Carrying on the Family Tradition....

.... of getting sick on Kievan's birthday. Yup, I'm dizzy, feverish, and I have a sore throat and a headache and a cough. If it wasn't for my favorite TV show, Smallville, chocolate milk and Ritz crackers, I'd probably be dead right now.

But anyway, happy happy happy happy birthday, Kievan! Maybe next year will be a little better. ;)

People!!

Lately, I've just been drawing a lot of random people. Here are a few of them..... I still haven't scanned all of them yet. :)

Uh.... sorry.

Um, this is a test..... go back to your lives, people. AT EASE!

Okay, now I really want one of these thingies.

THIS is like, the coolest digital art tools I've ever seen. If it didn't cost 1000 dollars, I would totally buy one. *nods*

More abstract art!

I had a fever when I drew this.....so..... anyway....

It's an abstract piece about one of my mind-reading characters. :)

Haha :)

"The problem with internet quotations is that they are often made up."

-Abraham Lincoln

Oh, the conversations I have...

Kievan: "Hey, it's a genetically modified pretzel!"
Me: "Um, how can you genetically modify a pretzel?"
Kievan: "Hey, it's gotta be possible... go ask a scientist!"
Me: "But... but pretzels don't have any genetics!"
Kievan: "Uh...."



AC (my three-year-old sister): *points to smiley-face earrings* "Hey, you have happy faces on your ears!"
Me: "Yep."
AC: "Why do you have happy faces on your ears?"
Me: "Because they make me happy."
AC: *hugs me* "Awww, you're so cute."

Shakespeare!

Well, in honor of our Shakespeare Club finishing the play Macbeth, I created this on Paintshop. It's only half done. (I still have to add Macduff)

Anyway, I thought Macbeth was very interesting.... it had so many strange similarities to Lord of the Rings. :) Now we can begin Much Ado About Nothing. :D

Picture dump!

Picture dump! Picture dump! You know what THAT means-I finally found my camera cord! YAY!

So, here we go.....


My cousin Timbo was quite thrilled to get one of his sister's birds for Christmas..... **story coming soon. ;)**


Kievan, Allie and I were lucky enough to attend a sock hop! Our wonderfully amazing Nana made our outfits-we had by far the best poodle skirts in the whole place. :) And bye-the-way, that girl with the silver poodle skirt is actually me. I had a hair extension that made me look very different, and had people that I knew failing to recognize me.


One of the days at our Grandparent's house this winter we (briefly) visited the beach. It was absolutely, positively freezing outside, and I was happy to have such a warm coat. I liked the way my boots looked on the beach, though, so I took this picture.


While touring CW we saw a HUGE bird, sitting on the ground eating... something. It was seriously awesome, but looked dangerous enough that we kept our distance.


Ben and I put the tree up this year, despite the fact that we spent most of the winter elsewhere. Somehow, I neglected to get a picture of the finished tree, but let's just say it ended up looking very... flashy.


Another Sock Hop picture-one of our little seven-year-old friends, Aubrey, practically forced Ben to dance with her. It was very cute and funny.


Anna Claire at the petting zoo with a llama-type creature. She was quite entranced by it. (That llama has been there for as long as I can remember and was smart enough not to bite or spit at A.C.... I'm sure if it had, she would've made llama sorry.)


SNOWMAN! I only went out in the snow briefly to get this picture; Allie, Ben, and Poppy were the artists. He's pretty cute, I think...


Me, studying the wonders of theater makeup and self-photography.


Me, wearing my Ravenclaw attire in celebration of the opening of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 1. IT WAS AMAZING!!! :D


And finally, me at the beach. Isn't the ocean pretty?




