Zombieism is a very serious disease (With DRAWINGS!)

So, the other day at work, I was walking back up to the office after a long day. The walk back is up a pretty steep switchback hill that already saps the soul out of me on a daily basis. Little did I know, today would be the day that things would get...

... a little bit worse.


I'm walking along, just trying to get up to the office, so I can put my stuff away and head home, when all of a sudden, something very-much-six-legged landed on my forehead. I felt the tiniest of pinches, almost indiscernible from the little buggy feet on my face.

Not shown: Me doing anything rage-inducing

Shown: Completely uncalled-for insect attack

Naturally, I had a mini-meltdown right there on the pathway. It was mostly internal, and over very quickly, but involved a lot of flailing at my face and trying to see if the insect that had ruthlessly tried to kill me was coming back for a second pass. I was the giant in ENDER'S GAME, and I feared that the little gnat of a warrior was going to figure out how to win.

Luckily, I made it back to our office unmolested, thanks to my superior ninja skills (not shown). It wasn't without a cost, though. Without having seen the insect responsible, I was pretty petrified.

See, I have a secret, guys.

I... I might be allergic to bees.

*cue loud gasp*

Okay, here's the thing. The last couple of times I have been stung, my reactions have been getting progressively worse. Last time, my whole arm swelled. I am pretty paranoid about being stung again (let's be honest: I'm pretty paranoid about every freaky way you can die), and you have to understand how unfair it was to be stung where I couldn't even see the bug responsible and figure out if I needed to be walking up the hill or, like, running.

So I get to the top, and I haven't, you know, keeled over dead. Yet. I go into the bathroom to see if I have an emergency or just a bad day, or both. And this is what awaits me:

Looking back, it really wasn't THIS bad

I did the walk of shame to my boss' office, where she promptly told me to go to the medic. Those words were like balm to my ravaged, panicky ears. A medic. Someone who could SAVE me, should my throat suddenly close up, and my brain explode. Despite the heat of the day, I made another walk back down the hill, knowing full well I would have to come back up it.

The medic was nice, but very dismissive. He obviously didn't understand that I could die AT ANY SECOND. But that was probably a good thing. He just told me to keep an eye on it and see my own doctor if I started "seeing the signs of an allergic reaction."

And then he asked me if I knew what those were. Of course I knew.

... didn't I?

"You want to watch for shortness of breath, swelling of the face, redness of the skin..."

Not shown: The clothes I was actually wearing at the time, I swear

And with that he sent me back up to the office. This trip, I wore my Don't-Mess-With-Me-Bug face, and it seemed to work. I made it back, trying to push the signs the medic had told me out of my head, and trying to ignore the occasional sharp pain from my forehead and the slight itchiness that had started there. I finished my stuff and clocked out, and got in my car, ready to make the 40-minute drive home.

Forty minutes is kind of a long drive. And when you're on the road for that long, you have a tendency to think. Within five minutes, it was like a record of the medic's voice playing over and over in my head. And let me tell you, folks, the symptoms of a mild panic attack? Kinda sorta similar to the signs of an allergic reaction.

By the time I got home, I was a quivering, nervous ball. WH managed to calm me down, as did the fact that I managed to reach my house without suddenly blowing up like Violet Beauregarde and dying on the freeway. I was safe. I had made it through another crisis alive, with only a slightly itchy bump to show for it.

That should have been good enough for a while, right? I mean, one unprovoked insect attack is enough excitement and paperwork for a girl for a week, right?

Well, the universe had other plans.

Today, I scraped my leg pretty hard on a metal bar at the bottom of a gate. You know, the unyielding kind that go into a hole in the concrete to hold the gate in place? Yeah, one of those. Right now, I'm sitting on the couch with an ace bandage wrapped around an ice pack, wrapped around my leg, trying NOT to go on one of those medical websites and see if there are any horrible ways you can die from bruising.

Any true hypochondriac knows exactly what this is like

It's not easy, let me tell you. I haven't had a bruise so bad it made my whole lower leg stiff in, I think, ever. I'm pretty convinced, though, that if I go onto that website and let myself do this, this will be the result:

Zombieism is a serious disease, folks. If I've got it, I don't want to know.

Pretending to be an artist

Last week, my work had an Employee Art Fair. I saw the flier shortly after I got hired in March, and for some idiotic reason thought it sounded like a good idea to sign up.

Here's why it was idiotic: I'm not an artist. Yes, I'm a writer, and I happen to think I'm okay at that craft. And I can build things, as evidenced by my love of dioramas and Cindy Pon's SILVER PHOENIX books. But when it comes to drawing and painting and sculpting? Forget it.

So it was rather stupid of me to sign up for an ART fair. But I did anyway, because of the whole building/ hands-on thing, and I thought that the idea I had might even work out in my favor. My idea? Decorate bird eggs. Not chicken eggs. Duck, goose, and one ostrich egg.

