The more things change, the more they stay the same...

Yes, I know: long time no blog. It happens sometimes. Okay, maybe it happens frequently or annually. Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Since I last posted:

• Went to the Art Fair when it was 90˚F.
• I had a medical issue.
• Finished a project.
• Handed out candy on Halloween.
• Made Thanksgiving dinner.
• Took down the summer decorations & put up the winter decorations.
• Spent 3 months working on illustrations for the holiday calendar. 
• Made Christmas dinner.
• Finished the holiday calendar.
• Had one of my printers die while printing the pages for the calendar.
• And completed the wrapping of gifts at 4am on 12-25.

It's been an eventful half-year.

This was how my living room looked right before the hustle and bustle of calendar production & assembly and gift wrapping. It may not presently be that tidy...

This was the last scene of  the last bit of illustrating that took place at my desk. It was a long haul of drawing. You can take a look at my last 3 months of illustration work here.

Yes, I do manage to post a lot of things on Tumblr. It might seem much easier to use and more accessible to more random people... therefore it might get more attention. Or I might make more of an effort to make regular posts here. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

One of the things that I enjoy the most is when Christmas is over with. It's the time when I usually finally have a moment to myself. I can just sit at home and relax. I'm not trying to finish something or work on something for someone or prepare some sort of massive feast or schedule my off-time around get-togethers or whatnot. There's a moment when the 25th becomes the 26th when everything is just calm and nice and solitary. I like those moments.

little things and lizards

Sometimes it's the little things that make the biggest difference.

As you may know, I'm enjoy kitsch, particularly when it comes to my decor.  I have a bit of a thing for lizards and frogs and turtles and birds.  And I have seasonal decorations.  In the winter time I hang glitter snowflake ornaments from the ceiling of my living room, and in the spring and the summer I have a set of monarch butterflies and some hummingbird ornaments that I use.  The hummingbirds were Christmas ornaments that I found in Target like 5-6 years ago. I thought they were so cool that I bought all the ones they had that weren't broken. I have 14 of them or so.  They're resin ornaments, so I brought them home and painted them so that they looked like real ruby-throated hummingbirds, right down to using various shades of iridescent nail polish over their plumage to make them shine... 

Anyway, back around that actual beginning of spring, I took down all the snowflakes and put up my butterflies and my hummingbirds.  And then it snowed the next day.  It's been a long winter, and that's meant a lot of time in doors.  So much so that I started changing out and moving around pictures and artwork just to entertain myself and stave off boredom and malaise.

I thought I was done until I found myself standing in Hobby Lobby buying 2 more resin lizards (like these).  So, of course, I gave them a new coat of paint.  And after they sat around my work space for a week or two - on a whim I finally got around to hanging them up on Tuesday morning.  This of course also meant that I needed a new picture for over the computer...

I am definitely not a minimalist.  But I think we all already knew that...

Hopefully the weather starts acting like spring soon. As much as I may enjoy decor and pictures and knick-knacks and stuff, I'm ready to put on my good shoes and grab the camera and throw some extra batteries in my pockets and go out wandering around enjoying some budding trees and daffodils.

so I was away for a while...

February and March plodded along until they just flew by... Yes, long time no blog. It was winter. It was Michigan. What can I say? I spent a lot of time in doors working on the in doors. My office / studio / living room underwent a slight cosmetic makeover. It is the room that I spend the bulk of my time in, so it was time for it to feel like a room that I wanted to spend most of my time in.

Before

After

It's the little things that make the biggest difference. I bought bookcases and assembled them so that I could move a lot of magazines and piles of paper and boxes of craft supplies out of the room. That alone made it feel like less of a glorified storage closet...
Then I started working on my desk. I have 2 of them. One of them had just become a place to set a printer and pile things... that was kind of silly. So, I moved a lot of stuff off my desk and better organized the things that needed to stay. And now I can actually sit there and draw - which was the desired result.

Plus, I framed and then hung many of my original drawings...

And then I got the chair...

It's one of those padded accent chairs. It's perfect. It's nice and low - the way I like my desk-to-chair ratio so that what I'm working on is close to eye level.

So, it's nice to have somewhere to sit and work without trying to balance a drawing board on my lap as my foot falls asleep.
Hopefully winter treated you well, and spring will eventually begin and stick around for a little while before we veer directly into 90˚F days of summer...

