jadedjayde

Okay where did the last 4 months go?

Oh I remember. Work, work, work, dad getting sick, dad needing heart surgery, the worries and overload of my extended family, and some life changing decisions. Sure makes time blur by.

I'm just now starting to feel like myself again. I'm very glad to be with my parents and friends this Christmas instead of being isolated on the other side of the island with no one to share the holidays with. Also, it feels good to be near a Starbucks again.

I need to catch up on Pandora Hearts. Then again I kind of like letting chapters pile up so I can go on a reading rampage later. I also need to make some additions to my website. No matter how many pieces I put up, I never feel satisfied that it is enough. Though, I think that dissatisfaction is just part of my core nature.

I'm purposely being a little vague at what is going on in my life. Those that know, know. I guess I'm not ready to openly talk about everything yet. I'd rather just continue on my path and when I get to a destination, then I'll fill people in. ;)

Happy Holidays everyone! Enjoy your friends and family. Nothing is more important!

So I finally read the translation for Retrace 40 of Pandora Hearts. It wasn't as bad as I thought. Yeah, I hoped for more plot development instead of more delving into the wacky brainwashed mind of Gil, but I won't throw too much of a fit. More Gil = More hotness. Break sure is perceptive though. It bugs me he only has about a year or so to live. :( But what the heck is up with Phillipe? He looks too demonically peaceful at the end of this chapter. Little bugger is up to something.

I'm listening to Hey Rosetta! and making up a detailed list of everything that has to be done with the company website. I really hope in the next few months we'll make a lot of headway on that.  *Yawn

So I had a hyper fit at about 2 am this morning. I woke up bolt awake and felt I could take on the world. Clean the whole apartment, organize all my clutter, fold napkins into paper swans....th-thousands of paper swans!  No more vigorous exercise after 8pm!!

Sheesh. And of course I wake up feeling deader than snot.

BLURFH

Oh, by the way, $5 pedometers suck. They really do. The one I have likes counting steps by itself. I managed to buy a pedometer that likes to count to itself. I can apparently walk 50 steps while sitting down. I left it on the bed and two hours later 150 steps were counted on it. Not that there were any better ones at the store. There was the exact same one in pink supporting breast cancer research for $12. The same device, made pink, and jacked up more than 100% in price and "5% of proceeds will go to breast cancer research"? I don't like the math there. Anyway, I left the sucker home today. Maybe if I'm lucky, by the time I get home from my 8 hours of sedentary desk jobbing I'll have reached 10,000 steps! Thank you pedometer!

I. want. to. go. home. and. sleep.

It seems the latest PH chapter is lacking. Apparently it's a lot of brainwashed-Gilbert freaking out but not much in plot dev. I think he tipped the spaz scales today. I haven't actually read it though, just snippets of what others (that can read Japanese) are saying about it.

Still.

I was really hoping for an action-packed chapter!

The PH anime is skipping a week, Skip Beat! was kind of lame this week too. At least 07Ghost is starting to get interesting.

 I didn't think my phone calls home were so crucial to my sanity out in the bayou. Well they are. I'm back to turning on the TV as soon as I get home from work just so there are sounds of life in my apartment. Sounds of life other than loud ATVs or motorbikes/fartbikes or whatever the hell the kids (and adults) around here like to drive right under my window.

I've exhausted the good shows recorded on my PVR. I'm going to have to put some more titles to record. It's excessively hard to motivate myself because I'm bored to tears even though there is plenty I could do. But it is like I've passed the level of boredom where I could do something and have falling into the level of boredom where all I can do is sit and drool.

The chapter releases of Skip Beat! have been so consistently inconsistent I've started to lose interest in that manga. I'm still very much into Pandora Hearts and another chapter was just released in Japan so in a few days I'm sure the translation will be kicking around. Other than that I've been educating myself on finances and investments which is as dry as it sounds, and reading up on MBA principles. Also dry.

My brother's life is full of excitement right now. I have a theory that the level of excitement is somehow balanced across my family so when things are super fun for one of us, it is shit boring for the other. Why am I so often on the shit boring side?

Anyway, time to be a good girl and clean the dishes and get some laundry done before I have to start wearing a tarp to work.

