Auction take two

I'm getting more excited for this auction thing. Apparently my painting will be on display for a week in some glass house. By far the fanciest digs any of my paintings have ever been in (I tend to treat them more like dirty socks that haven't quite made it to the hamper.)

I'm just a touch sad I can't actually be there to see the thing in action (I assume of course all the Regretsy objects will at some point come to life and do a reinterpretation of Swan Lake).

However, to sweeten the deal and because I love any excuse to play with photoshop I made a Certificate of Authenticity to go with this one of a kind, never gonna find another painting.

Along with the painting and a free pendant the winning bid will also get this puppy:

I'm not crazy, but I play one on TV!

For the politically minded

Generally I keep all those controversial topics to a lull around here unless something really gets in my craw but this "bumper sticker" I created was just too much of a fun pun to not share with all.

Long Live Futurama!

aaaand Sold!

April 6th is coming (as it is wont to do what with time being linear and all) and if any of you are big fans of the site of whimsicle then you know the book is coming out.

The book that I sent my little wedding dress attire pictures off to in the hopes of being included, signed most of my life away and haven't heard anything about since late January.

I've stayed silent on the topic since the first post because there was always a chance that during the editing processes my entry would get chopped out and left on the cutting room floor.

And if there's one thing I don't want to do it's to get my hopes up. I tend to operate at a below hope level so when something great does happen it's really super tear your hair out with excitement great and when something I was expecting doesn't fall through I mostly shrug it off and go back to knitting dryer lint.

Yet, it's still a little under two weeks so why am I mentioning this all now instead of waiting and just showing off say a picture of it in the book or instead quietly pretending I've never painted anything and am moving to the desert to catalog scorpions?

Yesterday Regretsy put a call out for pieces to be donated to a book signing auction for Housing Works Bookstore Cafe which helps the homeless with HIV/AIDS.

I've had the painting I made specifically for the book kicking around since mid January doing nothing more than being a lovely malt shop for dust bunnies. So, I e-mailed the Regretsy Luminary offering it up and right away got a response which judging by all the exclamation points at the time she must have been hooked to an IV of espresso and jogging away from a unglued grizzly bear.

Or she really likes my goofy art. But I'm sticking with the grizzly bear, coffee drip theory myself.

Anyway all this means that my little painting (and I'm going to toss in some other goodies because we'll I'm a sucker like that and maybe I can push the final bid over $0.25 somehow) is heading off to New York for its first big auction.

You too could own a piece of Regretsy history, assuming you live in New York anyway.

Now back to pretending I didn't actually make the cut and practicing my surprised face. "Wow! This is such a shock!" No too cliched. "Give me all your money and no one gets hurt!" Way off there. "I'd like to thank the academy." This is gonna take some time.

Presumptuous Precepts

It is human nature to go through life with certain expectations: something you throw up had better come down unless a giant bird is involved, dishes should be clean when they come out of the dishwasher or Sears is getting a call. Science is 99% seeing if you can get something to do that weird thing again under the same circumstances (the other 1% is "What the hell is that thing?!" Followed by magical protein/dna/chemical never being seen by anyone else ever again).

If you were to receive a box of chocolate you'd be pretty miffed if you pulled off the cover and found instead of sticky sweets a bag full of smoked haddock (unless you're running a Haddock smuggling ring in which case, knock it off! Norwegians need their lutefisk!).

And if we were to travel this world bright eyed like a newborn lamb always wondering what wonder nature was about to bestow upon us having nothing to draw upon we'd make it about three steps into the crosswalk before getting mowed down by a semi.

Yet expectations can hold one back, ruin what would have been an otherwise pleasant experience all because the dancing bear didn't come over to your table and try to tango with you (you people have weird presumptions about the Kennedy Center.)

My husband can get a bad case of the assumptions about a place, thing or food (animal, vegetable and mineral he always reserves judgment for though) but what can drive me mad is that 9 times out of 10 he doesn't realize he's had them til I find out his brain has declared a new restaurant dead to him because it failed to restock the napkins in the overhand manner.

So I am forced to dig out of him exactly why he reacts with vitriol every time we, say, drive past Cane's Chicken when all I remember was a fairly good experience albeit a bit pricey.

After hours of my asking "Why'd you hate it? Why'd you hate it? Why'd you hate it? Why'd you hate it" I finally get my answer. Thus is written another of my husbands tenets of life.

Low upon all you chicken places who dare to create a bready covering for your fowl for you shall be forsaken. Thus spake the husband.

