fire_foxe666

Just waiting around until it's time to go to church. Again, going without the hubby today, so that's kind of depressing. >_< Macy's has been quite busy so it's hard for him to try to switch his schedule around. He's had to work until midnight a couple of times in the past week. Crazy! His commission should be pretty good for this month, just like it was for last month. He's excited about that... that's his motivation, I think.

Anyway, I'm done working for the rest of the year! The division gave me some really nice presents (Macy's gift cards, woo!) so I was able to get myself a nice new cardigan, since my old one was so faded and, well... old. I'd like to try to find some skirts or sweaters or something. Anyway, it's great to have some time off to be able to dedicate to TWTYH. I've drawn through page 22 now and am constantly revising my script. I'm not as far ahead of what's online as I'd like to be because I've done some pretty big updates with multiple pages, just to move things along.

I've not felt very good lately emotionally. Sometimes I get really down on myself and feel completely inadequate and unworthy. I received some less than stellar comments and emails from readers of TWTYH which affected me more than I'd like to admit. So that's definitely part of this funk. I felt so down one night that I had actually told my husband that I wanted to give up and put TWTYH on hiatus for a while. Thankfully the next morning I felt much better. The hiatus idea isn't completely null, I might still do it for my own sanity's sake. I don't know... I have to work through some things and see. I'm glad I've got this break to be able to script a lot, brainstorm, and come up with concrete ideas. Just knowing where the story is going for sure will help me feel more confident in keeping it going.

Well, five days from Christmas! That's exciting! I didn't really get presents for people since we can't afford much. Did get something for the landlords and will be giving gift cards to my parents. I guess that's good enough. ^_^ The thing I love most about Christmas is spending time with my loved ones... I don't really care about presents. I just love the spirit of this season.

I've reconnected with Carl!!!!!!! *happy dance* He was my best friend from high school and we sort lost touch after graduation. I dug up his email and we've been communicating again, which is awesome. I don't really have friends here anymore, they've all moved away or moved on. The only people I ever hang out with these days are my husband and my family... I'm so excited to reconnect with a friend. He can't believe I'm married. XD

Alright, my parents will probably pick me up for church soon. Oh, I've added a Twitter badge to my site. Kind of spiffy :3 http://emi-art.com/twtyh

It's been snowing here since Thursday night, so everything is all beautiful and wintry. I walked into town in the snow yesterday to go Christmas shopping and it was lovely. Half of the big lake in the park was frozen! Crazy! The only downside is that the two large windows in my room are on the slanting roof, and are therefore currently covered with snow - but even that's kind of cool! Tonight I'm going to the main Hamburg Christmas market, dinner, and concert with two of the teachers from my school, and tomorrow I will go for a walk, as is my Sunday tradition, and then, barring any trouble (knock on wood), Monday I will get on a plane in the morning and be at SFO in the afternoon! How great is that??? I'm ready to be home for a little while, though I am sad it's such a little while. Hopefully it will help with emotional realignment - I had a dream last night that made me wake up feeling like an asshole, and earlier this week my subconscious welched on a longstanding deal we had, which hasn't helped with feeling out of sorts. It's time to be home with the people who love me. :)

Thanks to everyone who participated in the flavor choosing for the lip balm. I won't be able to order any supplies until after the holidays, but I figured I'd get a head start on some label preparation. 4 of 9 labels for lip balm tubes. :-) Firebird Flare is obviously still a work in progress. These are going to be printed at a very tiny 1.7" x 2".



Other flavors will include:
Basilisk Blood
Fenrir's Folly
Gryphon's Glee
Pegasus Pinion
Serpent Spell (sea serpent)

( Read more... )

Since the soaps went over so well and I had so much fun making them, I thought it might be fun to experiment with other bath and beauty products. I've been looking into chapstick/lip balm making. One of the fun things about lip balm is that it's not only possible to add a fragrance (like soap and lotion) but flavor as well! To this end I'm curious which supplies I should be purchasing if I decide to make some lip balm in the new year.

Chapstick / Lip Balm Flavor Poll.
If you have the time/inclination, please stop by and vote in the poll. It would be much appreciated! It's possible to check as many as you want, but if possible, please narrow it down to the ones you would like most. The purpose of this poll is to help me narrow it down to the 5-10 most desired flavors so I will know which flavor oils to purchase if/when I make my lip balm. :-)

(All of the lip balm will contain the same basic ingrediants for the lip balm base itself before flavor oils are added, including fruit oils and beeswax!)

Etsy Update
I updated the etsy shop with several items, including dragon soap, glass pendants, and plastic cel phone charms. I've had such fun making these! There's something that's just plain nice about the act of making things with your hands. I also played with some watercolor paintings while I was on my crafting binge, though sadly the results were kinda muddy. It's something to look into in the future!

