Conspiracy ahoy.

Well, as usual, I am antagonizing bureaucratic workers. It's sort of my special skill. Remind me to never move to France.

They haven't had the little fresh wipe thingys in the gym that people wipe the machines off after they are done, for a week. Gross, today I was talking to the cleaning staff who just happened to be around, asking if they could maybe throw a bottle of spray cleaner and a roll of paper towels in there while they were waiting for these magical wipes to get off backorder. The leasing office lady happened upon us and got indignant informing me that people should use towels and that the gym is cleaned everyday. I said, "Great but, my towel is just going to wipe the sweat around and unless you have cleaning staff doing each machine after it's been used all day, you've got a hygeine issue." She said, "We treat this gym like all other gyms in the complex." This mystified me. What did that have to do with anything? So all the gyms are gross and unclean and that should somehow shut me up? I said, "Well, I'm just trying to suggest a simple solution for the meantime." and left. I'm sure she deeply appreciated my input. In the way a beaver appreciates you putting up curtains in his dam.

What's more fun is that I found out my key needed to be updated to access the other gym which involved having to call on the same lady AND, the corporate housing company that oversees the details of our stay, called her because I mad a noise complaint about out neighbors. Ah yes, she will know me by name and will probably do all she can to foil me at every step from now on. That's what charm and charisma buys you ladies and gentlemens; an easy road, or rather, a trail of annoyed enemies.

That's right, enemies! You're all against me!! Facebook, my neighbors, that glass over there on the table, my socks. If I don't cover the walls with tinfoil and demand that the governor of California hire a flock of ravens to guard me at all times, evil will have it's way and the battle will be lost.

Sure I'm kidding. Ha.Ha.

I have to go buy more tinfoil.

having a real good day.

Ah MAN! Scheise! I tried today, I really did. It's all shit today. Shittty shit.
Some days, it's just really shit. And then I went to get the mail in the parking lot and the elevator wouldn't come back down and I was ready to kill anyone who looked at me wrong. I walked to the other end and took the other elevator and then went to see what the deal was. Some asshole pushed the button for every floor then got off. My PMS has been so mild this week that I almost didn't know I had it until I yelled through the wall Saturday for someone to turn down the fucking tv, at 1 am. And today, when I was ready to fist fight anyone pushing buttons superfluously on the elevator.

What I drew today was just not what I was trying to draw and I spent ages on it even though I knew it wasn't working. Lesson learned. I'm only just now starting to understand what my life needs to be about to get done what I want to get done but I'm so impatient. Now that I know, why can't it happen right away? I know why. I know I have to work. I will. It's hard. Hard when it doesn't go right. Hard when it's bubbling inside, but you just can't put your damn finger on it and get it down on the page. Hard when you have to admit defeat and go take a bath and regroup for trying again.

And fuck you Facebook. You suck. You will destroy proper communication. You are making life a high school for millions. Millions who are NOT in high school anymore. Even back in high school, did we talk only to ourselves into our little locker mirrors and hope that others were watching us as we did so, and was everyone else so busy talking into their own little mirrors and hoping the same, so that in the end, no one cared about anyone but themselves???? No, but Facebook is making it so. I wash my hands of thee.

Whatever, right?

It's warm as hell here today. Almost t-shirt warm. A gal should go for walk in that shit. Maybe I shall. Maybe I shall.

PS: I took a bath and made myself do another drawing. Both shitty and post-shitty results below.


The drawings on top of the page, were the unsucessful drawings that made me give up and try the one below it. I'm going to give the below one some more attention. I think pushing through paid off more than if I had just given up. Head up your ass much Monsterteeth?

3 for the price of 1.

This is a real person. She was in my New Media Design class. I won't say her real name, but it rhymes with Pix Bathknocker. I saw her parents once at an open house for the school. It's clear she was doomed from the start.



Ya, so out of the 5 weeks I've been here, I've been sick for 2 of them.



I dunno, but she seems like a fun lady.

Portland, will you marry me?

Northwest adventure completed.

In four days, we crammed 30 hours of driving under our belt, 1 of which found me behind the wheel. Tennessee handled the other 29. I always pair myself with people who can't handle being passengers. Luckily, I'm a very good passenger. Here is where my sluggish metabolism and distinctly absent desire to accomplish things in life really get a chance to shine as my best qualities. I can sit for hours and hours without moving and not go insane.