But because chicken not being crispy really doesn't put butts in pews here's another of my recent discoveries. While he and I both agree that the Prequels are really only good for making sand jokes, certain Original Trilogies are dead to him because of the fact that Vader can use telekinesis (yet mutants doing it, perfectly normal. Yeah I don't get it either) and for one big omission:

 This is such a grave injustice that Lucas had better not go out in any lightning storms.

Do any of you or your various significant others have any of your own strange creeds that if broken you shall never visit upon it again? Do you tend to keep these to yourself or do you share them freely?

There is; however, one tablet I think we can all agree upon.

Happy Saint Patricks Day!

I've got the corned beef simmering in the crock pot, reminded my husband to dig out his one green olive shirt and painted my fingernails with the brightest green shade I could find.

BRING IT ON SAINT "SNAKE MAN" PATRICK!

But some of you out there don't mark this day down on their calendar and plan their lives around it accordingly. So I scoured the internet looking for some awesome green pictures. And if you forgot to put on a bit of green just print one of these suckers off and tape them to your back.

For the Foodie:

For the Chicagoan

For the gamer

For the singing frog fan

For the car nut

For the water fan (who is not from a city big into dying things)

And one last one for everyone else who just likes looking at pretty pictures with green in them

Happy St. Patricks everyone! You all come back now, ya hear!

Wanted

Rotten Momatoes

Morning dearies.

Rotten Momatoe here to give you the lowdown on all the latest scrapings Hollywood is trying to ram down our throats (do I really have to say that? It's just so violent? All right then). Because who can give you a better opinion of a movie than dear old Mom? Sure I may not always remember what kind of people the kid sees, who Keyser Soze is supposed to be, or even stayed awake for most of the movie but you'd better listen to me or else!

Now stand up straight, stop fiddling and read ahead.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief- I kept waiting for the scar headed kid to show up but I think the producers forgot to include him. Otherwise it was really weird.

Cop Out - Didn't this take place in an office building at Christmas? Where were all the decorations? No ones going to remember your Christmas Movie if you don't have any decorations.

Avatar - Lots of people put on big blue masks and pranced around in the jungle. They're going to catch their death if they keep that up. Did no one think of all the mud they'd track into their spaceship?

Valentine's Day- I expected there to be more skeletons.

Alice in Wonderland - It was really weird. What was a pirate doing in Neverland? If they were going to do that they should have brought in Captain Hook and the crocodile as a subplot. It was nice to see someone who suffers from gigantism of the forehead in a role, you don't get that often.

Finally to round out this list and because the studio says I have to talk about it.

Transformers - People were throwing each other and turning into things. It was really weird.

And that's my reviews of this weeks movies. I give them all three and a half arm chairs which is what I passed out into about 20 minutes in.

Come back next week for even more Rotten Momatoes and for gods sake when are you going to give me some grandchildren?

(Author's Note - some of these reviews are actual and come from my mother, she has shall we say interesting tastes in anything she deems not weird.)

In the mood -- NOT

I've been waxing and waning about painting as often as the Moons on Jupiter (it's a joke see cause Jupiter has so many moons and I'm always waffling between loving and hating it. Okay so it wasn't that good of a joke, look I'm sorry I told it. Shesh. Let's just move on.)

One second I'll get these wild ideas involving space goblins and then the next I just don't want to go to all the bother to clear off my workspace (it's become one giant mess with all the soap stuff and apparently any other craft related object in this house must be stored there now), organize my brushes and find a cup of water.

So it falls by the wayside. I've also felt like I've been running out of ideas, this cold drab world of nothing that's been winter has zapped all my creativity out through my eyeballs and used it to freeze parts of Wisconsin (that's how winter works you know, it's actually all stolen creativity. Things like a looming Smurfs Movie are why it's been the coldest winter in years, thanks Hollywood.)

But I have cranked out a recent pendant, my first in weeks I think, I wanted to share.

It's based on Celtic Mythology around a triple goddess who would take the form of crows and survey a battlefield looking for souls much like the Valkyries.

This is my Morrigan. I wanted to make the background slightly unsettling so I used a combo of staining the wood and then covering it lightly in alternating shades of paint. While you can't tell in the picture it gives it a curious depth like there's more on the horizon from the birds.

And that's pretty much it. I have a background begging for something, another idea for trees and a whole bunch of nothing.

Maybe the swirls and whorls from the puppy's muddy paws as she runs through the house will inspire me more than the whiteout ever has.

