Ramblings of the Reymonkey

More weird people-faced deer!
( huge image of adorableness )

In other news, I did terrible things to my pinky finger today, on the fridge door. This is only one in a long history of mildly embarrassing and bizarrely obtained injuries. I carry and frequently use a pocket knife. I play with swords, for freak's sake, and I've injured myself on some kind of blade, in the history of my life that I can recall, twice. On the other hand, I've embedded the splinter of doom into my hand from a varnished banister railing, given myself bleeding gashes on the edges of counter and table tops, and once I even gave myself a nasty cut on corrugated cardboard. It's the non-sharp objects I've gotta look out for.
I opened the fridge, and a box of leftover fried chicken started to slide out, so I lunged to catch it. I rolled a critical failure, and jammed my pinky finger on the inside of the door somehow, badly enough that I made a sound Bridgie said counts as a scream. I never scream! My voice doesn't even go that high. I felt pretty stupid, except then my finger started immediately swelling. A package of frozen vegetables later, it's only slightly swollen, doesn't hurt much unless I bump it, and it moves okay which I assume means nothing's broken. I dunno.
Stupid fridge.

I keep meaning to play the refrigerator-shaped god of guilt from the Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul in DM, I even have icons ready. Maybe this is some kind of cosmic impetus.

It's like I have to beat somebody up to get a shot at the keyboard lately, I swear. I am so far out of the loop RP-wise...
Aaanyways, working on drawings, but not stuff I want to show off right now, because it's prelim proposal work for a possible graphics job. Not a long term gig, but something that would get my art a little exposure and give me something nice to put in the portfolio and on the resume. We'll see how that goes. I have to put in a bid and I'm always inclined to way undercharge.
Which I'm sure somehow hooks up with my weekend/Monday adventure in which my bank account was overdrawn. Because of the fee the bank extracts for my having an account. Yergh. They've also raised the overdraft fee more than I thought they had.

In the good stuff field, though! We went to Shenandoah last Friday, very spur of the moment trip. It was just a day trip but we saw lots of deer, twin fawns, a raccoon (I can't believe I took photos of that. They used to come up on the porch and stand a foot away from you in B'ham, begging for food.), and most spectacularly a bear cub. It was while we were driving, and I did get out to take a photo over the roof of the car, because I'm not a dumbass. But there were other people behind us who were dumbasses and wanted to go closer, and then the park rangers came around and blared sirens at all of us. Whee. Oh well. I still need to dl the photos.

In the hysterically weird stuff, last night I was about to go to bed, Shad was wrapping up on the computer, there were strange rattling noises in the AC unit, and the next thing we knew there was a bat crawling across the kitchen floor. Grabbing of cats and frantic searching for a box ensued.

Rey: Runs upstairs with cat and shoves it in bedroom Stay there!
Bridgie: Mmmmgh?
Rey: There's a bat! In the kitchen!
Bridgie: Okay. Nods contentedly

I just love adding these little surreal moments when she's not awake, but this is the same girl who wakes me up in he middle of the night to tell me there are birds on her neck or a hanger floating over the bed.
Anyways, bat was captured pretty easily, and released outside, although there was a moment I had the edge of the box on its wing which I feel pretty bad for. It made some funky noises about that, but it was in the livingroom by then and I think the carpet cushioned things so it didn't really get hurt. It flew away, outside, after sitting on the sidewalk a minute going 'ohshitwhatwasthat???'

Kitchenbat. LOL. I feel like I should draw a bat anthro thingy in homage.

So I meant to update earlier in the week, like Tuesday morning, but it kind of didn't happen. Anyways! A new art: Dirk Gently meets The Shadow. He is later found unconscious in an alley, and on waking, plaintively groans "He could have just asked me to be quiet..."
This was just a silly little thing I did in between stuff, and the coloring is kind of crappy, but it was an experiment. Need to work on the painting of Maggie now. I really hate having so many drawings started but not finished. For some reason that bothers me in a way all the ones I haven't started at all don't.

