Cat Conspiracies

Ever since I had to take the diabetic-fatass cat in for dental work last week, he's going through a round of not wanting to eat the food that he's supposed to eat. Finicky little bastard.

It makes trying to keep his diabetes in check more difficult, as I can't give him his regular dose of insulin, as it'll crash his blood sugar levels and at best he'll get all dopey and poop all over the house. At worst he goes into convulsions and we immediately rack up a couple grand in emergency vet costs.

He's done this before, and it takes about a week or so for the Battle of Lardo's Menu to sort itself out. He usually "loses"...in other words, he finally eats something resembling what he's supposed to and gets his insulin so he stays relatively healthy(as healthy as a 16-year old cat with diabetes and almost no teeth can be, anyway). This time, he's being an extra-big jerk about the whole food issue. Ever tried to force-feed a cat? It's not fun and I don't recommend it. Having a shower afterwards to scrub off all of the food-infested cat drool is mandatory.

If anyone wants a used cat, I'll send him to you. Airholes in the mailing receptacle optional.

Stuff update: when I was searching for something completely different, I found both my latest pair of sunglasses and my official Fight Crew tank top. That still leaves my favorite watch(missing since last August) and my fave CD case full o' homemade CD's still lost in another dimension. I win some, I lose some.

I'm such a doofus

About that Bad Mood...

...it's still kinda there, but it's been mitigated by cats.

Well, from kittehs from this site. My own cats are still annoying. Especially when I had to take the Angriest Cat in the World to the vet today for a checkup and she shat all over herself and is now insisting on climbing on the furniture. Ughghhghgh. Of course trying to clean up the mess is next to impossible...she went psycho on me and tried to shred my arms. Screw that. I'll let her stink.

Back to the kittehs...I just about died laughing when I saw this one. Note the cartoon reference:

Conspiracies

I think I'm being conspired against.

Yesterday I was tearing apart the house for my usual pair of sunglasses that I wear when I'm running errands on the bicycle. I know that they're somewhere in the house, but I can't find the damn things. The sunglasses are just the latest in a growing list of my belongings that the house ate. Others include(but not limited to):

• my favorite watch(Bugs Bunny. The watchband was awesome, too)
• a Soviet Air Force pin
• my official Fight Crew tank top
• a small leopard print-covered CD case full o' music that I listened to while in Texas
• about five other pairs of sunglasses from over the years
• 20,000 pens

Now, we've all had instances where we've stopped looking for a particular item, and it'll show up when we're looking for something else. The above list and other assorted crap seems to have permanently gone into another dimension, no matter how many other items I've searched and then non-searched the house for. I'm irked.


I'm also irked that the Derby Dolls are continuing to be harassed by the city. Yesterday we were told that our bout originally scheduled for May 5 that was rescheduled for May 12 may now not happen at all. Why? Because the city won't give us the permits necessary to have more bouts based on a false report that we had "simulated sex acts" as part of our halftime show at the April 14 bout. Now, we did have some dorky "dance" troupe as our halftime show who were provocatively dressed, doing provocative moves. BUT, no one was nekkid, and the audience is over 21. A tape was provided that showed what the dancers actually did. No go. Oh, and the cops apparently told our bar hosts that they're not allowed to sell alcohol at our games anymore, either. No reason given.

What freakin' gives?!?!?!?!

There's definitely some person or organization who is out to shut us down. We don't know who it is, and the city council won't tell us. They'll deny us permits based on accusations that carry no burden of proof, so we're guilty until proven innocent. And even then, we get screwed. Jeez, and I thought that only happened during criminal trials.

So today I continue the pissy mood that I've been sporting most of the week. Hooray.

Here's a monkey for you to enjoy. I'm currently building it in Illustrator:

Drunk Scouts

Every Wednesday the husband drags a few of his work slaves over to a local pub for a drinking session that's theraputic as hell for keeping everyone from going postal at his place of employment. They're a funny group of people who happen to be working on something so craptacular, it's mind-boggling. I encourage the husband to do this...after all, if I'm going to go to derby activities anywhere from 3 to 7 nights a week, he had better be able to have a life, too. He's managed to make this weekly event worth noting at his work...one of his nicknames is the Leader of the Drunk Scouts.

The husband has told me in the past that I should skip practice and come out drinking with him and the coworkerbees. He seemed to think that I'd actually add to the fun quotient. Well, last night was the proving ground for that theory, since I blew off practice(still can't skate anyway so why go?)and rode the bicycle to the pub.

3 Long Island Ice Teas, 3 Irish Car Bombs, some pub food and a Sharpie later, and the husband's crew was covered in drunken doodles. I also tagged the bartender. She was pretty cool about it even though she had no idea what she was getting herself into.


