Arms up or arms down?

For life's roller coaster.

Its been a decent week. As for the goals, I haven't exercised every day but I did make it to the gym three times this week, which is great because I've been a huge slacker and haven't gone in a couple months. Getting in the grove again. It felt good.

Been trying to be strict with myself on the food I'm eating, and I think I did mostly good.

As for creative projects, I finished another digital painting earlier in the week. This one is of the calico twins taking a nap. I don't like it as much as the LK portrait from last week but its all practice anyway.

The anime goal: Finishing up Mushishi tonight. Actually finished yesterday but I dozed off during the last ep so need to re-watch it. But, watched about 12 eps this week. Anime goal, check. It's a great series too. Gotta figure out what to watch next. Read a few volumes of manga this week as well. Genshiken, which is fantastic geek related stuff. Highly recommended.

My laptops not working at the moment so that may slow the anime down a bit. And make me mad.

The abandoned mama cat, which my neighbors dumped on me was spayed earlier in the week, so the threat of more neighborhood kittens is a thing of the past. When I got home from the store today she was outside being super friendly and rolled over to show me her stitches. I got scared because she appears to have ripped them open a bit. She's now bandaged up in my bathroom again, waiting to go back to see the vet on Monday. Five days too early for stitches to come out.

Weekly blog, check.

~ja ne

Goals.

In an effort to get things done, here is my current list of life betterment and short term goals. They're in no particular order.

The first list are time related, I'd like to complete these by the end of the year.

• Finish the current chapter of my comic.
• Get the first chapter of Panda Panda ready to be published.
• Lose 20 pounds via diet and exercise.
• Manage to save $1500, which is a lot for me. :)

The rest are ongoing, things I'd like to make a habit of until it's a given.

• Complete one creative project a week.
• Try one new recipe every week.
• Watch at least 5 episode of anime per week.
• Complete one hour of exercise a day. Either by going to the gym or playing WiiFit.
• Blog at least once a week.

I'll let you know how it goes. Feel free to kick me in the pants when I start to slack off.

~ja ne

Well look at that.

It's been almost a year since I updated here. Time sure does fly, or something. I will spare you the year in review. Rather than focusing on the past, lets just start fresh. And let's try the keep-it-simple-stupid approach as well.

There's a new block to the right above the Links. It's basically a mini blog. Twitter lets me "tweet" little updates on the fly from anywhere using my phone. You can also subscribe to my tweets through Twitter.com if you like and it'll even send my updates to your phone... and hell it can even be used to chat, if so inclined. It's neat, so check it out if you want.

~ja ne

Halloween fun!

So here it is, it's me in a panda costume! Look out. And there with me is Joe all dressed up as Mario. Sadly neither Joe or I won the contest at work, but no worries, the day itself was a ton of fun.

I'm also proud to say that my mouse cookies were a big hit. I realized after unveiling them that I never even tested them to see if they tasted good, but everyone said they loved them and I got lots of compliments on how cool looking they were.

If you'd like to see more pics of me and my co-workers all dressed up you can check them out here. The first place winner of the contest was one of our reporters, Gary, who dressed up as a red hatter, which was pretty funny. Gabe and Karen also won trophies for their costumes, which was awesome. Gabe came as the mayor and Karen was a letter from Wheel of Fortune!

Mice Cookies!

Tomorrow is Halloween and we're celebrating at work with a costume contest and a big lunch! It's super exciting since we've not really done anything like this before and I'm excited to be dressing up as a..... you guessed it... a panda.... tune in tomorrow or the next day, and maybe... just maybe, I'll post pics of some Halloween costumes!

But anyway, I just got done making some silly cookies for the party...

.... yes they're mice!!! But they're cookies..... but they're mice....

Okay, I'm out for now, I've got to put some finishing touches on my costume. :)

Portfolio is live.

So I kinda did this on the sly about two months ago, but it's finally complete, my portfolio is now online. You may or may not have noticed the link to the right. If you haven't, well, here's the link again. :)

What will you find there? Basically it's a collection of stuff I've done over the last few years. It's in no way everything I've done, cause that would be ridiculous, but there is a fair example of what I do or am capable of doing.

For the record, the last three years I've worked as an ad designer at a newspaper, so the majority of what's up there is examples of ad design. I'm more pleased with the collection of Special Section covers and some of the other random artwork stuff I've tried to do over the years.

There's also a copy of my resume up there and links to here and off to my webcomic, Panda panda!

Enjoy. :)

Work

Okay here comes one of the promised updates.... sorry I wrote so much!

The year is winding down, which means work is picking up.

I live in an area of Florida which is heavily populated by snowbirds in the winter, and during the summer months some businesses in the area can seriously just grind to a halt.

What is a snowbird you ask?

For those of you lucky enough to not even know what a snowbird is I'll explain. A snowbird is a person whom migrates with the weather, much like birds who go north for the summer, and south for the winter, following the ideal weather. Most snowbirds tend to be elderly.

So these elderly folk live up north usually from April or May until October or November, when they literally flock back to Florida and stay through out the winter. This is not usually a gradual migration, you can pretty much tell the exact moment when they've all returned because the entire IQ of the driving population drops by about 100 points. Traffic becomes slow, and dangerous. And I could go on to many of the other side effects of snowbird season, but well... we don't have all day.

My friend Gabe did a great editorial cartoon for our paper which sums up the snowbird a bit. And yes we had angry snowbirds calling in to complain about the cartoon, because complaining is one of their many hobbies, along with bingo.

What does this have to do with my work? Well this town caters to these people, and they bring in a lot of business, so businesses like to advertise more, which means, since I work at a newspaper, as a graphic designer for advertising, we suddenly get flooded with more ads.

Throw in the holidays, and all the extra holiday sections our paper produces, and that ups the ad count even more.

And as an added bonus, this time of the year seems to be the best time for us to lose employees for one reason or another... so once again this year we are severely understaffed. So in order to get all the ads done, which absolutely has to be done since ads = income for a newspaper, the staff that is around ends up shouldering overtime. A LOT of overtime.

Last year around November, pretty much our entire staff worked 30 days straight with no time off, usually 12-16 hour days, not bothering to take any breaks during the day. It nearly killed us all! :P

Starting the middle of September, we've started to get into this overtime cycle. Most of us have already started giving up days off, and even then we've begun the process of skipping lunch breaks and tacking extra hours onto our day.

So this is one reason I've been too pre-occupied to update here. :)