Okay, well that's that. BEWARE! I have more pictures coming soon! :D

Dragon

This is the dragon who is now on his way to an art museum after weeks of hard work. In case you can't tell, it's a large purple dragon lying in a pile of gold coins with two waterfalls nearby. It was very funny... while I was in art class trying to color all the little gold coins, I had a lot of little first, second and third graders come look at my art. The interpretations were HILARIOUS!! The funniest one I heard? A little girl thought it was a dead goat lying in a pile of yellow rice. I guess she was hungry. :)



Also, WE GOT A NEW KEYBOARD!! I'm not sure if I already mentioned this, but I spilled a glass of chocolate milk on the keyboard last summer and ever since we've been getting along without the letter "g". Believe it or not, but "g" is one of the most used letters, because it's at the end of so many words! Jumping, flying, swinging, swimming, etc. all end in "g"! And then there are the "g" names, like Ginny, Gabe, and the REALLY hard "g" names, like Gregor, George, Greg, Gilgamesh..... and then my absolute favorite word of all time.... giggling, with a whopping four "g's". But now we FINALLY have a new keyboard, which means that I am very very very happy. :)

Another header!

I recently realized I had no winter headers for my blog. Naturally, I made the current one as quickly as I could. :)

*Yawn*

Well, it's officially been four days since I arrived home from my grandparent's house, and I'm still completely and totally worn out. Why can't I be allowed to sleep in? :(

Sympathy

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

I KNOW what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals —
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting —
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings —
I know why the caged bird sings!

Well, happy New Years, everybody!

Yup, a whole new year is here! Get out the confetti and fireworks!

Well, Kievan and I spent our one night of partying watching Smallville, which is pretty much a TV show about Superman as a highscooler. It's pretty good. :)
We ate most of our remaining Christmas candy and giggled a lot and came downstairs at 10:30 simply to drink some chocolate milk. We had a lot of fun, and Kievan ONLY knocked me out of bed twice! ;)

So, anyway, happy happy New Years!

Whew.....

Well, today I had my first official lengthy "Oh no, I'm about to have a heart attack" attacks.
What happened? Well, it's BRUTALLY cold here (literally. The high today was 36, and windy.) so I decided to just throw the Wolf out the door and let him back inside after a few minutes, like I usually do when I just really don't want to go outdoors. He just had a bath this morning, so his harness was still soaking, and I didn't want to make him suffer, either. Sadly, this REALLY didn't work in my favor. Beowulf ran off, and so I threw on my coat and boots and went to go find him. For the first time, like, EVER, he didn't bashfully run up the second I walked out. Instead, I was forced to run down the street, calling for him.
He didn't come. A first.
Sooo I ran inside telling Poppy that he was gone. And eventually Poppy, Mommy and I all ended up patrolling the neighborhood in the 22 degree Fahrenheit darkness.
I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Honestly, Beowulf is adorable, but he's very tiny and would be a snack for any strange owl that might be around, and he's definitely not immune to the cold, and he's not exactly known for his thinking ability. I was panicking. And then... Poppy found him, begging to come inside. I nearly broke down and cried.

Anyway, just couldn't help sharing that. I still feel all shaky and everything... whew, I'm so relieved....

Sick

being sick is a very,
very unpleasant business.
it’s so…. sickening.

I've been very under the weather lately. I wrote that haiku last time I was ill, and I must admit that is exactly how I feel at the moment.

Random Poem

By yours truly. :D

I wrote this for some contest (HERE), the theme being "Time's Running Out". My poem turned out sorta....... wonky. Anyway, here 'tis!


Goodbye

You know,
I didn't want to leave.
Not really.
But I didn't get a choice,
Not really.

You know,

I still love you.
Really.
But my time ran out.
Really. For good.

The clock was ticking.
Tick tick ticking.
Really.
And I couldn't stop it.
I tried my best,
Really!
My best still wasn't good enough.
I still ran out of time.

But I want you to know that,
Really,
I'm sorry.

And it wasn't my fault.
Really.
And it wasn't your fault.
Seriously.
It wasn't.

I'm not gone forever,
Not really.
I promise.

I also realized I can't write poetry at all unless it's for a contest. Go figure...

Hello :D

I know I haven't posted in a little while-sorry. My scanner has been broken- it was VERY annoying. Anyway, here's a little bit of what I've been doodling:


I've been sorta messing around with abstract-ish art. These doodles were done with one crayola marker, one pencil, and one eraser. I had fun, but I definitely prefer my normal style.


I'm thinking maybe the face in this one was overkill...


