Having slept through my hangover (many of you don’t know, but I had one of my rare intoxication events last night), I am now working on this portrait that has been rattling around in my head all week. As I type this, my reference photos are printing out. Next they get taped above my art table, and then the puttering around in the kitchen stage begins. The puttering stage … very important. I’d liken it to stage fright. A certain amount of milling around in the kitchen, looking at the blank canvas and any reference images is required before I even get out the paints and brushes, and then a bit more before I am able to open the tubes and put paint on canvas. Since this is a portrait, the first I have ever attempted, I might add, there might even have to be a period of sketching on paper first and actual pencil lines put on the canvas. In other words, don’t expect to see any immediate results.

I’m actually not sure what direction I am going to take with it, but you can be sure it will not be photorealism. Just not my style. Though seeing as I have never done a painting of a person that actually exists before, I have no idea what my portraiture style is. I guess we will find out, won’t we? It will either turn out to be phenomenally cool or a total failure. Whichever it is, it will still be a painting.

I need (and want) to do more painting. It’s a hard thing to do during the winter, not so much due to the lack of lighting, since I do most of my painting at night anyway, but because it’s so freaking cold in the house. I can’t paint while wearing layers of clothing (and still feeling cold). Nope. I have to wear a ratty old tee shirt with the sleeves cut out and a tattered old pair of baggy jeans. Being barefoot is essential, as is the hair pulled back into a pony tail. Mostly nude would really work the best, but owing to the fact that a) my art table is right by a window that has no curtains for shades and b) I have neighbors who do not need to see me sans clothing, that is hardly an option. Basically, I need to be comfortable, have ease of movement, and I must be warm … in fact, the warmer the room the better, which is why I now have the furnace cranked to a level Lin would have a fit about if he knew. I can’t have the furnace on while I am painting, as much as I would like to. My art table sites directly under a vent that can’t be closed, and it dries out the paint too quickly. Acrylics dry fast enough without hot air blowing directly on them. Sometimes I think I need to switch to oils so I can dabble away and take my time with things. Maybe this summer, when having a warm house isn’t so difficult, I’ll buy a small set of oils and give them a try.

My reference photos are finished printing, and the house is starting to warm up. It must be time to move to the kitchen and begin milling about … right after I run the kittens around the house to wear them out a little. They are having another one of their Insane Kitten Days today, and they are about to drive me stark raving mad getting into stuff … like the top of the TV and the bedroom closet. Little monsters! Talk about a distraction!

Because the very thing a person who has a migraine hovering over their left shoulder should do is learn to use book printing software and make a book … that is exactly what I wasted my time doing this afternoon.

No, it wasn’t supposed to turn out that small, and yes, the pages aren’t cut especially neatly. All the same, it is a book, sewn together with loving care (OK, not really loving care), and I can now say I have officially made a book. It’s a pretty crappy little book, but it IS a book.

I’m going to go take a shower now and get ready to make dinner. I feel both grubby and hungry. It’s a bad combination.

I had a thought last night, and somehow I managed to remember it today … so here it is:

At the dawn of the internet people could have used the ability to interact with other people from around the world to seek out ways in which we are all the same … to realize the unity of the human condition worldwide, no matter the cultures involved. I did see a lot of that happening in the early years. Now that the internet is passed its infancy and strolling into its unruly teen-aged years, what I see is instead of looking for the similarities between us all and developing bonds of friendship across massive cultural divides, people use the internet to find all the differences they can be offended and upset by and focus mainly on those topics to the detriment of being able to see any similarities all humans share.

And porn … people use the internet for porn.

It’s a huge generalization, of course, because we aren’t all like that. Still, it’s a trend I have seen growing for some time now.

One of my LJ friends entertained herself earlier by putting things in her microwave, and since I was bored and am in a Monkey See, Monkey Do state of mind, I decided to put some things in my microwave as well. I’m sure if Lin knew, Mr. Safety would give me a big lecture about putting things in microwaves that don’t belong in microwaves, but he’s not here. When Mr. Safety is away, Orb will play!

