Life is strange. The days blur together in their mundane routine and then suddenly out of the blue one of those 1 in 1000 days blind sides you. The status quo is upended by some radical event and you get a punctuated equilibrium. Your life is shifted and time can be split into before and after.

You find a new love or lose an old one. You make a new friend or say goodbye to a past one. You move outside your comfort zone in a way that means you can’t quite go back all the way.

And you are changed and it becomes the new status quo until the next event shakes your life again. The shock and questions of how can I adjust to this new reality quickly fade to the new same old, same old.

The punctuated equilibriums are not all bad of course. There are happy events aplenty that remake your world, just unexpected when they happen.

Update to the 30 awesome things:

14. Wedding flowers 2: flower harder! Now thatyuki_onna  andjustbeast  are hopefully and finally safely on their way to their honeymoon I can reveal my small part in their nuptials.

I was intimadated by Cat for the first year I knew her. She was a big Writer with a capital W and such an amazing person. She has such a magnetic personality and is just awesome.

So when she asked if I would do her the honor of making her wedding bouquet I was stunned and honored. I'm a small time, craft-store artist who dabbles and makes gewgaws for my friends. She's a professional artist and she wanted me to play a part in one of the biggest events of her life.

I said, "Hell yeah" and then promptly didn't work on it for six months.

*ahem*

But procrastination aside the flowers came out amazingly well and I'm quite proud of them. But more importantly Cat loves them.
I like sharing happiness with my friends.

Update to the 30 awesome things:

13. Halloween party! yakavenger  and I went to our very first Halloween party at rayan4d2 and ioianthe. Besides being a totally rollicking good time with all sorts of wonderful people from LJ that I won't mention by name because I don't know them all and I would leave people out and feel bad, it was also supercool to get to dress up in costume!

Halloween is a big thing were I work and every year we have a costume contest with $100 for first place. So this year with
ioianthe help I went all our with a wonderful Carmen Miranda costume! The fruit is plastic but the hat is real. The "dress" is a mumu from my grandmother's closet (I'd never seen her wear it). yakavenger  was rocking the 80's glam look with giant hoop earrings and lots of neon bling.

It was quite the fun weekend!

Update to the 30 awesome things:

12. Revisiting assumptions! It's easy to get stuck in a pattern of thought or behavior. It's simple to just do what you've always done. But sometimes the assumptions need to be revisited and new things tried.

My whole live I've been afraid of apple sauce and oatmeal. Convinced in my own mind that I wouldn't like them and revolted at the sight of them. It was only recently that I actually questioned that postulate.

Turns out that after getting over my old irrational fears I think applesauce and oatmeal taste pretty good. The oatmeal especially was tasty with sunflower seeds, strawberries, bananas, and craisions.

The world will wrap you in a cage of your own making if you let it. Sometimes it is good to step outside your comfort zone and try new things or even old things you haven't done in a while.

I hope I never forget to do this from time to time.

I’m giving yakavenger a big gold star for this week.

As an adult you are where the buck stops. You have to do those unpleasant tasks that come along with life. When the world throws obstacles in your path, you’re the one who gets to deal with them.

If you work really hard and do everything right, no one notices.

Well fuck that. I’m giving gratitude and map props where it’s due. yakavenger , this gold star is for you!

Even being home on medical leave the mighty Yak managed to arrange for an HVAC guy to come and replace the furnace, arranged a 0% heating assistance loan (with attached paperwork), and managed to drag out the home heating specialist to look at our house and add in another 2k worth of insulation upgrades. On top of that she managed to get 75% of the insulation paid for with rebates.

Did I mention she’s battling fatigue with guys banging away for hours a day in the basement in a house with no heat?

I don’t even know where I would start when faced with that kind of calamity. I am in awe of her ability to get things done. I’m lucky if I make it to work on time everyday and just do the normal home maintenance. Litterboxes, trash, dishes, and I’m feeling accomplished.

Thank you dear. I love you and not just because you do amazing things. It is the ease and confidence you have when you tackle all the crazy challenges and the wild ride of the last week. You have no idea how amazing and impressive everything you juggled and everything you did really is. I could only do it with great difficulty and much bungling.

