More Squirrels

Over the weekend I was farting around with a stencil that I made. I don't know what it is about squirrels, but they're damn fun to draw and make stencils out of. Anyway, the photos below show my stencil and my awesome overspray-prowess with spray chalk. You wish you could be this sloppy:










Sorry for the ridiculous amount of blue that these photos have. I tried fixing it in Photoshop, but it didn't work too well. Oh well. If you want to see the true grandeur of this hot pink squirrel, come visit my backyard.










I'm thinking of airbrushing the lil' booger on a t-shirt for fecal matter and guffaws. However, I'm thinking of not including the overspray. Try to contain your disappointment, sports fans.


Tonight there's a meeting after derby practice in which a bunch of us will talk about how we're going to run our bouts this season. That includes any and all rule changes(we play the game differently from every other league out there, because our old coach who has since quit said so), how long each period will go for, how the referee situation will be set up, etc. I was looking forward to this meeting, but now I'm not. In fact, I'm seriously contemplating going back on my two-month personal ultimatum I gave myself to stay with the Derby Dolls because one of the league owners is pissing me off so bad. She's acting like a Hollywood producer in that she has to have her hand in just about everything. Which would be OK if she were focused, but she's not.

I don't want to quit the Derby Dolls, but I may have to for sanity's sake.

I Dunno...

...which is more disturbing, the 3-armed baby:















Or the "family heirloom":

What I did last week...

Can I just say that building a roller skate in Illustrator is not easy?

Mark your calendars now and SHOW UP:

Scurry Up

I have this week of day-job-freeness going on. No deadlines, no being nice to anyone.

But I'm still busy.

I have 3 toilet seats that need to be started, 3 more that need to be finished. A bout poster needs to be tidied up. Stencils need to be made and cut and ready to use by the weekend. And I'm running derby practice tonight. Oh, and I'm still coughing up almost-solid chunks of phlegm. Good times!


Here's a rough drawing of the seat I've started for a gallery show in October that I'm supposed to be participating in:








Cute, isn't it?

Yes, repulsive.

Fuzzy

My head is still fuzzy from this cough/cold/flu thing that I've been "enjoying" over the past 4-5 days. Also, my computer has decided that it doesn't need to see the D drive within its innards. Which is a big problem, because that's where allllllllll my artwork is stored. Oh hell yeah, good times! So no pictures for now. Which may be a relief, for all I know.

My last day at work was a pain. The sequence director suddenly decided that many drawings that have been in the boards for three weeks or more were suddenly unacceptable and I had a lot of redrawing to do. What made it really maddening was that he didn't compile a list, he just kinda decided on the fly what he wanted changed as he flipped through the entire board throughout the day. So I'd have a revision. Take the page to his office, he'd look at it, say yay or nay, and either have me redraw that page again or hand me one, two or three more changes to make at a time. Rinse and repeat.

So I was running back and forth between my cubicle and his office all freakin' day. I think I wore through the carpeting between that horrible cubicle and that horrible office. And I was driving to Sacramento as soon as the last revision was completed. He knew it, but kept with the straggling drawings here-and-there until I was seriously thinking of just throwing what I had left to do at him and leaving without getting my final paycheck from Human Resources. Note: not a very good plan.

I just want to say that I don't mind doing the work, as long as it's somewhat organized and useful. What happened on Friday was random and chaotic and DAMMIT, it was my last fuxxing day!

The last thing I want to hear when I'm trying to get work done and get the hell out is: "Hey, it's lunchtime, go talk to your derby friends and take a break." Um, NO, how about you figure out somewhat quickly what else you want me to redo so that I can get it done and get the FUXX outta here, never to darken your doorstep any more?

Now that's a great idea!

I was in a foul mood, to say the least. You'd think that the sequence director would want to get rid of me as fast as possible, but I really think he enjoyed torturing me.

To add insult to injury, the production person on the crew forgot to give my final timecard to Human Resources, so they didn't have my final paycheck cut and ready for me. Bastards! So I could've walked out after all, as my paycheck was mailed to me. Sheesh.

The last comical aspect of all this? The supervising director kept saying to me, "You should become a director! You'd be GREAT!" Uh, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Not Again...

I have some kind of flu-cold-ick thing going. I hatehatehate it when I get sick, as it's usually because I've been exposed to someone who refused to stay home and get over their sickness so they're spreading it to everyone else in the free frickin' world. So did I stay home when I started getting it last Friday? Oh hell no, I went to my last day of work and then drove up to Sacramento! Yes, I specialize in hypocrisy, why do you ask?