Craft project: painting the birds

We all have our own quirks and proclivities and personal touches. I like weird stuff. Now, everyone has different sensibilities when it comes to weird stuff, myself included. I like to decorate with what I assume people would think of as weird stuff. I like frogs and lizards and turtles and apparently my new thing is birds. I have them all over the studio / office / living room. Most of them are probably supposed to be in a garden or a child's toy box, but, well, I'm not much of a gardener. So, yeah, I have garden statuary and toys standing in as knick knacks in my living room.

Basically, I like kitsch, and I decorate with kitsch.

And since I was done coming home from work and finishing up the holiday calendar — well, I suddenly had free time again! I know, it always seems novel to come home from work and not have to work on something. Leisure, who knew?

Anyway, after catching up on the last 5 episodes of the now cancelled Leverage and probably 7-10 miscellaneous hours of tv watching, well, I had to pry myself away from the facebook and do something (besides sleeping).

As it turns out, I had a little home dec project to finish. My vcr/dvd player died in the beginning of December, so, there was some consternation over hooking up the replacement and having the correct number of cables and looking at diagrams and attaching the right cable to the right slot between the new dvd player, the cable box, and the television. Apparently, in order to watch a dvd you need to have a degree in engineering...

Anyway, one of the cords was too short, and I had to rearrange things, and it was weird looking. So, eventually I was standing there in Target while Christmas shopping and bought myself a little stand for the tv to sit on so that the tv could be in the middle of the spot for the tv again...

Before: the original configuration

 Middle (the new dvd player) (above)

After (below)

So, of course, now there's more space for knick knacks, boo-yah! And by knick knacks I mean the birds, the turtle, the frogs, and the lizards.

I like to buy bird, frog, and reptile decorations that look realistic. Occasionally, I buy things that I think just need a new coat of paint, because I'm crafty like that. So, my post holiday I-did-it-for-the-fun-of-it project was to paint a couple resin birds I had bought that I thought needed a do-over with paint.

So, with some craft paint, a knowledge of bird plumage, and some satin and matte varnish:

 So, now I have 3 yellow warblers (2 females, 1 male) and a chickadee on a pine cone in my menagerie of creatures.

Oh, and the chickadee has a home too : )

Someone needs to make sure the plastic iguanas behave themselves.

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday (and perhaps some post holiday relaxation or maybe a craft project) and have a happy new year!

Where have I been?

D'oh.

It is apparently exceptionally easy to get out of the habit of blogging. Probably because blogging is kind of hard. I mean, if I went out and took fabulous beautiful photos every week and spent a lot of time on "social media" making nice with everyone else - then people would visit here and leave nice comments.  Or if I was famous - well, I imagine that simply helps — assuming it's like good famous and not D-level reality tv also ran famous or something.  If I was into fashion — you know, I guess that's what the young ladies do... except that just not my thing.

So, I'm guilty of not blogging here and I do openly admit that not writing anything and just posting a something on tumblr seems to be a lot easier. That and tumblr is searchable so random people have a greater chance of finding your content. 

But anyway, it's September because I dropped off somewhere in August. It would be nice if I had some story or pictures about some fabulous vacation. But I don't. I didn't go anywhere. I was somehow busy between work and life and home.  There was a lot of overtime (aka 6 day work weeks), and some home drama. The latter I should have probably not mentioned, because apparently it's an unmentionable thing. It's not a divorce or domestic incident or fire or natural disaster, and no one is injured or ill or fired or boozing it up or anything particularly interesting... it's one of those dumb things that apparently you're never supposed to speak of. And I know this because I have mentioned it casually to a number of people that I know and they look at me as if I just told them that so-in-so is (insert scandalous thing). 

Let's just say that in the month of August, as I have been doing in very small increments for the past year, there was a sudden burst of cleaning... because someone seems to have a little problem parting ways with things that ought to be thrown away. Before there were tv shows we just called it the Mess. There's less of it now. There may have been some words exchanged and some strained faces every time Wednesday rolled around. And I may have gone on clandestine missions and snuck garbage bags out of the house, but there ought to be a clear path to the fuse box. And we are no longer not throwing out junk mail, because that was some moronic bullshit. If I am writing out a check every couple of months for the garbage man to come take away 3 bags of trash every week, then, 3 bags of trash are going to leave every week until I run out of stuff that needs to go.

