Circus and prints

I'm getting ready to send pictures in to get proofs made. Resizing is all that's left.

Tonight Husband and I are going to see Cirque du Soleil's Dralion performance at the 1st Bank Center. We saw Kooza a couple years ago. If you ever get a chance to see them, do. They are the best circus performers in the world, after all.


Today I got the Spring Fashion 2012 colors so that I can make more effort to tailor my etsy stuff to the fashion conscious masses. I made a lilac colored pendant before I even knew it was on the list of upcoming colors. Here's a rough picture of it, just post-completion.




Will take better pictures of it when it's completely set so I can list it on etsy. I also need to seriously work on getting my banner and all that professional nonsense done... But it's a hassle and I'm awesome at procrastinating, so it isn't happening.

The mask is also not done. Actually, it wouldn't be one of my projects if something didn't go wrong right in the middle and subsequently derail all motivation. That's where we are now. I need to go get a new base mask and paint two more parts and put it all together, and that's it. But there's that procrastination demon again.

As it goes now, I need to go make dinner and get ready to go.

Benefits

So I got an order off Etsy today. Good pictures apparently really do pay off.

I've decided I'm gonna to try my hand at bath products as a separate side endeavor. I even have people willing to be guinea pigs and who I know will give honest feedback.

Terrible stress headache tonight, so it's going to be a short post. Youngest Daughter is teething and it's making for long, miserable days for everyone. But tomorrow is finally Thursday so it's just her and I.

Here we are at 26 days :)

I'm pondering adding options

I'm thinking about adding fine art prints to my line of stuff at etsy, just because. More options, I suppose. But then that leads to finding a printing company and getting proofs made and messing with the whole thing and that part is very discouraging.

New camera. Retails for $600. I got it for $150. It's amazing, really. I can take photos clear down the street in the dark with NO flash, and they still come out clearly.

I posted new pictures to everything I have listed on Etsy. They show all the flaws, and I don't really like that aspect, but they also show the detail I couldn't catch with my other camera.


I have a strange desire to paint a phoenix. I don't like painting. Or drawing. But the phoenix has become a driving need because no matter how I try, I can never get it right when I sketch it in the steam on my shower door. Maybe if I do one and get it right, I'll get that made into prints also.

***

Kittens are good. Eating about a bottle each per feeding now. They're not at all interested in solid food. They also have insanely sharp claws. I'm not a fan of the claws. They also run really fast now and they're constantly right under my feet, trying to get squashed.

***

I'm going on the record to state that whoever the woman was that I talked to at the Colorado State Patrol this morning... She's a bitch. I called in because a huge box full of metal blew off of a truck and spilled all over I-25 northbound and almost hit a car. So the dispatcher, or whoever she was, gave me all sorts of attitude about the size of the box and how many lanes did it spill over, etc. It covered EVERY lane and the shoulders on both sides! What does she want from me? I'm not getting out to pick it up. I all ready had an infant screaming in the back seat.

So I was glad when my phone disconnected. It was a real mistake, honestly. In fact, my phone decided to randomly shut off and reboot right then. So I suppose they sent someone out to clean it up because when I went by later, the mess was gone. Take THAT, bitchy dispatcher!

Creeper Feature

For those of you who don't know, Husband and I packed up Grandma and the kids in July of 2010 and moved out of Denver. Shortly before moving, we had a yard sale to get rid of some of our junk. The yard sale being a pain in the ass and the obnoxious people who came to it aren't even the point of this post. The point is, a day or so before, I posted an ad on craigslist (yes, craigslist is creepy, but oh well). I had a couple people email me for directions and stuff like that and that was the end of it. Or so I thought.

Last night, I got an email from an address I didn't recognize saying "Hey". Nothing more, nothing less. So I responded, basically asking "Do I know you?". The person asked if I'd posted an ad on craigslist, and I said "Yes, but not in a long time. Which ad are you talking about, exactly?" The next email I got from this weirdo was a picture of a half-naked guy in his bed and the question "Wanna meet up?" Baffled, I said something about not knowing who it was and asking how he got my email and he really said in response "You posted an ad for a yard sale like a year ago".

So okay, one more reason I'm glad we moved out of that house. Seriously? Who keeps an email address about a yard sale for over a year? Why is he emailing me NOW? What a total freak. He hasn't emailed me again, thankfully, as I really don't want to have to involve the police to get the stranger danger to leave me alone.


The moral of this story, kids, is to stay away from weird people on craigslist. Like murderers. Like people who email you a year later and send half-naked pictures of themselves.


However, if you need a quick laugh you might want to stroll on over to the "Missed Connections" section and just read the titles. Really. I saw one yesterday that said "I hit your dog with my car". Because running over my family pet really makes me want to date you. Or if you're worried about someone thinking you're looking for someone else, you can always read some of the stuff on The Best of Craigslist. You'll instantly feel better about your own life.


