Plans & Goals 2021: Week 37

I’m not going to lie, you guys…I’m in a wee bit of a mood this evening, so I’m not really feeling the writing of this post. So if it seems like I’m rushing through things or otherwise not being as eloquent as usual (ha ha ha), you’ll know why.

Why am I in a bit of a mood? Well, to be quite blunt (and also quite vague), it’s a financial mood, so I’m not really going to get into it. Just suffice it to say that I am SO bloody done with Covid grinding the economy to a halt. If there are any rich kooks out there who want to sponsor my writing and art and keep me as a ‘pet’, I’m currently accepting offers. 😛

In happier news, though, hubby and I finally finished up all the work we were doing on the basement and our collection, as well as the filming we had to do for the previously mentioned documentaries and toy show. Unless the director comes back to us to ask for any additional footage or changes, we are effectively finished with that project, and as a pleasant side effect the basement has never been cleaner. To these ends we also opened a metric ton of toys and collectibles that had been sitting in their boxes for ages, and also found some more things to sell, as well as some things that we fully intended to keep, but that had gotten buried under the massive mess that was everywhere. So, yeah…that’s nice!

I haven’t got all that much more to talk about in the pre-post this week, simply because SO MUCH of last week was spent finishing up the basement stuff and filming the clips we needed to film, so not a whole lot else happened. So, with that said, I’ll move along…

Health

Well, the good news is that, as of this morning, I’ve restarted the ’10 Rounds’ program, and I even got through the first video without feeling as though I was going to die in the middle of our living room. Along with that, I can add that we went grocery shopping today for the first time in quite a while, and I bought lots of actual healthy things, like fruits and veggies. Go me, right?

Mind you, that’s all stuff that happened today, which is technically part of next week’s post… As far as last week, I can’t really report anything even remotely positive. Being distracted by the basement and the filming meant little to no proper exercise, and definitely no decent food choices. There was a lot of fast food, a lot of cheap-and-easy food, and an inordinate amount of just-plain-junk food. I’m pretty sure I gained about five pounds last week. But I’m refusing to look. Fuck it all.

Move forward and refuse to look backwards. That’s a totally healthy mental outlook, right?

Right???

Creativity

Continuing on with my choice to not lie, I must tell you that last week was my worst week in a very long time as far as creative endeavours are concerned.

Firstly, I didn’t draw a damn thing. Not with pencil and paper, nor digitally.

Secondly, I absolutely flopped when it came to my Pacemaker.press goal for the week. The site wanted me to write 11,810 words, which should have been totally doable, but I only closed out the week with 5926 words…roughly half of the goal. Absolutely horrid.

I did have the excuse of working on the basement and filming, not to mention the fact that my parents visited for a night, so that one was written off. I don’t feel any better about it for having been busy though. I’ve got too many writing projects on the go – that I genuinely want to write – to be allowing myself to write less than a thousand words per day. Supposing I have to find somewhere else to cut time from, I need to start pumping out the words more reliably.

That said, since the basement/filming stuff is off our shoulders now, I should be able to hunt down some extra time this week. Fingers crossed.

For the record, what I did write last week was mostly entries for ‘Kinktober’, which I don’t believe I actually mentioned on here (correct me if I’m wrong). Basically it’s a fandom-based challenge that happens in October, much like the Instagram photo challenges that you might see happening all the time, but it’s for artwork or fanfic, and each entry is a different kink of some kind. Obviously it can get quite explicit, and that’s half the fun, but thus far my entries (which I’m writing and posting to my Patreon in advance) are surprisingly soft and loving. I just can’t get past the whole ineffable romance thing…lol

Down-Time

Down-time? What the hell is that?

No, but seriously, I know you’re sick of hearing about the basement stuff, but that did, in fact, devour our lives last week. As a result we didn’t do much of anything when it comes to media consumption.

One thing that we did watch was a newer horror movie called ‘Malignant’. It’s got viewers divided on whether or not its actually good, with some people loving it, some people hating it, and some people unable to put their brains back together long enough to work out whether they enjoyed it or not. It’s also pretty difficult to describe without ruining it, so suffice it to say that I enjoyed it. I personally thought that the mystery of what was happening was actually fairly obvious, but it was also done in an interesting, fresh way, and the third act was pretty damned entertaining, in my opinion. I’d say that it’s worth a watch, if only to see which side of the divide you’re on.

Games were completely thrown out the window for the entire week, unless you count going over to our friends’ house the night after we finished the filming stuff in order to play card and board games.

