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. :)

A whole month.

And then some, since I've updated. Sorry about that, I told you from the begining I was no good at this blogging stuff. And things have just been crazy busy.

So lets see what's been going on... posts to follow. :)

Inchworms... the return?

Could it be the inchworms have returned... in moth form?

This fellow was found hanging out all day on the hallway wall. He was all alone though, perhaps he was the only one that didn't self distruct.

Panda Updates

So holy cow, there's a lot of stuff going on in the world of pandas. And I've missed a lot of news updates. Let's see...

Bai Yun's 4th Cub Arrived

That's right Friday August 3rd Bai Yun gave birth to her fourth panda cub at San Diego Zoo. As of right now they're still not sure if the cub is a girl or a boy. Washington Post Article Here


In related San Diego panda news, Mei Sheng, is celebrating his 4th birthday today, and his little sister Su Lin celebrated her 2nd birthday on August 2nd! Their both Bai Yun's previous cubs.



Panda Poo Souvenirs

It's no joke, China's trying to come up with ways to cut costs and such when caring for pandas, and it turns out their poo can be recycled and made into paper and other materials which are being sold as souvenirs. Full Article Here

Now, I can back this up too. A while back we'd heard something about this and I went looking to see if any thing was available on ebay as a joke. Well we didn't find anything. But then... there we were at the San Diego Zoo... and holy cow... panda poo notebooks.

Panda Attack!

Yeah they're cute, they look cuddly, and overall they are a mild mannered species, but that doesn't change the fact that they are wild animals. A zoo keeper in China was tore up when a panda grabbed his arm which was sticking through the wire cage. The keeper required 100 stitches after the attack. Full article here.

A couple things to note, this young panda was already in a state of distress when the attack happened, he had, within the week, just moved to that location, hadn't been eating since he'd gotten there, and was not accustomed to the zoo keeper that was attacked.

Male panda gives birth to twins!

Poor Jinzhu. Mistaken at birth in 1996 as a male panda, this girl was sent off to Japan in 2000 to mate with another female panda there. After Jinzhu showed absolutely no interest in mating with the other female there, they went in to do artificial insemination and discovered.... Jinzhu was not a male panda either....

At which point specialists believed she was either hermaphroditic or just had under developed sexual organs. It wasn't until 2005, when she was 9 years old that they discovered in an examination that her ovaries were simply in the wrong place. After a two hour operation, and then another two years later, she proudly gave birth to twin girls just two weeks ago.

Poor girl.

And lastly...

Send Chuang Chuang home?

This story bothers me a little bit, and I feel so sorry for Chuang Chuang. The Thai have been trying so hard to get their pair of pandas to successfully mate and produce a cub. I think they've gone a bit to far here and there.

Chuang Chuang has made the news several times in the past on the issue of mating. First they believed he was too heavy to mate, making him lazy and that he would crush his partner. So they put him on a diet, and the whole world heard about it. Then they even staged a panda marriage ceremony.... for real...

And then again they tested out the "panda porn" theory on him, forcing him to watch videos of pandas mating, hoping he would learn a few things, or simply just "get in the mood".

All these attempts failed, and I mean, come on, pandas are known for not being great at mating. So they went with artificial insemination. Which I might add, is widely used at most zoos to help with panda breeding, so in no way should it be a slight to Chuang Chuang.

Apparently the pregnancy has ended as a pseudo pregnancy. So still they will have no baby panda this year. but now talks are going on to discuss whether or not they put Chuang Chuang on another diet, or give up on him completely and send him back to China and basically trade him in for a better model.

Poor Chuang Chuang, hasn't this panda been through enough? I mean, you can't seriously blame a pseudo pregnancy on him as well. For those who don't know, pseudo pregnancies are EXTREMELY common. Two out of the three expected panda births in the US this year ended in pseudos as well.

Come on... give the guy a break. Plus... isn't he married now... are you going to stage a divorce as well?

Full article here.