Low motivation to achieve aside, let me confirm the idea that, first of all, Northern California is beautiful. Driving through the mountains was stunning and great. The air! So fresh and so clean. Ain't nobody dope as the mountains. Oregon and Washington were pretty too. I am a northern lady, for sure. Fir trees and moss and mist are all up in my alley. I was sort of hoping to see a waterfall in slow motion while a logging truck glided past a la Twin Peaks, in fact, it was so close to how that show looked I really figured I'd see the one-armed man or the log lady walking by at any moment. That whole state seems to be quirky. I really do understand why Lynch films all take place there.

Second of all, Portland is a way cool place. Everyone there is nuts. Everything is weird, but in the best way. Some cities, you can tell people are trying to hard to be "cool"; The eccentricity is contrived or forced. This city just seems to genuinely be filled with happily bizzare people who don't give a crap. The super weirdos just sort of blend in with everyone else. Even the preppy go-getter types still have at least one piece of clothing from the Goodwill on. And vegetarian restaurants? Hell yes! Everywhere! It's the most bike friendly and vegetarian friendly city in the USA. Here's the good part though, it's not hippies. It's just really progressive, liberal people.

The amount of vintage shops is astounding also. We went to one that was so big I got lost in the middle and didn't know how to get out. The beauty of the place was that it was real vintage junk, not fake and not overpriced. They also had the courtesy to lay out the place in the most haphazard and nonsensical way, so that you really felt like you were hunting through the estate of some insane old lady that collected crazy things her whole life. I could have lived in there for days. And cheap!!! Cheap and no tax.

The book stores are the same; everything ever in print, no matter how small and independent and cheap and no tax. We were sad to have to leave it behind after only a day.

The day before, we spent in Olympia, WA. Another super cute and quirky little place. A little too heavy on the hippie side though. Again, plenty of the vintage shops and veggie-friendly food and good record stores and all that, but it's small enough that the youngsters sort of have their heads up their asses a little. You know, how people can think they've reached their pinnacle when they have no challenges? Kinda like that. Olympia has a good start to being a cool place, they maybe are just a little too self-satisfied to keep up the good work though. It seems to be a place on the decline. I really like it there anyway. It's a port town and sweet and cute with just the right amount of seasoned kookiness to balance it out. I bought a great pair of orange sherbet coloured pants from the 70s for 8 bucks and had a good salmon burger, served by a guy that looked like what Michael Stipe would have turned out to be, had he never joined a band and became a small town waiter instead. Points to the man for serving the entire place with a bandaged up left hand.

We didn't have much of a master plan for Olympia, hoping instead to just find something to do. We saw a flyer on a record store window for a cafe that was having a cabaret night including clogging, a puppet show and fake beat poetry. Obviously, that was meant for us to go see. After narrowly avoiding staying in the worst hostel ever, we went to the address of the cafe, which turned out to be a couple's house. Once a month, they fill their living room with tables and chairs and candles and make a few dishes to serve and have friends perform in a little lit up corner of the living room. They were young kids who were the sort of hippyish people I mentioned above but it was a really cool concept and pretty neat of them to go through with. We had a good vegan meal, daiquiris and watched an orange-haired girl play her own songs on her ukulele, singing about good sandwiches and polyamorous love.

Did I mention that I had a full-on, hacking, coughing, nose-blowing, lozenge sucking, head-cold for the entire trip, starting the night before leaving? Well I did. It sort of sucked, but I managed to have a good time in spite of it. It could have been worse. We didn't stay out as late as we might have or troop around town as much as we normally would have, but we both feel we had a full and tasty passage through the northwest. I declare it a fine place to go. Fine indeed.

Please go here to see the photo evidence of our adventure.

Drawings to resume promptly.

Voodoo doughnuts and David Lynch territory.

