Drifting

Yay! I Did It! A blog post every day for a month, every single day!

I am excited. I'm not excited that it's over... I'm excited to know that I can blog like a "real" blogger! laughs. I _do_ have things to say, I am able to post little thoughts and not see those posts as "totally lame"!

So... be sure to head on over to my regular web site. I won't be posting here any longer, and I'm setting up my Static8 blog to be easier to update...

Static8 Journal

And in fact, here shortly, I will be updating the S8 with thumbnails of ALL my drawings that I did this month.

A big shout out goes to Eden, who runs National Blog Posting Month! Thanks so much, Eden, for conceiving the idea, and for running the web site, and for getting prizes organized.

Also, another Thank You to my Significant Other, who makes my life worth living... and maybe worth typing about! laughs.

I have been feeling kind of blah the past couple days, and have not been drawing because of it. humph!

The above is my drawing from the 18th. I saw that scene on my walk to work and thought to myself it would make a great drawing. Except I wish I could make my moon more moon-like! ha.

It always drives me crazy when artists render the shape of the moon incorrectly in their art.

In real life, when you see the moon you can always tell exactly where the sun is. Because the moon is reflecting the sun's light. Obviously.

But some artists just throw down a moon shape. They put their silly moon shape backwards, and it'll be pointing at a sun in the noon position, except their sky is black with stars.

It drives me crazy. And I know it's crazy that it drives me crazy. I mean, it's _art_, right? haven't you ever heard of "artistic license"???

Yes. I have heard of artistic license. Have You ever heard of observing nature and getting your stupid moon shapes correct??!

You see how crazy it makes me?

;)

I am sending two postcards today, one to Germany, one to Austria... and I used my very last international stamps! (I'm hoping the stamps I ordered last weekend will arrive today!)



I really enjoy PostCrossing. And I will soon get up to the next level of sending...

As a newbie, I can only send out five postcards at a time. Each time a receiver registers the postcard I sent, I am able to get a new address to send to.

After you've got 20 postcards sent, you're allowed to have six postcards out at a time! The next level after that is 40 postcards (for seven at a time).

I've now got 18 of my postcards registered.

In the last couple of weeks I was worried that I would never get to 20 because several of my postcards got stuck. One of the first postcards I sent out never arrived, and at two months it finally "expired". And then three more of my postcards got stuck!

But the other day, one of the stuck postcards got registered after 25 days of traveling, so that makes me happy. I've just got the two now that have been traveling for over a month.

PostCrossing says that the average traveling time is 15.7 days. Most of my postcards take from 7 to 15 days...

It'll probably be a week or two before I hit the 20 postcard level. But if those stuck postcards would just get unstuck, I would have 20 right now!

This entry is dedicated to my Significant Other! He is the best!

Without him, the daily blogging and the daily drawing would not have been possible. He has made us dinner every day, and has done all the house chores! Yay!

Plus, my SO is a wonderful person to have around, and I'm glad he's in my life.

SO: Thank you for all you do. And thank you for being you!

Happy Day! Have a Living Thanksgiving.

I have been noticing the sea gulls lately. We are about 60 miles from the ocean, and they don't normally live here. Sometimes you'll see a small group hanging out with the ducks, getting bread handed to them by humans.

But now there's a dozen or so sea gulls, flying around. Maybe they got tired of the ocean and decided to vacation here!

I couldn't find any sea gull pictures that I wanted to draw from, so I drew this albatross instead. Not the best drawing, but eh.




And then, this little sandpiper, to continue with my water bird theme!

Sometimes, when people in real life find out I'm vegan, they say some crazy stuff. One of the more amusing ones is "where do you get your protein?"

heh. There is no such thing as a protein deficiency. If a person does have a "protein deficiency" it actually means they are starving to death.

I've been vegan for five years, now, and I've not starved to death yet. Not even once.

;)

So. The next time you find out some cool person you know is vegan... Don't ask them where they get their protein!

Say this instead: "Wow, that's awesome! I'd like to go vegan, too. What's your advice?"

Trust me, that will make your vegan friend the happiest person in the world!!

