So I dreamed that greygirlbeast posted the cover for her 45th book, entitled The Almond's Meat. It was brighter than most of hers tend to be, sky blues along a shoreline, though the style was in line with the ones for The Red Tree and the last couple mass markets. The blue sky pictured in this one had subtle teeth.

There were other bits about trying to get into a closed post office for other reasons than mail, I think it was the Norwood one near where I used to live, and visiting someone's mother in a place that wasn't a home or an asylum, but having to go through the bit with the orderly bringing her out and such. I looked for snacks while they talked to her. The visiting room reminded me of the waiting area at a DMV or similar.

I am currently divided on the work that needs to be done today, though as long as I get something done, all should be good. I've got an idea for lord_of_smoking's present, finally. :D

I do wish that one of the people I'm waiting on sketch verdicts from would get back to me. I hate having things just hanging in the air like this.

(Edit: 1:47pm. Workout note, something to remember to add in permanently. Oh, OWinaGOODway, best exercise addition ever. Using the 20lb dumbbell to do slow, waist-up movements kind of like t'ai chi. Even holding it in both hands, it's HARD.)

The sweet potatoes went into the ground yesterday, and seem to like it where I put them. The aloes need to dry out, as they've gotten pale due to the last couple days of rain. The yellow rosebush is starting to bloom again. I have my first cucumber, as of a few days ago, and the garlic has done something interesting. I dug it up because I thought it was dying, and each of the cloves had become a bit of rotting nutrients for a tiny, globular new garlic bulb, so now I have six of them.

Last night, at the grocery store, a tiny Indian/Bangladeshi woman was delighted by my ego_likeness tank top, pointing out that the script above the bands' name was from her home or familiar to her in some way.

Today has been waking up to thunderstorms and a marathon of my personal guilty TV pleasure, NCIS. It's got really great character interaction and an utterly adorable and brilliant Goth chick, what more could I want?

Needless to say, I haven't been on the computer to read anyone's stuff yet between turning off the thing due to the former and getting sucked into the latter. And I'm not likely to until I get something done today. I set some episodes of crack to record for motivation. :D

Before I do, a pimping: primaldog makes really neat totem-animal type things out of bones and feathers and beads. If I hadn't been almost too broke to buy food lately, I'd be all over the psychopomp sculptures.

And...wow. My head feels weird. As of a minute ago. I think the air pressure's changing again.

Pho is indeed specifically beef stock.

Fish stock recipes to mess with. And Chicken stock, either of which can likely be used in the former recipe, but then it's not actually called Pho. I dunno what it would be called.

Google Maps Street-view. Useful research and drawing-outside-scenery practice tool, or dangerously fascinating timesink?

The last two hours that disappeared without me noticing argue for the latter. O_o;

This factory, though? (PDF WARNING) Awesome ref. It's got ALL KINDS of structure variation.

This intersection in Philly on Google Maps, when viewed from the street, shows a street you can't go down with that. It's got an underpass, beneath train tracks.

I remember passing it often when taking the non-I95 way into town, and wondering exactly what the hell was down that road. Why it was always empty, why no one ever went down it, and why there were always abandoned cars on it. I never got a chance to explore there, because I never had my own transportation. I want to now, even more. Because if you follow it back on the overhead view it goes to a complex of what looks like abandoned houses and other neat things.

There's a 'road' here simply labelled 'PC'. And here are a bunch of 'streets' that are apparently on bare fields. I lived up there for twenty-six years, and didn't know that there was a 91st Street.

And....NOW there's apparently Arkham Horror, now that I've given up on it. :P

I think I woke up too early today, for no good reason, and now half of me wants a nap and half doesn't want to work but knows it should. I think the weather is to blame, too. It's been grey most of the day, and raining on and off. I swear to fuck I heard all of the plants around sighing and going 'Hells yes!' when it started pouring for ten whole minutes, earlier.

Trying not to get angry about and argue with people whose apparent opinions differ from my own to begin with, about things I actually feel the need to argue about. I know it never gets anyone anywhere except angry at one another, and neither side, in things like this, will ever be likely to convince the other of their viewpoint.

Plus, the idea of having to argue over it seems to want to give me panic attacks, complete with shaking, and that pit-of-the-stomach thing and forgetting to breathe.

