Mirror World Preview

So I finished working on the first page and now am in the throws of inking the second page. I'm taking my computer to work today so we'll see how it goes (gotta love subbing wednesdays)


Mirror World Saga Preview Pg.1 by ~SyntheticPlatypus on deviantART

So here it is! I asked Connie if the preview was okay and she said that it was cool with her...I didn't want to give anything away if she didn't want.That's why there is no text showing. I didn't want to give away the actual story.

Page 2 is done in the same place with the same people. Page 3 takes us into the MirrorWorld and the bad guy's lair. My thumbnail for page 3 has been approved so as soon as I'm done with page 2 page 3 will be on it's way.

Still thinking about the movie thing. I do an "animation" project with my students, I may adapt that into something.

Trying to be active lately as well (can't be a lazy artist and sit on my bum all day) I've been running a lot again lately. Got up to five miles yesterday...I will be running on Thursday with my geek girls too.

oh I'm also going on a girls trip (not of the geek variety) to Disneyland. I've never been so this should be fun. Don't feel too bad about the lack of Disneyland for me...I've been to Disneyworld in Florida too many times!

I'm on my last assignment for my college class for my certification here. Which is good the last day is the 31st. I'm going to work on that during my prep tomorrow and Friday. If I can just get the outline of it finished on paper I can just type it up and submit it when I get home on Sunday...and hopefully run 6 miles that day too.

I'm a busy lady, but I'm feeling better now. So that's good.

Epic Fail

on the art front.

*bashes head against desk*

I have this creative grab bag thing right now and it is PISSING ME OFF. I just can't seem to get it. I finally have another idea which I will be doing this week and hopefully life will be good again.

I did finish the prize pic for Miss Kabukikatze for dA all I need to do is scan and post. Which I did hers by restarting the 90% picture I had finished before.

I also sketched a bunch for the webcomic I'll be working on and bought some new paper things for it. So, as soon as Miss Connie gets back from INDIA(!) I'll be able to start a bit more.

Had an epic garage sale over the weekend. I made posts everywhere and multiple times on craigslist. As the sale was going on I kept rearranging things and pushing everything forward toward the door. I think we sold about 75% of the stuff we had. Sold all the furniture but the bigger metal cabinet, sold one rug out of the two, sold all the electronics I had, and alot of the queen bed linens I put out there. Over half the shoes, a little bit of clothes, and honestly a bunch of misc. I didn't think was going to go.

We had the sale on Friday and Saturday and decided that what we had left was not worth trying to do another day. So I made a big bin of clothing for the geek girl clothing swap, and a giant pile of date and two bins for bookmans and said that whatever they didn't take at bookmans we would add to the donate.

Well, they took a bunch more books at bookmans! I have lots of credit again and am very excited. Carted everything to goodwill and my garage is EMPTY. We just need to organize this alcove we have and it's all good. My brother is very jealous.

I'll post pics from my phone of the garage sale. I have a new app and want to utilize it when I find fun Phoenix Art things. I'll do before and after pics.

I've also been running and I found part of the AZ canal system a mile and a half away, which is super exciting to me. I ran there the other day and Evan met me there (he can barely run) and we ran-walked an additional two together. But I was frustrated...how am I supposed to run with him all these miles I want to do? He's wheezing through one.

So we came up with a solution...he rollerblades. He'll rollerblade next to me on the long distances. Which we did (he can rollerblade forever) and we went and did 6.2 miles....which for those of you who don't know is a 10K.

So, a few (hopeful) goals this week.

1) Post the prize pic
2) finish this creative grab bag finally! (and post it to prove it!)
3) Get the clay stuff at school out and organized along with the powerpoints to go along with them.
4)Run the 6.2 miles Mon, Weds, Fri, and 8 miles on Saturday. (My eventual goal for this is a half marathon, 13.1 miles, which I would like to do twice a month and maybe eventually go for a marathon. But I still thing 26.2 miles is crazy)
5) Join the gym by the house to crosstrain on Tues and Sun.
6) Get most of the schoolwork done during conferences this week!

Goal Setting

So I belong to a group of Geek Girls here in AZ. They are a wonderful bunch of intelligent (and hot!) women who like to get together, have fun, and not bitch and back stab at each other. Which really, has been my whole problem with finding long lasting girlfriends with the exception of a few.

So last night I went to a Goal Setting Meeting about Time Management. This meet-up is run by Shauna who is trying to create a whole program about setting goals and getting people to pay for it. Lucky for me, it's free to the Geek Girls.

So, last month we talked about goal setting and this month it was keeping our goals during such hectic times. Shauna gave us a lot of good ideas on how to stop making excuses and asking why we procrastinate or are so busy.

So, I'm gonna use a few of her ideas and apply them to my "rocks" which was from "7 habits of Highly Effective People" and you have to take the big ricks (the stuff that s uber important to you) and put them in your bucket and then fill in the gravel (the day to day drudgery that fills our lives).

My rocks (in no order in particular):

Sleep
Eat
Evan/Family
Friends
Exercise
Art
Work

So I want to focus on these in my life and tie my goals in with them.

A few things I'm going to read: iwantmorebalance.com and "The 4 Hour Workweek" Also as homework for the group was reading "The Alchemist" which everyone assures me is life changing.

Now my goals for the month!

