Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you a tale…it is a tale of pain and woe, wrapped in a tale of friendship and festivity…
Which is to say that I got fantastically drunk this past Friday, to the point that I’m only pretty much properly okay as of this morning. @_@
Backtracking just a tad… Last week Jason’s cousin went into the hospital and had her second child, our new little family cutie: Monty. Justin (a.k.a. ‘Cousin-in-Law’, a.k.a. the brother of the one who just had the baby) suggested that we take a trip ‘down home’ to meet the new little bundle, and in the process meet and have a few drinks with his girlfriend. We concurred, and thus babies were cooed over, a girlfriend was introduced, and a quite spectacular amount of alcohol was drunk.
All things considered it was a pretty good night…at least, the first half of it. I got along spectacularly with Justin’s girl, who is much more like me than either of us are like any of the rest of the family, so that’s nice! The problem is that she and I, as well as Justin, all got so magnificently pissed, that Jason was actually the voice of reason.
Long story short, it was a fun night, but when I finally managed to claw my way out of bed on Saturday I was as sick as I’ve ever been after a night of drinking. So sick, in fact, that I couldn’t even keep down water. It was a bad scene, and I’m honestly, genuinely considering going perma-sober, because…damn. I seriously thought I might pass out of dehydration by the time liquids finally started staying where I was putting them. Even the following day (Sunday, if you’re not paying attention) was miserable to the point of barely leaving the couch until it was time to go back to bed.
And all of this is, of course, a very roundabout way of explaining why I got absolutely nothing done from Friday through to this morning.
And with that nonsense out of the way, let’s see what I did manage to pull off last week.
Health
Okay, so, considering the story I just told you’re probably going to assume that health-related stuff wasn’t exactly piling up on my “Wins” stack this past week. Surprisingly, you’d be mostly wrong.
Yes, obviously the weekend is pretty up there with one of the unhealthiest three-day periods I’ve had in quite a while, but when you look at the week as a whole it actually wasn’t all that bad.
Concerning food, I had a pretty decent week for paying attention to my calorie count, avoiding snacking, avoiding high-fat foods, and cramming myself full of vegetables. Did I have little muck-ups? Sure I did! But overall, I was pretty diligent and managed to avoid any major missteps. Normally Friday night’s escapades definitely would have been the dagger in my diet’s back, so to speak, but I was so occupied with bonding with my new friend that I barely ended up snacking at all…which, in retrospect, was probably half of the reason I got so bloody sick, but…at least I didn’t sabotage my weight loss? Yeah, no, it sounded stunned even as I was typing it. I deserved my two days of sickness.
Anyway, regarding exercise, you might remember that last week at this time I had started “PiYo”, which is one of the Beachbody programs. That lasted precisely two days. Not to say that it’s a bad program or anything, but it definitely wasn’t for me. For one thing, it’s a fusion of pilates and yoga (something I probably should have caught on to), and I’m not the biggest fan of yoga. For another thing, I’m so much over my healthy weight at the moment that half of the moves made my joints feel like they were going to snap. It wasn’t challenging, it was painful. So I stopped. Instead, I did some “Just Dance” and some around-the-house stuff for a few days while looking for a new program to try.
And on that topic I can inform you that, as of this morning, I’m giving “Morning Meltdown 100” a go. They’re short videos (less than 30 mins each) of high-intensity workouts designed for you to move with the dance-club-style music that is being played in the background. Right now I’m doing the “Prep” month, which I was going to skip, but I’m glad I didn’t. The first vid kicked my ass, so I obviously need the prep. Here’s to seeing how I feel after the 28 days of the prep schedule. In the meantime I’ll do my best to continue not eating like a sow. đ
Creativity
I’m going to make a statement here: if I were actually, like…properly making a living wage from all the drawing and writing I’ve been doing, I would be a genuinely, mindblowingly happy woman.
That shouldn’t be a shocker or anything; I’m just making a statement. I’ve been seriously happy with the art I’ve been creating – both the visual and literary types – and pretty much the only thing at this point keeping me from a kind of creative nirvana is the fact that I’m only making nickles and dimes doing it. But hey…you never know what can happen, right?
On that note, I did a good bit of drawing last week, as evidenced by the three pieces I’m sharing this week. Firstly is a piece that I was commissioned to do out of one of my own fan-fics, in which Aziraphale loses any sense of shame or inhibition because of a lust potion:
Second is a little something I threw together for Valentine’s Day. It’s basically a redraw of a piece I did a while back for a scene from another fan-fic that got rather popular on AO3, “In Silence Our Secrets Lie”:
And lastly, a bit of a content warning on this one before you continue to scroll, as it is somewhat NSFW. The Twitter “Good Omens” fans came up with a fun idea for a bit of an artistic group project. Back when the GO crew created their little quarantine video last year, it was strongly suggested that Crowley was planning to sleep until the pandemic was over. As it is still going on, Neil Gaiman has regularly teased that, yes, Crowley is still sleeping, which prompted a fan-counter-tease (hey, you come up with a better thing to call it…) known as #WakeTheSnake. There have been lots of pieces of artwork, fics, comics, and more centered around the idea of waking Crowley up because he and Aziraphale should be spending their hard-earned freedom together. The most recent offshoot of this “movement” has been #ForbiddenFruit which, to put things simply, has involved filling the Twitter timeline with drawings of a certain naked angel in order to entice a certain demon to wake the hell up already.