Huh...More and more things seem to want to do that to me. Tight crowds, possible arguments or even the hint of disagreeing with someone, confrontation, speaking to strangers...I might be neglecting something emotionally that I should really be paying attention to, here.

This helps:

raoin's birthday was good. I'm slightly hungover, but only slightly. I'm learning that weak, sugarless green tea, especially jasmine, seems to taste better (i.e. has less bad aftertaste) to my hungover self, and is therefore less likely to contribute to any ill stomach feelings. So I've got some cold steeping in the fridge while I type this.

There were good conversations had, a bit of item purification done in the name of testing the backyard brick oven for wolven's birthday ritual plans, and tons of tasty things.

I just found one of my new potted plants, the rose cutting, pulled out and dug through, deep enough to displace and remove some of the rocks I put in the bottom (of a sizable pot) to facilitate drainage. I'm more confused than anything, because nothing else was touched in that area. Not the beer-bottled sweet potato slips (how to deal with those for when I feel up to it) or the precariously temp-potted aloes, or the grapefruit, or any of the other small seedlings that are still working their way out. Nothing else was even slightly disturbed. I put it back in along with as much of the soil as I could get off the pavement, and watered it. I hope I don't have to start security-belling my plants or something.

The aloes will get permanent pots once they grow better root systems. According to cailement, I have males and females, and can expect babies.

I am relaxing today. For fuck's sake.

I'm so close to done with this comic that I think it's making my brain itch. I spent close to twelve hours on it yesterday, and have one more page to flat colour before I start the shading and pretty-making. Going to do so today, before people start showing up for raoin's birthday.

I'm looking for one of these. If anyone has one, though I doubt it, I will trade stuff or artwork for it. I had one a while back, and it was the best damned pocketknife I've ever owned. It turned out to be my brother's, one he lost in the house before moving to Jersey, and he threw a fit until my mom made me give it back to him.

Dreams; something about losing the people I was with in a supermarket, and finding a gift for someone I knew in a cemetery, recognising the person it was for by the nature of the gift. And another section where I was trying to call 911 for wolven's grandmom or great aunt or someone, as she appeared to have a heart attack, but the dispatcher kept not paying attention or not hearing me, or being bored and hanging up. We were all in a big yellow Victorian/Tudor kind of house, the kind you only see up North.

Dreams...something about visiting a friend of my father's, finding a peacock skin propped up and curing outside, and stealing two silver feathers from it, each as long as my thumb. A conversation with beard about me borrowing his no-longer-needed stuff from the Arabic class he withdrew from, and finding a bikini to use that was covered in Arabic writing, pink on black.

After yesterday's hijacking of my brain, I need to get actual mundane work done, today. Comic pages and hametsunosaturn's commission.

...to let me get some damned work done. Seriously.



I started piecing this together in my head, before I sat down to work on comic pages, as something to convince myself to finish quicker. Painter crashed. I start it up again, and it threatens to crash twice during the second go, but the way Painter behaves allows me to stop it, save it as a different filetype as it has issues with .jpgs sometimes, and continue. I manage to finish the base colour for page 17, before it tries one more time. I think 'Fine! Whatever. let's do this.'

Seven hours, a half a gallon of water and one sweltering studio later...The scan sucks, comparatively, but it always does. I'm very happy with it, but still. RUDE.

Work needs to get done today, as I didn't finish as much as I'd have liked yesterday. Though I did get down all the notes I had wanted to for reworking that old story-world, as well as had a chance to go over some other notes I'd taken recently (last couple months) and forgotten about.

Gardening will happen, too, later. After some work. My only non-necessity purchase (not food or soap) yesterday was a large bag of garden soil so that I could go ahead and pot the grapefruit and the now-rooted rose. The Home Despot wanted entirely too much for potted daylilies, almost fifteen bucks for a pot, for something I could likely find growing wild, pull and transplant with great success. Granted, they had the beautiful wine-coloured ones I wanted, but still. And they had no bulbs that I could find, anymore, so it looks like if I'm going to make this happen, I'm going to have to go scavenge the wildflowers up and down the railroad tracks in Oakhurst or something.

Depending on how much of the soil I use, I might try yet again for the trumpet vine. Keeping it potted and trimmed will keep it from engulfing things and taking over the garden.