And finally, back to my favorite subject: people and griffins, done with pencils and and a trusty ol' gel pen. I did this piece for my friend Greta, who finished her Percy Jackson fan fiction, Strike, earlier this month. ( first chapter found HERE.)

Happy December! :D

I know it's a little late, but have a happy December!! This Christmas I'm going on a 16 hour drive to my grandparent's house, because we have a wedding to attend. We'll be spending Christmas there, also. :D The problems this presents, however, is I have to come up with presents for everybody. Mick, Tim, Aunt Mel, Uncle Jeff, Aunt Angie, (future) Uncle Tyler, Aunt Jessi, Grandmother, Grandpa, plus My mother and father and five siblings. I'm in trouble! D:

Best short story EVER!!!!

This story is possibly one of the funniest I've ever read. It's classified under non-fiction, but I'm not sure I believe it..... ;)



The Night the Bed Fell
by James Thurber

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. It makes a better recitation (unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has heard it five or six times) than it does a piece of writing, for it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark like a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it did take place.

It happened, then, that my father had decided to sleep in the attic one night, to be away where he could think. My mother opposed the notion strongly because, she said, the old wooden bed up there was unsafe- it was wobbly and the heavy headboard would crash down on father's head in case the bed fell, and kill him. There was no dissuading him, however, and at a quarter past ten he closed the attic door behind him and went up the narrow twisting stairs. We later heard ominous creakings as he crawled into bed. Grandfather, who usually slept in the attic bed when he was with us, had disappeared some days before. (On these occasions he was usually gone six or seven days and returned growling and out of temper, with the news that the federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads and that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any more chance than a fiddler's bitch.)

We had visiting us at this time a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beall, who believed that he was likely to cease breathing when he was asleep. It was his feeling that if he were not awakened every hour during the night, he might die of suffocation. He had been accustomed to setting an alarm clock to ring at intervals until morning, but I persuaded him to abandon this. He slept in my room and I told him that I was such a light sleeper that if anybody quit breathing in the same room with me, I would wake Instantly. He tested me the first night-which I had suspected he would by holding his breath after my regular breathing had convinced him I was asleep. I was not asleep, however, and called to him. This seemed to allay his fears a little, but he took the precaution of putting a class of spirits of camphor on a little table at the head of his bed. In case I didn't arouse him until he was almost gone, he said, he would sniff the camphor, a powerful reviver.

Briggs was not the only member of his family who had his crotchets. Old Aunt Alelissa Beall (who could whistle like a man, with two fingers in her mouth) suffered under the premonition that she was destined to die on South High Street, because she had been born on South High Street and married on South High Street. Then there was Aunt Sarah Shoaf, who never went to bed at night without the fear that a burglar was going to get in and blow chloroform under her door through a tube. To avert this calamity -for she was in greater dread of anesthetics than of losing her household goods-she always piled her money, silverware, and other valuables in a neat stack just outside her bedroom, with a note reading,: "This is all I have. Please take it and do not use your chloroform, as this is all I have." Aunt Gracie Shoaf also had a burglar phobia, but she met it with more fortitude. She was confident that burglars had been getting into her house every night for four years. The fact that she never missed anything was to her no proof to the contrary. She always claimed that she scared them off before they could take anything, by throwing shoes down the hallway. When she went to bed she piled, where she could get at them handily, all the shoes there were about her house. Five minutes after she had turned off the light, she would sit up in bed and say "Hark!" Her husband, who had learned to ignore the whole situation as long ago as 1903, would either be sound asleep or pretend to be sound asleep. In either case he would not respond to her tugging and pulling, so that presently she would arise, tiptoe to the door, open it slightly and heave a shoe down the hall in one direction, and its mate down the hall in the other direction. Some nights she threw them all, some nights only a couple of pair.

But I am straying from the remarkable incidents that took place during the night that the bed fell on father. By midnight we were all in bed. The layout of the rooms and the disposition of their occupants is important to an understanding of what later occurred. In the front room upstairs (just under father's attic bedroom) were my mother and my brother Terry, who sometimes sang in his sleep, usually "Marching Through Georgia" or "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Briggs Beall and myself were in a room adjoining this one. My brother Roy was in a room across the hall from ours. Our bull terrier, Rex, slept in the hall.