So I saw the Bay Area Derby Girls and the Sac City Rollers do their thing. It was really weird to be a spectator and not have any responsibility to do anything except say, "Hi, I'm from the LA league." and buy shirts from each league.

BAD girls: they debuted two new teams: the Treasure Island Goldiggers and the Alcatraz Escapees. I cheered for the Goldiggers, as they had cool uniforms and I was staying with one of their team members, Fighty Irish. Their games are split into three 20-minute periods. The skating goes by really fast, but the breaks in between the periods are as long as the periods themselves, so it really killed the flow of the game. It didn't help that the only entertainment they had was a magician/freak show guy who specialized in putting drill bits up his nose and laying down on a bed of nails. snore. By the start of the third period, a noticeable chunk of the crowd had left.

The pack was tight and moving at a good pace. The jammers were pretty good. Didn't see too much in strategy going on, and part of that is because the pack didn't look around to keep track of the jammers often enough. No one did any whips or jumps. One skater, Rolemite, landed on her face when she jammed. We feared that she was truly injured, but she recovered and came back in after sitting out a couple of jams. In the end, Fighty Irish from the Goldiggers and Motley Cruz from the Escapees really stood out as exceptional jammers. The Goldiggers won by a sizeable margin.


Sac City Rollers: this was their first exhibition bout. They had their new girls, the A-cups (I love that name! Better than the "Fresh Meat" term that the Dolls use) play a game of musical chairs to the tune of Black Sabbath's Sweet Leaf that was hilarious. The sister of one of my old friends from high school participated in that and she hung in there for a good long while. After a short band set, the league's two new teams, the Shakedown Syndicate and Operation Assassination played for one 20-minute period.

Their packs were slower and more spread out, which makes it easier for the jammers to find holes to skate through. They started playing pretty clean, but they ended up getting rather handsy with each other...I saw a little grabbing, which is highly illegal. It was still a fun match to watch, and the Shakedowns won. I was impressed with Loco Coco, Billie Club, and Mugshot Mary skate-wise. I was asked by manymany of the skaters after the bout what I thought of them. Wow! As if my opinion matters, but I must admit I was a bit tickled by it all. They're a great bunch of girls and I hope some of them make it down to LA to watch us play.

This is such a boring trip report, but it's hard to be entertaining when I'm dizzy. Feh.

Horse

A few weeks ago one of the husband's biker friends emailed me saying that he saw a photo of me in a chopper magazine called The Horse. I was amused, since The Horse is a somewhat typical biker mag in that the women seen in its pages are usually wearing veryvery little and are draped across motorcycles that they don't own and therefore don't ride. So what would little old me be doing in a magazine like that?

Skating at the No Love ride, of course. Click on photo to see bigger copy of said photo:












It's a crapacious scan, but the photo is pretty funny. Appropos for the mag, since I almost have cleavage showing.


I'm still shovelling Scooby doo. One of the sequence directors is making friends and influencing people by totally flaking on getting his section done. The board artists on his crew are disgusted...and after I saw what their boards look like(absolutelyfreakingamazing stuff, they're doing), I can understand why...the director's stuff looks like an autistic koala on LSD drew it out. I can't wait to hear what happens next.

Miss Manners

In the new roller derby world, it's been customary in the not-too-distant past to let out-of-town rollergirls get into bouts for free. However, for the bouts that I plan to attend this coming weekend, that doesn't seem to be the case. Either the Bay Area and Sacto leagues aren't up on said etiquette, or that etiquette is already a thing of the past. San Diego didn't honor that etiquette either, which I disagreed with. Luckily I was able to sneak my way in. Nevertheless, it sucks when I'm trying to plan this shit.

I'm not whining about this because I'm cheap. Well, I am cheap, but damn, I'm driving all the way through the central CA valley to see these bitches skate and I don't get a break?! Um, jeez. Makes me love Texas that much more...they know how to treat their guests!

Well, at least the Dolls have a way to cut down our guest list for upcoming bouts, I guess.

Oh, Sweet Release...

I'm a happy girl today.

Yes, you read right. I'm not my usual miserably whiny self. Why?

Because we got our banked track back up and running at our old rooftop home in downtown/Chinatown. Oh, blessed skating release!

How could this get better? My job ends on Friday. Oh hell yeah, I'm happy!

But wait, there's more!

