Talk About Tuesday

 

In Which I Am Le Tired

Yesterday was Quite A Day, let me tell you. It started normally enough - took a shower, drank some coffee, chatted with my guy, and started to get ready to finish the shrug I was working on...

And my mother told me to get ready for an adventure with the cat!

I'm always down for a kitty trip, so I threw on some Tromping Around Clothes (I'd changed back into pajamas after my shower, not anticipating the surprise adventure), and came down to find a paper bag on the counter.

The plan was thus:

• Grab the cat and the paper bag, get in the car.
• Head to the Wal-Mart for some forgotten bread and a box of tissues
• Head to the next town over to drop off some Vicks, cold medicine, and tissues for my guy, who has a chest cold (Feel Better, Love!)
• Find a beach that was open and not too crowded.

Now you may be thinking that's a lot of car time for a cat. Would she be okay? Especially with a trip to Wal-Mart?

Sure, she was fine. Annoyed at being stuck in her carrier while I tried to find the tissues (I was lied to by an endcap and looked in the wrong aisle for like 5 minutes before I could find them), but fine.

The first beach we tried was Birch Point State Park, but apparently the state decided that, despite our Septembers being anywhere from 55-75℉/12,8-23,9℃, and Mainers swimming in the ocean up until about January, the beach had to be closed. What a pain.

Well, we weren't going to let a little State Park Closure prevent our girl from having her first ever beach adventure, so we headed over to another beach - Crescent Beach. Poor Evie the Cat was chirping crankily from her carrier and reaching out with her cute little paws by now, so we made our way down and parked. By the time we got her out on her leash (which she was very curious and very nervous about), I realized we'd made a fatal error that my fellow Mainers will probably tease me for.

We forgot to check the tides.

We arrived just as the tide was at its highest, just starting to ebb.

On a beach where the beach head is 100% loose stones.

Yeah, there was no sand for her to walk on for the first half of our visit.

She enjoyed sniffing the dried seaweed and climbing the rocks (which, yeah, was against the rules, but she's a cat, so she can't read signs), and we figured that would be it.

And then another family pulled up and came hiking across the stones.

If you've never met my cat, you need to know this about her:

Evie LOVES people. She is obsessed. She desperately loves new people and wants to hang out with everyone on Earth.

So of course, she immediately had to go visit these people, dragging my mother and I with her. Thankfully the family thought our 3-Braincell Tabby was the bees' knees, and they put up with her crawling under their feet and begging for snacks (they had a banana). Eventually, the water receded enough for us to put her down on wet sand and...

She hated it.

So, Evie did not enjoy her beach trip as much as we'd hoped lol.

And she was also so squirmy and exploratory that it was very hard to take pictures between trying to dislodge her from crevices where she got herself stuck. I did manage two pictures, though!

Here's Evie sitting on a rock, about to go wrap her leash around a rugosa rose bush.
She's just noticed the family and wants to go say hi!

Here Evie has failed to retrieve banana from the other family
And has grumpily decided she'll go climb more rocks in protest.
Also seaweed smells fun to her I guess lol

After that, we scooped her up and took her home, where she sulked outside with my mom. I ran upstairs and worked on yesterday's blog.

I do have to admit, though...

It was incredibly hard, being surrounded by all those delightfully smooth beach rocks in so many interesting colors and shapes and knowing I couldn't keep any of them. It's illegal to take the beach rocks, and at Crescent Beach, they're absolutely necessary for preventing erosion, so it's just bad all around to take beach rocks from there. If I'd gone wading and grabbed one from the water, I'd have been pretty ok with it, but I wasn't going to get in the surf while the tide was receding as fast as it was (we went from no sand to 5 feet of sand in 10 minutes, it seemed).

So that was my adventure this week!

The rest of the week's plans are thus:

• If you want to send me a coffee donation through that light green button, you can leave a message telling me what theme I'm drawing from this week! Those themes are:
• Animal
• Vegetable
• Mineral
• Geometric
  
• Location
• Dedbert
• Word
• Art Blog on Thursday
• I forgot to post the tea last week so maybe I'll do it this weekend? We'll see
• More crochet for Monday!
• Blather next Tuesday!