If you are interested in any of these things and place an order with the etsy shop soon, chances are still fairly good that it will arrive in time for Christmas (within the US).

Soaps
I didn't think I'd be able to, but I was able to manage to get a small quantity of dragon soap ready before the new year! If you missed out on the first batch, there's now a total of 20 soaps available. Brown Sugar & Fig, Fresh Vanilla, Cranberry, and Eucalyptus & Spearmint soaps are now in stock. (No lavender or black raspberry vanilla this time around :-( When I get some more time next year I will try my hand at soap making again!)


Glass Pendants
All of these glass pendants have already found homes from my DA journal post yesterday, but they're still kinda pretty to see.


Plastic Phone Charms
These phone charms have artwork on one side, and a solid colored back on the other. (Back color of the plastic matches the border around the artwork) They are glazed on both sides and is very shiny! The lariat has a touch of glitter thread woven in.

First snowfall of the season happening right now!! I hope that it sticks after my husband gets home from work. I hope that I won't have to go to work tomorrow because of it. :) If nothing else, the little white flakes are very beautiful and makes it feel even more like Christmas time!

Speaking of which, we decorated our place for Christmas on Friday! Set up our cute little faux tree we purchased last year and I strung up some lights around the living room. I'll take pictures soon and put them on Facebook. ^^

Oh, my heart is so full right now with gratitude for all of my many blessings! Just being able to live in a nice, warm, comfortable home is such a rich blessing during this cold weather. We're doing substantially better financially than I had expected too, his commission was pretty sweet last month. The donations for my website have been AWESOME and have helped sooooooooo much. I don't think my readers will ever realize how much their donations mean to us. They're an answer to prayer!

The only negative thing to report on is that my skin is absolutely horrid right now since it's been so dry lately! I have dry skin anyway, but the past week has been horrendous. So many dry patches on my hands and face, it's really awful. >_< I'm self conscious about it and don't want anyone to look too closely at my face. Once the air moistens up it'll get better. My lotion doesn't seem to be helping much...

Yesterday I worked on my script for track 10 of TWTYH and changed things around a bit and also came up with a few new scenes which I LOVE. I am so excited to get to those parts! >< Still have plenty more brainstorming and planning to do too, so I want to do a bit more while I wait for Tsukasa to come home. Then we'll go over to my parents' house for dinner. I'm doing a "ding dong ditch secret Santa" mission later on this evening and tithing settlement tonight. Lots to do! I wonder if this snow will complicate things...?

Ok, going to look over my script now. OH! Extra update tomorrow!!! Be sure and check it out! :3

Let the light shine.

I'm actually a Methodist, but I figure all of the non-Christians get stuck with enough Merry Christmas that I'd chime in. Also the energy nut in me gets a kick out of a celebration of extraordinarily efficient oil.

So, I brought my Audubon Field Guide to work to try and figure out what this little bird is. It's brown/grey on top, lighter on the bottom, with a very narrow black beak, and yellow at its throat/chest and rump (maybe it's whole underside, but it's hard to tell), and I'm thinking it might be some kind of warbler, even though it has a kind-of-crest like a flycatcher, because it's too small to be a flycatcher... The thing is, though, most of the birds this birdie looks like live in forests and stuff, which is definitely not the habitat on campus. So far the best candidates, I think, are the female yellow-rumped warbler, the western flycatcher, the dusky flycatcher, maaaaaaaybe the female common yellowthroat. I just can't for the life of me figure out which it actually is. It's pretty adorable, thought.

In other news, though it was finger-numbingly cold in the library Monday-Wednesday, yesterday it was so warm that after three hours, the heat and stuffiness had made me feel really ill, so then I spent the next two hours sitting outside, even though it was cold. Today looks to be much the same, and I can't even take off my hat. :c

eta;; went outside to stave off nausea & had more birdie encounters. I'm pretty certain it's the yellow-rumped warbler, and I'm pretty certain I'm seeing the females, since they don't have yellow caps like the males ought to. Yay!

so my apartment managers definitely didn't warn us that the water would be turned off this morning (or if they did, I definitely didn't get the memo, which I'm reasonably certain was not posted anywhere I would potentially see it), presumably from about 9-10, because I tried to take a shower at 9:30 and it was off, but it seems to have just come back on... about 15 minutes too late for me to be able to take a shower before I have to leave for work. Between the tea kettle and the Brita, I was able to have enough of a wash that I don't smell bad, but man my hair is disgusting. It's definitely a hat day. :C motherfuckers.

also, the inconvenience has prevented me from doing any of my chores.

things I will do tomorrow:
1. call the vet
2. call the eye doctor
3. call the dentist
4. finally look up that little bird
5. play bassoon omg

dude it's been raining since ten :)

i need to not watch "just another episode" of dvr'd telly and fall asleep on the couch during it. that needs to stop. on the other hand, even though it's almost two, at least i've already gotten about an hour of sleep tonight, yeah?