You are awesome.

I’ve been thinking about memories. I am 10,764 days old and if I tried really hard I might be able to come up with 1076 distinct memories (some of them would probably overlap). This is 10% of my life. Considering how poorly defined my early childhood memories it is a significant number. But it still means that nine of every ten days disappear into the fog of history. For every awesome Friday or noteworthy Wednesday there are a slew of other days that fail to make the cut.

This makes sense. I would not want to be one of those people with a hyper memory, recalling every normal day in explicit detail. Most days are the baseline, not bad, not great, just ok. Half of my life, for me, is average by definition. I’m positive that my life is better than the average person’s life

I’ve been lucky enough to have so many amazing experiences and done some crazy and wild things. Most of these days are etched in my mind, worn down over the years as I occasionally recall them. Mentally running them over in my hands, reliving the fading colors and moments.

I wonder what things I’ve lost. Those moments that burned so bright when they happened that now I have absolute no recall for. This probably sums up most of my adolescent years. All those agonizing nights that I thought would haunt me forever have faded in the decades to dust and distant dream.

I wonder what happens to the one or two standard deviations above normal days. The days that are awesome but not breath taking. The days that are the best day of the season but not the year.

I know some of my memories get bundled together. These are mostly my personal relationships. I can always recall a few specific memories with people but most of the time they get lumped together in memories bundles. I remember gaming, the laughter and the joking but not individual games. I recall all the wonderful evenings with the Yak but not the specific things we did. I remember the laughter, smiles, and joy of being married more than the specific events.

I guess this is life. You get the 1% of things you will never forget, the major life changing events. There are the 10% colorful memories that return with prompting, these are your stories, the unique chapters. The rest fades along the spectrum into the broad sweep of days.

The memories never stop being forged. Sometimes they come all at once, intense periods of life alteration and transformation and other times there are halcyon lulls where seasons pass.

Updates for the week!

yakavenger.livejournal.com/191481.html

In life sometimes you come to the spork in the road. It's like the proverbial fork in the road (and the one less traveled...blah blah blah), except it's not binary. So very few life choices are truly binary and our obsession with making it seem that way does them a great disservice.

One of the things I enjoy most about having kept a sporadic journal for so long is the ability to go back and see these sporks in the road. Of course most of the time they are not labeled as such and it is only through hindsight that I can see the splitting of the possibilities. Those pithy and sometimes insightful moments when I capture my mind and my mood

This time I'm taking a spork out of the drawer and throwing it down in the road. Here it is oh mighty spork! This is the state of my mind.

*spork*

Update to the 30 awesome things:

10. Found an art buddy! ioianthe not only makes incredible art, she's wicked fun to make art with. Motivation is one of my big failings when it comes to creating things. ioianthe not only inspires me with her gorgeous creations she helps me nurture my own creative spark.

11. Finding my own creative confidence. I have 243 poems stored on an old hard drive. Most of them are are not very good, creative thesaurus exercises and juvenile woe is me outbursts. The trials and tribulations of a normal geeky child struggling with the slings and arrows of suburban angst and jejune. A couple of dozen of them are decent, there might be a handful that are truly good. I've published two of them in a college literary collection and another three in an Internet self publishing collection of poetry (act now only 24.95 to see yourself in print!). I have over 200 painted miniatures, again most of them are decent, a handful are good, and a couple might approach the amazing job yakavenger did on the few she put her mind on. I have over 325 LJ entries and a couple hundred offline journal entries in several battered journals. I've written a great many letters to friends and lovers.

By all accounts I have been fecund with my creativity.

But I don't have the self confidence to think of myself as creative. I feel like the small child with the finger paints being congratulated by their parents for hydrocephaloid stick figures without fingers. I feel like a pretender. I'm sure some of it is knowing so many amazing creative people. Some of it is the power of the Internet to show you the top 1%.