The Derby Dolls have an actual season lined up. Yes, a real, honest-to-goodness season.
We're having flat-track bouts in June and July, with a weekend of banked-track fun in August. Oh by-the-way, if you're in LA on Saturday, June 17, you're required to show up to the Fight Crew v. Tough Cookies bout in NoHo. We're going to be in our spiffy new uniforms kicking some wannabe Girl-Scout ass. It'll be fun. You'll enjoy yourself, especially when you're cheering for your favorite miserably whiny Fight Crew captain. Oh yes, you will.

How can this be topped?

Glad you asked.

I'm going to NoCal next weekend to see the Bay Area Derby girls do their thang. And then I'm giong to see the Sac City Rollers have their first in-town bout the following night. This will be the last time I'll be able to travel for awhile(if you call going to NoCal "travelling"), so I'm really looking forward to it. Yes, I'm a derby-aholic.

I'm doing a Snoopy dance of joy on the inside.

And now, a totally incomprehensible doodle that I did several years ago. I must've been drunk.

Grumpy Again...

Is it wrong to want to throttle the boss?

It really sucks to work for a person who keeps changing their minds, as all it does is create more work with less results. It'd be a helluva lot easier for the boss to actually sit and think about what they want before telling people to change what they've done already, especially since it ends up being changed about five more times after that. Grrrrrrrrr!

Only two more weeks.

Only two more weeks.

Only two more weeks...


Anyway, here's a Swamp critter to gaze upon. I don't remember where it came from. It just...became.

Summer...?

I almost forgot to mention...summer is creeping up on me again.

The best indicator of summer's presence is the yearly return of movie screenings at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. Some folk might find it kinda morbid to bring a picnic dinner, a bottle of wine or other libations and a blanket to a cemetery to watch old films. Of course I don't, and apparently there are a couple thousand other people who are freaks like me.

Tonight is the first screening of the year: The Maltese Falcon. Yes, these guys go for the classics! Next week they're showing The Birds. They were taking suggestions for other films to be shown during the season, so I emailed them. Amongst my suggestions were Chaplin and Keaton films, Blazing Saddles and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I forgot to suggest Rock n' Roll High School...shame on me.

Five-o dee May-o

Most LA folk spend Cinco de Mayo drinking margaritas and partying. I'm certainly not adverse to such activity, but this year I did something different.

I went to a wedding at the LA Zoo.

Yes, at the Zoo.

It was pretty fun...we got to ride a tram, see the giraffes and an elephant, make fun of peacocks, and -- the best part -- we had chimpanzees screaming throughout the ceremony. That was cool. The groom (Mudsock) and bride (Starfish) looked wonderful and put on a great gig. To be honest I always thought that Starfish would rather lick the sweat off of an obese gymnast's buttcrack during a particularly humid summer afternoon than talk to me, so I was pleasantly startled to be included in the whole chimp-screaming adventure, since it was a small, intimate affair. It was also pleasant to see other work colleagues whom I haven't talked to in about forever. Hi kids...leave a comment, dammit!

Anyway, it was a fun evening and a heartfelt wedding. It was quite nice to go to a ceremony that wasn't caught up in ceremony.


In other news...

Two weeks left on Scooby Doo, then it's blessed unemployed release. I'm thinking of going back up to Sackoftomatoes for the Sac City Rollers' first hometown bout. I also have two toilet seats to paint, a monkey logo to draw, and those damn buttons that I keep threatening to order need to be ordered.

On Wednesday I went to a fundraiser at a local bar for the new flat-track derby league that broke away from the Derby Dolls. Overall I had fun and even bought a shirt. I had a long discussion with some skaters who haven't made up their minds about whether to stay with the Dolls or go to this new league. What's the problem? Well, some of them are up to be placed on Derby Doll teams, but these girls are kinda opinionated about which team they want to be on. In fact, they said that if they're placed on a particular team(not mine...they apparently like my team...as they should!), they'd rather quit the Dolls and go to the flat-track league. Oy vey! What the hell am I supposed to do with that information?! Seriously, I'm at a loss as to how to handle it. And this is happening during our supposed league hiatus. Hiatus, schmiatus, apparently.


I have to work this weekend. As well as go to San Diego to check out the first exhibition bout for the sister league. I'm looking forward to that, as I'll be able to use my human megaphone powers during the game for good instead of evil.


Below is a doodle that was drawn when I was depressed a few years ago. I forget what exactly I was depressed about when I drew it, but I remember the general feeling of misery when I look at it.

More Entropy...

The latest in @$$hole neighbor activity here.