Team Rogue all the way

Warning - extremely nerdy thing ahead. So nerdy in fact I actually got my own rating from the IWVO!

So if you're not into the RPG scene you may want to turn back now. Maybe get a nice drink from the bar, steal a few of those cheese wedges on sticks and have a nice walk in the warm spring air. I'll call you in when we start talking about puppies or failed recipes.

Over the weekend my husband and I got into one of our usual debates where he expressed his love of acting the part of the human meat shield that takes blow after blow and stands there grinning moronically before smashing everything in his path.

While I much prefer the part of the sneaky bastard, throwing poisons, stunning anyone in my way and sniping whenever I get the chance. (Which reminds me of an entertaining story that concerns Oblivion. I was so big into sneaking and sniping with the bow and arrow there were times I'd have to ask my husband at the end of a big dark cave if I was supposed to kill the person or talk to them. There were a few times an ally wound up with an arrow in their arm and I pleaded ignorance).

This idea percolated with help from Twitter and soon I took to pixel and photoshop to create my own graphics to represent just how much I enjoyed being the sneak compared to the ox.

But you can't have a Ying Team Rogue without its Yang Team Warrior, so the next morning I once again put my watery eyes to computer screen and created one for my husband's favorite form of game play.

But this is really a triumvirate, a love triangle as it were.

So for those of you that are bigger into the chance to throw fireballs or turn your enemies into crates may I give you Team Mage:

Now we're getting the explicit nerd portion of our blog. Because not only did I create these bad boys, I loved them so much I decided to put them on shirts and get one for my hubby and I.

 

  

  

Neither of us are Team Mage but I did for a second think it'd be hilarious if I got a shirt for Es, but it'd wind up chewed into tiny bits.

I've used the hell out of my Cafe Press store, though most of the orders have been to me, myself and moi. Yay for creatively displaying my own personal nerdiness.

And that is what horribly nerdy thing I did over the weekend. How about the rest of you that made it through all those pictures and have a vague idea of what Team Rogue/Warrior/Mage refers to. Did you contribute to the worlds nerdiness in anyway over the weekend?

Teenagers *sigh*

From the day we brought our little 10 pound bundle of puppy energy home I've been dreading the day Esme's hormones would kick in and I'd suddenly have a moody "I don't have to listen to you" teenager on my hand.

I've watched it happen at least three times before with my parents dogs. They're cute adorable 4 month olds who listen to just about every command you give them, love their owners and would never think of doing anything naughty.

Then the 6 month mark rolls around or so and suddenly they're ignoring your commands (and simple ones they knew at the age of 10 weeks like sit), sassing back when they don't want to do something like go outside, or joining a rebel biker group and getting tattoos of wolves as they spike their hair.

We've hit teenage overload. She's testing her boundaries big time, refusing to go out to her pen when before we hadn't had a problem since she first was introduced to it. And no is not a word that exists in her vocab anymore.

So it only seems fair that we get to embarrass the hell out of her every chance we can (I'm beginning to understand why parents like to pull out the baby book in front of your friends, payback).

Here is Esmeralda sporting the latest in doggie wear, a lovely set of pink leg warmers formed from the tentacles of her toy octopus she massacred:

They bothered her for a bit as she tried to figure out how to get them off:

But she quickly accepted her fate mostly because ball was involved. BALL! BALL! BALL!

I'd like to think this humbled her a bit, but I'm sure she'll be back to her slamming doors and screaming she's moving out when she turns one in no time.

Teenagers *sigh*

Why's there a racoon in my living room?

It's been one of those crazy whirlwind weekends where you have no idea where your pants are, there's melted cheddar cheese in the chandelier and for some reason a raccoon has taken residence inside your entertainment center.

Most would attribute that to a wild college weekend only all this carnage isn't due to 20 year olds strung out on grain alcohol and Big macs. We were visited by a 5 year and 9 month old from Friday night til Monday afternoon. Throw in Essie who was on par with the 5 year olds energy and need to knock over everything in her path and every other word this weekend was either "No!" "SIT!" or "FORTHELOVEOFGODJUSTSTOP!"

I've rented a spray washer to take care of most of the mess, but on top of all that I've got a lovely cold starting at the back of my throat.

When will I post next, I have no idea. But certainly not until I can come up with a plan for the crocodile jammed in our toilet.

In the mean time enjoy this hilarious video. Long Live Deadpool:

Now where did I put that flamethrower?