So I signed up, and then started gathering supplies and ideas, and promptly waited until about one week before the art fair to actually start doing anything. Yeah. Told you I was a moron.

Anyway, since several people have asked, here are some pictures of the eggs I made. You can click on any of these pictures to make them larger.

Here is my table. It was HUGE.


And here are my eggs!





This egg is one of my favorites. The Twilight Egg-- it actually is lit from beneath with a portable, battery powered LED.

The Dragon Eggs: (Note: these came out COMPLETELY differently from what I'd planned, but then WH had the brilliant idea to call them Dragon Eggs. The man is a marketing genius! Or, well, an idea genius. Would have been a marketing genius if I'd actually sold any).

The Gnomish Dragon Egg

The Volcano Dragon Egg

The Blue Dragon Egg

The Red Dragon Egg

I made several rhinestone eggs. I wish I could take complete credit for these, but they were mostly just really awesome stickers that I cut and stuck to the eggs. Some of the gems I glued on by hand, but certainly not enough to feel comfortable taking full credit. Still, I love the way they came out.

This one refused to photograph. But it was the only one I sold!

The Fire and Ice Eggs

The back of the "Ice" egg

The back of the "Fire" egg

I only painted a couple eggs, because, as I said, I am not very good with painting. Here they are!

The Butterfly Garden egg

The "It's a Hoot" egg

This one is wrapped with acacia leaves, because at the zoo I work at, acacia is one of the browse plants we use for pretty much all of our herbivores. It's a good, well-rounded source of nutrition, plus it's tasty (at least to the herbivores). And everyone who works there has a certain fondness for this plant. So I thought an egg wrapped in acacia would appeal to a large amount of people. It did, just not enough for anyone to buy it, unfortunately.

And my magnum opus egg. This one is a real ostrich egg, cut in half. The top fits back on the base and is filled with cotton clouds and a golden sun.




















So yeah. Was it fun? Absolutely. Was it what I thought it was going to be (an event where I sold all my eggs in the first ten minutes and made back every penny I spent on supplies, and then some)? No. But I guess one of the first lessons you learn when you create anything is that you need to have some patience, right?

GIRAFFES ARE AWESOME

Okay. I'll be honest. I don't love giraffes as much as I love cheetahs. But they are still pretty cool. Here are some weird things you never wanted to know about giraffes:

• Generally speaking, for every foot a giraffe is tall, its tongue will be one inch long. So an eighteen-foot-tall giraffe will have an eighteen-inch-long tongue.
• Giraffes have black/ purple tongues. It's freaky. The theory is that it serves as sun protection, since they spend so much of their day eating!
• Giraffe spit is extra sticky. It helps coat the thorns of their favorite food, the thorny acacia, which is a very cool looking green-barked tree, that's covered in 2-3" long thorns.
  
• Giraffes have seven neck bones, just like humans. But theirs are all ten inches long, hence the six-foot-neck!
• When a giraffe baby is born, Mama Giraffe doesn't lay down. She gives birth-- standing up! Baby has a six-foot fall ahead of him, which shocks him into taking a breath.
  

Who here likes giraffes? *raises hand*

CHEETAHS ARE AWESOME

I love cheetahs. Here's why:

• They totally purr. And it is ADORABLE. And LOUD. And ADORABLE.

• They are the smallest of the big cats, and as such are actually rather skittish. They lack the confidence that lions and tigers have and are therefore relatively trainable. Many facilities that keep cheetahs allow for direct contact, which they will not do with other big cats. This means I get to see cheetahs walking around on leashes all the time. How freaking cool is that?

• They can run up to 70 MPH! That's as fast as a car on the freeway. I know that seems obvious, but it still blows my mind to think about driving down the freeway and having a CAT keep up with me. Every time I bump it up to 75, I think, "Ha! Got away from THAT cheetah!" (Of course, they can only keep this speed up for about a minute. Sprinter, not marathoner. Still impressive. Can YOU run 70 MPH? I didn't think so).

• At full speed, one stride can be up to 22 FEET long!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why cheetahs are awesome. What more do you need?

WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN...

So... yeah.

Rather than trying to explain, I will just say... hi!

I think most of you follow me on the Archives anyway. So it's not like I've disappeared. I just haven't been HERE. Sorry about that.

The good news? I've got a new, exciting job, and a new, exciting MS that I'm excited to talk about. And there's no shortage of stuff to share from those! So yay for things to blog about!

The well that had runneth dry now runneth over.

And I will start runneth-ing over very soon!

Home Improvement!

Despite having one of THOSE days (the kind where I officially don't feel well and spend most of the day on the couch, sipping at liquids), I am ridiculously excited to share a couple changes we recently made around the house.

About two months ago, I got the brilliant idea to freshen up our bathrooms. As a real estate agent, I know that outdated baths and kitchens are often the first reason for undervalued home sales. And while I don't know for sure that the work we're doing will still be good-looking or in mode by the time we do decide to sell our home, at least it's prettier to look at and live in in the meantime.