Lately the weather has been really muggy and my energy levels have shot down as a result. I keep thinking once there is a huge downpour it won't be so humid after, but we've had a couple serious rains here and it is still as muggy as ever.

I'm happily watching my Aerogarden grow. I'm debating putting weekly pictures up here, or maybe I'll start a glog on an aerogarden forum. Glog? Yes. Gardening blog. Haha. I didn't coin that term. Today is the two-week mark of when I started up the Aerogarden. All the herbs have sprouted and the basil looks great! I can't wait to start putting it in foods.

The Aerogarden has also made me appreciate the cost of foods more. I used to grouch at the cost of cherry and grape tomatoes but they take a good bit of work to grow. I bet if I were to grow them in my garden I'd probably get two pints of tomatoes MAX over a three month growing season. At least that seems to be the results others are getting. So let's see. $3.99 x 2 for two pints of grocery store tomatoes, vs a $25 seed kit. Meh, I think I know who wins there. One way around the cost of a cherry tomato seed kit is to buy seeds for the do-it-yourself seed pods I just ordered. Seeds are about $2.

I'm getting ready to head back home for a visit. Though this visit won't have much flexibility. Mom is flying to Alberta and I pretty much have to hold the fort. With Dad's health being problematic I'll mostly be taking care of him. I've already begged them to leave me a list of recipes but they can't think of anything! Mom is now trying to cook and freeze up Indian food. I don't know how well some of that stuff freezes.

I don't have a huge wish list of what I want to do on my trip. A couple visits to Chapters/Starbucks will be a necessity. I also want to pick up some items at the Asian grocery. Other than that I'll probably go to a restaurant with friends once. It's hard finding a time where everyone is free. Life really changes after friends have kids. Now if we go to restaurants it is usually family restaurants and a good chunk of the conversation is about kids and parenting.

I've been playing Rune Factory Frontier and really enjoying it. I'm reminded though that it is sometimes impossible to play Rune Factory games without a walkthrough guide. Why can't the put the hints of what to do IN the game? Why can't they make it a bit more intuitive? No I didn't know I had to go to this area between 4-6pm on a sunny day to get this event to trigger. Argh. I guess that's sort of the "charm" of all Harvest Moon games though, not just the Rune Factory versions.

Anyway, it's 7:10 am now. I thought I could pull off 6 hours of sleep and actually did wake up alert but now I feel groggy. I'm such a sleep slug. My body seems to be happiest around 8 hours of sleep even though I'm constantly trying to train it to accept less. We all know the benefits of being a high energy person, but what are the benefits of being a low energy slug? I guess low energy people have their thyroids last longer.

Working back to back 14-hour days sucks. At first I called them 12-hour days but since the traveling time is 1 hour each way, I might as well call it 14. I'm glad there was a weekend between this furniture sale and my regular work week. I pretty much spent my weekend sleeping, eating pretty much baby food, and wondering why I could feel my heartbeat in my hands.

I watched masses of "Heartland". Not the American show about heart surgery or whatever it was, but the Canadian show about life on a horse ranch. I gotta say, I'm addicted. Normally I giggle at CBC shows but they are getting better! The scenery is beautiful, the acting is great, and it all feels very real and natural. It's also great to hear them mention Canadian cities and I recognize most of them! Makes me want to move back to Alberta quickly!

Back to furniture sale... I snagged a great wooden bedroom set in a dark stain. No plywood garbage here! It's heavy though, and it's going to be shipped to my parents' place. It was really a "for future" purchase. I'll never get a deal like that again.

I think my sleep schedule may have been fixed. Amazing. I never thought there'd be a plus side to working such long days.

I still want to go home and nap but its more for a mental break than the need of sleep. My brain still feels fried.

Pandora Hearts chapter 30 is out now and it looks like the English translations will be caught up to the Japanese releases pretty soon. I'm discovering I really like dark, gothic, eerie stories. They do fuel weird dreams though.

I was thrilled to find loads of what I thought were good quality PH art scans, but of course they were set to 72 dpi. I scaled them down so they could be 100dpi but these might be jpgs that have been saved many times. It seems my printer likes to put cyan pixels on skin tones. :( When Yen Press releases Pandora Hearts I think I'll still be very tempted to buy it for the art.

