Hello Livejournal
Sorry,
I'm sorry I haven't been present here. Also I'm sorry for letting you down.
Summer was great, but I was being stupid. I didn't end up taking any summer classes, so I ending up spending my school refund, basically living off it for three months. That was not good. I kept justifying it, saying that I would be able to pay myself back from my work.
I ended up 4 months behind on my work. After finals I just kind of let everything go. I just relaxed for about a month. then when it came time to get back to work I was bombarded with good stress that just kept pushing everything else back.
In May and June I was still doing work, I was attending meetings I was making prints. At the same time I was working on getting my car transferred from my grandmother to me. We had just done a lot of work on the car and were in the midst of doing more work on the car so that it could pass inspection when the exhaust system just went on the car. Thankfully it was a fast repair.
The last week of June I ended up going to the beach. If I had gotten all my work done before than I would have still been on schedule. However, in standard me-fashion I had taken a project on that was more than I could do and charging for less than what it was worth. When I had discussed animation with client I had made it clear that I had effectively no experience in animation. He assumed that this was something I could learn in a class and I said yes, expecting to the client to pay for whatever training I would need to learn the skill. He expected his already overtaxed tech guy and I to be able to muddle through learning the animation together when we realized that that was the only form that would fit the minimal real estate available on the frontpage on the website.
Actionscript coding is not easy, and trying to understand which part of my job was the priority; finishing the static images that I already had the skills to do, or creating the animation, which I needed to teach myself to do.
I took my work with me to the beach, but I couldn't bring myself to work. I was far too happy enjoying the company of my friends and my boyfriend Duane. It was a pretty genius idea to invite me on this trip because it really cemented our relationship. He really treated me like a queen the whole time and we did so much exploring together, and I got to see what he was really like. I got to hear him sing for the first time. We had two failed attempts at sex before we finally had sex for the first time, which was so much more satisfying than any other time i had done it before. We took showers together, we took pictures of each other.
We learned about each other's dreams. We started talking about moving in together.
After that I had a week of partying at my grandmother's house for the yearly birthday party celebration. I got called upon to do more than I ever had to before because of my grandparents aging. I tried to work in the midst of all the partying but it was near impossible to get through actionscript coding manuals with all the activity going on in the house. That week I got to see Duane's apartment for the first time. He spent most of that weekend with me, helping me through all the stress. My family was impressed with him helping out with the work, and I got my grandfather's seal of approval on Duane. We ended up going to the folklife festival with all the extended family and we danced together.
After that we haven't spent a single week apart.
I spent the rest of July and halfway into August on three projects. Learning Actionscript to program the animation for my client and finishing the other static images; doing letterpress business cards at Pyramid Atlantic, and getting ready to go back to school. I had an advising meeting that was long overdue, because my own advisor had packed to leave on sabbatical about two week's before last semester ended. I had waited on doing it, because I was so rarely on campus during regular office hours that semester, and when I finally asked she told me she wasn't available to do it. So I finally had a meeting with my department head, and it was basically same-old same-old, time to jump through hoops again. So I slowly put together my SAP appeal, and an academic plan of action for my retake petition. Because last year the Academic Policy Specialist had told me that since I was not able to attend last fall, the approval could roll over to this year, I only worked on re-doing the schedule of my academic plan. However, this year there was a new Academic Policy Specialist and when I asked about the previous decision, she said there was no record of it and that it was too late. Which my department head then berated me about again, waiting too long. Actionscript was tough, and I also had a lot of images to prepare to make the animation. I don't know that I have finally hit the style that works for this comic yet either. I am really satisfied with the avatars, but when it comes to the comics I feel like my style is kind of all over the place. If I could tighten up my workflow and have something of a standard way of doing things I feel like the images would come out a lot better. My old method was very much all about layout, my early comic years were all about full page layouts, and I am not used to working in a strip format at all. I really could use doing some research on comic strips, but really all I had time for was learning code. Video tutorials were useless for me. The coding language books I bought were a little too high-minded and abstract for me, I needed concrete tutorials. I finally downloaded a user manual from Adobe and things really started to click. With it, and the assistance of my friend David, I finally produced a five-panel, user controlled, click-through webcomic. Letterpress was hard. I ordered plates. I did a test strip to get the exposure. I was trying to do it during letterpress happy hour, but I just couldn't seem to get it together. Each time I would go to letterpress I would go on the wrong day. Wednesday like it said on the site, and the woman in the bindery would tell me no it moved to Mondays for the summer, and then two weeks later I would be there Wednesday again. This proves how out of it I have been because I did this 3 times in a row. When I exposed the plate it was fine, but I kept thinking that I needed to scrub the plate until I got to the metal. And thus I ended scrubbing off some of my letters. Sadface. At the same time I was trying to set up times to work in the letterpress print shop independently, however, I ended up finding out that it would cost me 100 dollars in the certification and deposit fees. I put the whole thing on the backburner, because until I had settled up work with my other client, letterpress was something I just couldn't afford. Now I have access to the school printshop but the plate is useless now, because I could not afford to keep my cell phone on and have now lost my old phone number which is burned into that plate.
