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Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
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11:24 pm - Feeling calmer
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I've started this thing of writing a little stick-it (post-it? I don't know. I prefer STICK IT!) note of how I want to wake up the next morning and sticking it onto my bed head as I go to sleep.
Today: happy and confident and inspired and motivated to get my work done.
Kinda helped. I did actually get a lot done. And feel pretty good.
I've realised (again) I'm a person who struggles to be happy (duh) and that the quote about happiness being like a butterfly that you can't catch blah blah blah least expect it sits in the palm of your hand is bullshit.
I'm a person who needs to pursue it earnest. In a pith helmet, armed with a butterfly net.
I must make sure I seek it out actively as much as I can, because when I sit still and wait for the rotten thing to land in my hand like a butterfly I forget what I was even waiting for, and just wallow and stagnate and when happiness does turn up I don't want it.
it makes no sense, but sometimes I'm more comfortable not being happy. I know depressed. At least I understand it.
But! No more of that. I will take my pith helmet and butterfly net approach to happiness, armed with a pad of sticky notes. With cute little big-headed dogs in the corner of them for good measure.
_________
Japanese food tonight with Laurie, Pru, my dad and my grandma. Beautiful food, but rather salty, and I'm really thirsty now. Really enjoyed myself though, and was nice to be able to go out with folks. I really miss that since leaving work.
And juice was on special when we went to get some groceries tonight.
I have pineapple coconut. It tastes like a liquid holiday.
I have new large gauge ear jewellery, ordered wholesale through Laurie and the lovely woman Laurie works for, who is also my neighbour, who is also my friend.
It's nice having a friend live right across the road. She's at work a whole lot, and it's not like we hang out at each other's places. But she sees me come and go and I see her, and I feel like the neighbourhood is a safe place, looking out for each other.
I feel like it's an eternity until the next Dexter episode....*sigh*
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12:47 am - What is this?
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My thoughts and heart rate and breathing and everything just keep getting faster and faster and faster and I have so much to do! No time to lose! My brain is thinking everything! I need teal paint! I need a studio area! I could build garden beds! I should do some cooking! Why don't I have any red shoes? I could find some on ebay! I should paint! I should build!
I have AN IDEA! I have an idea ATOP an idea! Inside an idea!
I have babushka ideas in 3D and three-strip technicolour. Built like rapidly expanding fractals, and all with expiry dates of RIGHT FREAKING NOW!
Zoom zoom zoom!!
This is not like me.
I am a slow mover.
Slow down, slow mover! Slow down!
I don't like this. I find this alien and frightening, and THOROUGHLY disruptive. Becuase oddly enough, I'm not getting much done. I'm too busy leap-frogging between tasks and ideas.
I'm going to have a shower and maybe actually sit and meditate and calm down.
Haha, oh, this is the universe getting me back for making a comment last night about meditation not being king shit of the spiritual world. 'Cause, you know, that's what the universe is like. It's a petty bitch. I'm pretty sure that's a direct quote from the Dalai Lama.*
Imagine if it wasn't the Dalai Lama, but the Dalia Llama. What would that even BE??
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| Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
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11:49 pm - Issues
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I'm sure it comes as no surprise to any of you that I'm a person with....issues.
I'm not sure what my problem is today. I feel like I'm ALMOST close to where I need to be, and if I could just GET ORGANISED, I'd be ok. So naturally I tried to tidy parts of the house, made a bigger mess in the process, drilled a few random things, wrapped some Christmas presents.
Somehow, when I feel at a loss as to actually how to get a grip on things and move productively forward, I feel comforted by wandering the house, drill resting atop one shoulder. That way if I find anything that needs fixing - rrzzzz! - fixed.
God, and it's not even my drill. I need to give it back.
How can I actually work properly in a messy house of chaos? WHY CAN'T I BE TIDY?
I want a peaceful, serene house of tidy and calm. Not a house where the floor mat has a hill under it from a pile of knitting. Or disturbing numbers of 'stash' boxes, full of wool and fabric and felt and beads and string and needles and pins and cardboard for making all sorts of....well, you never know.
STOP HOARDING YOU'LL FEEL BETTER!!!!!!
Why can't my house be tidy and organised and PEACEFUL? Like an IKEA catalogue?
Why can't my life be like an IKEA catalogue? Why am I so messy? Why am I such a mess?
Where do beautifully manicured people with beautifully organised houses find TIME?
I feel like every second day I'm plucking my eyebrows. Why does mess and body hair just sneak up on me so FAST? Why is this so hard?
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| Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
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11:20 pm - I found this today
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in a random forum, found after googling for something else entirely:
"Referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Temperaments under "Temperament Blends", I would like to discuss whether it is possible for a person to have a blend of sanguine and melancholic at the same time.
AFAIK, a sanguine tends to be sloppy while a melancholic tends to be perfectionist. How then can one person be sloppy and neat at the same time?"
