[UPDATE:] I’ve moved on to other things, like learning how to play the Ukulele, and no longer update this daily. It was a good run and I’m truly grateful to everyone who followed for it through the hundreds of posts.  I may put up an occasional drawing, but don’t count on it. “The beginning”, ironically, turned out to be the end. – Kate [/UPDATE]

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Things are starting to become real.  Saturday’s* is the test ride.  Everything on the bike, 400+ miles. Destination? Vermont. Not sure where. Miller want’s some cheese. I told him I’d get it for him if he could find someone 200 miles away to sell it to me. If he doesn’t… there’s plenty more random things to ride to in Vermont, or any of the other states in a 200 mile radius of Boston.

I can’t wait.

* Probably Saturday… may change my mind and do it Sunday.

Raaaaa!

So, this is what I look like, but not really. It’s weird. The lines are technically correct, but the result is radically different from real life. A thinning of eyebrows, and severe simplification and everything changes. This drawing seems especially so. I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly has made the difference so dramatic, but I think, that as I come closer to understanding that I’ll become a much more educated artist.

of strawberries past.

Our landlord took our concrete courtyard and added a dirt oval with 2 bush-tree-things. They don’t look good and two or three years on they’ve never filled out. Because no-one wanted them or feels any responsibility towards them, the landlord hires a “landscaper” to come and weed it about twice a year. Today they decided to “weed” the box garden in front of my house too. They removed about 30 Strawberry plants a large mass of Mint and my Morning Glory. I have no idea what they did with my 1/2 bag of potting soil which the Morning Glory had happily claimed as home. I had just weeded it a couple days ago…

To add insult to injury they did a crap job of removing the mint. The roots are still there with tough scraggly stalks poking up.

I was able to save about five Strawberry plants from the trash, and a handful of Mints.

Tammy and I planted a few Strawberry plants years ago and I’d been keeping them free from weeds, and semi-regularly beating back the mint. I loved that they flourished every year and gave me enough strawberries to share with my coworkers every day for one to two weeks a year.

The landlord will be hearing from me tomorrow and I’ll see if I can get them to get the landscaper to replace the Strawberries,  and the Morning Glory but I don’t have a lot of hope…

It’s worse than before. Before it was this scared anticipation. Now… Now I’m already out on the road. Eight days out and I’d be approaching California. I’d be somewhere near the Rockies. Instead I’m on my couch.

Three more weeks. My bags are packed. I can only fiddle.

I don’t want to be here. Bandido is about the only thing I’m enjoying about being home right now. Everything else feels like… not the road. I’m sure by the time I get back I’ll be physically beat up and miserable. I’ll love the feel of my sweet couch beneath me. But right now….

I think. I think I’m going to stop doing nightly drawings once my vacation starts. After that I’ll just do them on a more spontaneous basis…. or maybe, once I stop, I’ll find it hard to get started at all again.

I’m not sure.

Part of me is going to be sad to see this end. Part of me thinks it’s time.

PandaCatBaby’s mum said she appeared “a little murderous” in this picture. Personally, I think she just looks hot (literally) and sexy, but I liked the description, so I ran with it and tried to give her more of a “murderous” edge in this drawing. It was fun. It just now occurred to me that I could have done her zombie style, but that look doesn’t say “flesh eater” it says… well… it says sexy things that only Mr. Panda will ever know the details of. Either that, or, “I’m really tired and you need to fuck off now.” Hard to tell which.

;)

Drawing’s so much more fun with good source material.

Speaking of Zombies. I just watched Zombies Anonymous on streaming Netflix. It’s a fairly low-budget film, but I was very happily surprised with it. I was expecting either a comedy, or some crap bad-acting low budget thing I’d have to turn off after 15 minutes of misery. But it’s actually pretty good. There are a lot of parts that definitely make you tense up, and scenes well written enough to make you feel uncomfortable about the situation, and the plot does not end up going where you expect it to. Yes, you can frequently predict the gist of the next scene, but not two scenes ahead.

The fight scenes were pretty horribly choreographed, and once someone was down on the ground they seemed to forget they could sit up, and when, storywise, someone with a gun needed to be pummeled they seemed to conveniently forget that bullets worked from a distance. But, I can forgive that in a low budget indie flick. It’s the only low budget zombie flick I’ve ever made it to the end of nevermind enjoyed.

Just watch the first five minutes of the film, or the trailer, and you’ll understand that this isn’t just another cheap excuse to stick people in zombie makeup. It’s got many of the common flaws of a low budget indie flick, but it overcomes them in the end, and is worth seeing if you’re into zombie flicks.

YouTube trailer here.

I’ve been doing this for a while now.  355 posts spanning 72 weeks… almost a year and a half. And, it’s brought me a lot of joy. But, I’m questioning if it’s worth continuing.

It’s just not as fulfilling anymore. The lack of subject matter is no small part of that. But it’s also that a fell that, for the most part, I’m just talking and drawing to myself. I am, for the most part, but it feels more like I am entirely.

Does anyone really care if this continues besides me?

er, yeah.

In unrelated news: I got a Furminator for Bandido. They’ve got them for almost half off at drugstore.com, and I have to say it is effing amazing. Dog owners rave about this thing even though it’s normally $50, and we all hate that it costs that much, but after using it we all say the same thing, “It’s worth every penny.”

‘Dido’s coat feels radically different as does Tabba’s, because I pulled out an enormous amount of fur from each of them. What’s even more surprising is that they both really liked it. Normally ‘Dido just puts up with me brushing him, but today he sat there in the park and just let me brush and brush and brush even though I wasn’t even verbally asking him to stay. I even encouraged him to go a couple times and he just sat waiting for more.

It’s worth $50, but you can get it for $29 at drugstore.com. If you have a cat or dog you owe it to yourself, and them, to get one. Trust me, the price may be crazy for a brush, but you will not regret it.

… about this delayed vacation thing.

But I try and stay positive.

There are more things afoot in this life than I am aware of, and somehow they always seem to work to give me what I need most, even thought that’s frequently not what I want.