So I've been sitting next to the window in the library all day, and I swear the cold has been sapping my energy. The temperature outside is 58ºF and it can't be more than a couple degrees warmer here inside the library, especially right up against the two-storey windows.

I've only managed to write about 3/4 of a page so far, double-spaced and including three lines of heading and two lines of title.... but I think this paper will be happier than I was expecting, because I have almost a page already and this is just the introductory paragraph. That leaves three double-spaced pages to delve into how teacher expectations affect their students, deficit thinking about the educability of lower-class and minority students, and how I will try to counter these challenges to success in my own classroom. And I think I have a lot to say about at least the teacher expectations part and the "in my classroom in the future..." part, so that's good.

What's not good is that I appear to have just taken a 15-or-so-minute nap in the library with my head on my arms, and now spent another five minutes typing about my paper instead of typing my paper.

In 25 minutes I'll stop and get driving directions for my afternoon and evening jaunts to schools in Santa Monica, yay.

So I just spent about half an hour trying to use whatbird.com to identify the adorable little brown-and-yellow bird I've seen twice this morning.... but so far, no dice; I'm probably going to have to comb through my Audubon Field Guide when I get home tonight. In other news, I still haven't really started the paper about why some students succeed. I'm torn between "familial support" and "teacher expectations" and I almost want to resort do doing both to make sure I have four pages... Each paper will state your argument for why you think some students succeed and others fail, the theory that supports your arguments, and ways you will address the challenges to success in your classroom. It doesn't help that we didn't really talk about theories at all, and that I probably only did about 3% of the assigned reading (oops). I'm also getting really distracted by how dry my skin is, particularly on my knuckles :c

So, um.... well, here I go...

1. http://fuckyeah.org/ Apparently you call this phone number and leave a message for the internet, totally anonymously, about whatever is on your mind?

2. I found that website because I typed "fuck yeah" into the search field at http://www.ninja.com/, which is really just Google but in a pretty skin and "deadly accurate"

3. I also found a Neil Patrick Harris fansite. Fuck yeah! http://www.fuckyeahneilpatrickharris.com/ That man is beautiful.

4. So I... finished? mostly?... finished one project, which was a miniature version of the PACT teacher assessment thing I'll have to do next term. There was some stuff I very deliberately chose to leave out because I am a slow worker and still ended up sending the "here's my assignment! :D" e-mail 5-8 minutes late.

5. TOMORROW:
a.m. until 3ish?: The other project, a paper on who succeeds at school and why. Also, DON'T FORGET: driving directions to HS and MS
4pm: meeting with my Master Teacher for the rest of the year
4:30-somewhat before 7: observe Music Ed Advisor doing an orchestra clinic at the school where I will student teach
7pm: attend middle school orchestra concert to see My Bassoon Student :DDDDD
after 7pm: get my drink on with music ed peeps? Or that might be Wednesday, I forget.

6. WEDNESDAY: study the fuck out of constitution book, have early dinner with Violist P and My Favourite Junior (hopefully at Father's Office, mmmmmmm), Music Ed Get Smashed Party?

7. Thursday OR Friday, depends on progress of constitution studying and on whether I am hungover: Drive to CSULB at fuck o'clock ayemme, take citizenship test, drive back to UCLA, work in library.

8. FRIDAY: OMG MIA WILL BE BACK.

9. Gig this weekend with Proto-Doctor Grad Conductor's Korean Youth Orchestra, yay! I love earning money for playing bassoon.

10. ALL OF BREAK: PRACTISE THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING. PROPERLY THIS TIME, EH?

---
p.s. 11. moar fuckyeah-related links!
http://fuckyeahsharks.tumblr.com/
http://fuckyeahtattoos.tumblr.com/ -- some of these are way too fresh for my taste, but mostly they look really cool. It does spook me a little when I can't tell what body part it is, though
and the rest of it is all team america, save for one unfortunate etched powerbook. :/

Wow, you guys, chatting after class takes a long time. I now have one hour less in which to finish my project than I thought I would. It's okay, though, because I just now decided to do less than I was planning, so now I need to pound out three lesson plans and then I'm good. AAAAAND Busywork Teacher decided to spare us the take-home final, in lieu of some extra stuff during this final class. AWESOME.

Also, someone sent me a snowflake cookie virtual gift! Thank you, Anon! It definitely brightened my afternoon of confinement in the library. <3

I'll be arting for about an on my livestream.

Thanks for watching!

It's raining, it's pouring...

My rainboots are too snug and they leak. Also, today must necessarily be workaholic day. But I feel rested finally? And I like rain. :)