wayne suddenly had no cares about family or legacy, which were pretty much key points to said characters.

Worst of all, I watched as DC started treating women very badly.

Women who had been there since the beginning were killed off.

Women who had been plot movers and game changers were erased entirely.

Women who were smart and caring and all manner of other things were reduced to objects for the men.

I was hurt.

…DC had broken my heart and I felt embarrassed to say I had ever been a fan.

DC threw away YEARS of our time together like I had meant nothing.

After all, I was just another woman.

Disheartened, I went to the comic book store.
It was time to move on and shop around for someone new, right?

…Was I ready to move on?

Dark Horse was there, of course.
Dark Horse and I always had a good time when we were together, but we hardly got to see each other anymore.

I found myself not having much to talk about beyond old titles from our history together.
It was difficult to find any new ground.

Still, Dark Horse was comforting in my hour of graphic novel need.

Madman never let me down...

But…

I wanted something more steady.

I wanted something that could give me movies so I could talk about characters with other fans who hadn't read the comics.
Or someone with cartoons-
…like DC.

Oh.

I missed DC.

Batman: The Animated Series…

You know, DC is still good for an animated movie once in a while, but no one else seems to pay any attention to it, so it feels like some kind of dirty secret.

I wind up saying, "NO! You don't understand! DC isn't like that! You just don't know DC like I do!" …And then I realize what that sounds like.

Then…

In the back of the room, looking all cool…

There was Marvel.

Now, I knew Marvel in passing.
I mean, my father hung out with Marvel just as much as he had DC, so I thought I had a good idea of what Marvel was all about.

Back in the day, I had pushed Marvel away when I saw what the Fantastic Four were like to each other.
They were mean in the comics, replacing key characters at the drop of a hat.
Plus, there was that time where EVERYONE was a mutant.

Of course…

There was Iron Man.

Iron Man had been good to me.
Even as a playboy, Tony wasn't outright cruel to anyone.
Iron Man was allowed to have friends.

He had been with me even when I left for art school, and honestly, I realize that I just kind of…

Well, I ignored him.

I hadn't really given Iron Man a chance.

You know…

I hadn't given a lot of Marvel a chance.
I guess I judged all of the characters by their friends.

Still, Marvel had never peaked my interest before.

I mean, Marvel just wasn't DC.

…But maybe that was the whole point.
Maybe I needed Marvel for that very reason.

What was Marvel going to do with someone like me though?

Marvel spotted me as I stood there among all the options.
Marvel said, "I know it's been a while, but I'm different now. You've grown up, and I've grown up too."

That set up a red flag for me.
After all, DC was "different" now.
More "grown up" too.

DC had started wearing the name tag of "New 52" and started all that awful violence with no purpose, heroes with no friends…
Sexist, racist, AND it carried right over into the movies!
And I just-

"No, no" Marvel said, putting a cool hand up, "It isn't like that. What I've done? I call it Ultimate. You'll see. Just give me a chance. There's women. We even brought some back from the dead! There's people of color in real hero roles. No more sidelines bullshit. Trust me. Just give me one try."
Marvel handed me something Hawkeye related.

Hawkeye…
Clint Barton and… Kate Bishop?

And the movies!

MY GOD the movies.

Marvel put hands in coat pockets, shrugging while giving me a disclaimer, "Sure, people still get sexualized, but you never had a problem with that, right?" Marvel blushed.
We started laughing together.
I guess Marvel was paying attention.

After all, in Marvel films, it was an even playing field.
Marvel added, "I mean, Black Widow's zipper may go down a little at one point, but the camera stays on Captain America's butt for like 80% of the film."

Now, I knew DC had been trying.
Batwoman showed promise, some of the other female characters were being brought back in...
But I just didn't trust DC anymore.

...I wanted to.

I was still hurt. I needed time.

DC needed time.

It was the recent films that really turned me off to DC, though I did find the action packed whatever-the-Hell-they-were entertaining.

They were nice to look at, but the characters I knew and loved were nowhere to be found, replaced by soulless, angry, violent, frightening-

They weren't heroes anymore.

And where the Hell was Wonder Woman???

Comics be damned, it is a new world and I just can't be satisfied anymore without good, live-action films.
What about MY needs, DC?

So,
for now,
I have to move on.

Marvel stood, waiting patiently by the door with two tickets for yet another Marvel film.

I looked longingly over at DC…
"Well," I said, taking the Marvel comic to the register, "We'll always have Batman: The Animated Series."

