So I vanquished that... whatever... that was inhabiting TLAB, but it appears that it has come back.

Wrote a letter to tech support at iPower. Hoping they'll solve it soon. I can't get rid of that line of script... and now I'm mad. >

Finally got some information out of Matsuricon lady. So it looks like I'll be going, after all. (Thank you wtf for your offer, lol... but I don't think I'll need it?)

OMG wtf I'M GONNA SEE YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE IKASUCON 2003!!!!!1111one And Caroline, too! Which is kind of funny 'cause I was thinking of getting the kid a birthday present. 'Cause, you know, it'd be appropriate, what with us having the same birthday.

So... who wants to go to Matsuri? :) I've heard that the con kind of sucks, actually... but I don't know. And, c'mon, wtf is going, so you can look at her and maybe even talk to her. If all else fails, we can get REALLY DRUNK AND FORGET IT EVER HAPPENED. And of course, folks like saiyengirl and nyaonyaoneko know who else will be there. *snicker*

Anyway... I got the church and my mom and I are putting the deposit down at Windows on the River tomorrow! So it looks like the wedding is on, now. :)

I got up and checked my e-mail this morning to find one from the director of the charity event I was at on Saturday. She asked me to come to a family festival in Twinsburg this Saturday to do some caricature and that she'd give me $75 just for going, because I live kind of far away (...45 minutes.) And, like at the charity thing, I'd get to keep whatever money I made.

So uh, hell yeah. I'm going to Twinsburg on Saturday! Turns out that the lady actually works for an event-planning service... so... let's see where this goes. :)

Colossalcon is also this weekend. I'm going with Tris before & after Twinsburg for an excuse to wear my Umi costume. Its almost done. I ordered shoes today, I got my wig two days ago. Unfortunately the wig is way too short... but I'm not that upset. It wasn't expensive and it is certainly better quality than the last one. I'll have money to get a longer one later. I need to get a headband and perhaps do something to the bangs on the wig, but other than that the costume is pretty much wearable.

Know whats funny?

I'm skipping devo to get married. XD


(Unless we don't have devo 'cause it's the week before spring break. But I hope we do. So I can skip it. 'Cause I hate giving up my Sunday nights and so I seek revennnnggggeeeeeeee.)

Looking at cruise packages for our honeymoon cheers me up. We're going to Alaska during B-W's spring break, which is conveniently the weekend after our wedding. :)

I really love this icon. Isaac Asimov is totally one of my old-man crushes. Right up there with Daniel Craig, Patrick Dempsey and Ron Paul.

BAD NEWS

Anyway, Tristan and I had like, the worst fight ever last night. It's because my family is INSANE and my mom will NOT a) pay for or b) show up to our wedding if we don't get married in a Methodist church by a Methodist pastor. Except Tris will not have anything to do with Methodist church/pastor and wants his mail-order-ordination dad to do the ceremony. Which sends my family into apoplectic fits. And I'd kind of prefer to be married in the church anyway and not by his father-with-five-failed-marriages. I think it's kind of a bad omen.

It's a Scottish wedding, so I'm allowed to be absurdly superstitious. Just this once.

So we're at this impasse. And basically we can't move forward with ANYTHING concerning the wedding until we get it figured out. Either way someone loses and will probably resent the other for the rest of forever, which does not bode well.

It's enough to make me hop on a plane to Vegas, except I want my homemade poofy dress and my friends and my bagpipes and my fancy dinner and dammit, I will have them. And my handfasting. We're totally going to handfast and it's going to be absurd amounts of awesome, because tartans.

So anyway, I ended up crying in the middle of Perkins, which--let me tell you--was totally rad. I adore crying in public places. And then I went home and cried some more. Thank you parttimehanyou for offering to come get me! I am so, so sorry I didn't come over last night. :( Miss you guys... but, next time!

So things are okay now. Tristan bribed me over with chocolate cake and we talked and he's going to come over and fight to the death with my parents so I can quit being the damn go-between. Honestly, whatever. I just want to get fscking married. I'd prefer my pastor, but what is really important is a) poofy dress, b) friends, c) bagpipes, d) fancy. 'Cause I'm superficial like that and also refuse to just go to the courthouse and get it over with. I stand on pageantry and tradition like it's my job.