I hope my feline misadventures have brought a smile to your face today!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which I Am Bad At Making Decisions

Every week, I ask my boyfriend what I should draw/paint next. I give him a choice of 5 categories:

• Animal
• Vegetable
• Mineral
• Geometry/Shapes
• Place

And every week I make my art based off of the choice he makes.

This is because, when left to my own devices, I'm very bad at making choices that make sense.

If I were to pick my own subject matter, I'd change my mind six times and make a random set of blobs. Or I would overextend myself on one single project and then bungle it by saving it in the wrong format...

But this way, I know by, say, Tuesday, that I should sketch up an animal. I don't go beyond the five categories because I also have issues with authority and would just do something different in order to be difficult.

Heck, I'm drinking a can of Coke right now and it's almost 10pm because I guess I didn't really want to sleep tonight? Foolish.

This past week, I made a crack about June Bugs being God's Perfect Idiots. It should be noted that I'm only referring to the large black "Brown June Bug" we have in Maine when I talk about these insects. I cannot verify the intelligence (or lack thereof) of Green June Bugs or Striped June Bugs, since I haven't ever been brained by one while walking at night.

Brown June Bugs, being a North American scarab, are big and hard-shelled and lumbering. They are also phenomenally stupid by human standards. These ponderous little critters will slap into your windows at full speed, which is understandable since most wildlife doesn't perceive glass.

But I will never get over watching them brain themselves on giant freaking trees that have been right there the insects' entire lives. They just buzz at full speed sometimes until they're stopped by a hard surface, and then they'll lay at the base of whatever they hit (or get tangled in it with their bristly legs), stunned, for a few long minutes before struggling on their backs. If they're lucky, they'll get enough momentum or buzz their wings enough and flip back onto their feet, but... they're pretty dumb, so that's not always the case.

I once watched a June Bug flail on its back for 40 minutes while I lugged lawn furniture around. Once I got a break, I helped the poor guy get onto its feet... only to watch it stun itself on the door again and drop back onto the welcome mat. Seriously, bro?

And as a broad, clumsy creature that can barely see and runs into things all the time and sometimes has trouble getting back to my feet, I can somewhat relate.

So here's to America's scarab, God's Perfect Moron, the June Bug.

"Phyllophaga spp." pencil on watercolor paper; 2022

If you want to print that line drawing out or trace it, please feel free to use it to practice coloring, painting, whatever you like (though if you repost it anywhere, please, please remember to credit me!).

And now the colored version:

"God's Perfect Idiot"; watercolor on paper; 2022

I hope today's silly blog made you smile, and if you have any other Stupid Animals you'd like to see me paint, feel free to tell me! Or heck, even shoot me a coffee over on Ko-Fi and you, too, may choose what I draw!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Talk About Tuesday

 

Yep. Still Tired lol.

Great news! I'm sleeping more than 2 hours a night again!

Bad news is, though, that even a full 8 hours a night isn't recharging me yet.

I'll be working on rectifying that by moving more tomorrow, since I think part of my tiredness is because I keep forgetting to exercise enough. I took a short walk yesterday (the uphill-both-ways one I do every week), but I couldn't go out much today because not only was it chilly, it's been raining off and on since the afternoon. Right now it's pouring and the wind is roaring.

My eyes constantly feel gritty, right now, which is a pain, but I've been through this before. I go through the eye-grime every time I start recovering from an insomniac bout. Best things for it are water, sleep, and face-washing. I'll be getting the first and last as soon as I post this blog, but the middle one will come when it comes, and no amount of relaxation techniques and soothing jazz will change that. It'll probably hit me around 2AM. That seems to be the magic hour for sleep lol.

I still haven't grabbed my red crochet thread, so I won't be able to finish the Secret Project for a while yet, but we'll get there.

I have ideas for Thursday - I might try to do more work on that silly Happiny idea from last week, or I might try to draw something else. Maybe a dinosaur. I have been thinking a lot about raptors this week lol.

Mostly I just keep getting distracted. I'm distracted a lot lately, mostly because I'm having SpeedyBrain, which is hard when I also have MolassesBrain at the same time. My thoughts are very very fast, but it's like having an auctioneer in my head. The thinky thinky goes fast, but the understandy goes very very slow. I'm fairly sure that's just because of the overabundance of coffee, so I'll try to have less caffeine tomorrow - easy since I plan to be using the treadmill and coffee + treadmill = disaster, so there will be less bean juice tomorrow than today lol.

