velma

Wii Fit continues:

According to my body test today... I GAINED WEIGHT! Nearly half a pound. For me this is a HUGE accomplishment! I actually feel like my goal to gain 10 pounds is achievable right now! Never before would I think this was possible, but I feel like it is now!! Really, there aren't enough exclamation points to drive this point home... but I'm very excited. Seriously!!

!!!!!!!

So happy right now. So happy. I did the tight rope walking thing and passed on my first try, even with having to jump over the chattering teeth bear trap thing! This is a big deal because on the ski jump thing I pretty much committed suicide 4 times because I'm too weak to be able to jump. Heh.

I'm feeling really amazing right now. I'm turning 25 in two weeks and... I'm finally maintaining my weight, and not only that, GAINING!! There is hope for me yet! I hope I become less of a weakling as time goes by. Man I feel motivated.

SO AWESOME!

Yeah I also did a lot of exercising during Colbert tonight. Talk about motivation... :p

CLICK ME

I was browsing last.fm last night, and I came across some super fox in glasses. He had a link to his website so I went there hoping for more pics -- alas, no pics were found -- but what I discovered in the credits of his site was a link to indexhibit. Upon further inspection, I realized it fit what I've been looking for perfectly: A design tool, which employs some cool tricks and is simple to use and easy to set up. Even better, it is FREE.

Long story short, I've updated my entire website using indexhibit. My art, dating back to 2001, is up and ready to lag your computer right now! Seriously, though. Open the 2001-2008 section at your own risk, that sucker is loaded with images.

New year, new layout, and my older content is all finally back.

Here's a cool Christmas present of sorts...The Thought Chapter is now on iTunes, which means you can do a little search for that(under Color Theory) and see my art plain as day in the iTunes store. Feels pretty great to see that.

2008 has been quite the year.

Aside from the fact I fucked up my neck and back and feel horrible today, EMOTIONALLY I FEEL AMAZING, because I got two packages in the mail. :)

One of the packages consists of two copies of Brian Hazard's(Color Theory) new album, The Thought Chapter, for which I did the artwork(both inside and out). It's so incredible seeing those images in print all fancy-like. They really do come to life.

A fellow named Thomas in Germany runs a fan site for Color Theory, and I gave him permission to use the artwork I did for the album in some various site banners and such to promote the new album. He emailed me today to let me know he has a bunch of stuff up on his site now using my art, and you can see some of the artwork from the rest of the album layout at his site here: http://colortheory.de

The other package was a Color Theory tshirt. :)

So yeah. I've been completely empty when it comes to inspiration lately. You can probably figure out as much because I haven't updated this journal in quite a while, I haven't updated Tegaki E in ages, and I haven't updated dA in eons either(though that really is neither here nor there considering dA isn't that important). I tend to sink underneath the waves of reality when my inspiration evaporates. So maybe this will snap me back into drawing mode!

All I know is I've got a mad case of the "warm fuzzies," as ma says, after picking the CD up from the post office, oh yeah. I was sitting in the car unwrapping the CD, opening it up, admiring each panel of the Digipak, trying to soak in the fact it's got images I drew on it. It really is surreal. It's really a strange feeling any time I see my art used somewhere for something. It makes me realize every time that I should give myself more credit and not give up so fast when I feel like my inspiration's gone and I start thinking I'm a hack. It'll come back again. I'm pretty good. I feel pretty good.

Yeah pretty much I feel pretty on top of the world right now. And to think I got paid to do something that makes me feel so great. This makes me think I need to get serious about this art thing again. No idea WTF to do or where to start but if I could spend the rest of my life doing stuff like this I'd never be unhappy again. That's a pretty great point to ponder.