It made me laugh out loud. I am the ultimate messy perfectionist. My floor is COVERED in clothes, because I can't bring myself to put them back imperfectly...
and I lack the ability to manage perfection. Thus I live forever driven to something I know I can never reach, paralysed by the horror of missing the mark.
It's spectacularly stupid. I suggest trying it sometime.
In other news I seem to have some tiny shard of glass in my foot.
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| Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
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12:21 pm - Will life be worth living in 2000?
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12:15 pm - Yuck
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The last few days have been nightmarishly hot.
I think we were spoiled in our old place, which was all concrete walls. This place has pretty much no insulation and is like living in a sweat box. The worst room for heat is the front room, which is the room I have all my stuff set up to work.
I'm thinking I'm going to take it all apart and move it into my bedroom until wintertime is here again and I need the heat....
The poor cat. She hates the heat. She's all spilled out across the floor like a cat puddle.
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| Saturday, November 21st, 2009
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1:45 pm - Choices!
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So! For Christmas, my dad has offered Seth and I between a choice of two things -
a) a cordless drill
b) a 'Flavorwave' cooker.
We're having a hard time choosing.
The drill would be super handy. I use a drill ALL THE TIME. For everything. Right now I've got one on loan, but don't own my own.
Still, does a person reach a point at which they have nothing more to drill? I can't imagine this happening personally, but who knows?
My dad has a Flavorwave thingy, and swears by it. But being vegetarians*, will Seth and I get as much use out of it?
It's big and will take up a bit of counter space, and while it claims it bakes beautiful cakes and muffins, a quick intarweb search says it's awful for baking. Gluten free baking can be especially tricky, so no dice there.
BUT! Our house is a very hot house. Today I'm sweating like a pig as I sit here and type. Ideally, I'd like to eat a big salad with roast pumpkin and pine nuts, but on a day this hot there's no WAY I'd fire up the oven to roast a pumpkin. If I had a flavorwave, I could cook it no problem, with no added heat in the house.
Yum.
BUT! BUT! In winter, I TRY to use the oven, so as to heat the whole house while it cooks stuff.
So I'm torn. The flavorwave would be AWESOME on days like today, but would I fail to use it much generally? The drill would be generally useful time to time, but am I missing out by saying no to a flavorwave? And a summer full of roasted vegetable salads?
I CAN'T CHOOSE!!! Anybody have any thoughts? I'm lost here...
_____
* These days I'm not, actually, vegetarian. My new cut off point is that I will not eat anything with an endoskeleton.
With the exception of:
crocodile, if I were offered it, and the occasional bit of kangaroo, because I'm all behind the eating kangaroos thing.
Also with the exception of octopi: They have no endoskeleton (it's cartilaginous tissue), but they're smart enough to open jars. I don't think I should be eating things that can open jars. That extends to cephalopods in general.
Sharks (also cartilaginous tissue, no bones) I'll make a case by case decision on.
Uh....so not 'vegetarian'. I have no idea what to call this ridiculously complex approach, though. 'Crazy', maybe?
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| Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
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10:04 am - STOLENZ and reposted
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I had to share this. Daawwww. Yeah...uh...not for the non cat people.
I think god Kitty McShitty doesn't have a piano. We might have to introduce her to a more silent artform...
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| Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
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2:24 pm - Writer's Block: Famous last words
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"Goodbye, everyone, I go to a better place...oh look, there are the gates. The music is beautiful, I hear angels singing and...wait! Aargh, no! The flames! The pitchforks! The heat, my god, the heat!"....*dies*
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| Sunday, October 11th, 2009
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6:45 pm - websites and email still down + wedding + the quiet erow
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it's amazing how cut off from the world i feel when my servers go down. i can't hear from clients via email. or anyone. i can't SEND anyone an email through those servers either.
if it's not fixed tonight i'll have to email from my back up web mail.
last night's wedding was really, really nice. not that i've been to a whole heap of weddings or anything, but it was by far the nicest one i've ever been to. it was really personalised and gave everyone a real sense of who they were as individuals and as a couple, and took place in a beautiful bush chapel, the trees making a canopy overhead and ferns and mossy rocks making a backdrop.
then the reception took place in the scout hall (a nice touch since they both met through scouts) which is a beautiful old building overlooking a beautiful view of wollongong. it rained and the bush was so green and the hall so cozy. the food was beautiful and speeches actually entertaining and enjoyable to sit through - everything was lovely and though i felt unwell until we made it inside to the warmer hall, i was so glad i'd been well enough to make it.
seth couldn't make it to the reception, just the wedding - it was his second night performing The Quiet Erow with kraig grady in helensburgh.
i went with him for the opening night, and it was really fantastic. only the second time i've seen seth perform, and it kept hitting me that after however many years of fancying musicians during high school, this time one of them was mine. haha.
going to go up to see closing night this weekend.
still feeling really out of it after the sinus problems - god knows how many typos or odd things are in this - and am still somewhat deaf, but i feel human today. and i've got baked pizza-mushrooms (where you use the mushroom cup as the pizza base) and salad from the garden planned for dinner.
so, recovering.
though i expect it'll be a few days before i feel like me again. i'm still having a hard time remembering words for talking ('put it in the.....you know! brrr...cold! the cold thing! the food holder cold thing!') but eh...i'm up and moving about again.
yay!