Finishing 2 art pieces for the month plus an art sketch from life once a week
Socializing with the Geek Girls 5-8 times.
Blogging twice a week!
Weighing four pounds less!
Exercise 3 days of cardio a week and 3 days of weight lifting a week. No time constraints. Plus Wii fit Plus in the mornings.
House stuff: paint our bedroom and office. Evan won't let me clean out the gutters.
Eating habits are being vegetarian every other week.

So here's to the next month!

I can't ride my bike with no handle bars, no handle bars, no handle bars

I really can't.

I have the balance of a...something that has no balance. Really.

I have been struggling finding something to do that is active and fun in the evenings that 1) Does not tear the shit out of my knees like running and 2) does not want to literally kill me like rollerblading. I took a NASTY spill (3 times!) the last time I went rollerblading and I was pretty much done. I now have a nice gross patch of skin on my arm that may never be the same. It's all healed up but still, I would rather not. I also had the biggest bruise on my bum ever and it took two months to go away. I felt dead sexy with those two things, let me assure you.

So, after months of pining for a bike. Make that years (I haven't had a bike since I was 10, my mom didn't want me to ride on our dirt road where I lived in MI and riding back and forth on our driveway had little appeal), I was finally able to get one. A REALLY NICE one.

Thanks to my folks. Oh goodness, thank you to my folks. They came to visit (the leave on Monday, much sadness) and they really outdid themselves with the gift giving. I won't go over exactly what they gave but it did help out immensely and then my om took Evan and I shopping for some more things. Evan got clothes that he DESPERATELY needed. Seriously, the man hasn't gone shopping for at least two years. We got some major good deals at Macy's too. We went yesterday and avoided the Black Friday crowd. According to receipt Evan got 500 bucks of clothing for only $200. These were some nice things too, Calvin Klein and whatnot. One shirt was $55 and it rang up for $8.99 and then my mom had a coupon too! I need clothes but I am working on my body so I opted for asking my mom and dad for a bike.

We had looked online and found a really nice and cheap Schwinn cruiser at Sports Authority so we popped over and they don't carry Schwinns in the store, online special only. Screw them. So there was an actual bike store in the next mall strip so we popped over there and I saw it. This beautiful streamlined, pink and grey, complete with matching basket in the front cruiser. I was in love at first sight. My mom said okay and she bought it for me. I could have cried. So we loaded into Evan's car and drove back to my brother's to drop off my mom so my dad could take her. I made Evan get my bike out so my dad could really see it (so he knew exactly what he bought me). I rode around the block before we put it back in.

Apparently while I was riding with my goofy-ass grin of sheer delight my dad said to Evan that he doesn't know why he buys anyone any gift if they don't love it as much as I love that bike.

So we bid goodbye and many thank you's to my parents and came home. Where Evan strapped on his roller blades, I got my bike, we grabbed the dog and we went to the dog park. It was awesome fantastic fun and I would like to ride my bike everywhere now.

Thanks Mom and Dad.

A Day in the Life

Why is chartreuse not red?

It's a blasted pukey green color and yet the word is so pretty it needs to be red.

Any ways, I've been doing a lot of reading and exercising lately. I've got a few books going on the should help with the teaching woes (woes of which there are many, but I do not feel like bitching about, this blog is not about bitching) and a few about weight loss and dieting.

This weight loss and dieting thing is really interesting to me. I bought one book on raising a child to not have self-image woes. (Not preggers, no worries) but I wanted to see what they said, what I could learn from it, and how to avoid perhaps doing to my future child or children what was done to me. I feel as if I have a better grasp on that. I also bought a book about a diet blogger, Dietgirl, she is a sassy Australian lass who was at one point 350 lbs. The whittled herself down to 175 by the end of the book. The whole thing was all the ups and downs (literally) she had in her battle of the bulge and she won. It took her six years but she really did it.

This speaks to me because I am on that path as well. I was never so big or even classified as obese, but I had been in the overweight category for a bit and was right sick of it. So with Evan supporting me I have kicked a lot of flabbiness to the curb. By no means am I done, but I have tried on all of my clothes again and had to put a bunch of clothes into the too big pile. t was quite ridiculous. I few more pants got freed from the bin (my stash of smaller clothes from yesteryear that I was too ashamed to throw out) and I actually went to Goodwill today and bought a couple pairs of shorts and a new pair of khakis. The khakis I had made me look huge because they were all baggy. From this shopping trip I believe I'm officially down a size, but women's sizes are all messed up and I tried on 5 different things all in the same size and a few were baggy, some were too tight, and others just right. But technically, I'm down two sizes. I never bought anything of the highest size (never wanted to admit it) but I was definitely two sizes bigger.

As happy as I am that I am getting healthy and looking, quite frankly, fantabulous, I have these spurts of awkwardness. I don't know how to look in a lot of these clothes. I feel somewhat uncomfortable in my new skin because I am not used to being healthy and fit. Evan's sister apparently called me tiny over the phone the other day. TINY. Folks, I would have never ever used this word to describe myself. EVER. If I am "tiny" now just think in the next ten more pounds I want to lose, and then the last ten after that? I might be invisible!

Also, never ever get sized at Victoria's Secret. That blood store had me wearing the wrong undergarments for the past few years. I highly suggest Soma as they have the comfiest stuff in the universe.

Evan and I went on a lovely hike on Saturday at the Tonto National Forest and I will hopefully put up just a few of my favorite pictures from that hike. One of them being the one that is currently my new desktop backround on my computer. Yes, I am a nerd. I don't care.

Toodles for now, anyone who is reading!