Yeah, gush gush gush. HAPPY MOMENT.

as you may have seen in my previous entry, I have a pair of purple pants now! I got these pants in the mail earlier in the week from a site having a clearance sale. I bought a pair of pants and two T-shirts. one of the T-shirts is *drum roll* AN ORANGE CRUSH SHIRT!!



yeah guys, you know me and my AIM username, Frosted Crush, there's part of why I want one. and also, how I've been wanting to get an Orange Crush logo shirt for ages ever since I fell in love with orange soda and discovered logo tees at least ten years ago. combine the screen name and love of orange soda and you get why I wanted the shirt. I've been waiting until I found one with a price that isn't painful, and ok, so it may have taken this many years, BUT I FINALLY HAVE IT!

yep, I feel very accomplished and happy about that. and the purple pants. the purple pants are awesome. awesome is an understatement. it's kinda energizing wearing an outfit of my two favorite colors, hmm...



so I haven't been posting much of substance lately, yes, but that's because I've been having a lot of family time and errands and setting up stuff and planning and...yeah.

next up on the roster is getting some things around the house fixed and such. I'm now Bob Vila.

That's right -- I ALWAYS get my man!

I found that game I mentioned in a previous post! The one that I've been trying to track down for years. Yeah, I ended up looking through someone's complete NES game collection list(600 titles in total...) and googled each title in alphabetical order depending on whether a title seemed promising. The person didn't have images for every game, so this went a little slow, but I found it!

Turns out my memories of the game play were 100% spot-on, but the cover was a lot different than I recalled. It was green like I remember(on the border) and had a snake...but it was a totally different art style than I thought! I'm glad I found it through a list instead of trying in vain to find whatever the cover is I have in my mind. :p

Anyway, the game is called Mystery Quest, and I found a playable version online. :) It was amazing to read about and play this game again after all these years. Such a crazy sense of joy overwhelmed me. Yeah, I know, I'm 24, but what can I say? A mystery of my childhood is now solved and I feel incredible relief!

- Read about and see it in action on NESguide.com

Gotta buy this and Clu Clu Land whenever I get some extra money I feel ok about spending...mmm. Childhood games!

The state of the Maya address, yeah. Haven't had one of these for a while, but here's a rundown of my life these days...in a nutshell.

I've received nearly all of my medical bills now. A little stressful at first...but yeah. Only one more I'm waiting on, if memory serves. Here's hoping I can pay them all off! Haha

Life's weird as always, the topic of moving is in the air of course, who knows what's going on there, but the possibilities I've mentioned in the past are still what we're looking at. As for when... July, August, or not until next year... WHO KNOWS! Not me! I love how even as time goes by I still know as much as I did a year ago. But that's life. I'm not stressing about it. Just would be nice to have some kinda clue, y'know?

A theater is finally opening in town soon. I'm dying to see a movie again. I MISS MOVIE-GOING. Here's hoping I do that. Yep.

I haven't had coffee in ages. Chocolate milk replacement therapy, mmm yeah. I'm entering the "only mildy paranoid about dying from trying a little" phase over the whole caffeine thing. Maybe I'll give it a try again soon. Chocolate milk is pretty delicious though, so no complaints really.

Also been having strawberry, banana and yogurt smoothies. SO delicious. I just remembered one day how I used to drink those a lot years ago, so I wanted to try it again. It's my current favorite thing aside from chocolate milk, oh yeah. Eating some fried zucchini and Caesar dressing, too, mmm... oh and now, toast with Caesar dressing to dip it in, YUM.

Been walking every day and doing my stretching. The plus and downside to this: My body hurts and is being rickety while it's adjusting to rebuilding. Really, the pain, ooo yeah. No pain no gain is one of my mottos for a reason, though, so par for the course.

All in all, I feel very good about myself right now because I've not had any caffeine or alcohol in ages, and I'm exercising more. Drinking lots of water and juices and such. So I'm keeping hydrated on top of everything else.

Yep. The state of the Maya address is a positive one for the now. Only problem is my sleep is all effed up. However, considering I've been creative, productive, and working on my wussiness/paranoia/cowardly tendencies, I don't think the sleep thing is that huge of a deal right now.

Oh yeah, about the coward/wuss/paranoid thing... I had a realization after talking things over about this. I was listening to a song, went to SM to comment on it, and as I was putting down my thoughts on it, I looked back over what I'd posted and realized it really got to the heart of one of my issues: A lot of times people who hold things back seem to think they're saving themselves heartache, but what we often don't realize is that by holding things back, we're often causing ourselves heartache in the long run.