This-here picture is just disturbing. In case you can't tell, the guy who has his shirt pulled up has a tatdoodle on his stomach. Poor bastard.

















Here's a nice cross-section of some of my handiwork, as well as the efforts of the other redhead in the group:
















Luckily(?!)for me, I have to be at derby practice on Wednesdays for most of May. I don't think my liver would be able to manage a weekly abuse session like last night.

Well...

...I hate not being able to exercise for real. Bicycling should be a great workout, but with my metabolism I'd have to ride about 5,000 miles a day to keep the fat at bay. So I've gained 10 lbs. the past two weeks. Argh.

It doesn't help when I'm sitting on my fat ass doing crap like this:





















I'm trying to get my Illustrator chops back up. While I'm still in Unemployed land, I should be transferring more drawings into something vaguely useable. We'll see how that goes.

Blah. I'm in a foul mood.

So Close, Yet So Far...

I got hired and fired from the husband's place of employment yesterday. Yes, all in one afternoon. That was amusing! So I've scheduled some alternate freelance and keep hoping that a union gig with my name on it opens up soon.

Back in December I was asked to paint up a hard-sided rolling suitcase for one of the rollergirls. I've been terrified to start on it, because of my lack of experience in using enamel paint, which I think would be more durable than acrylic. Since it's a rainfest today, I think I'll have to break down and start it and hope for the best. If I screw up, I don't know what I'll do.

Speaking of said rollergirl, she had come up to me earlier this week all a-giggled saying, "I have a secret!" I asked if she was pregnant. No, she says mock-sorrowfully. She hinted that she'd tell me soon.

Last night she broke down and told me. "I called them," she cryptically says to me. I instantly know what she's talking about. "YOU DID NOT!" I said. "YES I DID!" she replied. "And you came really close! They loved you for a couple of weeks!" Alas, I didn't make the final cut, so no trip to NYC to have my wardrobe ravaged. Damn!

I feel pretty special(in a have-to-wear-a-helmet-every-day type of way)to have people in my life who are willing to go out of their way to embarrass the living bejeezus out of me. That takes effort and dedication, and I respect that!

Speaking of embarrassing, here's a couple of photos from last week's bout. I got a lot of compliments on the hat:












































Knee update: went to the doctor on Tuesday. She inspects the knee. Says nothing is broken and to take it easy for another week. If it's still very painful by next week, I get to schedule an MRI. I asked and got an x-ray just to make doubly-sure that nothing's broken. Nothing's broken. I've been good about taking ibuprofin 3x a day, and the knee is beginning to feel better. Not enough to run, jump or skate, but I can ride my bicycle like nobody's business and even walk a little bit.

Yay.

Another Day, Another...uh...Day.

Monday.

Jobless, winless, and tired.

However, I got my new "business cards" in the mail today!

Aren't they cool?! I love 'em, even though I can't take a decent photo of them to save my life! They're called "Moo cards" and I ordered them through Flickr, the photo website. For $20 one can order a box o' cards with as many different pix as they want. On the back one can either have the pic info or have biz card info. Mine have my name, email addy, blog addy, and "I draw lots of silly stuff". It's fun!


For those of you who didn't go to the Derby Dolls game on Saturday, my team lost.

Which SUCKS.

However, we found out that we do have fans! And they got to see the best skateout EVER:


Silly as hell, but it was worth it. The Tough Cookies won by five points. We made them work VERY hard for that win. Now that my team got its @$$ kicked, I'm hoping that some internal @$$-kicking ensues so that we don't lose again.

Stuck on the Sidelines

Welp, I'm not skating in the game tonight.

Which SUCKS.

However, whatever I did to my knee still hurts, and even when I wrap it and put on my nifty Mad Max brace over it, it still twinges when I twist it a certain way. The chiropractor says I sprained a couple of ligaments, but he doesn't think I tore them. I personally think that too, since the pain I get is so specific.

So hopefully I'll be in the infield during the game screaming my lungs out.

Wheeeeeee!

Not being able to play in the game tonight makes me wanna pull out my innards.

Pop!

This is not my week.

Last night was the rehearsal scrimmage for our game this coming Saturday. It sucked some major @$$age.
Fight Crew doesn't have its captain and badass blocker, Myna Threat playing. Nor does it have one of its jammers, Crystal Deth. OK, that leaves quite a few other perfectly capable skaters to take on the Tough Cookies with minimal problem.

Well, except for the fact that everyone was nervous last night and craziness ensued.

First off, no one felt on their game. I certainly wasn't. My situation wasn't helped with the injury I received last night. Yep, I got injured. Don't know whether I'll be able to skate the game, as a matter of fact. Greeeeeaaaaaat. How did it happen? You may be asking.