It has only been with the help of many wonder people that I think I'm coming to accept my own creative voice and self. I am very grateful for their help. Thanks, you are the best!

yakavenger has shown me that even with the awesome creative skills she has, she does not consider herself an artist. It is all in your mind.
myopicgreen has shown me that passion and drive can be shared with others. Having someone else excited in what you creative is an amazing help.
sheryl67 has shown me creativity is a whole life thing. It's not compartmentalized but how you live your life all the time that matters. Creativity is a state of mind.
yuki_onna has shown me that artists are not demi-gods among us mortals. They are flesh and blood creatures of failure and heartache and normalacy.
earthenwood has shown me that creativity can be a path to happiness and joy. It is true that you infuse a small part of yourself in everything you create.
ioianthe has shown me that once you find the medium that speaks to your heart your work will show it. Chase and find what resonates with you.

It will always be a struggle, but self acceptance is one of those stages towards self awareness, self actualization and other assorted gobbledygook things.

The ever growing list of awesome things!

1. Making Jer/Ger's wedding flowers.
2. The amazing 5th wedding anniversary.
3. Playing Titan after a 10 year hiatus.
4. Playing in the snow on the 4th of July with my family.
5. Finding my original journals.
6. Playing Warhammer 40k for the first time after a decade of wanting to.
7. Podcast shoutout!
8. Dying my hair!
9. Construct!
10. Finding an art buddy!
11. Creative confidence!

Happy Friday!

So some TLC rehab on the swag bag and I had the first set of guys ready to be primed. One coat of black primer later and I was ready to start painting. So far I have the armor pretty much done on the first two test models. They will be tied together with gold trim, although I don't know what colors to paint the backpack yet. The chain sword (a chainsaw that's also a sword, who said the future isn't awesome!) and boltgun are both going to be a weathered gunmetal once I figure out if I want to weather black or brown.

Anyway, here's some pictures of what I've been working on this week. Hopefully more later! Have a great day everybody!

At Construct the lovely guest of honor myopicgreen  gave me a swag bag of some of her old warhammer 40k models. Bags of old models (and ebay sales) are like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get, except that it's free and it's awesome! 

Here are two lovely "before" pictures. Like all those commercials on TV except this time the before and after pictures are really the same thing! Tune in tomorrow where I post the first progress pictures and show what a little TLC will do.

A picture of the snowcone of awesome! I look more demented in this picture than I usually am. Maybe it's because I just released my inner faerie. I don't know.

Update to the 30 awesome things:

8. I finally dyed my hair! It's been a lifelong dream to dye my hair bright and crazy colors. Why? I have no idea, because I wasn't loved enough as a child and have a desperate need for attention....or because it's awesome! I didn't listen to that silly voice in my head, the one that said people will stare or laugh or not understand. Because really, it doesn't matter. It makes me happy and my friends think it's cool and who cares what everyone else thinks. It is symbolic of not letting the world tell me what I can and can't do and deciding for myself. Who knew that $12.84 from Salley's beauty salon could say more than, "I <3 bright colors".

9. Construct! Although I guess it could have been called, friendcon or awesomecon or any other combination of those things. Getting to hang out with some of my closest friends and feel all the friendship and joy... Let's just say that my past self was dead wrong. Just a few of the memories i want to keep: miracle berries, comedy improv, hot tub shenanigans, inopportune water on glasses, thanks for coming!, t-shirts, 80's prom, and so many more.

Thank you for all the well wishes. The grandmother memories are more touching and full of happiness and joy than I imagined. They are much more comforting and supportive than any condolences could be. You guys are the best.

Update to the 30 awesome things:

6. Played my first game of Warhammer 40k. I've wanted to play this game since I was 15 but never got up the nerve, etc... etc. Thanks to some help and motivation from my Geeky Soul Mate I put all that behind me and disregarded my fears and threw down. Signed up for the league at the game store so I'm committed now. Even started a couple of progject logs (plogs!) on popular warhammer forums, which is something I never thought I would do.

7. Got to play some games and a shoutout on one of my favorite podcasts (about 58 minutes in). These guys are geeky heroes of mine and it is totally awesome that they are as amazing in person as I hoped they would be.

I'm going to go finish packing and play some plants vs. zombies. Good nite everyone. Tomorrow is hustle bustle travel for me.

