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. :)

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.

Inchworms. The end.

Since Friday night, I've only had one or two inchworms show up in the house. Both those on Friday. Not a single one Saturday or Sunday.

As quickly as they came, they simply disappeared all over again. While scrubbing everything up on Saturday, I did find tons of little inchworm corpses, and I'm feeling a lot better without them coming in, and exploding all over the place.

I assume this means that they've all found a little corner of the world to cocoon themselves up in, and shortly we'll be seeing an increase in the moth population. While enjoying the day in my apartment with the windows shades open to let the sunlight in, I did see quite a few butterflies outside... are moths soon to follow?

Now they're gone though, my attention has been brought back to the original cockroach problem. I dunno if they were just afraid of the inchworms and didn't come out for that entire week or maybe I was just so distracted with exploding inchworms I didn't notice them, but they're back. I really can't stand them, but at least they're not falling on me from the ceiling and leaving goo puddles on the walls and floor.

And on that thought, goodnight, and sweet dreams. :)

Clean house and other stuff.

I've been fairly inactive online and with certain creative outlets the last two days. But for good reason, I've been cleaning house. All day yesterday, top to bottom the house has been cleaned. Now I'm not a neat freak, as my mother will tell you, but there's nothing more motivating and good feeling than a nice clean and organized space to mess up all over again.

After the recent bug invasions I really needed to remove the carcasses, scrub the floors and vacuum and organize some spaces that have gotten out of control. And now things are good.

The only truly frustrating aspect of this weekend is coming to the realization that my iPod has definitely played it's last tune. It started acting up a couple weeks ago, and I kinda just let it sit cause I didn't really want to deal with it. Especially since the recommended option was to reformat it. That's such a pain having to reload 40gb of stuff onto it all over again, making sure files are named correctly and blah blah blah...

So I finally sat down and decided just to go ahead with it. Plugging it in, the computer and iTunes wouldn't even recognize it. After reading up on the support site I figured I'd have to force it into disc mode, which I was able to do after some battling, and the use the restore option. Essentially reformatting.

Well it had an error and as much as I've fought with it over the last two days I'm pretty sure its a hardware issue and the little sucker just needs to be lain to rest for all eternity. The other option is to smash it in a fit of rage but well...

Technology is a wonderful thing. And sadly it's still a pretty expensive thing. And even sadder still, with new technology coming out, and the lifespan of current technology.... you constantly have to replace and upgrade things in order to stay up to date. This iPod cost me $400 about 3 years ago. It's not even a video iPod, it's the old standard two tone display 40gb iPod. And it only lasted just under 3 years. That's around 35 cents a day... I guess that's not bad... but when you've not got a lot of money to begin with....

But now I'm looking at paying around $350 for a new fancy shmancy video iPod. I mean I don't have to... I could go iPod-less and probably be okay.... but technology also makes you dependent on it, and I need my tunes, all of them, available to me, at anytime, with just the touch of a button..... :)

Sunflowers.

A while back I decided I was going to try growing some plants. I've never been very good with plants, but I thought why not. I planted basil, tomatoes, rosemary, and sunflowers.

Now the rosemary never even sprouted. The tomatoes came up real nice, then just... well held at where they still are, no where near growing any tomatoes. The basil kinda did the same thing.

Most of my original sunflower sprouts were eaten by something in the neighborhood. The second sprouting did well enough but most didn't get very big, some fell over and died, but one.... one lonely plant grew up. And it flowered the other day!

Inchworms continued....

They're still coming in, and I swear they're getting bigger. See example on the right.

I'm pretty confident now that they're coming in right through the front door. This weekend's plans include fortifying the weather stripping to hopefully cause a cease in the invasion. I've researched into renters rights in Florida to see if I need to pay for the exterminator or if that's my landlords responsibility. Turns out, since I rent half a duplex and not an actual apartment, the bill is on me.

Considering the extremely low amount of money I have right now, I guess I have to live through it for the time being. It's certainly making for interesting stories though.

Like the other day, when I was sitting at the coffee table working on Panda panda and suddenly I feel something... a little tickle.... going across my lower back....

Yup, it was an inchworm...

And then an hour and a half later.... the same thing happened all over again.

Or my current personal favorite... tonight I was sitting on one couch, and Joe was sitting on the other across the room, when suddenly he freaks out and flicks one off his neck.... and it flies across the room before I even know what's going on and lands right on me. Or should I say it bounces off the side of my face and then lands in my lap. And don't worry, that little worm was just fine.

I on the other hand was less then calm.