Well, allow me to retort...I was at the front/middle of the pack. FC jammer was being held back by a wall o' Cookies. I did a sweep and took everyone up to the railing. So I had 3-4 skaters pushing on me from one direction. Someone...maybe a Cookie, maybe a Crew, decided to do what I did from the very front of the pack, and they ended up hitting me up at the rail on the other side of me, effectively sandwiching me up against the group that I just took up to the rail. That caused me(and half of the group at the rail) to fall, and when I did, my left knee twisted. I heard a pop! and knew right then I was fucked.So I sat out the rest of the scrimmage.

Then, there were the pack refs. They called a lot of penalties. Mostly against Fight Crew. Now, I'm not going to say that FC didn't earn those penalties. However, there isn't a clean-skating team in the entire league, so for one team to get penalties waaayyyyyyyy more than another shows that there's something going on with the damn refs. We ended up having 3 skaters foul out of the game entirely. The Cookies got one. One?!?!? After some of the sh!t I saw in that scrimmage that wasn't called, I was pissed.

This forced the rest of the skaters to have to hustle a lot more. Which actually turned out for the best for them. They got wayyyyyy more practice than they anticipated, and in the long run it's going to make them better skaters. The trial by fire part sucked, though.By the end of the night, two more FC skaters got injured to some degree or another. I think we ended up with six skateable skaters out of 14. Good times!The score was 43-17.

Today I'm going to try to Mad Max my knee and see if that'll make me mobile enough to play on Saturday. This sucks. It's bad enough that the other teams in the league want to see us go down, but when we get extra-proper screwed, it just makes me even more cranky.

Easter

Today is Easter.

I haven't had my yearly Cadbury chocolate egg yet. Guess where I'm going tomorrow? Yep, discounted Cadbury eggs at the local grocery store, here I come!

This past week was an extravagance in Passover eating. My gawd, I'm fat. Need to skate more so that I can a)lose the weight, and b)be ready for our game next weekend. Which c)I think might be the first time that Fight Crew loses a game since we started having bouts again last year. As a result, d)I'd be very unhappy and would want to kick my team's collective butt. Well, some of them, at any rate.

I've been pondering on Anibator's rant about Geena Davis' call to change the view of female in animation. As I said in the comments section of that post, I find it ironic that Davis herself talks about acting out male characters from the show The Rifleman with no ill effects, but thinks that animation needs more female characters. How did she get through her childhood so successfully, but other women didn't, just based on the number of female characters in cartoons!?

Some of my thoughts: I have met a few women executives in animation. Some of them were foul, some of them were alright. One of them told me outright that my show ideas that featured girl characters would not get picked up by the studio just because of the female lead aspect of the show. She said that it's pretty much gospel that little boys won't watch shows featuring little girls. What about Powerpuff Girls and the like? Those are considered exceptions.

Lourdy.

So I don't bother pitching my show ideas anymore, 'cos they have icky girls in them. The bs involved with dealing in the studio system with trying to please executives, focus groups(a whole other rant), advertising, budgets, schedules, paperwork, potential ratings, etc. makes me itch just thinking about it.

There are a lot more female characters in animation than there ever were before. Most of them are pretty bland and stereotyped, as is exampled in Anibator's rant. Would it change if more women artists were moved up into director positions? Hmmmm...maybe. I don't know why there are plenty of women background artists, timers, storyboarders, and character designers out there but not a lot of women directors. What if there were more women animation writers?

Sidenote:
Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch about animation writers in general, I'm throwing this out there because as of right now, there are scripts in the overwhelming majority of animation and writers write them. Would I prefer that board artists were just given an outline to work from story-wise to board out? Hells yes! But that's not the reality as of right now.

So, would more women writers help bring about a change in having interesting female characters in animation? I'd go for interesting over sheer numbers any day.

I think the young crop of artists enterting the animation industry can help change things a bit if they realize the power they have. Hell, even the old farts can help change the industry if they come out of their cubby holes.

Argh. Posting this stuff after a day of drinking wine and watching professional drifters in Long Beach makes for some fuzzy thinking. Ah well.

So to end, here's some more bar doodles. Here's Jenna Tailya and Vulvarine showing off their "tattoos":














Here I am starting on Jenna's "tattoo". Poor girl. She really didn't know what she was in for when she sat next to me:

It Takes Two...

Here's an example of my madd drunk-doodling skills from Sunday night. The critter was drawn on one of our newer mega-jammers, Mila Minute. While I was drawing, my captain Myna Threat came up to me and yelled, "GIVE IT TWO BUTHOLES!" I thought that was funny, so I did. See said butholes on either side of the mouth.