That's so true. So often I'd rather just shut my mouth and say nothing rather than risk, what I fear, would just be another case of my mouth opening and a whole lot of stupid flying out. I psych myself out of things a lot. There are a lot of times where I have something I want to say or do, but I just give up before I even try because of the possible ways it could go wrong. How stupid? I'm the one who always says SEIZE THE DAY and LIFE IS SHORT and all that stuff... yet, so often I just freeze up and do nothing because I'm, well, scared. Yep.

So, starting last week, I began making changes, doing and saying more things even when my doubts are crowding around, and so far, nothing's blown up in my face. In fact, quite the opposite. So, if any of you readers out there in TV land have issues with psyching yourself out of things because you're scared, well, do yourself(and others) a favor, and take a risk.

I'm not saying I'm 100% cured, haha, but I've been saying this is my year, so I may as well take a chance and risk... crashing into something.


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Ooo 4 pics this time.


( Read more... )

I can't believe I forgot to mention this before, but...my old school pchat bud, Maris(who you can check out here), PMed me about a Christmas gift exchange over on dA, and well...as you guys know out there in TV land, I am a hardcore procrastinator and I suck at stuff like this and get all self-conscious, but I decided to go for it! yes! and I'm SO excited! I'm trying not to be intimidated by all the crazy wishes people are putting down...ahhh. haha. I'm going to grow if it kills me. :p

I have no idea who I'll be matched up with but I can't wait to work on something for this. very exciting. thing is my request is so boring and simple compared to everyone who has submitted their wish so far, haha. everyone else is pretty specific in what they want, and then there's me... who just wants a person wearing glasses. HAHA. god I make myself laugh.

I'm so easy to please.



another piece of news is that, SADLY, the only other lyrics site I enjoy aside from SongMeanings - Alwaysontherun.net - will be dead as of December. I'd been wondering how he could afford the bandwidth for it, and apparently he can't really anymore. it's very sad, because his site has been running for 14 years and I found so many amazing artists through it...but what can you do? man. rest in pixelated pieces, AOTR.


oh and thank the stars, LJ is doing that gift giving promo so if you give someone a year of LJ they get a year of the userpic add-on for free. so, anyone want to buy me that? I'd buy it for you in return, haha...no? yeah didn't think so. *schemes*

I worked on my test painting again today, got tired but had fun with some watered down red and did some ganglion lines. mmm. did some finger dabbing too. I think I feel a bit more optimistic about building my painting skills up. it'll build up my art-working patience. I'm bad about doing something fast and then moving on...this may force me into spending tons more time on each thing I do, which is a good thing. :P

so...pretty awesome. I got another free iTunes song today, started to DL it and it picked up where it left off on that song the other day! so I got both songs, woo. iTunes regains points! btw, that "You Picked Me" song by A Fine Frenzy is pretty awesome after all, I wonder why Mr. Starbucks didn't like it?

yai sent me some pics he's taken of me so here's one of that dress I mentioned before. I like how I look like a flower petal or something. here's one of my in my natural habitat behind my desk. in my "comfortable house attire." yeah. reality bites. :p

so, we have 2 pics I don't feel too ugly in, and also...drumroll...woohoo! I'm pretty happy today! why?

woke up and checked my email, and I had a deviantArt message. it was an automated one regarding a password reset request, and had a link to go to. I clicked it and it took me to a page to reset my password!! so now I have my account back! I deleted the crap that had been put on it, added a message and uploaded one of my recent pics, changed the webcam image, and un-hid all of my comments, and tada, it's back good as new. :D

I never received an official response from dA, but I don't even care because the bottom line is I have my account back, so thank you, powers that be! it feels nice having it all mine again, mmhmm.

my friendlist had been deleted, so I re-added everyone who was watching me(didn't realize there were so many...), and now I feel so great. I'm sure there are people I can't remember the usernames of who I don't have on my friendlist still, but I hope I stumble on them again sometime or something. for now, it's good to have everything back in order!

mom took this photo a few days ago. yeah, my baby enjoys playing nintendo. she kept laying on the controller later too. :P

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so, BIG GIANT YAY! Brian loved that latest pic and he's set on using it along with the cover, and now he's got to decide which of the other pics I drew he wants to use for each part. I think he's doing the Digipak for sure, so I can't wait to see it once it's finished. that's going to be awesome. I'm very excited, yep!