GOOD NEWS

Anyway, my mom decided that I needed some retail therapy after crying in Perkins, so we went to the mall. I got a new sweater and a new skirt. It is pretty and has blue flowers on it. Hooray.

And then I dragged her to the pet store, because going to the pet store ALWAYS cheers me up, no matter what. I like to pick up the bunnies and birds and pet the puppies. I can't be upset when there are cute animals around.

I was a little sad when I went to the guinea pig pen and realized that they were all new pigs. For the past few weeks I've been going to the store and playing with a silky-haired white pig. She was really the sweetest guinea pig ever--totally chill when you picked her up (Salvador freaks out) and she'd nibble on you, but not bite. The first time I saw her she was WAY pregnant, the second time I got to see the babies (soooo cute) and the third time she was being picked on by the alpha pig in the pen. So I guess I was a little in love with her. :)

But then I realized they had a second pen of pigs who were full-grown adults. I went over there, but still no white pig. Then my mom picked up the log house and there she was! So I picked her up and cooed at her and she was chirping at me and the pet store guy comes over. Pet store guy recognizes me on sight because I spend so much time in the store, lol.

Pet Store Guy: Haven't you been in here like... every week?
Me: Uh... yeah.
PSG: And you always pick up the same guinea pig and then leave without it.
Me: ... yeah. Well, uh, this time she's coming home with me.

So now I have the start of my own herd of guinea pigs! I had moved Salvador to a bigger cage, so I have two cages... so, no baby pigs (at least for awhile). Her name is Georgia O'Keefe and she is gorrrrregous.

( Photos! )

It feels like someone just ripped my heart out.

LJ-cuts for those of you who suffer from tl;dr syndrome.

( Crazy dreams. )

( Baldwin-Wallace Oopsies. )

( Gettin' hitched is SRS BZNZ. )

( My dad is going to Europe. )

( Tris bought a scooter. )

( Home improvement. )

I have to go to work in a half-hour. :(

March 1st, 2009. Save it.

( Ganked from little. )

So yeah, my bank card number got stolen yesterday. HOW RAD IS THAT? I checked my e-mail, found the overdraft notice, went to my account, and realized that Columbia House charged me $75. So I went to my Columbia House account (I do have one!) and checked it out--but Columbia House hadn't charged anything from my account... it was from some OTHER account. So I reported it to Columbia House, reported it to my bank, and now I will have my overdraft fee waived and get my $75 back on Monday. I'll also get a new bank card with a new number and my card number is currently frozen... so for the next week and a half I get to write checks and carry cash. I HATE checks and cash! I never realized how reliant I was on that little piece of plastic... drat.

I got to play with a snake last night. It was pretty rad. I really like snakes.

Uhmmmm. Going to see Prince Caspian tonight. Tris and I saw Hulk yesterday with Justin and Erin. It was actually pretty decent--nothing great, but definitely better than the first one. It wasn't Iron Man, though, although you should see it--Tony Stark shows up at the end of Hulk! They're totally going to make an Avengers movie in the future... drat, again. LOL. :)

That's it. I'm out.

If ONE MORE PERSON asks me when I'm getting married, I'm going to jack them in the face.

I have no idea how I am going to survive going to two different weddings next month without killing someone.

Argh. So Tris and I go to Wal*Mart last night (more fabric = more Umi) and it starts raining like CRAZY when we leave. So I drive home in the pouring rain, thunder and lighting. It was absurd, my wipers were going full blast and I still couldn't see more than a few feet in front of the car. The rain was pretty much coming down in sheets.

We get home, and try to open the garage door. And again. And again. My garage door opener is kind of fritzy (think it might be time for a new battery) but it had been working. Tristan sighs, runs up to the front door, goes inside and opens the garage door from within. Manually. 'Cause the power is out.

We found ONE candle and ONE flashlight. So Tris opened the garage door again and I drove in the pouring rain to Dollar General and bought $20 worth of candles and flashlights.