***

On an art-related note, I made a miniature cupcake base a bit ago. I'm going to put it into some mold making stuff and make more of them, and then make one big cupcake base mold, so that I can make lots of tiny cupcake bases at one time.

Also, I started cleaning my desk and my shelves last night. I need more shelves. Drawers too. Husband found this nifty pattern for a bookshelf shaped like an old-fashioned toe pincher coffin. I'm going to make him make me one with bookshelves and one with drawers.

I regret throwing away the ghetto Lazy Susan (the inventor certainly had a grudge, yeah?) that I had before I moved. It would be brilliant to stick some Crystal Light canisters on there to hold my pens and paintbrushes and all those long skinny things that are constantly strewn all over my desk.

Jack Frost is pounding on the door

Most of you in the US have probably heard about the snowstorm that's hammering Colorado right now. Here's a view of my back deck earlier this morning.




Thankfully, it seems to be letting up a bit.


What do we do when it snows like this? Well, here in my house, we're playing Skylanders and dipping pretzels in chocolate. I'm also brewing some French vanilla coffee for myself, as Husband thinks coffee comes from the Devil's scrotum. School and work were cancelled for Son and Husband, so we're all hanging out in the living room while the children ask repeatedly when it's time for lunch.

I should go take some new pictures of the kittens. They're both too big now for me to feed them holding them in one hand, and we're right at the brink of litter box training and weaning.

Reminisce with me minute, won't you?

Earlier today I was sitting at my art desk, pondering how to correctly make a polymer clay cherry blossom cane, and thinking how nice it was not to listen to fighting kids or wondering what trouble they were causing that it was so quiet. They older two are at school and daycare, and Baby was sleeping. Kittens were sleeping. Shadow Cat was napping downstairs. So rather than be productive, I spaced out. Somehow I ended up thinking about where I was 7 1/2 years ago, right before my whole life made a drastic change to include my oldest child. The memory in question was about dirty potatoes. Settle in, this story is a good one.



***


At the time, I was working about the biggest corporate retailer in America. You know the one; lowest prices, a happy face that wears a "Zorro" mask and slashes prices, they employ more people than anyone else in the country except the military? You know, the one that sounds like "ShmallShmart". Yeah, that store that everyone hates but goes to anyway.

Why I was working there isn't really important, but I can sum it up pretty quickly: I was in a junky little town in Wyoming and that's what there was besides seedy bars, motel service, or a call center. I ended up working at the call center later, but that's for another time.

So anyway. I started out as a cashier at said store, and worked there for a few months. I was good at what I did, averaging a scanning rate of 800 items per hour. Seriously. I was on my way to one of those goofy maroon vests that the uber-cashiers got. But before I got that vest, I got "promoted" to produce associate. Which means I showed up to work at 4:00 in the morning and pulled ten foot high pallets of produce out of the delivery truck. Then I cut and wrapped fruit and helped people figure out how to tell if stuff was ripe.

One day, I didn't have much to do, so I decided I was going to clean the potato racks. I talked to my boss about it and he was completely astounded that anyone would have that idea, so I got the clear impression that it hadn't been done in the entire time the store had been around (about six years, at that time). I loaded all the various kinds of potatoes into shopping carts and placed the prices and descriptions on them so that people could still get their potatoes. I didn't have to do so, because who buys potatoes at 8:00 in the morning anyway, but I did. Along the way, I found some horrific bags of potatoes that had turned to mush in the time they'd been on the racks. I still have a distinct memory of my thumb slipping into a mushy potato as I picked up the bag. *shudder*

Then I went to the produce backroom and got out an ancient-looking ShopVac that I'd never seen in use. I wheeled it out and hunted for an electrical outlet, finding none, then I found an extension cord and plugged it in back in the storeroom and snaked the cord out through the produce doors and over to the potato racks. I plugged it in, and joyfully not being electrocuted, proceeded to vacuum the HECK out of those gross potato racks. They dirt and potato skins and grime was about half an inch thick. About five minutes in, another girl from produce came running over to me yelling "STOP! STOP! IT'S A DISASTER!!!!" and the look on her face was more than enough to get my attention.

I turned off the vacuum and asked her what was wrong. She pointed toward the bakery tables about eight feet away. The ShopVac had been sucking all the potato dirt in and blowing it out the back, all over everything in the bakery! Um... WHY IS THIS SHOPVAC EVEN BACK THERE IF IT DOES THAT?!?!?!

While she went to get the assistant manager of the store, I took the ShopVac back into the back room and dumped what little remained inside into the trash before going back out to help the bakery workers clean off the tables that were covered in dirt. Eventually, the assistant manager and the other produce person came back, looked at the ShopVac, and went to get a new one.

I did the get the potato racks vacuumed, scrubbed and reloaded that day, after about four hours of constant work, and I was delighted with the visible improvement in the area. The bakery threw away everything that was covered in dirt. Then, literally the next week, I discovered the joys of decomposing, leaking tomatoes. But that's a story for another day.