I did finally get my email set up again, and was able to recover the account. Hi friends.

Life’s been nuts lately.

Colorado’s been wonderful, but hell on my body. I’m sure some of that is just getting older, but every time I go back to sea level, I feel better,a nd whatever nagging issue I’m currently experiencing goes away. So we’re moving. Conveniently (?), immediately after we decided that we should move at the end of Mark’s current contract, his contract got terminated. Six months-ish early.

He’s job-hunting. We’ll probably end up in either the Dallas area (Plano, there are jobs in Richardson that are what he does) or San Diego (but we’ll have to downsize 500 to 1000 square feet house-wise if so). I’m trying to declutter and not get sick / hurt / whatever again.

Mildly depressed, of course. But looking forward to being somewhere with a longer growing season, either way, and not being allergic to the outside at all times of year except the height of summer and the dead of winter.

Which I think is the major contributor to the ongoing health issues. There’s something here I’m really allergic to (an outdoor soil mold), but not your standard sneezing-sniffling-itchy eyes allergy, instead it’s an “inflame your entire respiratory system” allergy. Plus mildly allergic to ten other things that aren’t cats — grasses, more molds, a few trees.I spent my first few years here being pink, swollen, dealing with hives, and sleepy, and not knowing what the heck was wrong. I’ve been doing allergy shots for the past couple years, they’ve helped but it isn’t enough.

On the hobbies front: gardening has been less of a thing because I’m frankly anxious about being outside here for extended periods, the deer pressure here is absurd, and the yard here is already beautiful and forest-y and doing too much “farming” would wreck the vibe. So I’ve been doing a lot of online RP, some online video games (FFXIV, recently revisiting Genshin Impact thanks to previously mentioned online RP), did a game jam a couple years ago, and have been noodling on miniatures crafting. Currently feeling the “do more art” art bug but the move is taking up all my braincells, so we’ll see if any of that actually happens.

How’re you all?

Plein air drawing, for the most part. Got an all-Fair pass and have been down at the fair at least once a week since it started. Relevant pix are on my DeviantArt. Will be doing more over the upcoming weeks. Starting to chew on card design for Aliens Built My Hot Rod and for another upcoming card game with no name yet.  Spent the last few days in Idyllwild, on a little vacation. That's been wonderful. We had a great time. Very peaceful, just walking around and enjoying the quiet. I did a bit of sketching from that too. There will be pix when I get at the scanner.

Doing a bit of study and practice on perspective drawing. I've never been formally trained on it, really, so now is the time I get to teach myself.

Still stuck on Saijiki Stories, though I'm wanting to draw it again, finally. Problem is that I need a summer myth to base Summerside on, and I can't use Tanabata because of Bridge of Birds. (It's impossible. I would end up retelling Mr. Hughart's wonderful work. Not fair to him.)

Right now I'm in the middle of picking up an empty wallet for my Copic collection, and re-organizing my art supplies for a better, more transportable selection. And Tuesday will be our local art-group meeting (I've been calling it the atelier meeting) and that should be fun.

Let me leave you with some lovely art by Kazuo Oga, courtesy of Kotaku. This? This is what I want my stuff to look like. This is what I want to be able to do -- and ideally get paid for. On the bright side, I'm beginning to see my stuff get closer to that ... on the down side, I can tell I've still got quite a way to go ...

The Host Club is eating my life much in the same way, I suspect, as Alternity is eating some of my other friends' lives.

This is in some ways a good thing and in some ways a bad thing. I have a desperately active mind and need to keep it occupied, or I get depressed. And I pretty much got depressed for over a year while we were moving.

I am no longer depressed. Turning the tiny game that one of the other (departed) players started into a gigantic, powerful piece of roleplay has been an achievement I'm pleased with. I have since restructured it to give a bunch of the other players more responsibility (yay) and less for me (yay, because I am not Kyouya Ootori, even if I play him online).

Still working on fixing proper boundaries, but dear God. I needed that on so many counts. Now I need to figure out how to balance it, because I still dearly love it, and want to keep it as part of my life. I have the best players, OMG, and have made the best friends. But I need time and space to take care of my life too, now that my brain is ticking along again.

... when you do something stupid, that you really shouldn't have done?

Yeah, I did that.

I know I'm not perfect, and I've tried to patch it as best I can, but it's broken and won't be fixed. I'm still upset and mad at myself for doing something stupid. *sigh* I'm nearly 40, I should know better.

Now I'm going to wallow in guilt for a while. Dammit. ):

Adoption stuff. It's going to be a chunk of work, and a chunk of it has to be done within the next 120 days. And then we get to wait.

The meeting was pretty good, though it got a little long at the end ... you know how these Powerpoint things go. There was a lot to cover and deal with, and we've still got a big chunk of the packet to read on our own, but we got the fingerprinting done and the "no, we're not criminals" statement done.

We got to talk with an Angels family while we were there. They had taken in a newborn born with a cocaine addiction (the birth mother's eighth child), and they are going to be adopting him. The young man was apparently just finally mostly recovered from the withdrawal, poor thing. It's going to be kind of a tangle for them, since the dad is about to be deployed for seven months. I hope things work out. They were very positive and happy about Angels, which left me feeling good about that as an option for us. They started the process in December, were licensed in January, and got the call for the young man within 40 minutes of their licensing.

I'm not too worried about the paperwork, aside from trying to turn up my therapist's name from 13 years ago (yeeg), but we need to fix the master bedroom window (cracked) and the broken pane in the master shower before our house will be certified. There are other things I'd rather fix first, but that's how things go. And we need to baby-proof the house -- seriously baby-proof, they check it all. And purchase the appropriate stuff -- bed, car seat, all that kind of thing.

Happy Mother's Day to all the wonderful mommies I know -- and there are a lot of you! <3 You do a great and wonderful Work. (:

You know how I was moaning about the fertility people never getting back to me?

I just pinged the County for information on adoption, and they got back to me within *15 minutes*.

Edited to add: and it's not even 8am yet.

I've been sitting on some really cute chibi designs that I made bookmarks out of for the conventions I did.

... Dummy, why haven't I stripped the backgrounds and put them up on Zazzle? *facepalm*

I'll post when they're up. Probably sometime next week.

Cintiq is working again, yay. (: Just had to pop the whole thing open. 11 screws later ...

Edit: Damn, spoke too soon. Once the computer went to sleep, it lost it again and isn't getting it back. Very not-cool.

There are reasons why Summerside is taking forever. At this point, the question is to the tune of ... "well, of course X is going to do Y, X would be a fool not to, what with having the means, motive, and opportunity for grand success at it. How does our heroine escape that particular peril?"

I will actually script Summerside and get it up and posted one of these days. I swear. It's just a lot more complicated than it looks on the outside.