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.

Wheeeeeeeeeeee!

Another weekend of derby silliness:









































Yes, I'm wearing pink.

Yes, I still hate pink.

But in the end I don't care, as long as I have fun. This bout was fun. And sparkly.

The LA City Council has been giving grief to the Derby Dolls. Specifically one woman named Jan Perry. She doesn't like us, we don't really know why. So we've been having to fight an incredible amount of red tape that keeps changing shape so that we can keep rolling. We had a regular season bout scheduled for last Saturday, but it had to be postponed because of Jan Perry's insistence that we're not greasing the palms of the right people uh...doing things legally.

Um, yeah.

There are rumors that she doesn't like anyone who isn't big money trying to start up business in her district. She doesn't like poor artists who help pave the way to the monied gentrification that she seems to want, either.

Despite the bout postponement, we had a perfectly-legal friends-and-family-only event since there were quite a few out-of-towners who were coming in to see their beloveds skate. It was a free-for-all skater-wise. All a skater had to do was show up on game day with a black shirt and a pink shirt with name and number on the back. We lined up by skill and divided into teams about a half hour before the game started.

No pressure, no extra practices, no worrying about promotion, making bank, or whether the fire marshall would shut us down.

It was the most fun I've had skating in front of people in a looooooooooong time.














On Sunday I had to help lead Fresh Meat practice. I'm Team Manager for one of the temporary Fresh Meat teams called The Mean Machines. It's a take-off from The A-Team. The other team is called The Mr. T-Stops. After practice the Mean Machines did some bonding by going to have sushi. The place I took them to has an amazing Spicy Tuna Tower, and they got hooked. They kept ordering more Towers, and then turning to me to ask if I'd squish it up so that all the ingredients were mixed up correctly and then serve it to them. So they started calling me "Momma *T*". It's very cute!

Freelance schedules are still fluctuating. The current stuff I'm on is going fine (well, other than the designer who died last week). The other job I was supposed to start April 1, then April 4, is now scheduled for April 18. Argh. Whatever.

I keep threatening to talk about the mysterious industry person known as "Anibator". They had a venom-filled blog called, "Anibation Fantasy" that just blew the doors off the industry in saying how screwy everything is right now. He had some points. Good points. Great points. Unfortunately, he wouldn't keep the blog going. It got deleted and gay porn was what you saw if you went to the old blog address.

Now there's another Anibation Fantasy blog. Most of it is reposts from the first blog(cached from Google, no doubt), with a few newer posts thrown in.

A blog like that needs to be around. To say what needs to be said. Unfortunately, Anibator isn't sparking a movement as of yet. Everyone's still in the bitching stage. If Anibator keeps the new blog going(no new posts for almost two weeks...not a good sign), there's a chance that the meek little animators in the industry will start to think for not just their little corner of the world but for the industry in general. And then make some action accordingly.

But Anibator has to do that work for now. Because it's going to take a lot to get animators out of their cubbyholes and into the mindset that change is up to they themselves, not the union(though the union is made up of artists too), not the studios, not the government, and not just Anibator.

I have a lot more to say on the subject. But not right now. I gotta go do stuff.

Highs and Lows

High: had a lot of fun at the Sacred City/Bakersfield bout last Saturday.

Low: had to work the bout(didn't get drunk enough beforehand like the husband did). Penalty tracking was a skill I previously had no experience in doing.

High: set up a bootcamp date with Sacred City in May.

Low: came out of the bar where the discussions took place to be told by the door guy that some drunken f*cktard backed into my car with his SUV and his trailer hitch scraped the bejeezus out of my front bumper. Dammit!

High: Sunday we stopped at Harris Ranch on the way home for steak.

Low: it didn't live up to the hype. We didn't go for the fancy expensive steak-eating restaurant, though. Our bad.

High: today the husband got a raise!

Low: he's going to have to work more weekends.

High: got my notes back on my freelance.

Low: not in the mood to do any work 'cos the weather is gorgeous and all I wanna do is go outside and skate.

High: I'm recovering from some major dehydration that I experienced after this weekend's fun.

Low: one of the guys on the freelance crew I'm on died last night or early this morning of a heart attack. He was in his 40's. I feel especially weird about it because I tried to get a hold of him yesterday and today to ask about some designs he was doing for the episode I'm working on.