The Anxiety Monster

2014-04-30T04:33:00.000-07:00

My Knight and I were talking about what our anxiety looks like, assuming it has been personified into some kind of horrible creature.

We very quickly came up with this:

It was quick because, well, OF COURSE it looks like that.

Now, on good days, there are people who can ignore the anxiety monster.

I've never been so good at that, so while he isn't the most threatening thing in the world to me, (these days) he can still be super creepy.

Like...

Really.

Though, for the most part, he's just kind of annoying.
He is annoying in the way that he does shit like this:

He is the opposite of helpful.

He also enjoys SCREAMING in the middle of the night.

Normally I'd give some advice on how to deal with the anxiety monster.
I usually try to use these kinds of posts to offer some helpful hints on how to avoid the ball of stress I had become in my life.

Unfortunately, I haven't quite figured out how to get rid of this guy.

Ugh.

The Hell Hotel and The Central PA Comic Con

2014-04-17T18:18:00.000-07:00

The following blog entry is a collaboration between Bad Grey Matter and Tight Rope Noose. Together, we are Team Manticore!
We'll go back and forth a bit to tell bits of the story, and the illustrations from each of us will go...wherever they make sense to go. Not necessarily by the person who said it. Ready? Go!

What a weekend!

RP: We started by attending an event at Bard College. Neil Gaiman and Art Spiegelman had a conversation on stage in front of the audience, and if you don’t know why that was awesome then you don’t know the people I’m talking about. Neil Gaiman read from his version of Hansel and Gretel. They talked about the history of comics as it related to their lives. And MAD magazine. Very awesome.

RG: It was nice to see some similarities between my own background and theirs. Hearing talk of that grim relation that you don't have as many family members in your tree as you would have pre- WWII because your family is Jewish, the fact that the first thing I read in its entirety by myself was a Batman comic, and, like Rob said, MAD magazine, was all incredibly uplifting for me.

RP: Then we headed out to Pennsylvania from there. It was a dark and rainy night, so that was fun to drive in. The best part was an hour away from our destination, when a fog straight out of a horror movie surrounded everything in sight. It was like The Mist plus The Fog plus Silent Hill. This slowed us down considerably, and 20 minutes into it we saw our first “Warning: Heavy Fog” sign. That was super helpful because before that I had thought I had driven into the smoking section of America. No wait, I knew it was fog. The sign didn’t help at all.

RG: Rob started making siren noises like Silent Hill. It actually creeped me out, which is silly. We couldn't see ANYTHING on either side, so I kept wondering if we were going to fall off an edge and die in a ditch somewhere, but Rob was pretty skillful about not doing so.

RP: It was about 2:30 AM when I started having the sleep deprived hallucinations. The combination of being up since 7am Friday, plus the fog, plus the discomfort of lengthy stretches on the road started to take its toll. I was so glad when we got off of the highway and pulled into our hotel.

RG: See, I'm used to MY sleep deprived hallucinations. Faces in the trees? Wave at them like old friends. Little white creatures in the distance? Just don't look right at them. They hate that.

RP:….Until we go into the hotel. The man on duty was laying on the lobby couch with his shoes off. After opening the door he checked us in, asking if we were part of the dance crew (We were not) and started to show us to our room.

RG: Technically speaking, he looked at ME and said, "Oh, you're with the dancing group. One of the dancers." It felt like he was telling me I was a stripper. Turns out there WAS a dancing group at the con, but they were a small part of it. I guess they were the only other people who bothered to check into this Hell hole.

RP: Along the way we marveled at the general disrepair of the facilities. The yellow grime on the door hinges, the chipped paint at the corners, the dinginess of the rug, the dead plants in the hallway. But so far it was shared space, so if the room was nice we could deal with it.

RG: No, no. You don't understand. It's not like there was one dead hanging plant in a bucket or something. There was a giant row of dead plants along a wall on the floor. Someone had taken the time to set this whole thing up to look EXTRA fancy, so when no one took care of it, it was extra horrible.

RP: NOPE. We opened the door to the room to find out it wasn’t even put together. The bed was disassembled against the wall.

RG: He made me stand there with the door open. Just… stand there like a doorstop. Like, of course that was my purpose. I'm just a dancing girl. I hold doors.

RP: The man looked at us and said “You can’t sleep here, right?” This was said as an earnest question. As if we were OK with a room without a bed. We were not.