Oh the memories. Like cleaning up all the self destructions. See example to the left.

RoboPanda has arrived!!

So holy cow! Gabe text messaged me the other night with a picture he had taken at Walmart of the one, the only, RoboPanda. I couldn't believe it, but after a quick trip to confirm with my own eyes, there he was on the shelf, looking back at me... with those big, cute, glowing blue eyes.

Okay, so the eyes weren't glowing, but man was he awesome. And with an awesome price tag of $150, so for now, I had to leave him behind on the shelf. But I was amazed to see him there since the company website had said they weren't hitting shelves until October.

He's bigger than I had imagined he would be, but seeing him in person confirmed even more how much I really want to bring one home. And hey, feel free to paypal some money to silvrwrdz@aol.com if you want to help him come home that much sooner. ;)

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see my previous blog post about him here.

Inchworms!!

For those of you who read my delightful story earlier about cockroaches, let me inform you that not only do I currently still have the cockroach problem, but now I'm infested with inchworms.

Yes inchworms.

Over the course of the few days or so, I've removed countless inchworms from my ceiling and walls and relocated them back to the yard where they belong. But there seems to be no end to them, and I have never seen anything like this before. My brief research into the inchworm phenomenon tells me that it should be a temporary problem since they'll be shortly cocooning themselves and turning into moths.

At which point I'm sure I'll have a lovely moth problem on my hands.

I'd also like to add that the inchworms seem to have this annoying habit of self destructing. Yes occasionally one will self destruct into a spatter of brown red goo, either on the wall, or floor. I've never seen this happen but I've come across what was left behind a few times, and it's always a pleasure cleaning that up.

Still investigating the cost of an exterminator.
I may go insane before I'm able to get one in here though.

It's the rainy season.

Florida summer has officially been underway, including daily thunderstorms, and sweltering heat. On some days I get into my car, which feels like an oven, and I remember why it is I don't like Florida. Winters are nice, but summer is hell.

Additionally, because of the heat, and excessive rain these last couple weeks the bugs are out in full force. Or should I say they're in. Cause they're all up in my house making my skin crawl. I'm getting so frustrated.

If you're bug squeamish I suggest you skip the rest of this entry.

First Joe and I noticed a cockroach or two, one night. So we nabbed and flushed them. Then there was a couple more... then a few more... then I got angry and got my insect spray out and sprayed all around the doors, windows, and edges of every room. Suddenly it was like an exodus.

In one night we must have flushed or killed 30 of the little bastards. The next morning I woke up to find 10 more corpses. And they've been steadily on the move since then. It's been two weeks and not a day goes by where I don't find at least 10 corpses, have at least one run across my foot, spot the cats trying to torture one to death, or have a couple run across the wall out from behind furniture.

Pest control is coming on Tuesday to give me an estimate on treating the entire house. Back in the day when I moved in, I had asked my landlord, who lives upstairs from me, if he takes care of pest control. His answer to me, was for me to just get a little boric acid and sprinkle it around behind the couches and stuff..... yeah... so I guess that means he's not going to take care of it himself. While the boric acid is a feasible solution, I'd rather not mess around with insecticides I don't understand.

He will however, be getting a bill.

Soooo sleepy.

So tired today. I meant to go to bed early but I got caught up working on getting the site linked properly and the splash page up so it's actually accessible. As usual I got caught up and didn't get to bed until around 2am. Shame on me.

Fun morning.

Today really didn't start out good. I started out for work and thought something was wrong with my car so stopped at the gas station by my house to check the tires. When they seemed fine I got back on the road, but the closer I got to work the worse things got. Eventually I'm at the light right next to the office and just praying that when the turn signal goes green I'll be able to turn into the parking lot and park the car, rather than just giving out in the middle of the street.

As soon as I get out of the car, I can smell tire. The front passenger tire was completely flat. When just moments before it seemed prefectly fine. Long story short, I ended up having to pay $25 for a patch, which is much better than buying a new tire, but still sucks cause money is really tight.

Exciting stuff, I know.

New!

So I'm trying something new. I dunno if this is going to work. I was looking for an easy way to update news and such on my site, and this seemed like a good approach.

I've never successfully tried to blog before, but I figured I'd give it a shot. I imagine this is pretty much going to be a boring run down of my day to day existance, heavily sprinkled with random panda news and other updates on things I think are awesome.

I guess I just wanted an excuse to actually use my website again, and not just have a fancy pants splash screen that says "Site Coming" when it's supposedly been coming for around 3 years now. The wait is over, and here I am.

That's about it for now. :)