Happy Monday, my loves!
Can you believe that the summer is practically over? I’m having a hard time dealing with it, myself. Not to say that I haven’t had a great summer overall, but it certainly feels as though I blinked and it was over. 😦 The kid will be returning to school next week, and I’m going to be putting a hard drive on to find some work for the Fall, and it all just feels a little bit melancholy.
That said, I do enjoy Fall… It gets a little cooler, so I’m not sweating to death and having trouble sleeping at night. There are tons of awesome treats (yeah, I know it’s basic, but I adore pumpkin-spice sweets). Halloween comes along, so we get to be even more obsessed with horror than usual. It’s just a good time overall. So I suppose I can’t be too sad that summer is fading away.
Before I delve into the meat of the post, a bit of an update:
Last week I mentioned that hubby and I had something rather exciting coming up, but that I wasn’t sure how much I was allowed to share. Now I know that I can happily tell you that hubs and I will be appearing on Season Two of Action Figure Adventure! If you don’t know of it, it’s a great little docu-series that follows an avid collector travelling around in search of good deals on retro toys that he then auctions off to make money to donate to Children’s Health charities. It’s an awesome concept, and in between the toy hunting the crew intersperses interviews with collectors, shop owners, toy designers, and so on. For Season Two they decided to pop in to Nova Scotia, and they contacted us about being part of the interview process! Of course we were super-excited to be involved, and it finally happened this past weekend. Plus, while they had us, we also did two separate interviews to be used on their regularly occurring ‘Toy Show’, as well as another documentary focusing on old Filmation cartoons.
Long story short, it was great fun, the guys were lovely, and sometime in the future we are going to get to see our ugly mugs on an actual television show on Amazon Prime and Superchannel! How bloody cool is that? I’m all a-flutter. XD
But okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get the rest of this post going.
Health
A big high, followed by a big low this week.
I still haven’t gotten into a new exercise program, but in the run-up to our interviews, hubby and I actually did really well concerning food. Not that we thought we were going to magically lose a bunch of weight in a week or anything, but being good and consuming lots of water definitely made a difference as far as puffiness, complexion, and energy levels. It all went rather well, truly.
Then the interview actually happened, and we went a bit overboard in the celebrations afterward. We also had cousin-in-law visiting, and spent an evening at our friends’ place for drinks and games, so suffice it to say that there was a full weekend of over-indulgence. Lots of alcohol, lots of junky food, very little physical movement.
Plus, when we drove cousin-in-law back home afterward, we visited my parents, who fed us fried chicken and taters, before visiting Jason’s grandmother, whose boyfriend cooked us pork chops and mashed potatoes.
Suffice it to say that by the time we got home last night we were bloated and feeling a little bit disappointed in ourselves, and had vowed to do better this week.
Wish us luck.
Creativity
Let’s go with art first, because I didn’t do much, but I do still have one piece to share. Last week I shared two rough sketches that I did for ‘Draw This in Your Style’ challenges. This week I can share the completed digital lineart for one of those pieces:
I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out, and now I’m just dreading attempting to color it. Wish me luck! I really want to do a decent job on this one because the DTIYS challenge comes from one of my favorite artists on Twitter/Instagram. ❤
Moving into the writing side of things, I’m quite pleased to be able to tell you that I did, in fact, beat my Pacemaker.press goal for the week. Huzzah! Pacemaker wanted me to write 13,261 words, and I managed to go a fair bit above that with 14,535 words. The majority of the writing was spread across ‘The Prince’s Consort’ (which is rapidly approaching completion!) and a new idea I had that is tentatively titled ‘Angels and Demons’. The words were really flowing all week, let me tell you, and I honestly think I would have written quite a bit more if it hadn’t been for all the travelling and celebrating we did over the course of the weekend. It certainly gives me hope for this week, which should be quite a lot quieter. Pacemaker has set me another pretty steep goal, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that I manage to be as productive as I was last week.
Down-Time
I mean, if you really want to get technical about it, I had three straight days of down-time as a result of all the drinking and gaming and what-not. Just sayin’. But if we want to go into a littl emore detail…
Reading:
Yeah. Nope. Still no proper books. THAT SAID, I did read a couple of excellent fics that had me hooked from the get-go. One is called ‘Wednesday’, and is basically Crowley in a ‘Groundhog’s Day’ situation, in which a demon version of Aziraphale keeps killing him over and over again. The other is called ‘You’ve Got Kudos’, and is a very meta story in which Aziraphale discovers that an entire fandom has sprung up around a book and show based on his own life, and subsequently starts writing fanfiction as a way to express his explicit desires around Crowley. Both stories were extremely cute, with lots of humor and softness, and I definitely recommend them.
Playing:
I went a bit light on games this past week, simply because there was a lot going on. I did give a try to ‘Hades’, which hubby had recently bought and was having a blast with. It’s quite fun, but I haven’t gotten back into it yet because, again, I’ve had a lot going on.
I also played a few songs in ‘Guitar Hero: World Tour’ after getting the X-Box 360 added to the conglomeration in the retro-gaming area of the house. It made me remember how fun those games can be, so I definitely see me doing some more of that in the near future.
That’s it for video games, but we also played a few board/card games over the course of the weekend, which is always good fun. ‘Blokus’ has become a favorite of mine, and ‘Five Crowns’ always serves to devolve into a lot of playful swearing at one another. The Batman version of ‘Love Letter’ is also excellent, especially when my 10-year-old child is successfully bluffing her way to a win. It never gets old!
Watching:
The obsession of the moment has been ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’. Hubby and I came across this anime way back in high school, and it was one of those ones that you couldn’t help but fall in love with…despite the fact that it’s so out in left field that you end up feeling like your head is going to explode by the end. So much is SUPER vague, and it’s ostensibly based on the creator’s mental health problems, which makes for a real brain-twister of a plot, particularly coming on the end.
What happened later on, though, is that the creator basically remade the series into a group of movies with roughly the same plot but some major differences made along the way. Last week we watched three of the four movies, and we’ve definitely been enjoying them despite some really rather extreme changes. We’re probably going to be watching the fourth tonight, and I’m really hoping for it to make a bit more sense then the end of the original series. I’m all for leaving some stuff to the imagination, but you have no idea unless you’ve watched the original series…it’s just…mind-melting.
And that, my friends, was basically the last update of the summer. When I speak to you again next week it will be September and the kid will be ‘enjoying’ the first day of school. Here’s hoping for a fun and fanciful Fall, because the past two years have been a real pain in the arse and I’m ready for some levity. How about you?
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 what’s going on with you! ❤
Tracey Tobin 