Isn't it surreal how one feels when someone they know has died?

HOLY CRAP!!!!

So I checked in to my goofy MySpace account this morning and found a pic of this:




























So? Two chicks got the same tattoo. Hardly earth-shattering. Why do you care? You might be asking yourself.

They skate with the Bakersfield Rollergirls, and they just got tatts of their league logo.

A LOGO THAT I DESIGNED!

How cool is that?! They're marked for life with my artwork!

Mwahahahahahahahahaahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Two-fer Tuesday

Oh looky, I get a break in the weather and I'm actually able to accomplish something! Who knew?!

Here we have my latest favorite seat...octopus and girl.













I like how I didn't bother to hook up the octopus' arms very well from the lid to the seat. That's klassy!




















Ride 'em, cowgirl!

This is one of my fave pin-ups that I've done. She looks pretty good, has a nasty scowl on her face, and is a redhead.






















This close-up is kinda fuzzy, but hopefully you get the point:





















This week I'm looking forward to actually being able to work on the freelance stuff I have to do, since I now have something resembling character designs to work with. Woohoo! I still don't know when the roughs are due, but oh well. I'll just keep plugging away.

One of the voices on this show is Patrick Warburton. Yeah, that guy from Seinfeld(a show that I don't particular like), and he voiced Kronk in Emperor's New Groove(a movie that I liked mainly because of his character in the flick). In real life he's a rather deadpan fellow expression-wise, but his reads for animation are very expressive. Very expressive. It makes me want to put a pose in for every other word he says. Needless to say, it's hard to do that, so it really slows me down when I try to break down big chunks of dialogue into manageable pieces of storyboard panels.

Darn you to heck, Warburton! Darn you for having such a fun, expressive voice!

Anyway, I need to have the roughs done before I leave town for the weekend on St. Paddy's day. I'm going up to Sacoftomatoes to catch an interleague bout: Sacred City vs. Bakersfield. Sacred City is the breakaway league from the original Sacramento league. I submitted a rough logo idea or two to Sacred City, which they promptly discarded because they actually didn't know what it means to submit rough ideas. I'm not gonna clean something up that isn't going to be used, by gawd.

Bakersfield had the good sense to use my logo idea, so I might be cheering for them just a little bit more over the hometown girls. Ha! That's what happens when you dismiss my work!

Neener-neener.

One of these days I want to blog about the infamous "Anibator" who had a helluva blog about the animation biz up, but has since taken it down for various reasons. Anibator was anonymous, as were most of the commenters on his blog, but there were some excellent points made about the sad, pathetic state of animation.

WIP: 1...FINISHED!

Here's the lid to the never-ending Bellydancer seat.

I think it turned out pretty damn good, all things considered. I hope that the lady who's getting this likes it, too.


Last night the husband and I attempted to check out the yearly group show at La Luz de Jesus. It's a cool gallery, but as with many "cool" things in Hell Lay, it's in a part of town where the parking is absolutely ATROCIOUS at best. We drove ar0und and around and around looking for a damn parking space just to look at some goddam art. No luck. At all.

I got peeved, strangely enough. So what did I do?

I said we should go eat dinner instead. Which we did.

Take that, La Luz!

And had fun, 'cos we went to the Brite Spot on Sunset. It's a favorite little diner-type place for many little Silverlake hipsters and such, but we like it too. We sat next to a punk/metal band who seemed to be planning a tour. They were in their mid-40's and had many piercings and tattoos. They were of an age where the piercings in particular weren't really working for them looks-wise, but then again I'm kinda funny-looking too, so who am I to throw stones?

So we had a very, very mellow evening last night.

Today is another bout, the Sirens vs. Tough Cookies. I don't have to skate! Wow! But I do have to work the bout. Ah well. The husband will get to drink with impunity. Lucky bastard. The LA Marathon is tomorrow, and the new route practically encloses the track. So we're going to have to figure out a way to get out tonight when they start closing the streets off for the marathon route, and get back in tomorrow for clean-up and practice.

Oh freakin' joy.

Stoopid athletes! Messing up our fun!