I completed the animation in mid-August but it hasn't been added to the site yet. I did not get paid until the week before last. Which is my fault for not invoicing in a timely fashion.
I crashed my car. My dad and grandmother helped me fix it, but my entire paycheck went directly into fixing it.
The last of my refund money was spent at Otakon, and boy was it worth it. I got to shop at Baby's first booth at Otakon! I got to meet the American Lolita Designers. I got to do hair for the fashion show! I went to the tea party and caught up with all the lovely ladies I hadn't seen in ages. I got such sweet compliments from everyone. I got to hang out with Emily. I sewed a new salopette. It was wonderful!
I haven't had my cellphone on since about that time I have felt completely cut off from everyone. I miss you all so much. I couldn't handle it anymore and finally bit the bullet last night and got added to my dad's family plan. I hate feeling so dependent.
I am waiting now for my car's windshield replacement to arrive and then the beast will finally be in perfect working order.
But let me tell you the good news:
♥ I am taking installation art class this semester and it is great!! My professor welcomed me back to UMBC on the first day and said that I was a natural at this medium. This weekend I am building a bamboo structure and my boyfriend is super excited about helping me, he wants it to be our new hobby. Today I am going to buy a propane torch to get us started.
♥ The Baybrooke highschool project that I am working on with my professor! We are teaching high school kids how animation works! It's super exciting.
♥ if you have seen any of my facebook updates you know that I am showing work in a new Steampunk themed gallery in Harper's Ferry. The grand opening is this Saturday and the artwork will be up for the next two months.
♥ I participated in the Contemporary Art Museum's MonsterDraw session, it was a blast! I drew a Monster Cowgirl.
♥ I got a new job, I am going to be a server at Founding Farmer's.
♥ My SAP appeal was approved! Maybe I'll get some financial aid for spring semester.
So I am going to do my best to get back on track now that I will have a reliable income stream and a cellphone, but it means having even less time to do all the work that I want to do. All I know is that by January I need to pull at least 2,000 a month to be able to move out of here.
Until next time,
Spiralred
P.S. Over the summer my brother and I started a 4k training plan. Today I ran for 20 minutes, I'm so proud of myself.
I'm sorry I haven't been present here. Also I'm sorry for letting you down.
Summer was great, but I was being stupid. I didn't end up taking any summer classes, so I ending up spending my school refund, basically living off it for three months. That was not good. I kept justifying it, saying that I would be able to pay myself back from my work.
I ended up 4 months behind on my work. After finals I just kind of let everything go. I just relaxed for about a month. then when it came time to get back to work I was bombarded with good stress that just kept pushing everything else back.
In May and June I was still doing work, I was attending meetings I was making prints. At the same time I was working on getting my car transferred from my grandmother to me. We had just done a lot of work on the car and were in the midst of doing more work on the car so that it could pass inspection when the exhaust system just went on the car. Thankfully it was a fast repair.
The last week of June I ended up going to the beach. If I had gotten all my work done before than I would have still been on schedule. However, in standard me-fashion I had taken a project on that was more than I could do and charging for less than what it was worth. When I had discussed animation with client I had made it clear that I had effectively no experience in animation. He assumed that this was something I could learn in a class and I said yes, expecting to the client to pay for whatever training I would need to learn the skill. He expected his already overtaxed tech guy and I to be able to muddle through learning the animation together when we realized that that was the only form that would fit the minimal real estate available on the frontpage on the website.
Actionscript coding is not easy, and trying to understand which part of my job was the priority; finishing the static images that I already had the skills to do, or creating the animation, which I needed to teach myself to do.
I took my work with me to the beach, but I couldn't bring myself to work. I was far too happy enjoying the company of my friends and my boyfriend Duane. It was a pretty genius idea to invite me on this trip because it really cemented our relationship. He really treated me like a queen the whole time and we did so much exploring together, and I got to see what he was really like. I got to hear him sing for the first time. We had two failed attempts at sex before we finally had sex for the first time, which was so much more satisfying than any other time i had done it before. We took showers together, we took pictures of each other.
We learned about each other's dreams. We started talking about moving in together.
After that I had a week of partying at my grandmother's house for the yearly birthday party celebration. I got called upon to do more than I ever had to before because of my grandparents aging. I tried to work in the midst of all the partying but it was near impossible to get through actionscript coding manuals with all the activity going on in the house. That week I got to see Duane's apartment for the first time. He spent most of that weekend with me, helping me through all the stress. My family was impressed with him helping out with the work, and I got my grandfather's seal of approval on Duane. We ended up going to the folklife festival with all the extended family and we danced together.
