Things.
Tonight:
-I made gluten free cookies (no weird substitute flours to mess with, the recipe just called for oats as the base). They are pretty good! But the raw dough was even better :D
-I went shopping because I had a $10 off coupon thingy to use by Monday (no purchase limit, but I spent more than $10 anyway because I kept finding cute stuff and I can't turn cute stuff down, you know how I am). Apparently my new favourite colour is golden/mustard yellow, because I bought two things in that colour and kept spotting others as well... Also, mustard goes well with dark and reddish purples, which is my other new favourite colour. And it goes well with turquoises, but I've liked that colour for a while now. Anyway, I sure do love colours. And clothes...
-It SNOWED. It snowed a LOT. It's probably still snowing. It's pretty, but sooooo... cold.
So our cats, one of them, we've got eating raw meat these days. See, like, two or almost three weeks ago, we had to take her to the vet because she was stick-thin (she's normally thin anyway, but you'd pet her and her spine was very very noticeable) and throwing up even without anything in her stomach. We found out she's got kidney problems :( :( and so her kidneys don't have a lot of functionality. So... they put her on an IV for a couple days, and sent her back home with a special easy-on-the-kidneys diet, but then my mum did her research and figured out that these sorts of diet are usually low-protein (because protein is harder to break down?) and cats, being carnivores, really do NEED protein to thrive. So her natural-healing-inclined research suggested raw meats, because they are what cats normally eat in the wild (as opposed to grain-based commercial cat foods), and being raw, have enzymes that help break the food down better than cooked/processed meat/food. She also likes squash and pumpkin, so she gets that because it's a good source of water, which also helps flush out toxins so the kidneys don't have to work so hard. So... I suppose we don't know how much longer she'll be with us because kidneys don't really regenerate once they've started to lose function, but so far she is really really liking the raw meat (especially turkey!! man does she ever love raw turkey) and even getting a little more hefty (not a LOT but it's an improvement from before!). So that is something to be thankful for! I'm keeping optimistic :D
And then my other cat, the fat one♥, suddenly on Tuesday her tail went all droopy. And I did research on THAT, but it wasn't much help because most places just said it could be broken or caught in a door etc, and this cat is not really active enough to break anything (except maybe if she bumped into something fragile and broke THAT) and no one had noticed her getting caught anywhere. But it was such a sad looking tail... when I'd hold it up and drop it, it up it just plunked right back down like there was nothing to hold it up. Everything else about her was the same, though. She was still eating as much as ever and purring all the time and followed me around the house, and she used her litterbox like normal too. And she didn't seem to be bothered or in pain by my petting her tail or back or picking her up or anything... Well, anyway, it's still a little droopy but it seems to be getting better by today. So hopefully she's on the mend too. Having broken kitties is no fun!
Ummm whatelse whatelse. I finished cleaning off all the J-text from the pages of my first manga lettering job! It was fun and occasionally infuriating (one main character in particular has the unattractive habit of very often thinking on top of screentones so I did some yelling at her) and now, soon, hopefully I'll get to do more of the actual lettering part! But I had work at Flowerland all day today, and for 5 hours tomorrow, too, and then tomorrow night we have Advent Adventure! at church and it will be very much fun but also busy. So maybe Saturday...
And I keep kinda wanting to go back to that cover design thing I was working on, but on the other hand I don't... because I'd rather work on things that I am getting paid for. And I kinda think, I don't really LOVE doing cover designs (because I'm not good at it! (classic trait of Lys: giving up on things I deem myself no good at, to better pursue things I deem myself decent at (when I emphasize the second part of that sentence, it doesn't seem so bad-I'm not a quitter, I just want to make better use of my time elsewhere!))) ...er anyway, I don't LOVE doing cover design, I just feel compelled to try my hand at it for certain series that I feel strongly deserve a good cover and may not get one. And at the moment I'm just thinking of Bancho-sama. But realistically, they've probably already assigned someone to cover designing for that, so they probably wouldn't accept my design anyway, so it would all be a wasted effort and even if they did like it, I'd probably get assigned covers for series I don't care about, and that just wouldn't work for something I was already not-passionate-about. And, cover design is like oil painting in that it is something you can always change and tinker with more, and I don't have patience for oil painting either. That's why I like watercolour painting, and lettering-the more or less definite end-point. So maybe I'll offer my skills as a letterer to Certain Other Companies I Desperately Dream of Working For, instead of dedicating the time to refine my skills as a cover designer when I already know there are so many better designers out there who already know what they're doing far better than I ever will.
Finally, for now, I just have to say that oh, Anne of Green Gables (which I am currently rereading for the first time in some years) is so wonderful. I'm not really surprised by that, but I'm happy to still like them just as much now as when I first read them, because sometimes books and things aren't quite as wonderful when you are grown up(ish) as when you first read them as a kid. But I think L. M. Montgomery is like A. A. Milne in that you just realize even more how awesome they are, once you're older. *contented sigh*
[edit: man, what a brick of an entry. well, just think of it as however-many-days-since-my-last-post saved up for one big special rambling post with a million different subject tags. in other words, the usual.]