I just ran across pointy rocks to pass the phone to my mom who had a callback from a job she wants. it's in uh, lake pleasant. hmm.

Fly mentioned mailing art to me, so there's a third person I'm going to be drawing for... it's funny, I think this whole gig with Brian got my ideas flowing more steadily and I feel like drawing all the time again. I feel like I'm back in high school.


now to think about buying a new computer...decisions are evil! up on the list of things I'd like to buy eventually:

- new computer
- compact disc player
- hat
- iPod speakers
- external drive
- boots
- wii (HAHA)



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next up on my TO-RENT list: every pairing of Judy and Mickey. yup!


here's a playlist made up of songs that sound rain-related to me. Cody mentioned how songs from a certain album sound to him like water, and I was amused he thinks some stuff "sounds like water" and it reminded me of my playlists of stuff that "sounds" like other stuff, so I said I'd post one of them!

here's the appropriately-titled rain playlist.

"rainy"

01: Gin Blossoms - Til I Hear It From You
02: The Salteens - Damn You
03: The Beatles - You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
04: Aimee Mann - You Could Make A Killing
05: Tripping Daisy - I Got A Girl
06: Elliott Smith - No Name #3
07: Smog - Bathysphere
08: The Vines - Mary Jane
09: Semisonic - Gone To The Movies
10: The Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet With Butterfly Wings
11: Oasis - Hello
12: Lovage - Archie & Veronica
13: Stone Temple Pilots - Plush
14: Radiohead - High And Dry
15: The Smashing Pumpkins - Eye
16: Ani Difranco - Superhero
17: Dido - Don't Think Of Me
18: Massive Attack - Teardrop

basically, I'll be spending my nights drawing. mm mm mm. let's see what else comes to me! I'll try using my mom's combo scanner printer thing and see if I can post some doodles from my sketchbook. main reason I haven't is my scanner broken and my sketchbooks are all those huge books that don't fit in my mom's combo scanner thing. so, since the book I've been drawing in has pull-out pages, we'll see if we can scan some recent pencil stuff. I hope I can anyway...I've been having fun with pencils.





yeah that's about all for now! catching back up with PMs and emails, and been back on AIM a bit over the last day or two... you know me, fading in and out. :p

So, I haven't posted for a while. I've had a few instances of LEVEL UP though, so here's another longass post containing what's happened... since my last post.


- I've been very much into nightswimming. It's so calm and beautiful at night. It's kinda magical with the pool lights and how it tints people, and the stars in the sky and the way the clouds look lit up by the city lights. The air is calm, there's no sun burning your head off... it's just plain wonderful.

- After one of these nightly swims, the wind picked up a bit as I was wrapping a towel around myself and blew something into my eye which stung like hell. It was horrible. I figured I got an eyelash stabbed into my eye by the force of the wind or a piece of my hair had blown into my eye. I blinked and nothing happened, it just felt worse. I went into house and into the bathroom to change and then looked at my eye in the mirror. I saw a piece of something black in my eye. Yes. In my eye. Ok, it was under the bottom lid and peeking out, and I thought it was an eyelash, but as I continued to blink and tear up, it moved up into the inside corner of my eye and wrapped around the tear duct stuff in the corner of my eye and remained there. I hoped that overnight it'd dislodge like eyelashes always do, but when I woke up, my eye was reddening and puffy and horrible. It hurt and it looked terrible, this black thing wrapped around a part of my eye. When Kim came over, she looked at my eye and said "oh, it's infected!" ... so I went into panic mode at that point because it meant the object wasn't going to come out on its own and I'd have to have someone take it out. She said it'd be 250 at the hospital or something to have them do it, so I asked her if she'd do it... which was a hard thing for me to ask someone to do, because I have a huge phobia when it comes to people touching my eyes. :P Anyway, I lay on my bed and she bent the lamp towards my face and I held my eye open. It was hard as hell not to blink, and I kept apologizing... but after a few minutes, she said she'd gotten it out! I felt so relieved, I cried. For a while. Wow. But see, there's a milestone reached, and plus, we bonded now. That was trust right there. :p She was like "weren't you wearing your glasses when you were outside?" and I laughed because people usually poke fun at me for wearing my glasses in the pool so I was trying to be savvy by remembering to NOT wear them in the pool that day...oh well. I'm never taking them off again for sure now. Oh, and the object that got stuck in my eye turned out to be AN INSECT BODY.

