More Sad Things

Speaking of things that are sad: my landscape is changing in the most awful ways. All my life, I've lived in the middle of the woods and loved it (despite it sometimes being a little creepy). Now my creep neighbor has decided to build a second driveway so that he can drive right up to his sketchy little barn (where he lives. never trust a man who lives in a barn, raises no animals, and grows no crops) without having to drive over the vast, empty field he normally just drives right over judging by the tire tracks. The tire tracks which are now painfully visible, because he's decided that paving over part of his vast, empty field, in which he has never grown a damn thing, would just be too easy, cheap, and quick, and that instead he must cut down trees. Dozens upon dozens of trees. It's tree genocide over there. Senseless tree butchery. And now there's no barrier between our properties. We used to have a protective veil of beautiful trees. Now he has a straight line of sight right into our windows. It's truly creepy. And infuriating. And stupid.

I don't hate many people. But I truly, truly hate this man. Not just for this, but this really tipped the scales.

Engraving Art 2

You remember that rant I had a while back on how hard it is to find Engraving Art scratchboard in anything but rainbow and coloured foil and pre-printed designs and useless (for me) things like that? Well I was searching for it again after disappointing experiments with other brands... and my rant came up in my google search. On the first page. Towards the bottom, but still. That's how hard it is to get a hold of this stuff. You get the official website (with no pictures, so it's hard to know what you're buying, and I'm dubious because white "foil" doesn't sound like what I use), a handful of British websites, and my blog.

Sad.

Illustration Friday - Entangled

Been a while since I've had time to draw anything. It shows, unfortunately. Work is eating my life. I think that shows, too.

Good News!

Three months ago, my girlfriend had an incident at work. She was performing a "finger stick" on a recent mother and the mechanism malfunctioned, causing the strange woman's blood to splatter on my girlfriend's face. Yesterday morning, my girlfriend got over the big three-month hurdle and passed her blood test with flying colours.

Congratulations, baby!

Illustration Friday - Pattern

I haven't really felt much up to doing the art thing lately, between the car accident and the new job that gives me such little time and has me clicking a mouse seven hours a day... My hands have been hurting and I've just been too tired and dissatisfied with my ideas. But I did happen to check out illustration friday (illustrationfriday.com) this week, and the word of the week was "pattern," which instantly made me think of this drawing I made a ways back. Although I guess most of my drawings I've done for Illustration Friday involve patterns, this drawing is specifically *about* patterns. It's based off a picture I took of one of my old roommates with a classmate's painting.

At any rate... it's a way to feel productive without having to actually draw anything new.

Engraving Art

Some years ago, I bought a bunch of plain scratchboard from Michaels. Just a blank black coating over a white surface. Same kind of stuff they gave us in art class in junior high. You'd think it would kind of be a standard thing that they'd keep in stock through the years... But no! For some odd reason, over the past few years this stuff has become next to impossible to obtain! Michaels now stocks nothing but pre-printed drawings over black coating over coloured foils or rainbow surfaces. And every art store I go to either doesn't carry scratchboard or else they only carry scratchbord (scratchboard's incredibly expensive cousin, which is a black coating over an actual board you could club someone over the head with). So it's either namby-pamby arts'n'crafts (with the emphasis on crafts) fare which is utterly useless for my purposes, or it's hardcore artist grade I can't afford and would be half-scared to use for fear of fucking it up. After months of searching I found what I thought I was looking for on the Dick Blick website, but what they sent me was thirty sheets of crap. Shiny, oddly textured black surface that flakes more than it scrapes, almost like a thin shell of nail polish, over white paper that just kind of peels at the first touch of the knife and gets all grubby from the black flakes.

I've since figured out the brand name of the decent-enough-for-my-needs board I used to use (Engraving Art). So now I'm trying to hunt it down online, so that at least I'll know what I'm ordering is useable. After far more searching than should be necessary for such a ridiculously basic art supply, I've located it. For roughly twice what I paid for the useless crap from Dick Blick. But I guess it's worth it if it actually lets me do what I need to do. I just resent that such a basic thing has become such a rare commodity. Seriously. It's infinitely easier to find glow-in-the-dark scratchboard than it is to find plain ole black'n'white.

I guess the point of this is... don't buy anything online if you haven't already tested the quality in person.

And buy a ton of black and white scratchboard from Engraving Art before it goes COMPLETELY extinct.

It's been a big week for me, in good ways and in bad ways. I started my first "real job" on Monday, got my passport...

...and totaled my car this morning.

I've never done more than graze the occasional curb while parking before, so it was especially shocking. Not that I imagine it's ever NOT shocking to make a left turn and suddenly find your car being slammed right at forty-five mph. I still haven't figured out exactly what happened, if I thought he was stopped or going slow enough to give me time to make the turn, or if he was running a light or trying to beat a yellow or WHAT; I have no idea whose fault it was, but right now the insurance thing is for "no fault" so I'm guessing we both fucked up. I can't really imagine myself making a left turn onto a busy road if traffic was moving in both directions, which is why I wonder about him going through a light, but I couldn't really say for sure... I was very tired and stressed out (and furious at my GPS for fucking me up; if it had just said "take the next left" when it was supposed to and not "prepare to turn left in 100 yards" or whatever it did say, I wouldn't have changed lanes and missed my turn, and I wouldn't have had to turn around and pull back onto the road, and I wouldn't have been running late and anxious...), and it's entirely possible I "looked without seeing". I have no idea what happened; it was all so sudden and out of the blue.

In a weird way the scariest thing at first was not being able to find my glasses. They and my hat got knocked clear off me, probably by the air bag (suddenly finding that smoking up my car with that dentist-drilling-around-in-your-head kind of smell was a jolt too), but my gum was miraculously still in my mouth and not lodged in my throat. All I could think at first when bystanders were trying to get me out of the car was "Oh god I can't find my glasses"; all anybody could find for the first five, ten minutes were sunglasses, neither of which were my prescription ones, so not only did I total my car but I couldn't see what was going on.

Now that I have my glasses and am safely out of the hospital (mostly scrapes and bruises, no breaks or gashes, which was kind of surprising given the amount of glass I was picking out of my clothes at the hospital) what freaks me out the most is that my girlfriend hasn't been told. At the scene I only had time to call my mom and the friend who got me the job so she could tell them why I wasn't coming in today. Then at the hospital my parents persuaded me that it would be better to wait for Amanda to get here, since she's coming up tonight anyway, before telling her so that she doesn't drive worried and get herself into a crash too. Which makes sense, but I still feel awful not telling her right away. It's interesting how much things have changed since we've been dating... normally when something seriously bad happens I think "I want my mommy!". Today, even when I had my mom there holding my hand all I could think was "I want my baby!" Even if she'd been able to leave work straight away, I would have been discharged by the time she would be able to get up here, but still... I wanted her there. Now I think about how in four hours or so she's going to come up my drive and see my car's not there and she'll have no warning... but at least she won't be worrying about it during her drive, and I guess that's the important thing. But I still feel awful not calling her immediately, because I know she'd want to know.

Cars are frightening beasts. I've always felt that way. I always will. But all things considered, this could have been worse. I'm home. Bruised, scraped, aching, stiff, and abruptly car-less (which will make getting to and from my already overwhelming new job interesting), but home and relatively unharmed as far as these things go. I never managed to get a good look at the other guy, but as far as I could tell he was in roughly the same shape I was, so I'm hoping he too is safe and sound at home.