That’s a CD after two seconds. Sort of pretty, so I am going to do some more … because maybe I can find some crafty use for them. Always looking for interesting materials, you know!

And as you can see, no photos can be taken in this house without at least one cat in the frame.

I went to the bedroom a few minutes ago to get a sweatshirt and found Ronin lying on the foot of the bed. This was an unusual enough occurrence that I had to investigate. He’ll lie on the bed if Myu is there (she loves being lazy on the bed), and he’ll sometimes join Lin or me if we are taking a nap, but in general, he likes to stake out a post on higher ground. Yes, he has that whole King of the Jungle Overlooking His Kingdom thing going on in his little furry head. So to find him lying on the foot of the bed wide awake and sans Myu was just odd.

I sat on the bed and noticed the closet door was open a few inches (again), and thought maybe he’d run to the bed when he heard me coming so as to not get caught in the act of opening the closet door. Ronin is sneaky that way. I closed the closet door, sat back down on the bed and called for Myu. They are never more than a few feet apart, so it also seemed odd that she was nowhere to be seen.

First call … no sign or sound of Myu. Second call … I heard a bump that sounded like a cat jumping off of something in another room. I waited for her to arrive at the bedroom door. I waited. I waited some more. No Myu. Then I looked at Ronin, and he was staring at the closet with his eyes bugging out of his head. In a flash, he jumped off the bed, ran to the closet and began frantically pawing at edge of the mirrored door. So I go and open the door, and what do I find? Myu sitting on top of my bags of yarn looking all innocent and adorable.

I told you they were never more than a few feet apart!

Now the little brats are over on Lin’s side of the den rummaging in something. They do love rummaging in the boxes of paperwork Lin has stashed in the den. Yes, paper is the best toy EVER. Why you can rip it, bite it, chew it, claw it to shreds … just SO MUCH FUN! I better go rescue whatever it is they are into and take them to the living room for a play session. They appear to need some wearing out. If I don’t lower their energy levels now, they’ll be swinging from the chandeliers by mid-afternoon.

Two more days until their 6 month birthday! I can’t believe it. First off, I can’t believe they have already been with us for 6 months (well. almost, we didn’t get them at birth, so it’s more like 5 months), and secondly, I can’t believe they are only 6 months old. They have gotten SO huge the last few weeks. They are monsters, I tell you … MONSTERS! 8O

At long last, I have sort of figured out why my keyboard sometimes stops creating type when I press the keys. It appears to be a Firefox/Flash problem. Maybe it’s Firefox. Maybe it’s that I can’t use the new version of Flash without running my browser in Rosetta mode, and so don’t have the newest version of Flash in Firefox. Whatever it is, it happens after I have been playing Flash games in Firefox and then think I’d like to type something. Every single time … and the keyboard works fine in other programs. It’s just typing in Firefox that ceases to function. It doesn’t happen at all when I use Safari, which I do have running in Rosetta and with the latest version of Flash.

Not that I am any closer to knowing why it’s happening, but at least it isn’t an actual problem with my Mac. This isn’t going to make me use Safari as my default browser. I love Firefox entirely too much. It is worth it to me to just close the browser and restart it after my keyboard freaks out rather than use any other browser at all.

Yup, I love Firefox that much.

I am posting this with Safari though, and I see now why I decided to never use this browser … the buttons on my Wordpress post page are all missing. Ugh.

You can never have too many cookbooks, especially those in electronic format that don’t take up any space on your bookshelves. Also, charity is a good thing. Combine the two together and you have the Celebrity Pasta Lover’s Cookbook, which you can download for free while Barilla donates a dollar to America’s Second Harvest for every download made.

Go get yourself some great pasta recipes and help a worthy charity at the same time. Come on! It’ll make you feel good!