ETA: oh...so i guess my website and all IS working...it's just me who can't get there. strange. no idea what is going on there...
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12:28 pm - human
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today is the first day in ages where i've woken up feeling human.
and my servers are down due to a billing error....ugh
so i'm not getting my emails (no LJ notifications of comments, so sorry), my websites aren't working, so sorry to anybody trying to get in touch with me.
hopefully it'll be up again later tonight.
egads
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| Thursday, October 1st, 2009
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1:05 pm - Aussies looking for a wacom?
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| Thursday, September 24th, 2009
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9:37 am - this morning
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i am coughing up red dust until i get dizzy and fall against the sink.
red dust, red dust. more red dust.
i'm cleaning it out of my ears, blowing it out of my nose.
my bedroom is one of the worst sealing rooms in the house - there are holes in the floor that the wind came through, carrying red dust.
there's red dust in my bed.
it's a good exfoliant though!
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| Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
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12:13 pm - crazy
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seth and i need to go out to get the car serviced.
i'm frightened i'm going to blow away out there. crazy crazy shit.
the gale force winds do seem to have blown the red dust haze away somewhat, though. but my sinuses still hurt, and the wind is forcing a lot of dust into the house through the million and one cracks.
the top of my toilet paper was pink with red dust this morning. hahaha.
small things, small minds.
i'm going to buy me some lead shoes so i don't go sailing away like a kite. remind me not to go swimming in them.
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| Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
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11:16 am - it is not i who is crazy....it is i who is MAD!
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we're all mad here.
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| Saturday, August 22nd, 2009
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8:11 pm - Book suggestions wanted!!
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I love nights in. Especially nights in alone.
It’s sad and boring but very true.
Tonight, Seth is out at a music thing he has to go to, and I’ve decided to have a ‘girls night in’ solo style.
I love doing this, and really don’t get to do it very often, but tonight I am armed with awful chick flicks and tasty food (healthy food, trying to be careful there), a big cozy hoodie and a sleepy, cuddly (and rather disturbingly flatulent. And I mean really, really bad. We’re not talking clear a room bad, we’re talking clear the house bad) cat.
Continue reading at the Ugly Goat
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| Thursday, August 20th, 2009
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4:15 pm - stolen from 0ubliette
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i just had to share this with you:
it made me laugh, and it also made my cat come over to the speakers all like WTF HUH WHAT IS THAT!?!?!?!?!
awesome
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12:09 pm - Dreams (real ones, not the Fleetwood Mac song)
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It's a funny thing. It seems that the more work I do on illustration during the day, the stranger my dreams are.
I once read an article (or a book? where did that come from?) by Stephen King where he says that he has his scary ideas because he taught his imagination to misbehave. I rather feel that way about art sometimes.
When I'm stumped for the next idea, I ask my imagination to just go for a run and see what it comes back with:
A reclining nude? Not enough, go further. A still life? No, go further. A rat? Closer. A rat trapped in a bottle too small for it to have gotten into in the first place on the edge of a cliff? Good work, little imagination! Have a liver treat.
This results in really crazy dreams.
Read the rest at The Ugly Goat
Please tell me I'm not alone in this!!
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| Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
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2:33 pm - Working from home
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Most of the time when I tell people I work for myself, from home, it’s met with an extreme enthusiasm followed by the words that must irk freelancers the world over:
“I’d LOVE to work for myself and be my own boss! I wouldn’t have to work so hard! I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted! Do you work in your pajamas?”
read the rest
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1:41 pm - Going solo
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so! i've been thinking about this for some months now, and have finally done it.
i've jumped from LJ to wordpress.
to a 'REAL BLOG'™ .
i started with the basics yesterday - currently i'm using a premade layout with somebody else's graphics, i haven't managed to figure out how to feed it into my lj yet. hell, i've barely managed to figure out how to post.
but here's the deal - in the coming months, i'll be attempting to run a 'REAL BLOG'™.
i'll be writing about every day life, as well as what my experiences working as an illustrator, craftsperson, websiteythinger swinging between self employment and real world jobs have been.
i'll also be making weekly themed posts (uh...i can't tell you what they ARE yet. 'cause i haven't thought them up yet they're secret)
as soon as i figure it out, my posts will be fed to LJ.
private, for friends eyes only posts will be made exclusively on LJ.
and i'll still be here daily, reading what you guys are up to.
but! if you feel like coming along for the ride, please go to:
http://theuglygoat.toeknuckles.com
and watch it take shape. i'd love to have you guys there with me. 8-)
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toeknuckles's journal