Otherwise, in another 10 years we would have qualified for an episode of one of those shows, although we don't have any cats or rats or insect problems... although someone may be crushed to death someday by totes of craft supplies.

It's difficult to explain to non-relatives how there have been arguments and hurt feelings and dirty looks over throwing away empty shampoo bottles and milk jugs and  plastic bags.

So, that was August: work, cleaning, and exhaustion. Also, it was still too frigging hot.

And now it's September.

Anyway, I have been drawing and writing on and off when I'm not trying to catch up on sleep or think of how to better organize the thousands of things we have in this house... and one of the things that I endeavored upon was a new etsy account. Yeah, I know, like I really need another one.

esotericSarah — my photography will be slowly matriculating there because I actually opened the account with a completely different intention, and maybe, just like I thought last year - I'll get back on track with that project in January when my schedule clears out...

I laugh as I type that. But all the cleaning that I did in the month of August and throughout the past year was a bit of a journey in an attempt to live a happier, neater, better life; with some level or organization and planning. So, while I may look back on my summer and recall it being too hot to do anything and spending a lot of time with a the vacuum cleaner and a spray bottle of cleaning fluid - it was a path towards a more functional home and a more functional home life, where things get put away and there's a place to put things that we actually use.

Plus, I have 12 pictures to draw in less than 3 months. Eek! Good thing I have most of them sketched...

Hope everyone had a good summer!

the long rambling post...

I am a lot of things, many of which can be described with the use of adjectives, but all things are not constant all of the time. I mean, I'm female, I'm a certain height, I'm Caucasian (really, spell check, it's a proper noun?), and I'm alive. But beyond that, everything else is relative. And when I'm dead it doesn't really matter.

I was ill. It wasn't a cold or a stomach virus (nor was it like VD or something). It's just one of those things you kinda don't share with the entire world. I'm not entirely sure I'm fine, but well, one can only defer life for so long.

I'm tired, and I'm tired of being tired... so I suppose I want things to change and have to figure out how to make that happen. I want to stop coming home from work and spending hours in front of the computer and in the end having a feeling like I wonder where the last 3 hours went and wondering why I didn't get anything done.

I want a feeling of accomplishment. I want to feel like I don't have to bite my tongue or not say things because I might offend someone. I want to feel like being me is fine. And for a long time now I haven't felt that way.

I was never someone who wanted to be the center of attention, and I'm still not. I just want to be happy making the things I make, and if people happen to like those things - then that's cool... and for a long time I didn't have an outlet for that, and then a few years ago someone told me about Etsy.

And wouldn't that be neat - to just list things and sell them? Cool, right?
Without being specific, because it's kind of pointless, etsy is the thing that seems to eat up 3 hours of my day every morning with very little return.
I can list things, I can tweet about it, I could tumblr, I could get off my lazy ass and waste copious amounts of time with random strangers "liking" things on facebook, I could theoretically join teams, I could make treasuries... I could do that stuff in every waking non-working hour... and it still wouldn't amount to anything.

So, I guess I'm just going to be me because I'm tired of being philosophically paralyzed by the notion that I shouldn't say things because I should talk to everyone like they're my grandma. And which one, btw, I had 2 of them. They were very different people.

I'm 32, and the life that I have is not the one that I want. I'm not who I want to be. Somewhere, within me there is someone who is happy and content and comes home from work every day and doesn't wonder what the hell happened to that 3 hours since I walked in the door, and I have to find a way to remove the notion that that is buried in the depths of me.

I recently took down some decorations that had been hanging around for 10 years... they were mostly clippings from magazines, pictures of famous people and rock stars. They were brittle with age in most cases, and the masking tape with which they had been attached to the wall or the door was also that yellow-orange-brown shade and brittle. It was amusing in a way to pick off a layer of old ideas and notions. And why on earth did I have a picture of Robert Smith on the back of the door? I'm really not that fond of the Cure... oh, wait, yeah, magazines aren't really rife with shots of Geddy Lee. The Beatles were definitely over-represented. I'm not a big Beatles fan, but it's always easy to find Beatles pictures or post cards.