Then again, I'm seeing that it'll be pretty nice out tomorrow. Still windy (the real feel will be about 10℉ lower than the ambient temperature), but sunny (in the afternoon). If I'm very sneaky I might be able to get all the way down to Main Street without too much trouble from the neighborhood dogs, and if it really is all that nice (I'm seeing temps of about 53℉/11,7℃!) I might find a spot downtown to sit in the sun with a sketchbook and a thermos of lemon tea.

We'll see how motivated I feel around noon.

Let's see, what else should I talk about...

• I saw a bald eagle on Sunday! It wheeled around the intersection I cross on my way downtown to the local bookstores and vanished behind some houses and trees. Very cool.
• My next door neighbors have somehow ended up with a rooster, which is fine - it's not a very loud boi. It was just driving me nuts trying to figure out where the rooster noises were actually coming from.
• The deer have been emptying my mom's bird feeders into their cute lil faces on a nightly basis and my mom is getting ready to sic the cat on them.
• The cat got a new heavy ceramic planter which my mother planted with cat grass. The cat thanked her by trying to dig in the damp soil, then smugly trotted away to use the freshly-cleaned litterbox, only to bound upstairs with inquiring noises as soon as my mother tried to replace the literally soiled table cloth with a new one. The cat then proceeded to sit in the very center of the table and refuse to move, which ended with my mother just draping the tablecloth over the cat, who happily sat there in her tablecloth tent for a good 10 minutes. During the smug tablecloth adventure, I punctured a piece of plastic wrap a bunch of times and covered the cat's ungrown grass with it, using some toothpicks to hold the plastic off of the dirt.
• My dad finally beat a hard level in Beat Saber. He's getting good at the base game, apparently, and he plays it before dinner.
• I tried faroh risotto tonight and it was very nice. 10/10 do recommend.

I think that about covers my news this week, guys. I'll do my best to post a drawing on Thursday!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Talk About Tuesday

 

In Which I've Been Awake Too Long

I'm not a daytime person, really. I've always skewed towards the nocturnal end of things and it's only gotten worse as I've aged, so waking up at 8AM today was... embarrassingly difficult. Part of that was how deliciously warm my thick, fluffy red blanket is, to be fair. It was 39℉ (3.9℃) when I got up, and I dressed for the weather in my thick black jeans and thickest sweatshirt. I chugged a quick cup of my morning mocha (or "gruel" as my boyfriend nicknamed it) and my mom and I headed out to do our civic duty.

Voting day is a shockingly easy affair where I live. If you haven't registered to vote yet (you only have to do it once after you're 18 - just re-register every time you move), you can bring a bill and your driver's license or state ID (they're only about five bucks and ship to you fast) and they'll sign you up right at the polls. If you have already registered, like my mother and I have, you just get into your line and wait your turn. Our wait was about five minutes, so that was pretty great. I'd have to say the only drawbacks are that the polling place is A) not the most accessible (there are stairs, though there are handicap elevators/entrances, the building is from before the ADA, so that doesn't help much...) and B) There's almost no parking. It was designed with a much smaller town in mind, after all!

They had COVID procedures in place - socially distanced lines, masks available at the door, hand sanitizer everywhere, and the poll booths were set up a good 6 feet apart from one another. The ballots were printed at about 14-16 font for the most part, and I could read everything even through my fogged-up glasses! After we filled out our ballots, we dropped them in the appropriate boxes and were immediately mobbed by the usual gaggle of Signature-Seekers. The petitions this year were pretty good, from what I recall - urge the govt to come up with a Universal Healthcare plan, encourage better utility competition with a public option, and an election fairness petition to remove the loophole that allows international and interstate funds to be used in local elections (which is apparently illegal at the national level but you could've fooled me...).

I'll confess I made the grabby-hands motion towards the Universal Healthcare and Public Utility Option petitions. Might have had a savage grin as I signed the one against dark funding as well...

Regardless, that took up maybe 15 minutes total of my morning. Then we went to the laundromat and threw in some huge sleeping bags we can't wash at home. That took about 20 minutes. We took the lumpy old things home to dry on the line. I'm super happy we could do that because Sunday was miserable.