WIP: 1

Here's a slightly out-of-focus-so-it-looks-more-arty photo of the bellydancer seat that I've spent about, oh, a million years on.

So it seems.

Damn weather.

I'm pressing my luck by trying to do a light clearcoat when it's about 60 degrees outside(that means it's almost too cold to be attempting such daring feats). Hopefully I won't screw it up.

Much.

Freelance Frustration

I'm working for two different freelance productions. Both are non-union, which sucks quite a bit of @$$. Both are scheduled to be worked on at the same time, which also sucks a great deal of @$$. Both are also not able to be worked upon, because I'm lacking in vital materials. How much @$$-suckery can there be?!

The production that I want to work on doesn't have a voicetrack, character designs, or even a model pack to give me. I have the script, and I've already gone through and done chickenscratch-type of thumbnails on the pages so that I'm ready to do the next step of drawing on board paper. Too bad about the not having designs, soundtrack, etc. Oh, and I have no idea when this stuff is due.

The production I don't want to work on has gone back and forth about when I'd get a script. I have no board paper to do the work even if I got a clue as to when they'd send the script. Welp, they sent the script this morning with a killer due date. Owch! Since I have to do my taxes the day the board is due, I'm asking if I can get out of doing this board and be put on another script. Oh yeah, and some board paper would be nice.

I've been emailing studios about other work, but no answer as of yet. Dammit.

I have three toilet seats that are almost done, except for clearcoating. The weather is too crapacious to complete clearcoating, so I now have different parts of each seat lying around the back room, waiting to be clearcoated and put back together. Did I mention that I hate cold wind? I'm really hating it right now, as that's what's preventing me from finishing the damn seats. ARGH!

So what am I doing? Reading angry blogs and watching reruns of "Match Game PM" on the Game channel. Somebody kill me.

More Narcissism

When I skate, I imagine myself to look something like the doodle.
Not pretty, but pretty damn scary. Those are stink lines coming up off of me.



















It's embarrassing to see what I really look like out there. Well, you can almost see the stink lines!


















The weather is keeping me from being able to clearcoat the two toilet seats that I'm working on. So I started painting on yet another one. It has a semi-nautical theme featuring an octopus. I also have some freelance to do. Yay for money!

Shhhhh!

I had to reveal another secret last night.

The husband and I went to another roller derby bout in Orange County. No, that's not the secret part.

Quick backstory: I was brought in as a guest coach to this league last Tuesday, with hilarious results. At first, they hated me. I mean, really loathed me. Why? Because I gave them a warmup that they wouldn't soon forget. I made them work. Then I made them work on essential game skills. Then I made them scrimmage for a whole 20 minutes straight! Thennnnnnnn, I made them do what the Derby Dolls call a Wall of Pain, where situps and pushups ensue...all with skates on. After two hours they were crying and complaining about the pain yet they loved it. Masochists!

Anyway, back to my story. So, there we were in Orange County ready to watch some roller derby. I had recently acquired a pair of white sneakers, which I wore with a white t-shirt and black pants. For those of you who actually know me, this is a shocking wardrobe development because I'm never seen in anything other than black with the occasional red to show some team spirit.

One of the Derby Dolls(and former Fight Crew member), Razorslut was in attendance and immediately noticed the shoes. And gave me quite a bit of grief about them. "Sooooooo, what brought this on?" she slyly asks.

I couldn't get out of it. I knew that I had to make my big confession. She'd weasel it out of me at some point, so coming clean was the best and least painful option.

I added white shoes because I'm slowly...slllllllooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwllllllyyyyyy, adding some color to my wardrobe because I'm a secret freak for a show on TLC called What Not to Wear and I know that my wardrobe sucks. That's right, I love transformation shows!

It all started over Thanksgiving weekend when I was sick. Well, I think it was Thanksgiving weekend, I'm not really sure. Because I was sick. Nevermind. SO, I ended up sitting on the couch in the den feeling like crap and the only thing on tv was What Not to Wear. I was hypnotized.

My wardrobe is atrocious. I know it. There are parts of it that don't bother me because it's for specific things that necessitate it; my leather pants for example. They're for riding motorcycles. That's usually the only time that I wear them, unless a pirate party is announced. My miniskirt collection is another example. I only wear them for roller derby or when skating in general is involved. So when I'm not riding or skating, I don't have a lot to wear that's nice-looking, attractive, or flattering. I just wear menacing black. Which is fine on Halloween, but I do think it affects the job situation sometimes.

