The little miss has sprouted up quite a bit; i thought i might post some cute pics of her little pink-nosed self.

These two have become the best of friends, and follow one another everywhere. It's adorable.

We're down to the last few sessions in our art class, and last time we started a mosaic project which is supposed to take a few workshops to complete. It's not often that I run into a new medium which shakes my artistic confidence (drat you, film photography!), but I have to say I was a little shaky when it came to planning out my design. I'm also not all that patient; I like to sit down and begin a project, I rarely take a break, and just generally stick it out till I git 'er done. So  I came to class last time with a bag of doodads and buttons and with a general idea in mind, and the teacher supplied the rest of the tiles and the frame itself. When i finally sat down with my hoard of stuff and a blank surface to work on, I found myself feeling stumped. Trying to be deliberate about the arrangement was no good at all. The best bet, i found, was to stick stuff on willy-nilly and see what evolves.

Here it is so far:

And some closeups:

Freshwater pearls and an octopus.....

A pendant I made from my Nine Divas series....

A funny bottlecap, vintage plastic flowers, and a czech glass button...

I glued a photo underneath the iridescent glass drop. At certain angles she vanishes under the reflection, and then reappears like a nymph in a pool of water.

On tuesday, we're going to grout our creations. Here's hoping it comes out well!

...and they're freakin' orange! I decided it was a courageous color to wear- and how appropriate- since orange and I have always had a tenuous long-standing love-hate relationship. I admire it for it's citrus sassiness, but it never looks quite right with my complexion. Yesterday I was having a very Holly Golightly kinda day, so I decided to take the plunge and embrace my inner orangeness, in the form of some cute new shoes.

And yes, darling, they look rawther fabulous with blue socks. i simply don't care.

So this was, what, yesterday? Good things have been happening left and right. I started the day by snapping that new profile picture up there, in front of a work-in-progress, and I have to say I look quite like myself. For the first time in a long time, too. This is very satisfying.

Then i hopped on the train and poked around downtown, in order to seek out this one particularly renowned camera shop, and obtain the film i needed for my new Diana F+. Turns out they were completely out of the medium format rolls I needed, save a couple loose packages of black and white. So the guy just gave them to me! No wonder their reputation is so stellar; I'll be sure to go back there for all my photo supplies. In the meantime, I'm going to go shoot some photos of the cemetery in the snow, so wish me luck. I'll post the results when they come back from the lab.

After that i decided some tea and literature were in order, so I wandered over to the bookshop and purchased a copy of Breakfast At Tiffany's. Like I said, it was a Golightly kind of day, and Capote has recently piqued my curiosity. I've always adored the film version, and not just because i love Ms. Hepburn - it's always been clear to me that there was some kind of genius behind the creation of some of my favorite quotes, so I've been dying to get to the source. A girl can't just go to Sing-Sing with a green face, darling. So I soon settled down by the window with a cuppa and dived right in.  I never claimed to be super well-read, but I do know my way around a little bit of literature. So far, it's one of my favorite books, ever. Ever ever. ever. Positively exquisite.

And onwards! I did a wee bit of impulse shopping, and got a hold of yonder orange shoes, as well as some new rocketdogs which were ridonkulously ON SALE and totally rockstar yet super comfy, as well as a ruffled jacket which i think is tres chic. Behold:

I like this photo of me, too. I recently acquired some (as my best gal pal puts it) badonkadonk- twenty pounds of it to be precise- and while this means I have outgrown each and every pair of scrawny size 2 jeans I've been rockin' my whole life (good riddance!), I'm thinking I look pretty slammin' in my curvaceous 5/6's.  Rawr!

So, all in all, life is pretty sweet right now. New shoes, new books, new butt, no more evil ex-bf, and even the rabbit has been unusually nice to me. i have a feeling i can keep this up for a long time ; )

"Car accidents are a leading
cause of death for teenagers. The school board and your elected
representatives want to make sure that you and your families are spared
from such a tragedy, which is why the money for driver's ed was
eliminated from the budget. Whereas last year I was teaching your older
siblings how to shift and brake and three-point-turn during a six-week
course, it has since been decreed that I actually need just one
afternoon to tell you the only piece of safety information I'm
permitted by law to share:

The ONLY 100 percent effective method for avoiding car accidents is to ABSTAIN from driving until marriage."