Yeah, we’re a particular brand of especially passionate geek, so sue us.
Anyway, the point that I’m obviously coming to is that I did my own naked-angel piece. There’s nothing explicit shown, but just in case you’re not personally comfortable with a naked dude sitting with his legs crossed strategically, you should maybe scroll past the following image:
And with that bit of exposition out of the way, I shall finish off the visual art section of this post by simply stating, once again, that all the drawing has been making me quite happy. ^_^
AS HAS all the writing! See what I did there?
Now, to be perfectly honest, my word count went a bit sideways this past week. For one thing, I had a wee bit of writer’s block going on; I kept staring at every word file and finding it impossible to work out the next sentence. It was rather infuriating, all things told. Even still, I did manage to get a fair bit of writing done, and was set to get a fair bit more done…when the weekend hit. Really, you’d think that being laid up on the couch for two days would have actually resulted in some writing getting done, but that’s how sick I really was. I couldn’t even brain properly. Thus, as a result of those two days (plus the one on which the actual drinking took place), last week was the first week of 2021 during which I did not manage to keep up with the goal Pacemaker.press had set for me. Pacemaker wanted me to write 6786 words, and I only wrote 5967.
That said, I’m not too upset, because I’ve destroyed every other week thus far, meaning that I’m still ahead of the curve as far as what Pacemaker is expecting of me. Plus, looking more specifically at what I actually did manage to write last week, the majority of it was toward “The Other World: Book Three”, so yay for that!
Productivity
Okay, so, obviously you’re already assuming that I’m going to once again point out the weekend as an example of how things went off the rails for this post. And that would (again, obviously) be quite fair. What you might not be expecting me to say is that the black hole that was this weekend also managed to suck away any semblance of memory as to what occurred in the first four days of the week.
Yeah, I’m being a little overly dramatic about it. Shush.
The point being that I honestly can’t recall much of what got done in the early part of last week aside from selling a few things and doing that second art commission. And I really wish that I could remember, because if you look at the social media numbers you’ll find that everything went up. ._. We’re not talking big numbers or anything, but it so rarely happens that I can’t help but feel that I did something right…and now I can’t remember what it was. Figures.
FYI, if you’re interested in the actual numbers, the YouTube Twitter gained one follower, while the Instagram gained two; meanwhile the Author Twitter gained seven followers, with a gain of four on the Instagram.
Down-Time
I mean, if you really want to be technical about it, you can pretty much just say that the entire weekend was downtime and leave it at that.
But if you want to look at it in more specifics…
I did, in fact, play a game last week, in the form of returning to “Jedi: Fallen Order”. I only played for about an hour and a half, but that’s probably more than the previous 2-3 weeks combined, so, hey, it’s something! I’m very near to actually finishing the game as well, so that will be nice for a change. *cough cough* Once that’s over with I might return to “Borderlands 3”, which I can pick up whenever I want now that the PS4 is in a different room. That, or I might go back to “Mary Skelter”, which is a weird but enjoyable Vita game.
On an unrelated (but kinda related?) note, my daughter downloaded and tried out the demo for “Little Nightmares 2” yesterday, and it made me really interested to try out the original. But not for the bloody price they’re still asking for it. Geez, retailers…
Back on topic and moving on to books, I am still working my way through “Darkdawn” because I haven’t really been doing a lot of sitting down to read recently. I’ve picked at a few short fanfics here and there, but I haven’t carved out any decent pockets of time during which to get through a book. I’m hoping to finish it up soon though, because I’ve been antsy for a number of other books on my list.
As far as TV and movies are concerned, we’ve been binging the ever-loving hell out of “Community” lately. In retrospect it’s really hard to believe that this is one we skipped while it was actually airing. All the constant pop-culture references make it pretty much the perfect show for Jason and I. Aside from that, though, I’ve been picking away at “Supernatural” here and there while doing chores, and that’s pretty much been it unless you count all the hockey games we’ve been watching.
And hence we come to the end of another Monday post. All in all the week was…uh…you know, I don’t even really know how to describe it. It just…happened. And now it’s done. Soo…let’s hope that next week’s post is more positive and less…fantastically hungover. Sound good? Sounds good.
Feel free to let me know how your year is going so far! Do you have any big goals? Specific plans? Anything awesome on the horizon? Share whatâs going on with you! â¤
Tracey Tobin 