Problem is, I don't know diddley about clothes and how to figure them out for a tall, pudgy, knuckle-dragger artist-type who rides motorcycles such as myself. I hatehatehate ultra-feminine stuff. I don't wear pink under most circumstances, I hate floral prints, I hate chiffon and uber-girly stuff. Well guess what? There's a lot of floral prints, and uber-girly stuff out there! I don't know where to find clothes that don't fit the above description. I don't know what I'm doing, period. You'd think being associated with an all-girl derby league would be a help, but to be honest I've been very shy about asking for help from them. Probably because I'd get a lot of grief about it. So I watch What Not to Wear for clothing tips. It's not quite reflected itself in my wardrobe yet, but there's always hope for the future.

To complete my story, Razorslut has gleefully threatened to enter me into the What Not to Wear funfest of getting a new wardrobe. Thank gawd they're not looking for west coast peeps right now(I already checked their official website), so I'm safe from televised humiliation. However, I did draw the below doodle of what it would be like to be on that show, critiquing myself in their 360-degree mirror. Click to view it big and stuff so that you can read it:

The Joys of Pet Ownership

I have three cats.

If I was smart, I wouldn't have any cats, but since I'm a sucker for punishment, three cats I have.

They're all getting older. The youngest, LouC, is a big dumb Eddie Haskell type of a cat. He'll be sweet and cute with us, but as soon as he thinks we're not looking, he'll start some grief with the other two cats. He eats rubberbands and loves frolicking on the bed when we're putting clean sheets on it. He acts like a kitten even though he'll be 13 years old this summer.

When we got him as a young kitten, we were told he was a girl cat. Hence the name. About two weeks after we got the cat, it grew so fast, so quickly, I took another look at it and found out it had stealth balls. It already was answering to "Lucy", so we changed its name to "Lou C Fur". He's what I call a cat's cat...he likes stereotypical kitty toys and kitty food and kitty activities.

The other two are around the same age...we think. Lardo is gauged at around 15 years old. He adopted us one fine day back in 1999 when my sister was taking care of our other cats while we were on a motorcycle trip to Laughlin. See? We adopt critters by proxy, that's how stupid we are.

He's not a big cat, but he's a round cat. He looks like a small orange basketball with a cat head attached. He's mellow and keeps to himself most of the time. However, he's diabetic. Dealing with the joys of a diabetic animal is varied. He doesn't flinch when given his insulin. Giving him other types of medicine is usually painless. He has some baaaaad episodes when he's given too much insulin. Twice he's gone into shock and convulsions where he almost died were it not for my crazy driving to the local animal emergency hospital. LouC used to try to prove to Lardo that since he's bigger than Lardo, he's better. Lardo looks mild-mannered, but he can kick some kitty butt. LouC now leaves him alone most of the time.

Both Lardo and LouC purr very loudly. Sometimes they're in competition, which is strangely lulling when they're both on the bed at night while I'm trying to go to sleep.

Then there's Max.

Max is my first cat. We got her from the Santa Monica animal shelter when she was 4 weeks old...too young to be taken away from her mom, btw. She was fed babyfood and was small enough to be put into the pockets of various clothing. She's small, fuzzy, and has big buggy eyes. She's high-strung and grouchy. I call her the Angriest Cat in the World, because it's true. She's going to be 17 years old at the beginning of April.

She has lymphoma. It settled in her intestines, and it makes her hungry all the time. Whenever I go into the kitchen she'll wake up, jump down from whatever sleeping station she was curled up in to trot after me and meow incessantly. The moment I come close to consciousness in the morning, she meows at me. In the late afternoon/early evening, she meows at me. Whenever I open the door to the den, she follows me in and meows at me. All types of meows. Happy meows. Purr-meows. Yeowly-meows. Growl-meows. Feed-me-now-before-I-pee-on-your-clothes meows. She truly drives me nutso sometimes. It was cathartic to do the above doodle.