After that we haven't spent a single week apart.
I spent the rest of July and halfway into August on three projects. Learning Actionscript to program the animation for my client and finishing the other static images; doing letterpress business cards at Pyramid Atlantic, and getting ready to go back to school. I had an advising meeting that was long overdue, because my own advisor had packed to leave on sabbatical about two week's before last semester ended. I had waited on doing it, because I was so rarely on campus during regular office hours that semester, and when I finally asked she told me she wasn't available to do it. So I finally had a meeting with my department head, and it was basically same-old same-old, time to jump through hoops again. So I slowly put together my SAP appeal, and an academic plan of action for my retake petition. Because last year the Academic Policy Specialist had told me that since I was not able to attend last fall, the approval could roll over to this year, I only worked on re-doing the schedule of my academic plan. However, this year there was a new Academic Policy Specialist and when I asked about the previous decision, she said there was no record of it and that it was too late. Which my department head then berated me about again, waiting too long. Actionscript was tough, and I also had a lot of images to prepare to make the animation. I don't know that I have finally hit the style that works for this comic yet either. I am really satisfied with the avatars, but when it comes to the comics I feel like my style is kind of all over the place. If I could tighten up my workflow and have something of a standard way of doing things I feel like the images would come out a lot better. My old method was very much all about layout, my early comic years were all about full page layouts, and I am not used to working in a strip format at all. I really could use doing some research on comic strips, but really all I had time for was learning code. Video tutorials were useless for me. The coding language books I bought were a little too high-minded and abstract for me, I needed concrete tutorials. I finally downloaded a user manual from Adobe and things really started to click. With it, and the assistance of my friend David, I finally produced a five-panel, user controlled, click-through webcomic. Letterpress was hard. I ordered plates. I did a test strip to get the exposure. I was trying to do it during letterpress happy hour, but I just couldn't seem to get it together. Each time I would go to letterpress I would go on the wrong day. Wednesday like it said on the site, and the woman in the bindery would tell me no it moved to Mondays for the summer, and then two weeks later I would be there Wednesday again. This proves how out of it I have been because I did this 3 times in a row. When I exposed the plate it was fine, but I kept thinking that I needed to scrub the plate until I got to the metal. And thus I ended scrubbing off some of my letters. Sadface. At the same time I was trying to set up times to work in the letterpress print shop independently, however, I ended up finding out that it would cost me 100 dollars in the certification and deposit fees. I put the whole thing on the backburner, because until I had settled up work with my other client, letterpress was something I just couldn't afford. Now I have access to the school printshop but the plate is useless now, because I could not afford to keep my cell phone on and have now lost my old phone number which is burned into that plate.
I completed the animation in mid-August but it hasn't been added to the site yet. I did not get paid until the week before last. Which is my fault for not invoicing in a timely fashion.
I crashed my car. My dad and grandmother helped me fix it, but my entire paycheck went directly into fixing it.
The last of my refund money was spent at Otakon, and boy was it worth it. I got to shop at Baby's first booth at Otakon! I got to meet the American Lolita Designers. I got to do hair for the fashion show! I went to the tea party and caught up with all the lovely ladies I hadn't seen in ages. I got such sweet compliments from everyone. I got to hang out with Emily. I sewed a new salopette. It was wonderful!
I haven't had my cellphone on since about that time I have felt completely cut off from everyone. I miss you all so much. I couldn't handle it anymore and finally bit the bullet last night and got added to my dad's family plan. I hate feeling so dependent.
I am waiting now for my car's windshield replacement to arrive and then the beast will finally be in perfect working order.
But let me tell you the good news:
♥ I am taking installation art class this semester and it is great!! My professor welcomed me back to UMBC on the first day and said that I was a natural at this medium. This weekend I am building a bamboo structure and my boyfriend is super excited about helping me, he wants it to be our new hobby. Today I am going to buy a propane torch to get us started.
♥ The Baybrooke highschool project that I am working on with my professor! We are teaching high school kids how animation works! It's super exciting.
♥ if you have seen any of my facebook updates you know that I am showing work in a new Steampunk themed gallery in Harper's Ferry. The grand opening is this Saturday and the artwork will be up for the next two months.
♥ I participated in the Contemporary Art Museum's MonsterDraw session, it was a blast! I drew a Monster Cowgirl.
♥ I got a new job, I am going to be a server at Founding Farmer's.
♥ My SAP appeal was approved! Maybe I'll get some financial aid for spring semester.
So I am going to do my best to get back on track now that I will have a reliable income stream and a cellphone, but it means having even less time to do all the work that I want to do. All I know is that by January I need to pull at least 2,000 a month to be able to move out of here.
Until next time,
Spiralred
P.S. Over the summer my brother and I started a 4k training plan. Today I ran for 20 minutes, I'm so proud of myself.