Yesterday was the first day of a two-week catsitting job, which is cool because it's paid, and the kitties are nice. The WTF part was going out to my car to go there and finding somebody threw a bowlful of... ramen? on my windshield. With a few little chunks of potatoes. And maybe some scrambled egg. I got a pretty good look because it was damn hard to clean off, especially since my car has never had windshield wiper fluid in the time I've owned it because the resevoir for it is cracked. Yurgh. But the gas station had a window cleaning thingie that did a better job of it, and I'm over it, so now it's just a 'WTF?' moment. When we got to the house with the cats, there was someone else there cleaning (We'd been forewarned about that), and she was nice and cheerful and told us we should expect surprises. Expect a surprise every day! It sounded like something my mother would say. I almost told her I'd got mine in the form of noodles on my car, but I didn't want to sound grouchy.

Also! A plug! In case nobody reads Shad's LJ I will stand and wave my arms and point out that he's just gotten webpage set up! And I'm totally not plugging it just because I helped him beat the tables into behaving. He's got some good writing up there. I think we should all poke him until he puts the NaNovel up too.

Off to drink lots of coffee and make myself get down to watercolor pencils again...

Hey! Hey hey everybody! Monster Day! This is awesome! I don't draw monsters enough.
Edit: Monster day is not today, if you follow the link, but it is the 16th! That gives you time to get your monster on.

Also edit: 60 degrees this afternoon and snow tonight. W. T. F. Don't give me none of that 'Richmond weather' crap, the sky gods are fucking with our miiiiiiinds!!!

Is it silly that I'm slightly jealous there's an MP3 Player shuffle meme going around, and mine is noe pretty much worthless? I think I forgot to mention that on here. ( annoyed ramble )

Anyways, jobhunting and art commissions today. I called in Friday night and didn't have to do anything, but I get to call in on Jury duty again tonight and every weeknight for the next two weeks, so that's a little stressy. On the one hand I hope someone wants to interview me for a job, on the other hand I don't dare schedule an interview because what if I have to go in that day? I won't know until the night before.

Wacky funtimes, because it's needed.
cheezdanish made a post of this and I'm sharing the luff, because. Hitler on the Universal City Studios park.

This is effing awesome, for anyone who didn't catch it on WTF Nature. You should totally listen to these, but be warned some of them are NSFW. Hilarious anyway. I especially love Val, which sounds like a children's storybook. Follow the link for explanation and a neat cover by Edward Gorey.
We haven't listened to all of them yet but what we did hear left us dying of laughter in some cases, others just made us go wow.

I think that's it for now. Working on commissions but one's not quite finished and another is done but it was a birthday surprise and I don't want to post it until at least tomorrow because of that.

ETA: For all who didn't hear it, I got the answer back and I do get unemployment. Not knowing quite how you messed up doesn't count as misconduct. ;)

One of the nice parts of summer is the fresh food available, and we’re especially enjoying this since the Farmer’s Market opened right near our place. We’ve been getting good stuff like cherries and peapods and goat cheese and this weekend some really excellent tea (The lady at the stand tried to give us a little lesson on brewing tea properly and I just laughed and said we had a British friend).
Squeakers has also been enjoying the bounty of summer food, in the form of two bats in the past week alone, and a mole cricket whose legs and head I found on the floor by the TV. Last night I thought to take a short walk at dusk, and although Squeaks had only been out for ten or fifteen minutes I plucked her off the porch and put her back in so she wouldn’t follow me across the street. I didn’t realize until after I put her in that what she had been purring about was a little bat, not even dead yet, face up on the ground. I’m guessing she knocked it out of the air, because I’ve had eyewitnesses, including my parents, tell me she does that with birds. We watched the poor thing gasping for air, nudged it to one side with a leaf, and left it for a short walk. My hope was it was just stunned, and would recover if we left it alone. By the time we got back rigor mortis was setting in and I had to go put it in the trash can. Five minutes later she begged to be let out again, and when she begs to be let out we’re pretty sure the neighbors can all hear it.
She’s up to date on all her shots, she’s almost impossible to keep indoors, and by and large I don’t really mind her hunting, but geez. She doesn’t bring me stuff much anymore, probably because I have this tendency to put it in the trash can, for fear bits of it will be puked up indoors. Wouldn’t be the first time for that, either.