RG: On the way to figuring out if there was a room ready at all, he had asked us to follow him and leave our bags. We declined. While he was gone, we took the time to murmur to each other about possibly waking up in a bathtub of ice with no kidneys and how grimy that tub would probably be. We started planning our escape.

RP: He went and swapped the keys and then took us outside and around the building to a somehow even shadier motel-looking section of the supposed hotel.

RG: Oh... Oh so shady.

RP: We entered the room. Again, chaos. Exposed wires came out of the floor and wall, the gunk built up on the surfaces of the furniture. It looked like a drug motel, and probably was.

RG: Like Rob said, the journey when the man came back took us outside the building, up and down a bunch of steps. He kept asking where we were parked, as though our answer would magically change. I began to panic, then stifle the panic, back and forth. I assumed that this was actually fine, and that my crazy-ass was just blowing it out of proportion. My brain is so wrong that I honestly have trouble telling what is really bad versus just my head. This is why I have Rob.

RP: We closed the door and used the room phone to call the Hotel where the Convention was actually taking place. We had hoped to save a few dollars by getting a cheaper room, but not at this price! Luckily they still had rooms available and we quickly threw our bags back in the car, turned in the room key and left.

RG: Even just waiting for Rob to get back to the room, I looked every lock and sat on the bed, half afraid to touch anything. Dear god. What if it was covered in jizz or something?? I was so thankful when he returned for me. We ran to the car and I debated if we had just escaped from another King novel.

RP: The man tried to ask what was wrong, why were we leaving and I simply stated I would send them a list. I am still considering writing the chain office, since previously I have had good luck with that company's line of hotels, but after this location, I will probably not frequent them again.

RG: I had furiously texted my mother, much to her chagrin. On some level, I just wanted her to know what had happened, just in case she never heard from me again.

RP: We get to the hotel (again) and luckily it is a very nice building, high windows with well cleaned treatments and a giant brass fireplace. A man who was dressed like the sun checked us in, and surprisingly (and despite what was told to us by the convention earlier in the planning stages) the cost for this nice hotel was the same price as the fleabag shit-hole we had just come from! Score.

RG: There were chandeliers and real wallpaper, and yes, the largest of men in the brightest of yellow shirts greeted us with open doors.

RP: We essentially collapse immediately after setting our alarms, we had to setup our booth to be ready by 10am, and at this point it is 4am. We will have to man that booth until 7pm on however much sleep we can get.

RG: *cry* After awkwardly fighting panic just to sleep, I slept rather well.

RP: Except for being moved over a space (and losing the critical corner-zone) everything went smoothly on day one.

RG: So many people had beards and baseball caps! Is that a PA thing or something?

RP: We were seated next to Red Adept Publishing, cool authors all competing to see who could get the most votes for their genre. They also ran a great panel about it.

RG: The writers were a lot of fun. We're all internet friends now. :)

RP: People. Love. Cats. Rowyn’s stuffed cats are a huge hit and we pretty much immediately sell out of the large ones.

RG: My guess is that because I had a niche there, that was why they sold so quickly? I don't even know. Earrings and pins weren't bad either, but we went to sell prints. Rob's free comic went like hot cakes though, I will say.

And here are some shots of what our table actually looked like:

All in all, we had a great time!

PA Comic Con!

2014-03-26T05:24:00.001-07:00

We've been making our rounds this year for conventions, and in a couple of weeks, Team Manticore (Bad Grey Matter and Tight Rope Noose) will be at THIS one!

Table V12!

Come see me!

I'll have prints, cats, NEW prints of Donna stuff, some pins, earrings... STUFF.

Show me some love!

Bee Entertained

2014-03-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

Today, I'm going to tell you the tale of one of the very few typical-of-pretty-much-everyone's-childhood stories I have.

Bee stings.

My first (and so far only) was completely avoidable and I can absolutely blame it on my older sister.

No, but like... Seriously.

Okay, not really, but I'll tell you how it all went down.

First off, my sister is almost eight years older than I am, so when I was a kid, I automatically looked up to her and wanted to do as she said, regardless of whether or not that was a good decision.

I have since learned.

Many years ago, my family was stopping by a little shop that opens in the Summer for hotdogs, ice cream, and the like.

I was looking forward to these things.

Instead, I got this.

We were standing at the top of a hill:

Now, most children do want to roll down hills.
I understand this.

I was not most children.

So, to begin with, I really just did not want to do the normal-child thing of rolling down the hill.