Okay, Insomnia god won again, that jerk.

2 hours of sleep. 7 hours left at work. Today is going to be great.

I think I'll play Animal Crossing after neglecting my poor town for a good while. I'm scared to think of how many weeds have grown, not to mention the damn roaches that will be in my house.

STOMP STOMP STOMP

The heat and mugginess lately has sapped my motivation. I just feel like staying in front of a fan all day eating fudgesicles. At least it is raining now so the humidity might lessen. I think I'll watch more eps of "How I Met Your Mother"!

Yay weekends :o

I've never liked job hunting. It has always been one of the most horrible experiences. However, anyone who is job hunting right now probably has a lot more hair falling out as a result. None of us know how long this economic mess is going to last, and if that is really as big a reason behind the inability to find jobs as people say it is. I'm sure there are at least a few companies that are using this recession as a cop-out. That's my rant for the morning. In other news I started reading, "The Wallflower". Shoujo-style manga art scares me. It really does. The art in Skip Beat! isn't too bad. Sure I've joked about people being impaled by Ren's chin, but at least I can tell Ren is male. The guys in Wallflower? Holy ...burning ... eyes, I thought they were women. I'll post a picture as soon as I can. I literally shrieked when I saw the four of them together.

Womenmen!!

Scary...

so scary

I'm tempted to read the original Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. My friend sent me some letters with Alice stationary that used what I think is the original art. I've always been enchanted with that art. Does the original book have art in it? I can't remember. Now I'm -sure- my dinky little town library will have Alice. If they don't I'm going to go ballistic.

30 mins till home time. I think work will be glad to be rid of me today. I'm a ball of distraction.

So apparently the Twilight Series is the only vampire series in existence. What?

Yes, I know it is popular. I also have no interest in reading it. Since I haven't even read Anne Rice's books I'll probably start there. Time to hit up the tiny local library and see if they have anything half decent.

It's almost time for the next Skip Beat release! I hope the trans is out by Sunday! I'm also really crossing my fingers more Pandora Hearts will be translated. :0~

Other than that I plan to exercise myself to exhaustion, chug a Mike's Hard Lemonade and fall asleep on the floor. If I get carpet marks on my face, that's only a bonus.

TGIF

Okay I feel like a total idiot. My brain really likes to discard all information about anything I'm not actively using. Like Livejournal. I totally forgot how to use this freaking interface! I think I've successfully made myself look like a total dork through some private messages that I botched up today. Frig.

I'm realizing I need a good book series to start reading. I love reading books from a series because I tend to get attached to the characters and want to follow their lives as much as possible. It's hard to find a good series for adults that aren't in the fantasy or sci-fi genre. Fantasy is okay, but all I've found so far is medieval dragon stories with swordsmen. Blarf. Kind of sick of that.

So I've been recommended Neuromancer and Inkheart (sci-fi and fantasy. Aha). Maybe I should jump on the vampire bandwagon. All I know is waiting for new chapters of the manga I'm following is driving me batty. Skip Beat only comes out every 15 days and Pandora Hearts is still being translated by those lovely folks at TheBlackAbyss. I'm just impatient.



I adore the outfits in this series ;)

Okay, it is clear to say I suck at blogging/journaling. I make no promises on how often I'll update my darn page, but it will be an improvement on the rate I've been updating it lately. That's sure setting the bar high, isn't it?

And...I'm late for work.

More later. How much later? I can't tell you...

So, registration for the next semester is tomorrow. I haven't gotten my letter saying -when- the actual registration for my program is so I have a feeling the fees dispute I had last semester wasn't resolved after all. This means I have to get up bright and early and try to get that fixed so I can register on time. Huzzah.

I still can't get over how short this break felt. My original plans for the break had a lot of ambitious goals of art I'd work on but I quickly ditched that to hang out with friends, see movies, read and actually have fun. The slacking off did me a lot of good too. I'm ready to tackle the course work again.

I just remembered now that I was supposed to pick up all my course work that I handed in the Monday after finals. Oops. Guess those got thrown out!