That's right, sadly our Halloween up here was practically a bust. We had torrential rains on Saturday night, and when we woke up on Sunday morning, our basement was flooded. To be fair, pretty much everyone we knew ended up with a flooded basement, but if there's one thing you don't wanna see when you peek down into the cellar, it's a blue bucket bobbing along two inches above the floor.

We got lucky. Other people had a foot of flooding.

Even my poor guy got soggy - there was at least an inch in the basement there, too.

Fortunately, aside from a few grocery items and some already-deceased UPS's in my basement, not a ton was ruined. Some cardboard, some birdseed. Even more fortunately, nothing irreplaceable has been harmed. No one was hurt, the floodwaters have utterly vanished (unless you're walking around my yard in boots, then you'll have the mud around your ankles...) and the coast is once more at peace.

Until next weekend, of course >:( we're getting more rain.

I'm done with rain. I'd rather wake up to 39 inches of snow than three inches of rain (which is what we woke up to on Halloween).

Oh, and just in case you thought Halloween wasn't sad enough with everyone getting flooded? We got exactly one trick-or-treater here. Our next door neighbor.

On the plus side, I have more fun-size M&Ms than I know what to do with. Maybe some fun cookies are in my future...

I have some art commissions to work on, too!

And I've got a few crochet projects!

And my mom's mom wants me to make some doilies!

It looks like I'm going to be super busy with creative stuff, but don't worry, I'm also still writing.

Looks like I'm going to be participating in No-Burnout November (which I'm taking as a dare, it seems...)

Oh, and for lunch today I made some Nongshim K-Army Stew, which is very very spicy and available at Wal-Mart. I threw in a slice of American cheese for fun and it completely dissolved into the unbearably hot, delightfully spicy broth, coating the noodles in cheesy goodness.

Taken Seconds After Adding The Cheese

I think that'll about do it for me for today. My eyes are burning slightly and I've been working on my writing all afternoon, though I'm not convinced much of it's any good. My folks are recovering from colds, I've got hella allergies that might be segueing into the cold they've got, and I just want a nap lol.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Talk About Tuesday 305

In Which There Is Much To Discuss

It's a gray and gloomy day - not at all like the cold-yet-mostly-sunny day I was promised last night. At 33℉ (0.6℃), it's chillier than it has been all week, but I'm okay with that. The cold might clear my fuzzy head. I don't sleep well, this time of year, which locals call "False Spring". It's both too cold to sleep without heavy blankets but too warm to be comfortable in them. My neck sweats while my toes freeze.

Welcome to that sweet New England life so many people dream of. It's mud and ice and sleepless nights listening to coyotes scream at raccoons at the local dump while your neighbor leaves their stupidly bright front light on, casting shadows of the neighbor's aging tree into your room, which is coincidentally exactly where that tree will land if it's not trimmed next year.

New England is, by its very nature, a stressful place.

Where isn't?

Grumpy thoughts aside, I really am looking forward to today. Yesterday, I was treated to some fantastic Thai food (well, I had Korean pork, but the restaurant is a Thai restaurant), watched a completely insane movie that my partner and I were both sure would just be an allegory but instead barreled straight ahead into the madness, and talked about writing at great length. It was just about a perfect day, which bodes well for today, to be honest.

But you're not here to hear about my day, you're here about the week. Please do bear in mind that due to the novel (which is coming along!) I may skip a day here and there to work on writing.

• Tomorrow I'd like to talk some about the crazy cruise ship adventures from AEW
• Thursday I should have some art to show you
• Friday will either be about Highway to Hell or Hereditary or Poltergeist: The Legacy
• Saturday will probably involve a tower defense game, believe it or not
• Sunday will probably involve noodles :P
• Monday will be more progress (I hope!) on the shrug
• Next Tuesday I'll blather more about life, the weather, the blog, and writing

Speaking of writing! I'm not sure how much is going to stick around, but I'm 3k words into Part 2 of my novel, so let's hope I can keep up the pace. Also, let's hope I can really crystallize what I'm doing in this book into a solid idea. I always second-guess myself. I think I'm doing things right, though, so I'll keep going.

How are your guys' 2020 projects going? Are you writing a book or poetry or plays or something? Are you drawing? Making comics? Sewing, knitting, crocheting, crafting? You can do it, whatever it is! And if you make mistakes, you can learn from them, apply that knowledge gained, and improve your work! You guys rock!

Go Enjoy Something

FC