- The bills have been piling up, we've had the most consecutive days with temps over 110 degrees in years or something according to the news...whatever the case, the monsoon is finally here or something and it's been gray and rainy the past few days now. The temp has gone down considerably, but it's muggy. SO muggy. ARGH! I'm still happier with cooler temps and more mugginess than more hot as hell times. If it's like this summer next year(or worse), I don't wanna be here. heh :P

- I have phone calls I need to make! Also I need to get completely onto a new schedule. Mom's going to be working soon and so I should be getting up earlier and doing productive stuff earlier in the day. Now that it's cooler, I can finally reply to emails and work on more drawings for Brian(he asked me if I could do some more, so yay!!)



Basically I'm feeling very overwhelmed and stressed and weird with random periods of complete mind blankout. I guess we always wind up digging ourselves out of each grave we fall into, but sometimes it's easy to get caught up in it and feel stuck. Guess it's like that for everyone...maybe. I really have no idea how things are for anyone anymore, I used to feel like I had a good handle on people and how they are in their lives but it's like now...I don't even know what's going on in mine, so I don't even try to come close to claiming to understand anyone else. Yikes.

Comic Con is going on as of now... I hope everyone enjoys it! I feel really quiet and strange and only now realized that was the reason why. I wonder if that feeling will ever go away, or if there's always going to be this weird hollow restless feeling around this time of every year to come. I try not to think about it, but I guess some things you just can't hide from. I should draw or paint or write something about it and make some lemonade out of this crap at least...always looking on the bright side, that's me.

*DANCES* INTERNET! Mom fixed the router while I was sleeping this morning...I'm very proud of her!


In art stuff, I drew up an image for the back of the tray insert for the CD! I had fun drawing that, so I look forward to drawing some more stuff tomorrow and seeing what I come up with. Brian replied to the tray insert pic and said he liked it, so I feel very optimistic and productive now. :)

Watched movies last night: Clue is great, I need to buy that. Breakfast at Tiffany's made me cry. Of course. Where's my Paul? Which reminds me...here's a list while I'm thinking about it(a work in progress).

Romantically, I want a person who:

- Is encouraging
- Admits when he/she is wrong
- Lets me know when I fuck up
- Has patience and understanding
- Speaks up about things instead of bottling it up
- Listens
- Enjoys life
- Doesn't give up easily
- Motivated/excited/positive
- Has sympathy for others
- Enjoys bettering themselves
- Hasn't killed his/her kid at heart :p

I was added to the Who We Are page(lists the mods/admins/people of noteworth) on Songmeanings, btw, so check it out! Link: I love the little caption. :p (Rick used to say I was a lot like Daria when I was growing up so I figured it'd be an appropriate avatar...haha)

I guess I've officially "made it" in the world -- my pics have been ganked and spammed all over myspace and LJ! I was browsing the statistics page on my website and apparently a TON, and I do mean a TON, of people have hotlinked my art all over the place. One such person was a user on xpeeps... which, well, uh. I kinda wish I hadn't looked at everyone who had hotlinked my pics now. Yikes. I'd never even heard of xpeeps before. (DO NOT google it!) haha