Not to mention, hey, I like it.

My idea started out simple enough: paint the upper half of the walls and add wainscoting and chair rail molding to the lower half.

This was easily something WH and I could accomplish ourselves, and I have to admit to being super-psyched to start. I went and picked out paint colors. I bought the wainscoting and painted it. I picked out the molding.

And then logic started to set in. For instance: adding wainscoting meant taking out the toilet and vanity. That was messing with plumbing, which was not something either of us were comfortable doing on our own just yet. But some research online showed that it really wouldn't be that scary, so it was worth it to try.

Once we conquered the plumbing, I got another brilliant idea. Since we already had the toilet and vanity out, why not re-do the floors? When I suggested this, I didn't actually think WH would agree to it. But he did. And so somehow I wound up tiling my first-ever floor. Luckily it was a small one to start with!

The whole experience took way, way longer than we thought-- and we have only finished the smaller of the two baths. But at least it's done (except for one or two minor details) and ready to go!

So, without further ado, I present to you:

The Before:



The After:

(Click to embiggen)

If one of our wedding photos wasn't at the top of that picture I'm not sure I'd believe this bathroom is actually in our house!

A better picture of the floor that I tiled. (Can you tell I'm excited that I did this? I love working with my hands and discovering new skills, even things as mundane as tiling a floor. And I only screwed up a little!)


The awesome part is that the toilet and the vanity are both the old ones. We just got a new faucet, seat, and handle, and they cleaned up pretty spiffy! Our hall bath still has the glorious 80's/90's vanity from several owners ago, so we'll be replacing that one... but we won't start that bath for a couple weeks at least.

WH did such an amazing job with everything. There were several weekends where he practically did nothing but work on the bathroom, cutting the wainscoting and molding and measuring and re-cutting and filling holes in the drywall and fixing the toilet and etc. So thank you, to my amazing and awesome and wonderful husband for indulging my crazy project, which started out with him ideally just "helping" and wound up with him doing most of the work!

One more thing while I've got you here-- can't resist showing off our new dining room set!


As if you needed more evidence of his craftiness, WH built the banquette benches in the back by modifying cupboards from Ikea. Here's a slightly better view with bonus cat picture:


So yay home improvement! You have no idea how long I've been dying to show you guys these pictures. Can't wait to share the hall bath once we get that one done!

The Elegance of Post-Modernism Storytelling; or, HOLY CRAP I'M ACTUALLY LEARNING THIS SEMESTER

Last night, WH and I sat down, turned off our mutual internets and watched INCEPTION. This was a big deal for us. Normally, no matter WHAT we're watching, we're both clicking away, him in a game and me on Twitter. But we had both heard so much about INCEPTION, and we were in a snuggly mood thanks to the rainy weather, so we decided to devote our full attention to a movie for once. And I'm so glad we did.

In my English class this semester, we just started learning about Post-Modernism, and I have to admit that at first I wasn't interested in learning about it. In case you're not familiar, the Modernist movement was what most of us are familiar with when we think of story-telling: neat tales that wrap up in tidy little packages, and follow a steady plot line. Post-Modernism is sort of the opposite; where Modernism is neat and tidy, Post-Modernism is chaos.

But the more my professor explained the differences between the two, the more I began to feel like donning a beret and some suspenders, and maybe even sipping an espresso with my pinkie up.

Don't get me wrong-- I'm a HUGE fan of Modernist story-telling. I love me some neat plot-lines and happy-ever-afters. But there's something so . . . appealing about Post-Modernism, too. Something raw. Something animal, that invites us think for ourselves. Normally, I don't like it when the neat lines aren't drawn for me. I don't like having to work out if something did or did not happen within the context of a story that I did not write. But my appreciation has been piqued by our in-class viewing of THE THIN BLUE LINE, a documentary that was filmed by accident and literally saved a man's life, and ever since then I've been finding Post-Modernist tidbits everywhere.

Perhaps this is just like the week I discovered that people in Britain pronounce "aluminum" differently, and therefore started hearing people with British accents saying "al-you-min-ee-um" all the time. Or perhaps it's just my mind expanding with learning. The world may never know. But my appreciation remains. And I find it fascinating that I discovered I've actually been a fan all along: Christopher Nolan, who wrote and directed INCEPTION, also directed THE PRESTIGE, which is one of my absolute all-time favorite movies (of all time), as well as MEMENTO.

There goes my neat and tidy story. But real life isn't neat and tidy, and I think that's what I appreciate about it so much.

I've come to realize that I wholeheartedly love this method of storytelling because the story winds up being so powerful. So what if there's too much detail? Who cares if the plot is hard to follow at times? The overall emotional connection you have with the story is there, and it grabs you.

It grabs me.

Someday, whether linear or chaotic, I hope to write a novel as brilliantly, darkly twisted and beautiful as those movies. One that brings readers to their emotional knees and stays with them long after they close the cover on the last page.