-I made gluten free cookies (no weird substitute flours to mess with, the recipe just called for oats as the base). They are pretty good! But the raw dough was even better :D
-I went shopping because I had a $10 off coupon thingy to use by Monday (no purchase limit, but I spent more than $10 anyway because I kept finding cute stuff and I can't turn cute stuff down, you know how I am). Apparently my new favourite colour is golden/mustard yellow, because I bought two things in that colour and kept spotting others as well... Also, mustard goes well with dark and reddish purples, which is my other new favourite colour. And it goes well with turquoises, but I've liked that colour for a while now. Anyway, I sure do love colours. And clothes...
-It SNOWED. It snowed a LOT. It's probably still snowing. It's pretty, but sooooo... cold.
So our cats, one of them, we've got eating raw meat these days. See, like, two or almost three weeks ago, we had to take her to the vet because she was stick-thin (she's normally thin anyway, but you'd pet her and her spine was very very noticeable) and throwing up even without anything in her stomach. We found out she's got kidney problems :( :( and so her kidneys don't have a lot of functionality. So... they put her on an IV for a couple days, and sent her back home with a special easy-on-the-kidneys diet, but then my mum did her research and figured out that these sorts of diet are usually low-protein (because protein is harder to break down?) and cats, being carnivores, really do NEED protein to thrive. So her natural-healing-inclined research suggested raw meats, because they are what cats normally eat in the wild (as opposed to grain-based commercial cat foods), and being raw, have enzymes that help break the food down better than cooked/processed meat/food. She also likes squash and pumpkin, so she gets that because it's a good source of water, which also helps flush out toxins so the kidneys don't have to work so hard. So... I suppose we don't know how much longer she'll be with us because kidneys don't really regenerate once they've started to lose function, but so far she is really really liking the raw meat (especially turkey!! man does she ever love raw turkey) and even getting a little more hefty (not a LOT but it's an improvement from before!). So that is something to be thankful for! I'm keeping optimistic :D
And then my other cat, the fat one♥, suddenly on Tuesday her tail went all droopy. And I did research on THAT, but it wasn't much help because most places just said it could be broken or caught in a door etc, and this cat is not really active enough to break anything (except maybe if she bumped into something fragile and broke THAT) and no one had noticed her getting caught anywhere. But it was such a sad looking tail... when I'd hold it up and drop it, it up it just plunked right back down like there was nothing to hold it up. Everything else about her was the same, though. She was still eating as much as ever and purring all the time and followed me around the house, and she used her litterbox like normal too. And she didn't seem to be bothered or in pain by my petting her tail or back or picking her up or anything... Well, anyway, it's still a little droopy but it seems to be getting better by today. So hopefully she's on the mend too. Having broken kitties is no fun!
Ummm whatelse whatelse. I finished cleaning off all the J-text from the pages of my first manga lettering job! It was fun and occasionally infuriating (one main character in particular has the unattractive habit of very often thinking on top of screentones so I did some yelling at her) and now, soon, hopefully I'll get to do more of the actual lettering part! But I had work at Flowerland all day today, and for 5 hours tomorrow, too, and then tomorrow night we have Advent Adventure! at church and it will be very much fun but also busy. So maybe Saturday...
And I keep kinda wanting to go back to that cover design thing I was working on, but on the other hand I don't... because I'd rather work on things that I am getting paid for. And I kinda think, I don't really LOVE doing cover designs (because I'm not good at it! (classic trait of Lys: giving up on things I deem myself no good at, to better pursue things I deem myself decent at (when I emphasize the second part of that sentence, it doesn't seem so bad-I'm not a quitter, I just want to make better use of my time elsewhere!))) ...er anyway, I don't LOVE doing cover design, I just feel compelled to try my hand at it for certain series that I feel strongly deserve a good cover and may not get one. And at the moment I'm just thinking of Bancho-sama. But realistically, they've probably already assigned someone to cover designing for that, so they probably wouldn't accept my design anyway, so it would all be a wasted effort and even if they did like it, I'd probably get assigned covers for series I don't care about, and that just wouldn't work for something I was already not-passionate-about. And, cover design is like oil painting in that it is something you can always change and tinker with more, and I don't have patience for oil painting either. That's why I like watercolour painting, and lettering-the more or less definite end-point. So maybe I'll offer my skills as a letterer to Certain Other Companies I Desperately Dream of Working For, instead of dedicating the time to refine my skills as a cover designer when I already know there are so many better designers out there who already know what they're doing far better than I ever will.
Finally, for now, I just have to say that oh, Anne of Green Gables (which I am currently rereading for the first time in some years) is so wonderful. I'm not really surprised by that, but I'm happy to still like them just as much now as when I first read them, because sometimes books and things aren't quite as wonderful when you are grown up(ish) as when you first read them as a kid. But I think L. M. Montgomery is like A. A. Milne in that you just realize even more how awesome they are, once you're older. *contented sigh*
[edit: man, what a brick of an entry. well, just think of it as however-many-days-since-my-last-post saved up for one big special rambling post with a million different subject tags. in other words, the usual.]