The hardest thing to take off the back of the door was the newspaper clipping with the picture of some college-age neo-hippie named Shanti Stark lighting a candle in front of a Frank Zappa album. I think that one made it into the keep pile along with all the Beatles post cards.

I've never had heroes or role models or suffered from the notion that I would want to pattern my life after some one, but from an early age Frank Zappa was always interesting to me. He made weird music, and I probably first heard him on Dr. Demento, which I used to stay up and listen to on Sunday nights because the show was played on WIQB (back when that was still a decent station). Anyway, I either wrote my book reports about Frank Zappa or Pink Floyd. Zappa died when I was 14 years old, and that newspaper clipping was an announcement of his passing. It was on the back of my bedroom door, right by the door handle.

It's purely sentimental, I suppose. But it was the last thing to come down.

I decided it was time to redecorate the bedroom, which quite literally just means I'm going to hang different pictures on the wall because everything has pretty much been the same for 10 years, except for the things that fell down from the humidity and just never made it back up...

I don't spend a lot of time in the bedroom (not sleeping), but I guess maybe I'd like to. And I suppose changing some things out might be appropriate.

I have a lot of paintings that end up in the keep pile, and well, that's kind of a shame, because although I may be the only person who ever goes in that room - I probably ought to stop keeping my work in a pile on the desk or the floor and get it on the wall...

I've been thinking about this for a while now, and while my first few attempts at finding the right size frame may have ended in defeat (what the hell, Hobby Lobby - no love for the 9X12 unless I like the look of aged barn wood?). Well, I did find myself in a Michael's 10 minutes before the store closed on a rainy Wednesday night, and now that I've spray painted them a brownish shade of metallic silver which I believe was called "sesame" I have 4 9X12 frames and just need to figure out how to configure them on the wall... oh, plus like the other 10 picture frames I bought. I'm female, there was a half off sale in the framing department. I thought about Christmas and Birthdays and mentally said "fuck it" and there I was standing at the register with a heavy pile of frames.
Yes, relatives, it's artwork again as gifts, how could you expect anything different?

So, yeah, I have to go get those off the patio, where they are airing out, in the morning. I'd like to assume that in the span of time since I painted them and when I retrieve them that no birds have pooped on them or small animals have gnawed on them...

The one thing that I did take pause to notice while thinking about the whole bedroom decor thing was that my work has gotten progressively abstract. I don't paint pictures of things, I paint with color and shapes or lines or movement may happen to occur, but the intent is not an image of an object. I'm sure, in the realm of possibilities, that someone could draw a quick conclusion about that... or relate it to the fact that I keep sitting down with my sketchbook with the intent to draw and keep putting down a blank page, but presently I'm not so much in the moment that I think there's a meaningful conclusion to be drawn from that... just that it's an amusing observation.

Summer begins...

Well, summer officially starts on 21 June... which I know because it's my birthday. But it's summer now. The weather really doesn't care what the calendar says. It's humid and 70-80˚F out right now — that's summer weather.

So, a couple weeks ago I happened to look up at the obsolete tv antenna that towers over the house, and sitting way up there on the top of one of the rods was the male hummingbird. It's amusing to see such a tiny creature sitting way up there, where presumably he's surveying the territory. So, I cleaned up the feeder and made some bird kool-aid for him and the rest of the hummingbirds to fight over... and this weekend I finally got around to taking all the snowflakes down. Yes, I still had vestiges of the winter decorations hanging around the place. Laziness, I suppose.

So, the hummingbirds and the butterflies are now up.

A few years ago I was looking for snowflake Christmas ornaments at Target, and I happened to notice that they had all these resin bird ornaments... so I picked through them all, carefully, and literally bought all the hummingbirds that didn't have broken beaks, as resin is fragile, and these were just hanging on hooks. They had bluebirds and chickadees and goldfinches too, and yeah, I bought some of those as well, but they were all made in a perching position, where as the hummingbirds are flying. (Some day I'll get around to making something that my bluebirds can sit on)

So, anyway, all the birds were painted as the male form of the species... so, I brought them home and repainted them. I made males and females, and went so far as to use iridescent nail polish to make their feathers more authentic. So, every year when I finally let go of my laziness for an hour or so - I get them out and put them up - and they stay up until October or November - long after the real birds have flown south.

