Who's awesome? That's right, I'm awesome! Walking towards my New Year's Resolution
Work has been taking up a lot of my time. Having a job does come in handy for dealing with those pesky bill things. And it’s also very helpful in the way of knowing that if I lost a leg in a freak incident with the fax machine, that I would have medical insurance. All in all, there are securities that are offered with having one of those job things.
However, I don’t enjoy my job. I find it to be tiring, and spend most of my time completing reports and listening to people be rude and not understanding why I find it unacceptable for them to curse at me. And with the new extra-busy work weeks, I’m tired in the evenings, and often fall asleep before I can accomplish any drawing, painting or reading about book layouts and dummy books, or anything else I enjoy doing at home.
It was time to sit down and just draw anything! During my lunch break I drew whatever came to mind, which was me sitting at my work desk feeling a bit defeated. I found myself unconsciously hunching over, making faces at the pencil while I was drawing. The joy that comes with bringing something to mind on paper soon lifted my slouch, and I started smiling and humming as the pencil made little scrrritch noises against the paper. The little drawing is a sad thing, but I feel great! I have been keeping some ideas in the back of my mind for playing with later while I watch the Grammy award show. Alas! Back to work. Have a good day!
Working...again
I went to Montana’s Rib & Chop House with some friends . There’s a couple different branches but the one in Meadville, PA was great! It had a nice open atmosphere, a fireplace, and great service. My only complaint about the restaurant itself is that our table was squished against the fireplace, and I became too warm. Thankfully, one of my friends is prone to being cold ALL the time, so she and I switched places. Problem solved!
I ordered my usual bacon cheeseburger. It was huge! Everything there was enough food for at least two meals. But back to my burger-what really caught my eye was the bacon wasn’t sitting in strips, but had been chopped up and covered the entire burger. I wondered how this would impact the texture. But over all, it looked good. It wasn’t greasy or wet looking. The bun seemed intact and the lettuce and tomato weren’t watery (I love washed lettuce, but I don’t need a puddle of water seeping into my fries and hamburger bun to prove that you have clean food.)
As soon as I picked up the burger, a small pile of bacon crumbles plopped out. I adjusted my grip and took my first bite. Yup, this is a good bacon cheeseburger. The flavors were all there, a slight smokiness, just enough salt and cooked medium well. The cheese was just sharp enough to stand out against the burger and the bacon was great, even in it’s crumbly form. I was already wondering when we would come here to eat again, so I could try other burgers, and maybe even that steak my friend ordered which looked, aaamazing.
I missed the texture of a crisp bacon slice with this meal, but the crumbles solved a lot of bacon related issues with cheeseburgers. I didnt’ have any fatty bacon pieces, or stringy pieces that pulled the whole slice into my mouth, almost choking me as I anticipate a normal bite. On second thought, crumbles are a pretty kick-ass idea.
You have to go to Montana, Wyoming or Pennsylvania to eat at Montana’s Rib and Chop House. But if you’re ever in the neighborhood and want some good food, I recommend it 
I have enjoyed sharing my various attempts with you. This blog is essently my version of a mother’s refrigerator. “Look what I did today!”
So look what I did today! Last night I bought some very nice ink pens and some a-ok markers I saw some REALLY nice markers too. But I’m thinking at I may wish to either stick to paint or ink, and leave markers for the fridge unless I miraculously improve. I do like the way the color pops out though. So I’m not giving up. I was browsing through various photos of Geisha and found myself thinking “Oooh, I want to draw one! So I looked at several other paintings, drawings, photos and came up with this. I tried out some of the lines found in traditional Japanese paintings. now THOSE guys take their time with a drawing, not just banging something out to decompress after work:
You can see the face is primarily the ink pens, and her clothing is markers. I think the markers are kinda poopy. I’m going to learn to use photoshop to get the clean color effect. Or stick to acrylic paints. Maybe I can get some really great pens in different colors too. Who knows what will happen?This final one is an attempt to find inner peace. She looks like me, but not like me at the same time. I think this is what my inner peace looks like. Interesting but appearing incomplete.
I still have a long way to go, but this is fun. YAY!
Have an awesome day
I’m going to try to not use real people names in my bloggy thing, so instead of referring to my baby nephew by his real name, we’ll use my affectionate name for him-Captain Destructo. His older brother is the Little Prince.
About a month ago, I log onto facebook and see this post from my SIL:
“Captain Destructo has been biting off pieces of his wooden gate. Yes..I mean I have been pulling chunks of wood out of his mouth. So I get the great idea of putting lemon juice (unsweetened) on the top of the gate so when he bites it, it tastes bad. Immediately after putting it on, Captain Destructo bites it, licks his lips and just does it more as well as licks it repeatedly. He LIKES it! AHHHH! What am I going to DO with him!!!!!
mmm... lemony goodness!