I try to draw goats, because I have a friend who likes goats. But they always come out funny looking. just need more practice! :)

Many people think that being an environmentalist and being vegan are separate issues. Nope, they are one and the same. When you care about ecosystems, you have to care about the animals who live in those ecosystems. Domesticated animals are not excluded! We all have to live on the Earth!

The Amazon rain forest is being destroyed for cows. Everyone knows this, right? And you would call this an environmental issue, right? And the logical response to this environmental issue is to go vegan! Vegans do not contribute to the destruction of the rain forests.

Or, how about this. In the US over 10 billion land animals are killed for food every year. There are about 306 million humans in the US. And almost all of these 306 million humans have access to sewer treatment. And those 10 billion animals who lived and died this year... have no sewers. Even tho the waste of most of those 10 billion animals is toxic with pesticides, hormones, antibiotics and who knows what else.

Another environmental issue that can be responded to by going vegan!

And, of course, there are the animals who live in the oceans. Not only have we decimated the species that we eat -- 90% of the populations of fish that we eat are gone -- bottom trawlers completely obliterate ocean floor ecosystems. And don't even get me started on bycatch.

hm, vegans don't eat fish... Yet another environmental disaster we are not contributing to.

If you love the earth and biodiversity: go vegan! If you love animals, from cows and chickens, to dolphins and sea turtles, to jaguars and monkeys: go vegan!

I am one of those rare people who value sleep. I love to sleep! I do best on a little over 9 hours of sleep, and I arrange my schedule to get those nine hours.

I hate it when I don't get enough sleep. Most of all, I hate being sleepy when I'm at work or in a situation where I can't get a nap. Somehow, when I am sleepy, it's the worst feeling ever. And so I avoid it by getting enough sleep!

I don't have insomnia or anything, I do sleep for most of my nine hours.

And you would think that after getting all that sleep, I would jump out of bed and be a happy morning person. Nope. I hate mornings. I don't want to deal with anything in the morning. I especially don't want to deal with people smiling at me and saying "good morning" at me. bleh, and if you are bouncy and bubbly in the morning, I will curse at you!

On the other hand, I don't want to sleep through the morning. I like to get up in decent time. Weird, huh?

Yeah, I don't have anything to say again, so I figured I'd change things up with a photo. :)

This is Boo and Twitch playing with Mr. Mango a blue chicken.

And now... I am buying stamps. I sent so many postcards today, I've all but run out of stamps!

I saw a rainbow on the way to work again, and this time I didn't get rained upon. :) And at the temp job, they ran out of stuff for us to do: they are giving us Friday off. So, yay, a long weekend! Well, not yay for my bank account, but yay for creative me...

I am way behind with my postcards. For my monthly exchange, I designed and printed out my postcards last weekend, but I haven't had the time to write on them or cut them up. And for PostCrossing, I can send two postcards. And, I'd like to make a new postcard for that this weekend, too. I'll have to look through my quotes to see if I can find a good one for the lady bug stock photo that I kinda like... :)

Unfortunately, I came home to discover that poor Significant Other is getting sick. People at the job have been ill, too, and I probably brought home their stupid germs, darn it. I make him herbal tea and tell him he'll be sick for two days. :(

Anyway. The Booking Through Thursday didn't interest me today, so I'm just going to babble about books instead.

Between the temp job, NaBloPoMo and my DrawMo, I've only been reading 200 pages a week! It is such a downfall from my 600+ pages a week that I was reading when I was a jobless bum! Plus, 200 pages is only half a book... it takes me two freaken weeks to finish a book now?!?

Oh, it's horribly horrible, trust me.

During my jobless bum stage, I started reading Thoreau's Journals. I bought all 14 of them, um, a year or two ago? They are compiled by Dover into two very large archive-type books. They are the biggest and most expensive books I own!

I'm about half done with Journal #7. I really enjoy reading them. There's no plot to keep track of, he just talks about birds and trees and stuff. Good stuff!

Nothing interesting to say today. Anyway, I've not posted any of my drawings for a week! So here are the sketches I did of the guinea pigs with the mechanical pencil the other day...