My grandmother died last night. I'm flying to Phoenix on Thursday for the funeral. Although I'm not in mourning but celebration. This is not a suit and tie affair, my mother said to bring my loudest hawiian shirt. It is a celebration of a life well lived and all the lives she touched.

When I think of my grandmother I think of cards. Well worn decks of playing cards. All the adults sitting around the table playing pinochle and pitch. I would watch them for hours as they played their games. Her hands were sure and swift and she could shuffle cards like a blackjack dealer.

I started with skipbo and I still remember the first time I was allowed to play pitch. Sitting at the *big* table with the adults and playing cards! It was quite the rush. Or slowly leaning the archaic symbols and structure of keeping score, watching my father writing down numbers and circling some and squaring others.

What are your favorite grandmother memories?

I've been woefully bad about updating the LJ again. It's been really difficult to build up the motavation to make a coherent post lately. I've been a bad netizen.

I've been working on the new summer project and been really enjoying it. Hopefully I can get more pictures up tomorrow.

The itching is back and getting worse (it's disrupting sleep again, hence the lack of updates). The itch is everywhere but the legs oddly enough which makes me think it was not reexposure (thank goodness), but rather the residual effects still kicking around in my system. It's the special slice of hell that keeps on giving.

Hopefully, things will be up and running this week and I'll finally get around to all the posting I've been meaning to do. Hope springs eternal. ha!

Today's XKCD hits a little close to home....

While waiting at the realtor to make our offer on the house we spent the time in the waiting room making buildings out of the duplo blocks. Our poor realtor did not quite know what to make of us.

When we were signing the mountain of papers for the actual morgage, Yak kept wishpering secret names like Sporky McTurdmuffin that I should sign as my name on all the pages that asked for my "Real and legal and actual given name". So I'm signing all these papers with a lawyer and the confused realtor trying not to laugh out loud or write some totally inappropriate name.

So no, I totally don't feel like an adult. I guess I expected this zen kind of calm to decend from the heavens as one day I awoke and was an adult.

Alas, that didn't happen and I've been faking it until I make it for a long time now. I finally grapsed the great deception that my parents have been pulling off quite successfully for so many years.

We have no idea WTF we are doing and are making it up most of the time. Being an adult is getting your shit together and doing the things that need to get done even if you had to do it, because you take responsibility for yourself.

But it's not all bad. You have to pay bills and go to work to meet the morgage but sometimes you do get to eat ice cream for dinner.

I have been dealing with this poison ivy illness the equivalent of one day for every year of my life. Only 1/350 of my life experience and it has changed me. I am hoping it is for the better. As my body finally begins the final stage of healing I want to reflect now that I have the mental energy instead of letting this experience slip into the mists of the past. *cue introspection music*

A good friend of mine, helped me understand that to deal with the trials and tribulations of life it helps to find the little victories. Most of us are so accustomed to only seeing what we lack and the things we don't have. It's quite a negative way to look at life and how I use to approach things.

This really breaks down when you are sick. You wallow in the misery and close yourself off from life.

It helps to find the small victories. To understand that there are limitations and work through them.

It's not snapping at Yak when I get home because I'm miserable and hurt. It's accepting that I can't do everything I want but finding something small that I can. It's just enjoying the fact that I am able to suffer through my day and do most of the tasks of daily life. Cliche but true, it's good to be thankful for what you have.

I don't think I'm doing a very good job of describing this but I think just writing it down serves a good purpose. Maybe later when life gets me down with the everyday setbacks I can read this and remember.

It's time to get going on my part of the Constructacon magic. I want to put in the t-shirt order this week and I want to make sure I get enough shirts / the correct sizes.

Here's what I'm planning so far based on my own nefarious desires (my present, my shirts, tyranny of me!), and the feedback I've gotten.

What: 1st annual Constructacon memorial t-shirts (or pladicon year 2... for those *really* keeping track)

What exactly: Some crazy color and concoction of my fiendish brain. I'm planning on putting this year's awesome quote and the Construct logo on the front.

Sizes: lots! If you've sent me a text message I have your size all reserved for you. Of course I'll be getting some extra ones and such.

Anyway, just give me a shout if you haven't already with what size you want and all that sort of information. Or give me other ideas, quotes, designs.

Cross-posted!