Grass is dirty, worms freaked me out, sometimes grass made me itchy (which got worse with age), I feared rolling right into traffic... and so on.

With some coaxing, I (for whatever reason) was convinced that doing this thing was actually a proper plan.

Much like her frustration when I was not a fluent English speaker at two years old, all she wanted was to have me experience an authentic childhood thing.

All I wanted was ice cream.

So, I roll, like any other child would have done.

And, of course, I roll over a bee.

You know, despite the literal pain in my ass, I remember being very concerned about the bee.

I pictured a bee-crime scene and I wondered if his bee family would miss him.

Perhaps they'd send the bee-bulance, but it would "bee" of no use.

I had killed him.

With my butt.

We rushed home for an embarrassing round of "Here, hold that chair while Mommy takes a tweezer to your ass,"

And I resigned myself to a life inside, forever, because screw the outside world and its hills.

In case you are on the edge of your seat wondering, yes.

Yes, I totally did get some ice cream.

Rejection!

2014-03-12T05:44:00.002-07:00

Let's take a moment to talk about rejection.

It sounds like a dirty, horrible, hurtful thing, but it's really just a very formal way of saying "no."

Sometimes, these rejections are done in weird ways.

For example, I was once broken up with by a man I was not dating.

I had been effectively stalking his housemate and sort of using him to do it.

WOW that sounded really bad, all typed out.

Well, it's not really incorrect, so we'll keep it.

I did legitimately want to start a friendship with this guy anyway.

Then I learned why I shouldn't.

With no advances, with no mention of feelings, with complete and total base-line friendship, he still got concerned that he was leading me on.

Leading me on to what?
Do so many people really assume attraction when someone is just being friendly?

Yep.

He took me aside in a convenience store to politely tell me, "Look, I like you a lot, and I do find you attractive, but you just aren't my type, you know? I'm really sorry. This isn't going to work out."

He waited for my response, which was just kind of a face of blank confusion.

I think I maybe was supposed to cry or something?
I was so confused that I just kind of blinked at him until my eyebrow slowly went up.
"Maybe he's practicing for someone else and I just missed that part of the conversation" I thought to myself.

Eventually, I just said, "okay" and that was that.

We didn't hang out after that day.
I'm sure he thinks it was because I was heartbroken, but really, I just didn't want to accidentally "lead him on" by…
Standing there.
I don't know.

Don't get me wrong, I've had plenty of real rejections in my life, but I hardly ever openly tried enough to require one.

I've even been stood up.

More than once.

The thing is, with relationships, I had a tendency to wait around for Mr. or Ms. Perfect and when neither showed up, I'd just go to a person who was nice enough, even if I wasn't attracted to him.
This is a terrible plan and it never ended well.
Often, the guys turned out to be not-so-nice either.

Eventually, I stopped that, (after everything went to Hell a few years ago) and I grabbed the butt of my Knight in an effort to not be shy about it.

(He was wearing pants. I'm not sure why I didn't illustrate it that way.)
Okay, so I went from one side of the spectrum to the other, but it worked, so shut up.

When I was a kid, I didn't take rejection well, but I was also TERRIBLE at talking to people, which makes me wonder if half the people who rejected me even had any idea that they had done so.

Getting called a "failed experiment" by a girl is an interesting thing, but somehow didn't make me cry as much as all the "I'll totally dance with you" and then NEVER coming up to me at all.
Did I ever go up to them after the initial asking?

Nope.

Goes both ways.

Sometimes "rejection" is what we make up in our own heads.
Even in my happy relationship now, he and I were both so messed up from previous endeavors that we spent the first half a year (or more) worried that the other was just leading us on.

We referred to this as "Carrie-ing," and I can pretty much describe the fear I've had for most of my life this way.

Seriously, our own minds can be horrible friends to us.

Sometimes though, rejection comes in the form of little pieces of paper.

I am proud to say that out of high school, I applied to seven art schools and got into eight (not that you can tell by this blog).
However, that number evened out when I went for an interview AFTER getting an initial acceptance letter for a school that was specifically for cartoonists.

They liked me a lot, which is why they sent that letter before the actual in-face interview.

Then, they asked if I only wanted to be a cartoonist, and the answer is really no.
I want to draw, but I also write, sculpt, and all kinds of things.

It was suggested that I'd probably be happier getting a more rounded art degree, but that I could always go there again if I changed my mind.

THEN they sent a rejection letter.