I’m stalled on the digital painting. I think I just took too damn long on it, so I hit a point where all I see is things wrong with it. He got too muscular, and I feel like I’ve lost the fluidity and motion of the pose. Here’s an IP, genuine artistic criticism welcomed, really.
( cut for image )
Ignore the blotches of color beside him though, because those are just for sampling shadow colors, and his antlers obviously need work. It’s the figure itself I’m really having issues with.

Sooo finished inking the Magneto pic. It's pretty depressing, actually, but I guess that's what I was going for. If you're not familiar with the X-Men and Magneto, it probably doesn't make as much sense.
Note to self: Never, ever, ever do inking with a brush again. It took three days. The effects are interesting, although if I really wanted to do it right I would have made copies and inked the whole picture twice, because it was a very trial and error thing. I don't have that kind of patience, and this version is good enough. I like it because it doesn't look like my usual stuff at all, I was very much trying to copy the style of the comics I remember back when I was very into X-Men. Early nineties I guess. From what I've seen, the Marvel comics have a more heavily anime influenced look to them now, which is fine and all but this was to indulge nostalgia.
Cut for us poor pitiful dial-uppers.
( Magneto Memories )

I'm trying to finish up coloring the Mad Hatter pic, and I'll be computer coloring the Magneto one. It's already struck me that finishing a picture of the Mad Hatter having tea with time in pastel colors and Magneto remembering the concentration camps at the same time says something very weird about me. I'm not sure what, but it's damn weird.
In other news, I'm looking over those character meme drawing things that drift around on DA. I could use a break.

WTF of the day: Today in the mail we recieved a membership renewal for the gardens, which is a waste of paper as it is since we already renewed. Along with the envelope and form and all, there's a little green piece of paper to tell you about their dedication to saving trees and how you can help them save paper by renewing online because they are all about saving trees!

They sent us five duplicate copies of this piece of paper in the one envelope.

Because they really wanted us to know how big they are on saving paper.

Happy Birthday reyverie! Patricia...whatever. ;) I'm still struggling to get a really good picture of Dr. Dillamond.

Your random links for the day involve, irrationally, a chupacabra, and an article about the state of Texas being taken over by spiders.

Okay, what I really came online for this morning was to put the next fanart piece up. I give you the long-procrastinated Owen Burnett picture. I haven't done much digital coloring for a while, so I'm happy with how it turned out. After that talk of drooling on the keyboard last night, I got insomnia, so the background was colored at odd hours of the morning. It's finished, anyways.

WTF: There are radio commercials to tell you how you're obligated to buy your kid a new cell phone because it's the start of the new school year. Call me a cynic, but A)Aren't those not allowed at school? And B)Wouldn't it be a little smarter to save that money to help them maybe go to college?

After most of the week ferrying the cats back and forth and generally having our schedules disrupted, the window people still haven't touched our building. They approached it one day, but as soon as they did it started raining, and they left and never came back that day, even though the rain was for an hour or less in the morning. Since then they've been working on a building we thought they'd finished a week or more ago. We're starting to wonder if maybe they did a shoddy job and it leaked and they've been repairing it since. Not confidence inspiring. It was an ugly week in other respects too, with a severe random allergy attack, and Bridgie had an awful time at work. We'll see what next week brings.

Since I've been too lazy to put up a picture of the quilt I made for the contest, here's a link to the blog post my boss made. Mine's the bug one with the black border, seventh one down, but it does say my name on it.

WTF of the something: Last night we went to the store on the late side, about an hour before close I guess. We were trying to pick up some food for the weekend and Bridgie picked up this prepackaged just-put-it-in-the-microwave type pasta like they make in the deli. As soon as she picked it up this woman tidying up the fridge-thing Took it out of her hand and said she couldn't buy it, because it was being put on thrift tomorrow. She'd have to come back tomorrow morning if she wanted it.
The mind, it boggles.