And reading, as ever, was relegated to the fanfics I stuffed in my face in the few minutes I could grab here and there between other things happening. Unfortunately I forgot to make notes in my planner last week, so I couldn’t really tell you all what I read, but one that I definitely remember is ‘The Scarecrow’ by Appleseeds, which is positively adorable and definitely worth your time if you enjoy ‘true love’s kiss breaks the curse’ kinds of stories (although, ironically, true love’s kiss does not, in fact, break the curse).

So that’s that, I suppose. Are we good here for now? Alrighty, I’m gonna go have a little sulk, and hopefully I’ll be in less of a mood by tomorrow. 😛

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! ❤

Plans & Goals 2021: Week 36

Firstly, I just want to address the fact that I was looking at my day planner today and almost gagged at how little of it is left to use…i.e. how close we’re actually getting to the end of 2021. HOW DO THESE THINGS HAPPEN, YOU GUYS?! My life is disappearing behind me in the blink of an eye! *faints like a Victorian damsel*

Secondly, yes, I know this post is a day late. It is so because of the continuation of what I shall now move on to below…

Which is, thirdly, that some of my reports might be a bit sparse this week, but it is not because I haven’t been productive. On the contrary, I’ve been extremely productive…just not specifically on the topic of these goals. You recall when I previously talked about the documentaries that hubby and I were taking part in? Well the director asked us to also record some footage of our collection for use as b-roll stuff, which we were of course more than happy to provide. The only problem was that our collection (and, that is to say, the entire basement in general) was a disaster which could very nearly be described as biblical in nature. Therefore, hubby and I pulled up our metaphorical sock garters, hoarded a fridge worth of energy drinks, and put a massive push on to finally reconstruct our Nerd-vana.

Nearly a bloody week later, and the basement looks better than it has since we first started working on it years ago. I am not only pleased (and exhausted), but also immensely proud of the amount of work we’ve gotten done. I can’t even tell you guys. I’m actually really annoyed with myself for not thinking to take ‘Before’ pictures, because trust me, the difference is like night and day. Not to mention the fact that doing the hardcore clean-up resulted in the clearing of several shelves, so we’ve been happily opening stuff that has been sitting in boxes for ages in order to fill those shelves.

Which brings us to last night, when we decided to go live (on YouTube, for the first time, instead of Instagram) to chat, update people, and open things! It was fun, and was the first time we’d actually done anything on the channel in ages, so if you’re interested in checking it out now, after the fact, you can do so right here.

And now that I’ve explained what has been going on for the past 4-5-ish days, let’s take a look at these poor, neglected goals.

Health

Okay, let’s talk about health…let’s see…where to start…?

Well, for one thing, my eating habits have been less than stellar but also not as bad as they’ve been in the past. Most of the issue is due to the work hubby and I have been putting in, which tends to lend itself to random snacking and poorer meal choices in the name of ease and speed. That’s been less of a deal than one might think, since the amount of work we’ve been doing also equates to extra calories burned than what we would normally, but also there’s been lots of crackers and cookies and bread and the aforementioned energy drinks, soooo…..

I did do three days worth of ’10 Rounds’ last week, and it was quite good, but I’m thinking that I may have to restart it once we have all of this basement stuff behind us, because my efforts thus far haven’t exactly been well-organized. Two days one week, three days the next…yeah, when we get the basement filming out of the way and things get more back to normal I’ll definitely have to restart the program so that I don’t end up inadvertently murdering myself with exhaustion. 😛

On another health-related note… Without going into too much detail (because it’s no one’s business, and also you guys probably don’t really want to know…lol), back in May I went cold turkey on a particular type of medication that I’d been taking for years. Don’t worry, this is with my doc’s knowledge and encouragement, but of course going off any medication that you’ve been taking for years can have it’s side effects. That said, I am happy to announce that I just recently began to see my body turning around from those side effects, and things are starting to properly even back out for me, physically and mentally. I’m quite pleased with the results thus far, and look forward to never taking that particular type of medication ever again. 😛

Creativity

Well, first of all, I’ll go ahead and let you know that I, frustratingly, got absolutely no art worked on last week. Not a sketch, nor any lineart, nor any coloring. No art at all. This is mostly the result of spending four straight days basically living in the basement and taking little to no time to just sit down and relax. Not that I’m complaining, because DAMN have we done some good work, but yeah, that’s the long and short of it. I’m hoping to be able to find the time to work on some art this week, once all the recording is done for what is needed for the documentaries.