My bed was an army cot, one of those affairs which are made wide enough to sleep on comfortably only by putting up, flat with the middle section, the two sides which ordinarily hang down like the sideboards of a drop-leaf table. When these sides are up, it is perilous to roll too far toward the edge, for then the cot is likely to tip completely over, bringing the whole bed down on top of one, with a tremendous banging crash. This, in fact, is precisely what happened, about two o'clock in the morning. (It was my mother who, in recalling the scene later, first referred to it as "the night the bed fell on your father.")

Always a deep sleeper, slow to arouse (I had lied to Briggs), I was at first unconscious of what had happened when the iron cot rolled me onto the floor and toppled over on me. It left me still warmly bundled up and unhurt, for the bed rested above me like a canopy. Hence I did not wake up, only reached-the edge of consciousness and went back. The racket, however, instantly awakened my mother, in the next room, who came to the immediate conclusion that her worst dread was realized: the big wooden bed upstairs had fallen on father. She therefore screamed, "Let's go to your poor father!" It was this shout, rather, than the noise of my cot falling, that awakened Herman, in the same room with her. He thought that mother had become, for no apparent reason, hysterical. "You're all right, Mamma!" He shouted, trying, to calm her. They exchanged shout for shout for perhaps ten seconds: "Let's go to your poor father!" and "You're all right! " That woke up Briggs. By this time I was conscious of what was going on, in a vague way, but did not yet realize that I was under my bed instead of on it. Briggs, awakening in the midst of loud shouts of fear and apprehension, came to the quick conclusion that he was suffocating and that we were all trying to "bring him out." With a low moan, he grasped the glass of camphor at the head of his bed and instead of sniffing it poured it over himself. The room reeked of camphor. "Ugh, ugh," choked Briggs, like a drowning man, for he had almost succeeded in stopping his breathing under the deluge of pungent spirits. He leaped out of bed and groped toward the open window, but he came up against one that was closed. With his hand, he beat out the glass, and I could hear it crash and tinkle on the alleyway below. It was at this juncture that I, in trying to get up, had the uncanny sensation of feeling my bed above me. Foggy with sleep, I now suspected, in my turn, that the whole uproar was being made in a frantic endeavor to extricate me from what must be an unheard-of and perilous situation. "Get me out of this!" I bawled. "Get me out!" I think I had the nightmarish belief that I was entombed in a mine. "Ugh," gasped Briggs, floundering in his camphor.

By this time my mother, still shouting, pursued by Herman, still shouting, was trying to open the door to the attic, in order to' go up and get my father's body out of the wreckage. The door was stuck, however, and wouldn't yield. Her frantic pulls on it only added to the general banging and confusion. Roy and the dog were now up, the one shouting questions, the other barking.

Father, farthest away and soundest sleeper of all, had by this time been awakened by the battering on the attic door. He decided that the house was on fire. "I'm coming, I'm coming,!" be wailed in a slow, sleepy voice-it took him many minutes to regain full consciousness. My mother, still believing he was caught under the bed, detected in his "I'm coming!" the mournful, resigned note of one who is preparing to meet his Maker. "He's dying!" she shouted.

"I'm all right!" Briggs yelled to reassure her. "I'm all right!" He still believed that it was his own closeness to death that was worrying mother. I found at last the light switch in my room, unlocked the door, and Briggs and I joined the others at the attic door. The dog, who never did like Briggs, jumped for him assuming that he was the culprit in whatever was going on and Roy had to throw Rex and hold him. We could hear father crawling out of bed upstairs. Roy pulled the attic door open, with a mighty jerk, and father came down the stairs, sleepy and irritable but safe and sound. My mother began to weep when she saw him. Rex began to-howl. "What in the name of God "s going on here?" asked father.

The situation was finally put together like a gigantic jig-saw puzzle. Father caught a cold from prowling around in his bare feet but there were no other bad results. "I'm glad," said mother, who always looked on the bright side of things, "that your grandfather wasn't here."