I may not have Max and Lardo too much longer...Max is on medication right now, but I refuse to do chemotherapy on her and so the medication she's on might help her out for six months to a year. Lardo just switched insulin today...we'll see how that goes. LouC's doing fine...he has prescription food that he eats, but he's low-maintenance compared to the other two.

Low-maintenance is what I crave right now. I don't think I want more pets when the ones I have leave. But I know that as soon as I see a kitten up for adoption, I'd be tempted. I lasted 4 months without a cat when I first moved out of my parents' house. I made the husband get used to cats even though he's allergic to other people's cats.

At least we won't get a dog. That's too much responsibility, even for us.

Wow! Derby crap!

Last night was the season opener for the Derby Dolls.

My team went into the game with a great amount of anticipation and nervousness. Our best jammer, Militia Etheridge, quit the league. Our two other main jammers, Jihad and Crystal Deth were also not skating due to injury or leave of absence. The team was nervous about the amount of new players we had, and we had a championship title to defend.

We didn't need to worry.

Fight Crew won: 44 to 27 over the Tough Cookies.

WOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! Everyone really did well, I thought. No major injuries, too.

In other fun news, the latest issue of a new roller derby mag, Blood and Thunder has an article about people who do bout posters and such for different leagues and I got a full page! See above...click on it to actually read the damn thing. For some reason the Big Trouble in Little Chinatown poster looks horrible...the gradient on it is all screwed up.

We had famous people at the bout! Patricia and Alexis Arquette were spotted, as was John C. Reilly. I didn't see the Arquette sisters, but I saw John Reilly. It was funny, because a bunch of skaters saw him and NO ONE could remember his name. It went something like, "Hey! That actor guy is here! You know, the one from Boogie Nights!" "Which guy? The one with the gun?" "Nooooooo, the other guy!" "Uh, his friend?" "Um, yeah, I think so!"

Tooooo funny!

I wanted to get a photo with Reilly, but I was too chickensh!t to ask. Lame-o!

Bea Arthur has nothin' on me

Yesterday I was drawing a birthday card for the husband(HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HUSBAND!), and the phone rang.

When I answered, the young guy on the other end of the line asked for Mr. or Mrs. Frame. For a split second I thought of answering with, "Mr. and Mrs. Frame are my parents!" in my favorite stoner/surfer voice, but instead just stated that no, they're not here.

The young man replied with, "Oh. Sorry to bother you, sir."

Oh, good lourd.

It's sad that my voice is getting raspy enough so that I make Bea Arthur sound like Betty Boop. Just sad, I tell ya. It's difficult being this sexy, I tell you whut. And now that Anna Nicole has gone to the big trailerpark in the sky, I'm one step closer to goddess status, fer shure.

Hence, the above doodle.

Nature...yikes!

Everyone sees LA as a suburban/urban sprawl with nothing to offer to stimulate the mind and senses. Sitting in traffic, going to meetings, etc. is soooo mind-numbing. It turns one off to one's surroundings. What can possibly happen here that's interesting?

Come to my neighborhood and you can see some fun, furry critters! No, not the bajillion people walking their dogs...we have raccoons!

The other day I was on the computer(as usual) when I glance outside and notice two raccoons by the back door, loitering about. I've always thought of raccoons as strictly nocturnal creatures, so to see not one, but two of them in daylight was quite a sight. So I did what any badass roller derby player who rides motorcycles does.

I freaked right the hell out!

Then I grabbed the camera.

Here we see one of the raccoons wandering around the backyard. The other one left. Must've had a mind-numbing meeting to go to. Or it found an open trash can.

Whatever.

As you can see, this sucker is big. I figure it to be a young adult. As you can also see, I was still freaked out enough to shoot this pic through the closed screen door. That's style, I tell ya.



After grabbing a couple of photos from inside the house, I excitedly called the husband. I asked if raccoons were dangerous during the day. He thought I was stupid and said that they should be fine. He then suggested that I take some water out for the raccoons. Hmmm. OK.



So I found a plastic bowl and filled it with water. Grabbed the camera, and tiptoed out the front door and silently made my way to the backyard. I put the bowl down and noticed that the remaining raccoon was having fun sniffing around by the trampoline.










It sat under the trampoline.

Then it groomed itself like a cat would.