Well well, look who's blogging. I have been busy doing nothing. Not true. I've been planning a northwestern adventure. 24 hours of driving in 4 days, 3 states, can't complain about that. We're going to Portland, Oregon and Olympia, Washington. From what I've seen on the internetland, these are 2 very cool places. It's like, starting from Eugene WA up till Seattle, all women wear vintage dresses and black rimmed catseye glasses and knit skull, tea cosies and the guys all have toques and three musketeer moustaches and are vegan chefs. That kind of place. There's even a big craft fair at a log cabin style bar. It's gonna be so Twin Peaks! People will be talking backwards and mimes will replace traffic lights at every intersection and there will be donuts in the shape of voodoo dolls. Well, only that last bit is true. There's a place called Voodoo doughnuts, open 24 hours a day, where they perform marriages, give Swahili lessons and produce some seriously left leaning pastry. Now I know why David Lynch makes all his movies in the northwest. In fact, almost as a cosmic primer for the trip, one of the movie channels has been showing his films all week. I'm pretty excited.

Drawings. Drawings, frawings, brawings. I have been doing them, but they are in a serial form and not ready for release and taking up my time but I realized today that a gal can still post some quickly done, stupid drawings too right? So after the trip, I will try to get back on track with a drawing a day. In the meantime, here's a cryptic view of those comics I mentioned.

Now I must go create a valentine's day masterpiece which will not be posted due to obscenity laws. Just kidding but some things are private, gosh!

The Lick Observatory

This place is fantastic. Taking an hour of unending twists and turns up a mountain to get there, the pay off is the incredible view and fantastic atmosphere of this place. It's old school. Built in the late 1800's, it seems it was once a little village. Now, it's an observatory with 2 telescopes, a dormitory for the employees, and a handfull of decrepit abandoned little buildings on the tippy top of a mountain overlooking the south bay area. The buildings of the observatory are old school too, like if you're in a convent or church basement or old boarding school. It has that wicked, 1920's instinstitutional feel that I love. Old wood and ancient bathrooms with little blue tiles and narrow stairways....Did I mention the fantastic view? I want to live somewhere like this, high up in a mountain in an abandonned convent or observatory.

Dubious motto.

I went to a hockey game last night. Yes I did. I liked it. So there.

Today, I tried out the pool. I was alone for most of the time. It was only 14 degrees outside but the pool is heated. So there.

No really, it was...something. Fun? Yes...but also a bit, um, I don't know, Mallrats is on and I can't concentrate.

Big empty pool, big sky, plane doing circles high up. That sort of thing.

Eventually someone else came along who seemed to be annoyed I was there. I think she's used to having the place to herself. I understand but at the same time I don't give a crap. Sometimes I get sick of empathy.

Later, I went for a bit of a walk around. Just a leisure walk. I've been trying to exercise my huge ass off so most of the activity I do is geared toward that end(no pun intended), however sometimes a gal just wants to take a leisurely stroll and eat a bloody chocolate bar in her jogging pants. So there. The weather was so right on. I'm sorry to people dealing with snow, but it was so lovely. Fresh, clean spring air and gentle sun. A hawk floating on currents, flower buds about to blossom...

I've been working on some panel comics. Many people will be pissed at me should they ever see the light of day.

Hard-earned endorphins.

I have cards to make, and I can't post them until the people get them so...maybe less drawings for a couple of days? EXCUSES!! You yell. Sort of.

Brushing that aside, I have discovered running endorphins. Running in the weakest sense of the word. Jogging really. Jogging in spurts and then walking. It's called a 1-5 split people!! No really, it's groovy. Instead of launching into running a marathon, you start of jogging for a minute or until you reach your limit and then walk till you recover and then do it again and repeat etc...Who knew? I didn't. I thought you just had to be a freak to be able to run or jog.

There is a path specifically for this sort of thing round these here parts. It's elevated so you can see above all the IT buildings to the mountains on one side and there's a ravine on the other. I saw 3 eagles, a bunny and heard bullfrogs today. And it's a big loop that you can't shortcut so you are forced to do a proper distance. I've actually been getting better and looking forward to it. Thank you brain for releasing nice chemicals as a reward.

Yipee for me right? Could I be more boring? "Yes you could and you have been so quite yapping and draw something". Pfft. What does drawing do for me? Does it make my clothes fit better? Does it trick my brain into thinking it's happy? No and NO!

I'll do it anyway.