Seriously.
I have one of each from this school.
Kay.

More recently, I was up for an interview for an internship.
I was really excited/terrified.

She emailed me exactly twenty four hours before the interview to apologize a thousand times and explain that they found someone.

Weird excuses were made, which made me think none of it was her choice.

In such an email, is it really so hard to just say, "The position has been filled" and leave it at that?
I get that she apparently wanted to keep that interview, and I'm bummed that I have to keep looking, but for reals.

Partly because of how it was written, it felt a little like I was the nerdy kid at school who had landed a date to prom with the head cheerleader, only for her to last-minute tell me she's going with my friend instead.

"Like, OMG! I am so, so sorry, but Billy has a reaaalllly nice car, so…"
Poop.

So.
Fine.

Now, a surefire way for me to want to reject someone else is the misspelling of my name.
This is a digital age where everyone is emailing all the time.

There is ZERO reason to misspell a name when it was just right in front of you a moment ago.

Hell, copy/paste if you have to.
I'll never know.

On social media, saying my name in a formal way is just creepy, because if I already know a person in real life, and that person is messaging me on a private only-me thing…

You really don't have to make it a formal letter to explain that you are writing to only me.
If you're someone I don't actually know in real life, that's fine.
Otherwise, stop that.

If someone does do that, I wish this could also be the kind of person who looks at the message to see how my name is spelled, or remembers me enough from previous encounters to spell it correctly.

I imagine the person typing along, thinking, "Oh, jeez… Um… Screw it, I'll just make it up. I can't be assed to read the message she just sent!"

And you know?
Sometimes, a little wrong is fine.
Seriously.
So long as it's basically the same name, awesome.
There are lots of spellings to everything.

But, see...
Then there are cases like this one time...

Okay, my email is after my comic, Deddrie.com.

My EMAIL is not my name.
I signed an email -RG recently.
'Cause, you know, these are my initials.
The response I got?
"Hello, Debbie" …
The fuck is the Debbie? I mean, I know it's a name, but it isn't mine.

This means she not only ignored the signature, but then ALSO misread my email address, and then CONTINUED doing it, no matter how I signed emails after that, and how many emails she sent to me.

After this incident, with a completely different person in a completely different situation, I not only stated my full name in the body of the email, but I signed it with my full first name.

I got this strange butchered thing that has never been a name ever.
The first couple of letters were okay…

And then it just became strange and phonetically completely different.

Why?

WHY???

REJECTED.

Albany Games Fest!

2014-03-09T17:30:00.000-07:00

The first day of the convention went rather well.

Housemate and I made him a mask, as seen here:

Obviously, I took this before he painted it.

Though he didn't get a chance to do a cosplay contest.

Still, there were events, stuff got sold, we met some new people, and we talked to some old friends... Well, I did, anyway.

Rob made us turkey sandwiches for lunch and everything.

There were games of both video and board varieties, and there were prizes to be won.

Or, as one announcer stated,

While this was a very busy con for those actively participating in the events, it was not so busy for the venders.
This meant that we had some spare time.

During this ~~boredom~~ lull in the convention, I found ways to entertain myself.

I made more stuff,

I drew stuff,

I went over my to-do list,

I drank too much water and had to go to the strange bathroom that doesn't make any sense to me...

You know what, let's take a moment to talk about that bathroom.
I was told the men's toilet area was not this way.

First off, I understand why that mirror would be so low. If someone were to be in a wheelchair, that would be really useful.

However, why were all the other mirrors segregated to another room?

And why did this other room require one solitary chair and trash-bin??

All that being said, it was a really nice, clean bathroom. A+

*ahem*

Now, while there wasn't a regular cosplay contest, there was the "Iron Cosplay" that involved using only newspaper and tape in a short amount of time to make a costume.

My favorite was the narwhal,

Followed closely by Cthulhu.

Letsee...
I started texting my friend at one point...

I braided my hair a few million times...

I complained about the cold a lot...

Oh, I also totally accidentally stabbed myself with this pencil:

I still have a red dent in my wrist.

I took pictures, but I won't post any here.
I'm fine, by the way.

EDIT: Almost a month later, and I still have a scar.

What else did I do?

Well, I spent a lot of time coming up with randomly terrible scenarios about everything for no particular reason...

And I spent some time watching Rob play a videogame on his tablet...

When people were actively at the table, I kept my eye out for any wandering children.

I also worried too much about my prices being too high or too low at any given time.