And then we sat in the dark, trying to figure out what to do. We tried playing Uno, but it is not much fun with only two people. We played with the cats and the laser pointer until that got old. His sister took the board games with her when she moved out, leaving us with Spider-Man Monopoly and an incomplete chess set. We finally decided that Tris would clean the litter pans while I held the flashlight for him, went downstairs and remembered that we have a pool table. Pool tables do not require electricity.

So we lit a bunch of candles, hung a flashlight above the table and played pool in the dark. Then the rain let up and I went home.

Tris texted me this morning to say that his phone was almost dead and the power still hadn't been turned back on.

I think I got rid of it. I believe it was hiding in the leftovers from when I had the forum up.

Can someone running a virus scanner check?

So my website has this virus. And I can't get rid of it.

Its kind of important to me, 'cause I can't get work if all my clients are getting infected. I think that'd kind of piss them off.

Any suggestions?

Soooo... I've started looking at grad schools lately. I thought seriously about going back to MECA and then decided that was probably not a good idea. 'Cause, you know, I'll be married and all that and I can't really drag Tristan halfway across the country two or three times a year.

And the only other art schools around here are the CIA and CCAD. While CCAD is actually a good school, the CIA has never impressed me. It resembles an overgrown high school and everyone who goes into the CIA comes out making art that looks like they went to the CIA. CCAD, however, is out of the question because with gas costing four dollars a gallon, I don't want to have to drive to Columbus that often.

That, and I'm minoring in art history now instead of pursuing an education major. I want out of Baldwin-Wallace, and I want out now. I actually enjoy art history, which is strange because in high school I thought it was tedious. (Well...) I liked the survey at MECA and I really like the classes I've taken at B-W, so I'm taking three more for the minor.

What do you do with my degree? (Answer: jack.) But I started poking around museum websites and making some inquiries and it turns out there is a master's degree in art history and museum studies. So I googled and googled, trying to find where I go to school to get this thing.

And I finally hit up: Case.

I spend all this time trying to find out where the degree is offered around here, and it turns out it is a half-hour away in University Circle. LOL.

The program is even offered in conjunction with the museum, which is sweeeeeeet.

***

The only problem is going to be financial aid. I don't think I will have much trouble getting into Case (well, okay, maybe after the last semester, ouch) but paying for it will be difficult. They give funding up to full tuition + $10,000... but I am not that excellent. I'll have to work my ass off these next two semesters to get my GPA back up to where it was.

I'm excited. We'll see what happens. At least I have some sort of plan of what I want to do now.

Today
e-mail the CMA and MoCA
at least 5 more cards for Cogswell
deposit paycheck
get furniture?

So I think this is the time to tell you all about this Cogswell Hall event. It's a charity event next month at the Cleveland Browns Stadium. There'll be some bands, local "celebrities" (wtfnocelebshere) and some artists. Including me. Its a wicked fancy sort of thing, so don't even ask me how I got into it. I am too plebian to be at an event where the general-admission tickets cost $75.

(I also could never understand why a charity event charges wicked high admission prices.)

In an effort not to be intimidated by the other artists they're going to have (I don't know who they are, but I bet they are painters and they are snobby; this is Cleveland, after all) I am trying to be all LOL I R SRS BZNZ ARTIST FER REALZ about it. So in the next couple of weeks I need to really step up on my plan to make a bunch of greeting cards.

Handmade stuff makes rich people all a-flutter, right? Besides, the ones that I have done so far are kind of neat. OH HAY I POSTED THOSE LIKE TWO WEEKS AGO. I forgot about that. Durr. They look better in real life. I also might print up a couple sets of cards to sell--maybe four or five in a pack--with some photography on them and maybe some details--stitching, grommets, something.

I might make some buttons as well and I'm thinking of delving back into the depths of my own personal remnant bin and doing some more textile things.

ILLUSTRATION AND CRAFTING WILL LIVE IN THE FACE OF THE STRANGE, SCARY CLEVELAND PAINTERS. (rawr!)

Om nom nom.

I just ate half a jar of pickles to prepare myself for my workday.

With this I am pleased.

Sam is such an angry cat. I don't even know what he angry about, but he is angry all the time.