For some reason, to see a raccoon lick itself as if it were a cat amuses me. It stopped doing that when it noticed me crouched about 20 feet away with a little box making clicking noises every couple of seconds.







Another shot of the confused raccoon. It had an air about it as if to say, "Why are you bothering me? Am I bothering you? No? Then please, let me get back to my licking. I have a hot date later tonight."









It got nervous with me being out there, so it cautiously made its way to the back fence and silently disappeared.

I left the water bowl out, but it has remained untouched. I guess I scared away the fuzzy critters. Ah well.

Updates? What updates?

It's really funny that despite me not having a day job, I manage to stay busy enough to not update this-here blog very much.

Here's some photos from the LA/TX game. They were taken by one of my fave photographers, Boss Hogg. He lives in Santa Cruz but drives all over the state taking pix of the different derby leagues sprouting up like mold in the shower. He's funny as hell and snaps a good pic. I must admit I'm horrified to see that I skate with my eyes bugged out like I'm Rat Fink, though.

The Dolls have another photographer that they use. I and a few other skaters don't like him as much because he tends to focus on a "type" that he'll endlessly take pix of, while ignoring the rest of the team. If a skater doesn't have looooong flowing hair and isn't a size 00, she ain't getting her photo taken by this guy. In fact, he didn't even bother taking photos of Fight Crew with the Toughie Trophy when we won the Championship back in November, yet he took plenty of pix of the opposing team, even in defeat. Um, OK. Whatever.

Today is Superbowl Sunday, and I intend to go skate on the beach. And maybe work on the toilet seats that are works-in-progress in the back room. I also have a travel case that needs painting up, so I'm going to try out enamel paint for the very first time. Should be interesting!

Gawd, I'm easily amused...

Another image from the LiveJournal feed.

I'm cracking up.

Holy Crap!

Uh, bad pun.

I decided to google myself today.

Alright, c'mon, you know you do it, too.

Anyway, some surprising results came up.

First, I'm listed on Yahoo!'s little entertainment equivalent to the imdb. Of course, all the credits listed on there are really old and I don't list any of them on my resume due to severe sucktitude.

This-here blog is high up on the list, but it's below this site. Which was a very pleasant surprise to be part of. Wow, my stuff is slowly getting out into the world!

There's also some hideously old stuff related to Siggraph, and then there's the On Deck auction I did last year.

Huh!

Then it's the altered ego's turn. This blog entry from the Character Road trip show cracked me up. The rest of the results are a bunch of MySpace appearances and tribe.net stuff. Weird, since I hardly go on tribe.net anymore.

Today was a nice, lazy, do-nothing day. At least I showered, but that's about it. Oh wait, I made an appointment to have the oil changed in my car, too. I'm practically in a coma. It's great!

It's OK

Last night was the big bout between LA and Texas. Texas won on our own turf.

But it's OK.

On Thursday during a practice scrimmage each team had a player taken out due to injury. An LA skater got a multiple fracture in her ankle and foot. A Texas skater splintered the bone behind her knee after falling over little ol' me. Last night each team also had injuries...our own Jihad was blocked into the kickrail, and in the process her shin was scraped down to exposed bone. Insert painful wince here. One of the Texas skaters got a skate to the rib, and it may have a hairline fracture. Dayum.

But they'll be OK.

We are a very defense-oriented league; our blocking can be very good. But the majority of our team was off their game just enough to make things difficult for ourselves. Texas' defense was alright, but their jammers were just amazingly fast and they were able to outrun our blockers almost every jam. We have a lot to learn about our jammers...we have no one that compares to their top jammers and we need to fix that.

But it's OK.

The referee crew seemed disorganized and very inconsistent with their calls. Each team were called on the same amount of penalties, but there were times that each team either got over-penalized, or under-penalized. I had some screaming fits with them over points disputes and I think the league needs to overhaul who's reffing and what kind of requirements are needed to ref.

But it's OK.

Our team manager(who managed to fuck up our lineups at one point and seemed to show favoritism towards a player who shouldn't have been played as much as she was) broke my favorite clipboard. It shouldn't be anything to even think about, but I used that clipboard all last season for my team, and it sucks that I don't have that superstitious token of winning in my mind. I now have to search for a replacement, which annoys me because I got the original clipboard under unusual circumstances.