To give you an idea of what our table looked like from our end, here are some photos! (Are they still called that, if taken with a phone? Phone-tos.)

So many chairs. This was before they were all filled with gamers.

Earrings!

More earrings...

So many earrings.

A bowl of stuffed cats.

Random spider.

There were actually a lot of other things, but I got tired of taking pictures after a while.

I even drew a thing for a sign for a thing!

Day two went pretty smoothly, since we already knew how we were going to be set up.

They had the "Iron Cosplay" again, this time with the best little girl ever.

Rob said if we ever entered such a contest, he would dress me as the shoe from Monopoly.

It started as a mocking sort of plead from me not to ever do this:

And then it became weirdly dire in my head:

Eventually, tiredness took over.

And some really intense back pain.

Around this time, I started making little stories in my head about the cats...

I wasn't the only one feeling the burn of it, so we left a little early. Still, it was a fun, productive day.

I highly recommend the Albany Games Fest at UAlbany next year!

Cons and Stuff! Woo!

2014-03-07T11:55:00.000-08:00

Rob has his insanity about him, but I'm aware of what I bring to the table too.

Now that I've got your attention...

The two of us are going to be at a bunch of cons in the next couple of months, including Albany Games Fest THIS WEEKEND (check them out here!), and then the Central PA Comic Con (formerly RocCon) on April 5th and 6th (check that one out here!)! !!!
...
!

See you there!

Everything is Horrible, AND good news!

2014-03-04T09:49:00.003-08:00

I feel like crap.

I actually have an entirely different post for you planned, but I decided to do this first, so I have a reason to explain my ailments.

My body, especially my head and neck, feel like it's just full of wet cement.

I move, and the slow goop inside shifts to become extra heavy on the bottom.

Laying down, my bed is sometimes made of rocks…

Sometimes I get lost in the too-fluffy…ness.

My toe keeps cramping.

Just the one. I don't know why.

My chest is a giant knot of flesh.

When I shift to my back, an invisible sandbag materializes directly onto my face.

My arms feel… flat. Two dimensional?

I can't even explain this one.

My nails are brittle.

My eyes are itchy and horrible.

They cry at nothing now.

My ass has turned to lead.

I'm told this is a head cold, brought on by the weather and pressure changes.

I hate this.

*ahem*

On a much LIGHTER note, Oh Hell Donna! is now in a countdown until the first comic is posted!!

Go here to check it out:
Oh Hell, Donna!
(If you wanna buy the Fleyes pictured in FULL COLOR then just clink one of the links in the journal part.)

The Hubcap Massacre

2014-02-25T10:39:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was a scary driving day.

I still didn't do any of the things I assumed I was going to do by now…

Like hit a bird,

or get smashed by a deer,

or destroy a mailbox,

and I haven't even knocked a side-view mirror off yet!

YAY!

However, it IS Winter,
and the roads look like a giant infant took a hammer to them.

My father had trouble with a few potholes recently, so you'd think I would have seen this coming.

NOPE.

Mom, after the fact, said she saw it… but we're going to ignore how that would have been nice to mention BEFORE I hit it. Mom.

*ahem*

So, I whacked a giant hole in the ground and while it sounded scary, most of the road had sounded scary, so I didn't think much of it.

There were also so many potholes, some of which stretched across the whole area, so it was difficult to avoid them.

Usually I'm the only one making horrible noises while I drive, but this time Mom chimed in.

You know that noise Lucile Ball makes on I Love Lucy?
It was like that.

Every. Time.

Still, not nearly as bad as the noises my father makes as soon as I get behind the wheel at all.

Seriously, I could be parked and he'll still hit the imaginary brake on his side.

Anyway, I didn't know anything was horribly wrong until I went into a "lane" over on the side, thinking a car in front of me was in a turning lane, rather than, you know, parked.

Then another car came up next to me in the correct lane.

I figured I was trapped and Mom and I would have to eat parts of the car to survive until we were rescued from my stupidity.

The man in the other car honked, which I assumed was an angry honk.

It was not.
I rolled down the window and he mentioned that our hubcap (read: Mom's hubcap that I slammed off of her poor car) was by the town hall, in a snow bank.

Thank you, Stranger-Man.

I had this weird swell of embarrassment from having been driving around with only three hubcaps.

I pictured getting laughed at by more fashionable drivers.

Because Mom mentioned that I need to be careful with the next potholes so as not to damage the tire, my severe lack of car-knowledge showed.