Snoopy

Much like millions of other brats, I lovedlovedloved Peanuts as a kid. Especially Snoopy, of course. There was an almost Pavlovian response to seeing and hearing the CBS Special intro appear on the tv screen when they were about to air whatever classic Peanuts show at holiday time. Vince Guaraldi is best-known for his music on those specials. I had a kickass metal Snoopy lunchbox that I treasured for quite a few years. When I got a Lucy watch for my seventh birthday, I was stoked!!!

When I was in fourth grade, I got a small collection of Peanuts strips from the early-to-mid 60's. It was one of those cheapo repo's that were done just for schools, available through the school's book club. I noticed how different the characters looked. Especially Snoopy, of course. I liked the older-style Snoopy, when he was more dog-like. It wasn't until I was an adult that I did more research and found how cool Peanuts used to look even earlier, in the 50's:


































I find the above designs to be very much a product of their time. They appeal to the sense that the 50's were supposed to be about innocence and sweetness. What made it great was the philosophizing on a larger level coming from characters that were supposed to be small children. Great stuff.

The below is from the very early 60's. You can see that Snoopy is already developing a bulbous head, though he's still very doggish:








By the late 60's/early 70's, Snoopy evolved to the egg-head that is most familiar to everyone. I dunno, it's bland in my eyes. Then again, I think I liked the older designs because of the nostalgia factor. The evolution of the human characters bug me a little, but not as much as Snoopy's evolution. The line quality is something else that bugs me. I liked the smooth linework in the earlier drawings. The evolved scratchiness of the later work doesn't do it for me. I guess I'm just smoov like that.
























Whenever I see ads for Knott's Berry Farm, I just want to puke. I hate the Peanuts characters in that. Not because they're shills for an amusement park, but that they're badly done shills. Blah.


In other news...

I went and got my first flat tire on my Brand New Bike yesterday! Whooooooo! Glad to get that out of the way so fast. Luckily(?!) I did it in the afternoon with plenty of time to take the damn bike back to the bike store for some maintenance. They put in tire liners and new tubes(hopefully they're better tubes than the stock ones), and fixed some other squeaks and misalignments as well. The cool thing on the other squeaks and misalignments...I didn't ask for them to look into them, the dude did it on his own. Coolio! So I'm gonna be riding the bicycle to the husband's parents' pad tonight for Passover. Yeehaw!

Last night the husband and I went to the derby league's favorite bar to drown our sorrows with the Fresh Meat skaters. They were supposed to have had a little exhibition bout last night for their friends and family, but the Fire Marshall shut them down last week. So we had a Pity Party. Some fool brought a Sharpie out, and I started drawing on people. That was the bestest fun ever! I hope to get photos of what I did...they were hilarious!

New biek!

Yesterday the husband and I bought new bicycles.

This came as an almost-total surprise to me, as the husband had casually mentioned once or twice that he was thinking of getting a new bicycle, but I had no idea how close he was to actually doing it.

We started out with running errands on the old bikes, and he said that he wanted to stop by a couple of bicycle places. Okee-dokee.

As a side note, what the hell is it about bicycle shops that make them so damn snotty? The first place we went to, they ignored us. As in, the husband tried to get a salesputz's attention in regards to a bike light and the putz pretended that the husband wasn't there and took a phonecall instead. We left on the spot.

So we went to the next place, where it took awhile to get saleshelp, but we did, and we ended up buying the bikes that the husband had kinda-sorta researched on the internet. They had the husband's bike ready to go. They had the frame for my bike in stock, but they had to "build it up". They said it would take an hour. Fine. We ride home, relax, eat some beef jerky, and call my sister(well, wake her up) to get a ride back to the place. Over two hours later, we get back to the bike shop. My bike still wasn't ready. After me standing around for an added 15 minutes after we got there. So we decided to go eat some lunch.

Over an hour later(I never want to eat at Swingers again)we go back to the bike shop. Now they can't find my bike. WHAT?!?! I was seriously about to go ballistic at this point. As I stomped over to the store manager, they finally find the bike in the back of the service area. Lucky for them. So we finally get to ride the damn things.

They're comfy. And fast. We got the new Schwinn Voyageur, and this year's model has disc brakes! They're great! Nice ride, less work...it makes me want to not drive a car again.

However...

The husband now thinks there's something wrong with the bearings in the steering column of his bike. So he wants to take the bike in today so that they can fix it. He doesn't want to ride it in. He doesn't have a carrier for the car. So now he's getting all frustrated about how to bring the bike in. Great. April Fools, indeed!

Expect screaming and waiting around to ensue.