But it's OK.

I'm feeling somewhat serene at the moment. I got to have a quick talk with someone with whom I didn't think I'd get the chance to chat with about past grievances in the league, and I got to apologize to her. It made a world of difference in my attitude. And she seemed to appreciate it, which is even better.

It's one of those instances where I realize that we all can have quite an effect on others.

Now I gotta get back to reality and go back to the track to help clean up. Having the afterparty at the track is, IMO, not a great idea. Mopping the floor because of beer spillage isn't fun!

Done

Welcome to the last Derby Dolls flyer I'll be doing for the forseeable future. Click on it to see its bigger grandness.

Don't blink though...this won't be the version that'll end up being used officially. Glory in it now, by gawd.

I got an email from Mudsock saying that Junyer the 2nd Mudsock Esq. was finally born yesterday. Woohoo! Well, actually, I think Junyer arrived right on time, but for awhile they thought that he'd put in an early appearance because he was getting huge. Starfish must be mighty relieved! Everyone is healthy and happy, too.

What a busy week this will be. Derby practice, derby practice, derby practice. Play against Texas on Saturday, then more derby practice for the Feb. 10 bout. I'm already burnt.

I need to get back into the drawing thing big time. I've let myself rot creatively and physically. I'm wholly uninspired right now. Which is a bad thing if I want to continue being a so-called artist. So now I have to figure out how to reignite myself.

Got any ideas?

I'm Done

I think I can stop going to any other site, now that someone has posted this link for my entertainment.

Alright, it's not just for my entertainment, but I'm laughing anyway.

Another funny link: pithy boyfriend


After the husband complained that I'm still doing too much derby crap, I decided that I'm going to step back from doing art for the league. A variety of reasoning stands behind this, and so I think that I'd rather be bored than be pissed off all to hell in frustration. Besides, I have toilet seats to paint.

My derby diet won't start too soon though...tonight I have a team dinner. Saturday night the husband and I will drive to Irvine for a bout between the Inland Empire league and one of the Orange County leagues that I can't keep straight. Sunday is practicepracticepractice for the LA vs. TX bout next weekend. Then two weeks after that is the start of our regular season, in which my team is playing. Whoa boy.

Now I just gotta work on getting another job...

C-c-c-cold!!!!

One of the husband's greatest fantasties is to have it get cold and wet enough in LA to have snow.

BAD idea!!

Why?

Because then we'd have idiots do things like try to drive in it. See example:




And that's just Portland! Think how much more screwy it would be in LA!

So the drizzle today is nice, but if it gets to freezing and black ice, I'm staying HOME!

My favorite

Everyone has their favorites.

Their favorite shows, their favorite bands, their favorite food, their favorite shoes, their favorite sites that they check on the internet every time they sit in front of a computer.

For me, there's a favorite thread on a favorite site that I check out multiple times daily. It's brilliant in its simplicity. It's a site that shows the latest photos uploaded to Livejournal. It's unbelievable what people post online. And utterly brilliant.

You can see stuff like this:
















Or like this:





















Or, uh, like this:

















And, this:

















But my absolute favorite of the favorites are the cats:


















Apparently the "I'm in ur_________, ________in' ur ________" leet speak series started with some online gaming stuff. Or so I've been told. And I believe everything that I'm told. Anyway, someone takes funny cat photos and adds funny captions and I'm entertained for DAYS.

That's right, I'm part of the lowest common denominator. Ha!

Someone Has Some 'Splainin' to do...

See this moron to the left in the photo? If you know him, tell him his days are numbered.

This photo is of him riding on his bicycle on our track.

Thing is, the little peckerhead doesn't have permission to do so. He came in at some "off" time when the Dolls weren't there as if he owned the place and did his thing.

There are now 100 pissed off women who know how to knock people down very efficiently who want to meet this turdburglar.

The mall security and the cops have been informed, btw. Good thing the moron left PHOTOS of his misdeed.

EDIT: I guess this post has been picked up by the search engines, as I'm now getting anonymous comments about it(after alllll these months!), all in support of the douchebag hipster in the photos.

Guess what?