Interesting news? I got chased by a crazy person downtown yesterday. I was with a friend walking her dog and this guy started to yell slurred words at us and was insisting on having a conversation with us. He looked kind of like Red Green but really skinny. I couldn't figure out what the heck he was saying but he kept waking faster and yelling so we picked up the pace too. Then he got pissy that we started walking faster and then started yelling louder. We then crossed the street (which was a very wide busy road) figuring he wouldn't have the nerve to follow. Luckily he didn't follow but he kept running down his side of the street bellowing. It makes me love downtown.

Time to go to Staples to get more sharpies! All my sharpies decided to dry out at the same time. One has actually started to get this clear orangish goo around the lid. Yuck >

Christmas came really fast this year. It was simple but nice and I got some gifts I've wanted for a while. I also managed to get a lot of great things for my friends and family without spending too much! I went to see "Pursuit of Happyness" and luckily I didn't say much about the sign at the movie being spelled wrong because ends up it's intentional. It was a very good movie. I actually want to read the book to find out the real story this movie was based on.

In other news, I found the best candy ever. It's nothing new but I couldn't find it forever and just rediscovered it. It's "Love Hearts" by Swizzels. Not only are they sweet and tangy, but they have hilarious sayings on them like "Caddy lad", "Naughty boy", "Tickle monster" and "Just say no". I don't get how the last one got in there. I guess the proponents for abstinence got their say.

Anyway, back to the family events! I'm web-camming with my relatives in California tonight. :)

I hope you all have a great Christmas!

It's finals week. Projects due. Work, work, work.

I've been trying to work tonight but I spent the morning working and the afternoon at school, and I found my mind just stopped. I lapsed. I started daydreaming. I've been daydreaming about beaches, swimming with the dolphins...

Swimming with the dolphins and cows..



I have no idea, but it makes me happy.

CS2 hasn't been nice to me this week. Photoshop started showing this bizarre bug where any time I'd select the brush, clone or eraser tool, it would snap to the edge of the document or some random spot in the document. I'd move the mouse around and I wouldn't be able to see my cursor until it suddenly zipped over to whatever spot it was fixated on going to. I still have no idea what caused it. I reinstalled and the problem didn't fix. I ended up taking a break, then reinstalling again and oddly it seemed to work after the second reinstall.

Now Illustrator is acting up. I'd have both PS and Illustrator open at the same time working back and forth between them, and I'd be in Photoshop working there and Illustrator would just die. Crash. No apparent reason. I even did a disk check to make sure it's not my lovely computer causing all this. I have no clue what is going on. When I reinstalled PS I reinstalled Illustrator too so, yeah... any theories?

I'm saving every 2 minutes and hoping I can get my assignment done in time even with all the random crashes and bugs and weird happenings.

Yay package design. I'm designing a package (and the label) for Ayurvedic massage oils formulated for the three specific doshas. Have no idea what I'm talking about? It's an interesting read. It'll make a long post to explain it here but just google "Ayurveda dosha" and you should come up with a pile of links explaining what it's about.

I'm working on an illustration for the package and am using Hindu goddess art as inspiration. It turned out pretty well, but I do need a lot of practice with digital coloring. I haven't done it much. I've always hand-colored stuff.

Here's the illustration with a simple background:



Now, I need to do everything else! Haha. Wish me luck, it's due tomorrow.

I love forum signature banners. They are so entertaining. They normally have stretched pictures, or squished faces, or a lovely halo of white pixels around the image that is clearly placed on a foreign background...

This one has massive candy!



When I saw this, my mind took me to a magical place where candy is so big you can sit on it, and one candy could feed a family for a month. Why, oh why, can't this be reality?

For the latest art history assignment (which I'm actually done ahead of time, amazingly) my class had to create some original artwork in a style covered in our text book for art history. At first I was looking at the Renaissance but the time needed to work that much detail into a piece is more than I have right now. Also I work in acrylic and have no idea how to get that much detail with the drying time of that medium. Even with paint drying retarder I find the paint starts drying before I'm ready for it to!

Instead of Renaissance style I decided to imitate Impressionism. Also, a friend of mine has been asking me for a painting of a woman reading for months now so I figured I'd get a school assignment and a Christmas gift done at the same time.

For those of you who are studying in intensive artistic courses, please go easy on me. :) I haven't been doing much painting since I started studying graphic design. I didn't have a reference for the clothing and pretty much made up all those folds myself.