He is about fifteen years old, which officially makes him a grumpy old man. Anyway, he just jumped in my lap, sat there for ten minutes, and then growled, bit me on the arm and jumped off.

I didn't do anything! I rubbed his ears for a bit and then went back to the computer, and ten minutes later he up and bites me. Seriously, I did NOT do ANYTHING. I did not even touch his foot, which he hates. I was taking care not to touch his foot.

Irrational angry cat is angry and irrational.

Oh God. So I haven't posted since like... last Thursday. So much stuff has gone on in the past week.

And now I can't think of any of it. Of course.

I got a new phone (two new phones, actually). My mom's phone crapped out, so we split our plan up so she could get a new phone. I went bawling to Tris and we decided to go get a plan together. We hunted around at all the major providers and then settled on his current provider, Sprint.

I bought an HTC Mogul, had it for 24 hours, decided I didn't like it as much as I thought and that for as much as I paid for it I wanted to be able to send picture mail. HOW do you have an executive, Pocket PC smartphone that doesn't send picture mail? So I took it back yesterday and got a tiny pink smartphone which I absolutely adore. <3

BTW, this means that my little and I basically have matching, pink, smart-devices. She has a Blackberry Pearl and I've got the Palm Centro.

Tris got an HTC Touch. It has one button, which is crazy. The rest of the thing is one giant touchscreen. So it's kind of like a small, shitty iPhone. It is shitty because it runs Windows Mobile, which is a terrible way to ruin a really cool thing. If it ran, say, OS X, it'd be really, really cool. :P

And we went and looked at windows last night, and it looks as if we'll be getting a big ol' bay window installed at the house. For the cats, of course.

So right now I am downloading a new version of 3D Home Architect. Yesterday I spackled, sanded and painted 50% of the ex-dog-room at Tristan's. I am determined to have it done by party-time on Friday. His mom is over there right now with the window people, getting an estimate on how much it'll cost to replace all the windows.

I have work from 1:00-6:00. Then I'm going over to the house, gettin' my grove on and sanding/painting the other 50% of the room. And then I have to bake like a bazillion cakes, because I got the crazy idea in my head that I was going to make Kara the most awesome, amazing birthday cake ever. It is three tiers with three different kinds of cake. Or it will be. Once I get around to baking eight layers of cake. And then I have to figure out how to frost the damn thing.

Even crazier: I just printed out a recipe for fondant. I didn't know it was so easy to make!

Wanna know whats crazy? Tristan, my dear, darling, Tristan, actually said something about our wedding yesterday WITHOUT BEING PROMPTED BY ME!!!! So I guess sometime in the near future we'll be meeting with the event planner at Dave & Buster's. Its enough to make me wonder if maybe he got abducted by aliens when I wasn't looking.

My download apparently has half an hour to go. I can't wait to play with the new version of this program... the last one I had ran on Win3.11, lol. Also, you can choose colors in this one, and in the old one you could only set all your walls to color x and your furniture to color y, with the wood being color z. So I will pretty much be making Tristan's house in 3D, except I don't have exact measurements. Maybe I'll get those tonight and make a floor plan for real.

I need to come up with furniture for the "dog room". I also need to name it something else, because a) there are no dogs in there, b) it does not even smell like dogs anymore, and c) I fixed the damage from the dogs yesterday. Tristan is under the impression the room is a bedroom, but I know that it is not. No bedroom has a sliding glass door leading out onto the porch. His reasoning is that the previous owners kept one of their kids in there. WHO DOES THAT? Wouldn't the kid sneak out the door in the middle of the night to go gallivanting? That is SUCH A BAD IDEA.

I'm thinking of maybe putting a computer or entertainment hutch in the "closet" area of the room and some seating. It'll be like a sitting room where people can sit and watch the backyard without actually having to be in the backyard. Oh, man, I need to make curtains! There aren't any curtains in there. Crap. We can deal with no curtains for now.

...I like it when people tell me that Tris and I shouldn't have a big wedding and should save the money for a house. We have a house. TRUST ME GUYS YOU DON'T WANT ONE.

P.S. I lie. Houses are sweet.