I'm not publishing any of the comments, you wussies. Trespassing isn't cool, being a douchebag with someone else's property isn't cool, and acting as if you're entitled to be a douchebag with that someone else's property(who BUILT that property using their own hands, btw.) just makes you look like the, well, DOUCHEBAG you already are. So please, fuck off and go back to finding that exceptional pair of corduroy pants that goes with your pathetically trendy fixed-gear bike and go get hit by a pissed-off commuter in Silverlake, mkay?

Reverse Psychology

Fuxxing wind.

It's back. I'm peeved. The stoopid cats started crawling all over the bed sometime in the middle of the night when the wind kicked up again. This lack-of-sleep thing due to the most hated weather pattern of the season is grating on me.

Would a little rain in this non-existant rainy season be too much to ask? I mean, really. The weatherpeople keep predicting in Chicken Little-esque squawks about the rain that we're supposed to get, and instead we get more goddam wind. Cold wind, on top of it. ARGH.

So I suggest to the chickens that they start predicting more sun and wind so that we get some rain for once. C'mon, it'll be fun.

Today the mouse on the computer is malfunctioning. The "back" and "forward" buttons on it don't work anymore, and the software for the mouse is now gone from the computer. How that happened, I don't know, but it's not helping my bad mood at all.

Yesterday my mood was much better. Kaboom and I got to do an interview for a local sports show in Long Beach called Pep Talk. The two hosts are older gentlemen of the usual sport-talk type; one was in the 1972 Super Bowl and has the ring to prove it and the other guy...well, I don't know what he did but he wore a loud shirt. Upon first meeting them before the show taping I thought, Oh GAWD, this is going to be tedious, but luckily I was very wrong. The Super Bowl guy brought his mom, Virginia, to the taping. She's hilarious. She asked better interview questions than the hosts did. Sharp as a tack and was horrified to find out that DIY derby can't pay for health insurance yet. "You need sponsors!" she said. Yes, we do.

On the set we cracked a lot of jokes during the interview, and we got to promote our season and our sponsorship options, so our interview came off as very lively. There were two guests on after us; a women's water polo coach(she was shy and didn't talk to us very much), and a world-class bicyclist who is friends with a famous actor's son and wants to come to one of our bouts. Both of their interviews were more staid and typical of a sports talk show.

Afterwards Kaboom, Jenna Tailya(Derby Doll secretary and all-around awesome person) and I went to lunch. During lunch Jenna got a call from the Pep Talk producer (who wasn't able to be at the show taping) who heard that we were a lot of fun. Hooray for us!

As if that wasn't enough fun, I had to take my skates to the local skate shop for some maintenance. I found out that I need new axles, but the guy didn't charge me for the work he did on my much-abused skates. So I gave him some Derby Doll stickers and happily went to practice where I got to torture the girls who will be trying out for our subpool next week. Yay, me!

I'm sleepy now.

Wind

Of all the weather conditions that I normally experience here in SoCal, I hatehatehate wind most of all.

Yesterday was nice. Started sunny, got cloudy, started drizzling by the time I got in the car and drove downtown to derby practice. Since we've had little to no rain this rain season, I was quite delighted.

Sometime after midnight I was woken up by the frenetic jangling of the neighbor's windchimes and our lymphomic cat skittering all over the bed. The wind had decided to let its presence be known.

Fawwwwwwwk.

So I got up, put a jacket on, and meandered out to the backyard so that I could retrieve the one thing back there that I was afraid would blow away...the trampoline cover.

Yes, I have a trampoline in my backyard. I rock.

After that was done, I couldn't get back to sleep. The cats continued to annoy the bejeezus out of me by crawling all over the place and not settling down. The husband apparently was able to sleep through that. I couldn't. I didn't get any sleep the night before, either, so I'm in a charming mood.

Today it's still windy. Supposedly the power is out in areas all over SoCal. I wouldn't know, as I haven't turned on a tv or radio today. If I didn't have to take the lymphomic cat to the vet and go to a derby meeting, I'd just hide in bed all day.

I still have one toilet seat commission to do, along with a travel case to paint. Then there's the derby artwork that needs finishing so that I can step down from that crap. And no real work in sight. Harrumph.

Come back, rain...come back!