The point is, though, I'm now one of those artists responsible for art that random myspacers use for their backgrounds and page stretching! I feel so special. I'm in the ranks with bad anime with lensflare and stolen Flickr and SuicideGirls images. I am seriously on cloud nine over this, haha. I did, however, take down the main image that was most popular amongst everyone. It happens to be the image that someone paid me for, so I'd rather not have it spammed all over the internet. I know it's not my fault, exactly, but I still feel guilty about it being hotlinked like that, so I edited posts with that image in it and replaced it with a smaller image with a different filename on photobucket. I may delete it entirely, dunno yet. :p


Yay for being "good enough" to be used in myspace, xanga, LJ, forum icon, posts, and signatures?
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Also, my vacation may be bumped to June, because gas prices are insane and hotel rooms are booked in a lot of places because of... graduation! My birthday is on such a great spot in the year...hahaha. It really is a holiday! *sits back and ponders*

Quite unexpectedly, I was recently asked(and accepted) to join the Songmeanings.net crew! So I'm officially a moderator there. I'm not sure if any of you out there in TV land use that site, but it's my favorite place to post, comment on, and read lyrics of ... well, every musician you can think of(or submit). I'm so flattered and happy about this. Yay. I thought I was an invisible lurker but I guess not, haha. :P


And...long overdue, BUT:

painter 6.1

Clocks and feathers for Heather, inspired by her short story. Yeah, yeah, it's the feathery hair, but well. It's my interpretation! I want one of those masks! Birds and weird masks go hand in hand in my brain. In other related stuff, I need to start on the tattoo design for my niece Jessica(she wants to get a tattoo on her 18th birthday which is coming up next month!) and those random ideas for Chris... hmm. Am I forgetting any other pics I said I'd draw? I'll worry about that later.


Finally got the NES all set up, so I've been trying to regain my owningness at Mario 3 again. Holy shit, my hands are too big for the controller now, haha. It has been a LONGASS TIME since I played any games!! I SUCK! I'm so crushed about this but well, only a matter of time till I rock again. It's been so hot lately and my hands are constantly sweating, so that doubled the trouble. It's fun laughing at how terrible I am, BUT I -will- regain my skills. Then once I find the cables for my Dreamcast, I'm going to buy Soul Calibur and start training in preparation for super battles with anyone willing to try me... man, I missed gaming. It's nice sitting in front of the TV playing games again! So relaxing! Lord knows I need that lately...though I'm in a constant state of joy since being modded...woo! I love taking care of business, haha.

So things are going pretty good... frustrating in a lot of ways, but pretty good in general. If we do wind up moving to Ukiah, first thing up on the roster is visiting my babies in Petaluma and then going to PIER 39 IN SAN FRANCISCO AND THOSE TEA GARDEN THINGS I HAVE BEEN MEANING TO SEE FOR YEARS NOW. I haven't been to Pier 39 since I was like...9, too. It's time to go back. Whether I move back there or not, I WILL be bugging asses in the bay area very soon for a trip, at least...mmmyes. It's time to shake things back up there. :P





It's a "good thing" some people don't make an effort with certain things, 'cause I could easily be the feather in this picture. Easily. (think T&S - Take Me Anywhere) Paper walls fall quickly when you press against 'em.

I've been participating in the twenty1days challenge for the past 21 days. the challenge in question was to exercise every day for 21 days. I never thought I'd really make it all the way to the end, yet here I am. in one piece, in better shape, and with proof I'm capable of binding and gagging my procrastination. who knows what even got me to sign up and try it out, but I'm glad I did.

when I saw the little congrats graphic in the post to the community just now, I was instantly taken back to when I was 4 years old and various star stickers were given out for random accomplishments in school and at home for doing chores and such. the sacred gold star was something I longed for week after week, day after day, and whenever I got one, I was ecstatic. it's amazing how those feelings came rushing back because of one little graphic.

haha, who knew the push I needed would arrive in the form of an LJ community?

whatever the case, wow. happy. I FEEL SO ACCOMPLISHED!