I feel less and less, the more I think about it instead of simply reading societal expectations into it, like I have to reconcile all these things I do. I don't have to be or do any one thing. I can garden and still love computers. I can enjoy cooking and not turn my magical practice into 'kitchen witch' if I don't want to. I can do the chaote thing and not have to play the hardass crazy person. I can study science and not give up myth.

There is no mutual exclusivity in the things you do in life, the things you love, unless you put it there. Or allow others to, which is pretty much the same. Taking out baggage and cleaning house, indeed.

Still waking up. Not in a place to want to do work yet, though I've got reworkings of old stories on the brain. Something that, back in my high school-to-college transition, was a shabbily reworked self-insertion of FF7 and some anime, with some Shadowrun Future and Neuromancer thrown in, but if I do it right, rework the structure, it could be so much more than that. And if I do it visually...

I need to get the written note on that down quickly, and then get to colouring comic pages. Maybe I'll just write it down while I'm working out. I can transfer to the computer later.

More and more, I find myself wanting to revisit the parts of the past that I liked, things I think I may have dropped and abandoned prematurely in my want to get away from other things. I'm still not very confident about my computer skills, more so since I feel they've been mostly on hold for years, but it's something I should catch up with. I'd really like to get my paws on something I can put Ubuntu Linux on, like an EEEPC, and start learning that again.

Non sequitur verdict: coconut milk mixes well with chocolate syrup, but coconut cream mixed in makes the texture something I cannot deal with. So, next trip to Buford Highway will likely get me a can of the plain coconut milk so I can try it alone.

Frequency Allocation Chart. (PDF)
Homebrew laptop stuff.

By blix-it on DevArt, this made me giggle, thinking of it in relation to the thing I've been doing, as apparently this poor fuck of a djinn lives in a toilet.

From a purely technique standpoint, I love the expressiveness of the whole thing; the faces, gestures, the dog.

And completely unrelated, from an Ad Noiseam post, DO WANT: Navicon Torture Tech-The Gospels of the Gash; apparently his/their final release as that project.

It's gorgeous outside. Not Spring-gorgeous, but a good, not-too-hot, not-humid summer day, one with strong breezes that make me expect to smell the ocean, even this far inland, and what greygirlbeast refers to as a 'carnivorous blue sky'. I've begun to understand what she means, and that doesn't make me want to hide, but rather to stare into it until the blue peels back to show me, completely.

I wouldn't last long in hers or Lovecraft's worlds.

I want to go swimming, very badly. I want the pool I used to work at, in the fifteen minutes or so before opening, when it was just me and a lifeguard or two in that whole huge thing, and the remnant of morning chill and the fact that there had not yet been sweaty people in it all day making it more refreshing.

Dreams, what little I remember of them, were oddly dichotomous. Parts were completely mundane; packing boxes, cleaning, moving? Parts were the black-sand desert, again. I wish I could remember more when I end up there, though thinking about it now, working on my third cup of coffee, it fits together. Baggage being taken out. I can get behind that.

It's getting about time to dye my hair again, but we'll see where it all stands after I get my bills paid and some damned food. And I've got the I-want-more-tattoos urge again, showing up like it tends to when I'm too broke to do anything about it.

...And there's that train of thought ended. I refuse to let that spoil my mood. I'm going to finish base-colouring page fifteen, and then I'm going to work on my own stuff, today, with whatever that happens to mean.

So I actually got a good bit done yesterday without really realizing it, between bouts of 'Godsdamnit I'm Bored!'.

I sent off my sketches for the Semaphore Annual cover, emailed a list of print- and items-on-demand manufacturers (Cafepress and the like) to wolven's mom, received a new commission from hametsunosaturn and contacted Ixaxaar about contributing art to the next Clavicula Nox chapbook, Lilith. I may try to pull something out of my ass in writing for that as well, since their tentative publication date isn't for months.

As much as I've been depressed about what work has been yielding me, or not, I also feel like I'm getting closer to that place where one good push will put enough momentum into this thing to where I won't have to put so much energy into merely staying afloat. It's just down to finding the time for that push.