:)

I am a doomer. I believe that our civilization will collapse within my lifetime, probably a combination of factors: peak oil, food shortages, water problems and disease (my favorite, bird flu!!)

Since I live in the city, there is little chance that I, or the Significant Other, will survive. So I don't worry too much about it, and try to enjoy the life I've got right now.

I do sometimes imagine what it would be like, tho... My scenario, is that most everyone just dies, leaving the infrastructure intact. So: no people and no electricity but all the buildings and grocery stores are still there, full of canned foods to tide me over until my new garden starts growing.

(I recently decided that I would really miss hot showers. ha! I would miss my computer, but I wouldn't have to miss books unless some morons burned down the libraries.)

Of course, I wouldn't even have to bother with a garden, unless I want to. The foraging, both of the land and of the grocery stores, would be prime. And foraging societies only spend about three hours of their day with that "work", I would have plenty of time for those libraries!

Ha, yeah, too bad all you people have to die for me to live out my fantasy life! ;)

Yesterday I was seriously procrastinating my drawing time. I was totally ready for bed by the time I actually sat down to do it. I got my lap desk out and set up with my index card. And stared at it's whiteness for a while.

Then I got out my pencil case and stared at it for a while.

In it, I've got "hard" and "soft" pencils. The 4H, which I've decided I don't like because it's so pale a grey and it scratches the paper. My current favorite is the soft one, a 6B, nice dark line. Have to sharpen it all the time tho.

Yep, I've got a couple pencil sharpeners in my case. As well, a couple different kind of erasers... I use a white vinyl eraser but I've got a gum eraser and one of those molded erasers. All artists must have the molded eraser, because when you get bored you can make a tiny sculpture with it! ha.

I've got a set of 8 Crayola watercolour pencils which are almost perfectly useless because I need tan, different shades of green, and pink for pigs. I like to draw pigs, you know!

There's a couple other odds and ends, like the calligraphy marker and a length of measuring tape to make guidelines with. A bad, cheap paintbrush. a sharpened stick.

And at the bottom, my mechanical pencil. Used to be, I'd grab that first for my drawings because using the pencil sharpener was tedious. I wondered how it would stack up against my new love for that delightfully dark 6B...

I gave the mechanical pencil a try by sketching guinea pigs. They were eating their dinner, but they were taking turns at the food dish so I did not have time to do anything fancy. Just get their body shape down, and then they'd move, and I'd have to start the next sketch.

And suddenly I'm liking my mechanical pencil again. No stopping for sharpening! and it can do a decently dark line as well. On top of that, it's a consistently thin line... the 6B wears down very quickly (because it's soft, obviously!) and a sharp point gets wider with every stroke.

So, good. I should probably go through some of my other art supplies, to experiment with other old stuff...

Dang, it seems like this entire weekend was nothing but chores! There is always "one more thing", I hate that. The one thing that I didn't get to today was feeding the worms... but that's okay, they won't starve for a couple of months at least! ha.

I love our worms. It makes me incredibly happy that we aren't throwing away as much organic matter. As an environmentalist, landfills piss me off. It is just so very stupid of humans to mummify all of our leftover food and organics, I don't even know how we got to be so stupid!

Here's an old photo of our vermicomposting set up...





It's two 14gal Rubbermaid containers, set inside each other. The top one has a set of vents along the top edge to give the worms some air, it also has holes in the bottom of it to drain excess water (caught by the bottom container, which has a drain valve to pour out the water). There's a lid, and we keep the worms inside the house.

In the picture, our worm box was one year old, and I had dumped the entire thing, separated the worms from the dirt. The dirt was thrown into the tiny garden, and the worms were back in the box and set up with new bedding.

I "feed" the worms about once a week. The worms are vegan, so anything that's organic in our house can be tossed in... Any food that's gone bad, vegetable trimmings, tea and coffee (including filters!). I also have to renew the worms' bedding fairly often... the bedding is newspaper shreds that used to be bedding for guinea pigs! How cool is that, recycling newspapers several times over!

I wish more people had access to composting. As it is, our landfill will continue to grow and pollute and cost us money and lives. It's so so wrong! Please people: recycling isn't enough! Look into composting! Check out vermicomposting and indoor composting. It's wonderful!