Read the rest here.

Speaking of peace & cataclysms......

On wednesday morning I woke from a dream in which I'd been in a plane crash. The front half of the fuselage had split off, leaving the rest of us strapped in and falling towards our doom. Time seemed to slow itself; I remember knowing the names of a few of the passengers who had been suddenly flung through the ragged opening, and I specifically recall feeling empathy towards one couple -still strapped to their seats- who were staring horrified at the empty spot where a friend of theirs had been torn from the plane.  I even had the time and wherewithal to notice the colors of the clouds as we  plummeted past, to say some prayers in french, and to wonder how long it would take until we smashed into the ground. Where would we crash? Would it hurt? Why us?

As it turned out, we didn't actually crash. Somehow the dilapidated remnants of our craft glided back to earth unharmed - perhaps due to the fervency of my french prayers? At any rate, it all seemed a miracle. I contemplated the odds of living versus dying, and then woke up. I lay in bed for a while thinking about it.

Just in case, I checked the news. Since it was one of those dreams, and that kind of thing has happened to me before. No french speaking people falling out of the sky in a fiery disaster to be found, thank god. I did catch the live video of the space shuttle landing, which had me on edge for a little while. But even that went off without a hitch. Phew!

So I decided to cheer the fuck up, since nobody was dying that day. Made a pot of tea. Sat sipping it in the morning sunshine. A little later, I heard the mail slide through the slot. Usually I ignore the mail for a bit, because if it's not beads, it's bills, and I haven't ordered beads in a while. But this sounded heavy. Not that it was anything large.... just.... significant.

But first, let me fill you in on some recent drama: the ex-convict-ex boyfriend has been giving me trouble. There had been some bru-ha-ha over the possibility or impossibility of a friendship between us since his release, I was attempting to be kind to him, but his efforts to ingratiate himself back into my life were becoming obsessive and violent. Nevermind that he'd started dating somebody else (with my blessing- hey, whatever got him off my case!) and had no business bothering me anymore. But for years this guy had been doing me some serious mental harm, it was like a tacky white-trash abusive habit, and all I wanted was to recover and move on. Most of all, I wanted everybody to just be happy. Matt, however, was freaking out a little bit about the situation, and there had been some tears and some arguing, and I felt like absolute shit because it was all rapidly deteriorating and it seemed like I'd never find any goddamned peace with the whole fricking scenario. But the ex refused to let me go.

Back to the mail slot- I immediately recognized the prison stationery and ECEB's googly handwriting. Turns out, he violated some terms of his probation or something and his mother (great gal- yeesh) had tipped off the police as to his whereabouts. Shacking up with the new thingathing and her little kid, as it were. Anyways, he was considerate enough to write and tell me I was off the hook as far as he was concerned, since he was going to be locked up for some time and he'd recently figured out he was really in love with his new girlfriend. Poor thing, I feel really sorry for her.

But YAH-FUCKING-HOO, that asshole is finally out of my hair!!!

I laughed my ass off at first, and then the significance finally hit me- I was free. For the first time in nearly four years, I was absolutely free of his concern. The curse was broken. Best of all, everybody involved had found a way to move on and find some peace, even after all the terrible things that had happened. That felt really good. And then, like water, all the sadness and worry started just melting right off me, years and years of it, and I must have cried for about an hour.

So then I was thinking about my dream, it having been one of those dreams, and I realized I'd initially made the mistake of assuming it was literally prophetic. I think it was in fact a forecast- although not about my [french] prayers finally be answered- but more like some kind of cosmic reassurance that even in the face of a terrible disaster, things will unfold just as they should. Some crash landings are softer than others, I guess. I can't even begin to say how blessed I feel.

Recently i've been digging around in some of my old sketchbooks and media files, in hopes of preserving some of my earlier stuff for posterity. I came across this collection of teeny tiny artworks (and accompanying poems), and put them all together here. Aww, mousies.

I also saved a bunch of old drawings and paintings and flung them unceremoniously into the digital age, so now you can also see just about everything i've ever drawn on my newly revamped Flickr page.