I was under the assumption that the hubcap was usually bolted on, keeping the tire in place.

I imagined the tire now flying off without it's metal seat belt, and me going to some kind of car-jail for committing tire manslaughter.

Anyway, Mom found the hubcap after wandering around a bit.

This brings up a few questions.

Did it fly off of the car into the snowbank?

Did the kindly neighbors take the time to get out of their car to pick it off of the road and leave it where we could find it?

Did they follow us that whole way to tell us, or was it by chance that they happened to see a car missing a hubcap later on and fill in the blanks?

Either way, Mom and I weren't entirely positive we could put it back on right then and there, so she just plopped it in the car.

I was still a little shaken by "OH MY FUCK I BROKE YOUR CAR I'M SO SORRY" so I asked her to do the driving until our next errand was done.

I've been calling that my first accident just because I want that part of my life to be over with and it didn't involve anyone else being damaged.

Let me think this.

Shhh...

Wednesdays and Driving Like an Adult

2014-02-20T20:13:00.002-08:00

I should start this off by mentioning that I wrote this on a Wednesday, yet I'm posting it a day later at around eleven something PM.
That should give you an idea of how Wednesdays go for me.

I'm becoming like a syndicated cartoon strip, with how much I hate Wednesdays.

I still have to take the road test to get my license (and get a car) and Wednesdays are the day everyone seems to be most busy.
This year, I've had class every Wednesday.
This means, every Wednesday has been me totally alone…

and then suddenly off to school.

This wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't had the anxiety issues and all that.
I wound up just kind of doing nothing all day every day last semester, unless I had somewhere to be.

I was fine once people were home… but yeah. It was a pretty bad semester.

Of course, next week will be awful, even though Rob is home all day, but that is for the opposite reason.

Bored is awful.

Busy is awful.

Next week, we have a meeting together, then I have an interview in another town, and then I have class.

Why does everything have to happen on Wednesdays?

Either way, I am aware that I need to start driving.

This need does not change the fact that I don't want to and have never really wanted to.
Owning a car sounds awesome, without the insurance costs and all that.
I just don't wanna drive it.

To alleviate my automatic fear, I tend to make Mario Kart-like noises, especially on turns.

…

They can't fail me for that on the road test, right?

I will say, I'm not an awful driver, despite my fear.

I even avoided an accident yesterday when a woman came peeling out of a side street without looking.

I'm not afraid of dying in a car, by the way.
I'm afraid of being maimed. Losing a limb…

Hurting the car someone else owns is also on that list of fears.

*sigh*
…
I hate Wednesdays.

Fleyes

2014-02-13T13:01:00.000-08:00

I've been drawing these things and I'm not gonna post them all here because SURPRISES but...

FLEYES because I'm clever.

I love them.

I can't stop drawing them doing silly things...

Fifteen of them in black and white will be used to countdown to the first Oh Hell, Donna! being posted.

I'll let you know when that starts.

...For now...

Lookit fleyes playing the snow!

*ahem*

They’ll all wind up on mugs and such in http://society6.com/RowynGolde and possibly in a RedBubble store for stickers.
We’ll see.
I’ve got to shop around for that.

If you can think of a good place to have stickers made, let me know.
I'd also love to make some kind of charm out of these guys eventually.

Snow Day

2014-02-05T04:38:00.000-08:00

Looking out the window today, I am reminded that…

I have always hated the snow.

Mostly, I only looked forward to snow when there was enough to keep me from standing outside neck deep in it, waiting for the bus.

Now, don't say to me, "Then why live here???"

I have lived in the harsh desert lands as well.
Didn't work out.

I like it here. I do.

I also think the snow is very pretty.

And not liking to be in the snow, even as a child, certainly didn't stop my friends from outright forcing me to have a good time in the white, Wintery muck.

I did, indeed, have a good time.

…Once in a while.

Even in high school, we used a recycling bin:

Created snow-bricks:

And used said bricks of snow to make a very intense snow-fort:

It was around this time that it occurred to me that growing up didn't have to mean no longer having fun or being imaginative.

Being inventive is what makes life interesting.

After two nose bleeds, literal blood, sweat, and tears went into making that damn fort.

There were also many times before and after that day where R rated snow people were created.

Still, none of these memories, precious as they are, can convince me that going outside in the snow is better than sitting cozy inside, watching the snow from a window instead.

Happy snow day, to those who have it today.