On Friday, I signed off here with "it's friday night... go out and have fun," but I went to bed right after I typed that! I thought I was exhausted, but I tossed and turned all night. I zoned out for about half an hour before midnight and had dreams about colouring a drawing! I had gone to bed without doing my daily drawing and did dream drawing instead.

This morning I had chores to do... bleh! Ordinarily, I like to do chores during the week, to get them out of the way so my weekends are free. But I am not organized enough yet with my new temp job. eh.



This evening I watched yesterday's Whale Wars with my Significant Other. I love that show, it's very exciting plus they are directly saving animals. This was the second episode during which the Sea Shepard catches up with one of the whaling ships and two volunteers have jumped onto the whaling ship with a "cease and desist" letter! Yay, Sea Shepard!!!!



Yep, I like whales... But I also like domesticated animals, large and small. My Absolute Favorite animal sanctuary is Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary. They rescue farmed animals and are advocates of a vegan lifestyle. They are awesome!

I donate a pretty significant part of my income, and vegan advocating is one of the major deciding points. I used to support the Humane Society of the US, but I now consider that money wasted. I don't know what would happen if they spent their millions on vegan education... but I do know the millions they have spent, haven't done much good for animals. I would much rather support small organizations that directly help animals and have a clear, vegan direction.

It's Friday, which means I've survived my third week of the temp job, and my second week of blogging every day! yay!

I was at work today, eating my lunch, and I realize that the lunch was entirely homemade. Entirely! I had a hummus sandwich. I make my own hummus. and the bread machine makes my bread. I had a big cookie bar for dessert. Which I made from scratch as well. The only thing: I didn't grow my own ingredients! ha.

Trust me, being vegan is the awesome-est!

okay people, it's friday night... go out and have fun!

Why Buy

I’ve asked, in the past, about whether you more often buy your books, or get them from libraries. What I want to know today, is, WHY BUY?

Even if you are a die-hard fan of the public library system, I’m betting you have at least ONE permanent resident of your bookshelves in your house. I’m betting that no real book-lover can go through life without owning at least one book. So … why that one? What made you buy the books that you actually own, even though your usual preference is to borrow and return them?

If you usually buy your books, tell me why. Why buy instead of borrow? Why shell out your hard-earned dollars for something you could get for free?

I buy most of the books I read. I just don't like to touch used books. When I read used books I feel like I have to wash my hands all the time! I am not a germaphobe or anything, touching used books is the only thing that I'm weird about.

Unfortunately, book storage has become a problem. Which is why I love to buy ebooks!

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

I also enjoy reading magazines. I tend to fall behind on reading them because I get so many. This year I was really trying to fix that. I made a serious dent in my pile... but the past few weeks, with my new temp job and blogging and drawing every day, my pile has started to grow again. arg!

These are the mags I get:

• Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
• The Iowan
• The Artist's Magazine
• Paper Creations
• Earth First!

A couple of my favorite magazines stopped publishing in the past couple years, and I've kind of pulled back from getting subscriptions lately. In other words, I think that the above is too short a list, and I want more magazines!

I count magazines separately from my books (which is still at 75 for the year). I've read 49 magazines so far this year. My pile of unread mags is at 13 at this moment. The Smithsonian's take the longest to read, fortunately I've just got four of them left. They are from 2006, so you can see my pile is an ongoing problem! ;)

Walking to work this morning, I saw a rainbow. The one side was really bright and I hoped that it meant I was going to have a good day. Then I got rained on briefly. so. yeah.

I came home trying not to be grumpy. And I am still trying not to be grumpy. And I don't really have anything to type about anyway.

So, I'll show you some of my drawings that I do when I don't really feel like drawing...

Sometimes when I sit down to draw, it just looks bad. So I flip over my index card and try again on the back. The other day, I ended up with four attempts at a anteater.

Looking at them today, I guess they don't look so terrible. I mean, the feet are a little bit messed up... but you know, for somebody who curls up their hands and walks on their knuckles, maybe they just have messed up feet anyway! (anteater)

ha.