As much as I love our little house on the hill, one of the serious drawbacks to living in a place with "character" is the ancient heating system beneath us. The oil burner and boiler date from the forties, and are at the center of a maze of poorly insulated ducts and pipes in our dirty, scary-ass basement. The whole thing is decrepit and inefficient, and soot covers everything downstairs, and sometimes wafts up through the floorboards. Our bed happens to be directly upstairs from the behemoth, and when it clicks on at night i can sometimes smell the oil. In our house, the cobwebs are all black.

Like I said, the place has plenty of.... character. 

The heat also regularly fails us, and is ridiculously expensive. That's partly our fault for choosing a place with beautiful 12 foot high ceilings and big windows, but the fact that some of the radiator pipes aren't even insulated means we're operating fairly inefficiently from the outset, here. They can't even repair our burner if it comes down to it, since nobody  manufactures parts for it anymore.  Add in outrageous fuel prices, and we're talking six hundred dollars a month just to keep the place minimally warm.

At first, during the beginning months of the winter, it was only a mild concern. We even found humor in how scary the basement is, or the fact that the boiler is older than my parents. Ugmoe's feet have become black with soot, which is more worrisome. But things seem much less funny now that we're paying hand over fist to heat a place that's filled with fumes and soot. It's like living in Dickensian London or something.

Don't get me wrong; I love this house. It's the first place that feels like home since I don't know when. We've done our best to be proactive with the landlord and fuel company and have been careful about conserving heat. We've had technicians come at least three times this winter to rummage in our basement and fiddle with the boiler for various reasons; we keep hoping it will get a little better, or maybe someone will tel us if it's a do-or-die sort of situation. They always joked about how old and decrepit it is, and usually make some minimal recommendations about getting a new this-or-that, and then go on their merry way.

But it's still just old and dirty and expensive. I'm not the type to get freaked out over dark, filthy basements and old machinery, but this thing gives me the mechanical heebie jeebies. Not to mention that ever since about a month ago, since we had the whole system "cleaned", i've started finding black, oily soot upstairs.

What gives me serious pause is my own health, since i'm pretty much puttering around here all day long. I haven't been breathing so well lately, and my initial thought was the typical winter culprits: maybe i'm not getting enough exercise since it's been cold out, or perhaps it's allergies, or just a malingering low-level respiratory infection. I get seriously winded when i walk up the hill, to the point where I'm gasping for air. And for the past month or so I've been waking up in the night, unable to breathe at all.

So, yesterday the heat conked out on us again. The tech arrived this morning to come have a look and get us up and running again. I lead him downstairs to have a look, and made the usual banter about how old and disgusting the thing was. He agreed, then poked around a bit and got the boiler going. I waited up in the kitchen. What he said when he came upstairs, though, has given me cause for deep concern.

Apparently the thing is not only old and dirty and poorly insulated, but now the insulation is decaying. Asbestos insulation. Bits of it are falling off, along with the usual oily soot and grime, and are strewn all over the unit and surrounding area. Which is, like i said, directly beneath the warped and cracked floorboards of our bedroom. He didn't even have me sign off on the service slip; he just said he was going to put in a call to his office and that it was pretty urgent that our landlord get in contact with them. Other than that, he said the system was crap and should be replaced not only for efficiency reasons, but because it was unhealthy and unsafe.

I called Matt in the middle of having a low-level freakout. He immediately put in a call to the city inspection services, and notified our landlord. Tomorrow someone is going to come and look and let us know if we are in any danger; if so, I am very much going to flip the eff out. It's not like nobody's been down there (at least three times this winter!) who could have possibly missed that shit, and i don't care who's specifically responsible if our health has been put at risk during the nine months we've lived here.

Heads are going to farking roll, i tell you.

Checked out the Purse Blog (i usually scope out the Fug Bags category for my dose of fashion snark), and they were featuring the new spring Fairies line from Prada.

1. Pretty bag. pretty art. oooh. chic.

2. Prettier bag! Instead of paying two grand, though, I'ma going to hit up a thrift store and get a vintage white leather bag, then doodle some naughty nudie nymphs on it in sharpie. Take that, fashion elitism!!

3. nifty video. Mostly i like the art nouveau bit, and coco rosie is always nice to listen to; however, the animation of the woman is clunky and distracting and bugs the hell out of me. Like baaad nineties CGI. And hello? Pan's labyrinth much? jeesh.