I now have a few emails I need to send off before I go work out and get dressed. Or, well, at least one. Allergies are for shit today.... :/

Oh, right. I saw this while looking up some of Phil Hine's essays the other day, and it still boggles me: Why are his older. books. going for such ridiculous prices?? And I'm not even talking about individuals that might be selling them on speculation prices. Those are reasonable everywhere else I looked, in comparison to the list price given by Amazon. Did all of the other copies self-destruct? Should I be storing mine in a fireproof box just in case it, too is of the self-destructing edition?

The peppers are still midget sized. The cucumber plant is staging a hostile takeover, but will likely be fine once i can wrap some part of it around the fence. The tomatoes are doing well, about a foot-and-a-half high.

The ants seem to have moved on from my sunflower, though it might be because there is little left of it's leaves. Most of them look like fine lacework. The stem is still strong, though, so it might come back from this.

Today's victory is that the rose cutting has rooted, finally. I'm going to keep the jar over it for another week/until I can get soil to pot it alongside the grapefruit and magnolia, as I may have damaged some of the roots finding this out. I wasn't really expecting anything, given the last several attempts. Or should I keep it on there until there are new leaves? Have to look that up again...

Two of the pots I need for these things are full of small white stones, the kind people use for decorative gardening, that I've dug out of the beds I'm using. I might give them to someone if I can't find a place that they don't look like crap here. Once I can dig up the trees Numbnuts wants gone, I might try selling them on Craigslist before giving them away, as trees seem to be relatively expensive at Lowe's and Home Despot.

I don't remember much of my dreams, some small thing about moving into a house with a similar layout to this one, only most of it was windows, like a greenhouse. Feeling pretty good about this, about what I could grow, and the workspace it gave me to do so, until I thought about winter and heating it.

A pretty okay workday. Finished the base-colouring of most of the next two the next two and a half (as of one am) pages of the comic, as I've decided that the base-colouring needs to be done and over with because it is the most tedious and time-consuming part of it, and if I just power through this it'll all be done that much more quickly.

Also have sketches to scan and send off for the Semaphore cover. Which I keep mistyping as 'Semaphone' for some reason.

I've mailed off the next (last?) version of the essay as well, so we'll see how this goes.

I really, Really want either the hard-chocolate-coated kind of doughnuts, or pumpkin pie. There is neither in the house. *sadface* I'm also pondering a Jack-and-Dr. Pepper, which I shouldn't have.

Another reason to add to the list of why I want my own place; so I can experiment with spraypaint on large surfaces bought from Home Despot, without worrying that I'm going to fuck up the garage or driveway.

Took the picture down because I was disappointed that it was 'shooped. I should've known, as the middle finger (and now I need to listen to old Marilyn Manson...) is a peculiarly American gesture, but it was late, I was tired, and really only still tooling around the Internet at that point because I was waiting to use the occupied bathroom.

I should stop browsing EBay for random shiny things like sharp objects and yoga pants and bellydance shinies and pretty stones like silver obsidian and art supplies...Ok, maybe the art supplies are excusable, but I should still get the hell off here very soon and go get dressed. Last minute essay changes and...really, I hadn't planned my day beyond that. (Plans for the Semaphore cover. THAT was it.)

Time for one more cup of coffee, to check Google Shopping for the refillable Multiliners and then, it begins. (Ooh! I'm glad I didn't buy one, though I'd still like to give them a shot; they're apparently only refillable with cartridges, whereas I've found a couple others that are not, as well as a way to refill my Microns by popping the end off.)

Stolen from wolven and ego_likeness:

List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- list the first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes. Don't take too long to think about it. I have kept a few in the transfer from wolven, but this is in no particular order. No notes, but ask me things if you want.

1) House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
2) The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Michael Swanwick
3) American Gods, Neil Gaiman
4) Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O'Dell
5) Many Waters, Madeleine L'Engle
6) Cabal, Clive Barker
7) Insomnia, Stephen King
8) Neuromancer, William Gibson
9) I-O, Simon Logan
10) Threshold, Caitlin R. Kiernan
11) The Talisman, Stephen King and Peter Straub. (Thank you, ayrkain. Lazyweb was being lazy.)
12) Scott Westerfeld's 'Uglies' trilogy.
13) Primavera, Francesca Lia Block
14) The Books of Magic, Neil Gaiman
15) The Invisibles, Grant Morrison.

This took longer than it said to because the computer froze, so have an extra one:

16) The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene.

Back to work.