I made the monarch butterflies probably about 10 years ago. I suppose it's silly or childish or whimsical or maybe a little 'Flowers in the Attic'-ish, but I like weird stuff I suppose. And if you looked at the pictures and you're wondering - that brown blob on top of my computer is a snail knick knack.

I did some paintings on a whim last weekend, so now I need to scan them and varnish them, and sign them, and print out and attach the labels for the backs of them... I finally went through my paints this week (since the garbage was off by one day in observance of Memorial Day), and threw away all the bottles that were dried up and chunky or almost completely empty. I do that every now and then, particularly when I can no longer fit all the paint into the basket that holds the paint. The overflow of arts & crafts supplies gets to be a little much every now and then...

The summer flowers are here. The irises are blooming! Irises are my favorite flower, hands down. I love them in virtually every color (except the brown ones - that I will never understand). But violet (and any other shade of purple) is my favorite. Violet is also simply and unilaterally my favorite color.

Plus, after probably not having ridden on an actual bike for like 15 years - I bought a bike this weekend. Yes, it's a lavender shade of violet, which was most of the appeal... aside from the fact that it's a female model, adult sized, and has brakes. Yeah, I'm not one of those cyclist people, so, really I bought it because I want a bike to tool around on mostly for leisure purposes - which means riding it around the block in a residential area where I am least likely to be impeding traffic or hit by a car.

Hopefully your summer is filled with color and happy things, and maybe air conditioning, a fan, or the occasional cool breeze.

I like stuff

Wikipedia could probably tell you all about the history of Valentines Day... and Google probably could point you in the direction. Admittedly, I'm not really a history buff. That doesn't mean that I hate facts, I'm just indifferent to some things.

Valentine's Day is about that heart shaped box of chocolates, and seeing pink and red and white and hearts everywhere. It's trying to remember expressions of love... it's not quite as much of an "invented" holiday as "Sweetest Day," but it's about consumerism nonetheless.

I'm a participating consumer; otherwise I'm indifferent to the concept of consumerism, because it's just not something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I buy groceries, I buy stuff, hell, I even like stuff. I distinctly remember my seventh grade English teacher telling us that "stuff" is a dead word. But well, *eyeroll,* that hasn't ever stopped me from using it.

I like stuff. Yes, I said it: I like stuff. I mean, you know, if you've looked at any of my previous entries then you may have noticed that I happen to make stuff. So, it's not out of the question that I like stuff. Plus this is a blog, so I need to write about stuff or post some pictures or something... and it's Valentine's Day time, so I guess it's time to talk about love or stuff like it.

I'm not terribly obsessed with Valentine's Day. I buy a heart-shaped box of chocolates, I get a box of heart-shaped chocolates, and if I'm feeling frisky, then maybe I remember to make a couple of greeting cards. BTW, I like eating chocolate.

So, this is a post about stuff I like. Particularly some stuff that I like that happens to be in my "office."

I enjoy knick knacks, or inappropriately appropriating objects as knick knacks. Many of my knick knacks are toys or things that are apparently supposed to be left out in your garden (where presumably the birds would do their business on them and the insects would crawl all over them). I have an infinite collection of lizards, turtles, and frogs (and the occasional bird). A few of them are legitimate knick knacks, the rest were apparently intended for the garden. The more realistic the replica animal - the better. So, these are some shots of my menagerie.

I like books by Hunter S. Thompson.
I like the music of Warren Zevon, Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Everclear, John Denver, Rush, Jethro Tull, Bob Dylan...
I like listening to music I like.
I like watching tv.
I like doing nothing and imagining stories (which I believe they call day dreaming).
I like the color violet, and buying violet-colored things.
I like irises.
I like Coca Cola; regular Coke & Cherry Coke.
I like Mary Janes and striped socks.
I like those ridiculous and often gaudy patterned sheets from the seventies.
I like chocolate, particularly those Lindor bars.
I like coconut.
I like pleasantly warm weather.

I like a lot of things, as I imagine we all do, so listing them might get a little frivolous, but this was my "Valentines" theme post, so, I hope you take a moment to think about the stuff you like, and maybe remember why.