So I got this image in my head. My printer/scanner is being a poophead, so I used my phone to share…It’s a quick drawing I did. I’m still trying to find a medium that works best. If you work in illustration, what are some of your favorite tools, and do you have any advice for a fellow artist with dreams of success?
As far as Destructo goes, my poor SIL tried all sorts of safe non-tasty foods. she tried vinegar, but he liked that even more. My brother thinks the combination of lemon and vinegar must’ve made it taste like chips. mmm potato chips…Now I’m hungry! I haven’t heard any more stories of him trying to eat his gate, I think now he’s sampling the sofa…
- mmm… lemony goodness!
New Year’s Eve makes me nutso. I mean, I love the idea of getting a fresh start and saying “This year, I’m going to embrace everything awesome about me” but my oh so wise mother pointed out our society insists on getting so piss-drunk on the Eve. I mean, who is going to have a great fresh start when they’re hungover? How did I never notice that? It makes no sense, right?
But hang on…maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe New Year’s Resolutions started as a tradition after a night of too much partying where the nation collectively groans in their toilet bowls “That’s it. This year, I am NEVER partying like that again! I’m going to be healthy from now on! Just please make my head stop throbbing!”
Crap. That changes my whole perspective on New Year Resolutions. I don’t give a hooty hoot though. I have my resolutions and I’m going to do my best to make each of them happen. And when they do, I’ll have my own “yay! I’m really self absorbed and neglected everyone while I accomplished my goals but now I’m done and want someone to celebrate with me! (meaning, tell me how awesome I am)
Some of my kickass resolutions:
Get in shape. I mean, a smaller, more fit and girly shape. I’m technically a shape now, but this one is more like unformed bread dough.
Work on illustration- I’ve already scheduled a few hours a day for this. Pretty soon, I’m going to be one of those crazy people who sketch random strangers while they eat waffles.
Develop my social life-my friends and family are kick-ass. I’d like to see them more Because I’m going to need people to cheer me on as I progress on my awesome journey and say things like “YEAH, YOU ROCK!” Maybe make new friends too and join some kind of group. Not a cult. Cults focus on weird stuff like space ships and wife collecting. This doesn’t work for me because I need more attention focused on ME. Maybe they could form a cult about me? No, that seems like too much work. No cults. Period.
I frikkin’ love Cheeseburgers. When I try out a new restaurant, I usually order a cheeseburger.
When I worked at my old job, my then co-worker Betsy and I used to go to Target then try out different places to eat dinner. These outings were the highlight of my week. Betsy is the type of person you can go into a store and be extra-loud and silly with. This would end one day when we eventually became annoyed with each other more than we weren’t. She still has that “cool” thing working for her though whereas I sorta bop around like a lost Muppet. Anyway, I would go on and on about cheeseburgers until she said “You should write a blog about cheeseburgers!” I always thought that was a brilliant idea, but for some reason, never sat down to write about it. I’ve brought it up several times since, with “yeah! you should do THAT!”
It wasn’t until tonight, when I had a weird cheeseburger that I thought “It’s time to blog about Burgers”
I went to the Hardwood Cafe (pause for giggling at the name) located near some dark and windy twisty road near Butler with my parents and wow did it smell like awesome in there. I looked at the menu to see a cheddar and onion topped burger and I knew “I want this burger!” and ordered bacon on top of it too.
The bacon-onion-cheeseburger looked delicious when it arrived. I put a slice of tomato and lettuce on, and then my first amazing bite of burger weirdness.
First, the bun was soft but also slightly stale, so it started to come apart under the juiciness of the burger and tomato. The cheddar flavor was so subtle, that I had to check to see if it was there. Yup. Cheese, bacon, burger. The texture of the burger was pleasing, but it was difficult to taste under all the onions.
and call me crazy, but I love onions. I love them on my burger. Big fat tasty onions that really just compliment all the delicious cheeseburger goodness. But at the Hardwood, the onions were cut so long and thin, I could floss my teeth with them. Biting into the sandwich ended up with me carrying onion strings back to my mouth. At the midway point, I ended up with a mouthful of stringy onions, getting a weird feeling of “This must be what chewing jellyfish and seaweed feels like” and put the burger down. Again I couldn’t actually taste anything besides onion and broken bread.
So I wouldn’t recommend the onion cheddar burger at the Hardwood Cafe. But it wasn’t the worst burger I ever ate. I would try a different burger there perhaps and hold the onions. But I hear they make a kickass reuben!
We made stockings at work today
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My brother is one of the most awesome people I know. He’s always helping me and making life brighter. A few times, I’m able to return the positivity. This story happened when we were both in college I tried to find all the right words but this rough little cartoon happened instead.