As far as writing, I definitely got more done with words than with drawings, though I also definitely fell short of my Pacemaker.press goal for the week. Pacemaker wanted me to write 9799 words, which should have been easily done, but because of all the time spent working on the basement I only ended up with 8720 words for the week. That said, many of those words went toward preparing for October, which hosts one of fandom’s most ridiculous celebrations: Kinktober. Yeah. Don’t judge me. I’ve already written stories for ‘Hair Kink’ and ‘Bondage’ and there are 29 more prompts to go. I full intend to post a short for every day of October, though if you’re on my Patreon you’ll get access to each story as it’s written, so that’s something to think about if you’re a thirsty bitch like me. *cough cough*

Down-time

I’m sure you’ll have established by now that down-time is a thing that didn’t really exist for most of last week. There was a bit though, before the work really got going.

Reading, as you may have guessed, was confined to fanfiction as usual. I read an adorable story called ‘Written in the Stars’, in which Crowley invents horoscopes specifically to communicate with Aziraphale, plus a ridiculous and fun smutty piece called ‘Lost and Found’, in which Crowley is an emerg doctor who helps Aziraphale with a…specific kind of embarrassing issue.

Watching was a bit more horror-centric. Early in the week we watched ‘The Initiation’, which is an older slasher following a sorority girl with broken memories about an incident in her past. It was cheesy at points, and the sorority stuff was foolish, but it was dumb fun starring the same girl who plays Princess Vespa in ‘Spaceballs’.

We also watched ‘Demon of Paradise’, which had me cackling at how bad the monster’s costume was. It was something of a ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ rip-off about an aquatic reptile-man-creature being awoken by illegal dynamite fishers in Hawaii. It may have been standard fare for the year in which it was made, but the costume really made it. I almost died laughing when we first saw the creature’s face, and then when he came out of the water so we could see his whole body…dear lord. They hardly even tried. lol

Finally, we watched a newer horror flick: ‘Malignant’. There have been a lot of feelings on both sides of the fence for this one, but I personally enjoyed it. A woman starts seeing murders as they happen after her asshole boyfriend beats her up. Personally I thought the explanation for everything was a bit obvious, but the way it was portrayed was pretty unique and interesting. I can see why people would be divisive about the whole thing, but I personally enjoyed it.

Then we have Playing, which I actually do have a report for for this week! As hubby has been getting closer to finishing up ‘Hades’, I’ve been getting into playing it. I haven’t gotten super-far yet, because I rather suck and it is one of those games that requires playing, dying, repeating, over and over again, but it is ridiculously fun so it’s all good! I hope to play some more of it this week, if I can drag Jason away from it again. 🙂

And with that we are basically halfway through September, which is soooo hard to believe. Does anyone else want to work with me to discover a way to stop time? You can even take all the credit; I just want to enjoy the spoils. 😛

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! ❤

Plans & Goals 2021: Week 35

WOW, you guys… I know I mentioned it last week, but now that it’s actually happened I really can’t believe that Summer is over. I’m a little morose over it, if I’m being truly honest! I love Fall as well, and I tolerate Winter because I adore cozy couch blankets and hot chocolate, but it’s still quite sad to see Summer go.

I know the kid feels the same, anyway, because she nearly had a breakdown this morning when she realized that tomorrow is the first day of school. lol

On the upside, Summer ending means significantly less social outings. And, okay, I can see where that statement might make me sound like a bit of an antisocial bitch, but let me explain! For one thing, less social outings will mean significantly less alcohol and super-junky-food consumption. For another, it will mean less money (that we don’t really have) spent on frivolous stuff (like the aforementioned alcohol and junk food). For a third thing, well…the fact of the matter is simply that I’m a fairly-high-functioning introvert. I enjoy being social, but afterwards I truly require a significant bit of time to myself to recharge, and it’s been hard to get that with the amount of stuff we’ve had going on lately. So I’m honestly a bit relieved to know that I’m going to be able to just relax by myself more often in the coming days.

(Plus, the weather cooling down means I get to get back into hot baths…<3 ❤ ❤ ❤ <3)

With that said, I don’t really have much to report this week that is outside the topics of the three goal sections, so let’s just go ahead and move on, shall we?

Health

OKAY. SO. So. Hopefully this is the last the (for a while, anyway) that you’ll hear me start this section by stating that I’m not going to lie about it. *cough cough*

Basically, it comes down to the fact that it was the last week of the Summer, and was capped off by visiting some of hubby’s family for one of the little ones’ birthday party. What this resulted in, as you may have already put together, was a disgusting amount of food, followed by a night of inebriation. And, well, long story short: I’m pretty sure over the course of less than 48 hours I consumed a week’s worth of calories in cupcakes alone.

Don’t worry. I felt suitably disgusted with myself afterwards.

I did start a new exercise program last week, in the form of Beachbody’s ’10 Rounds’. It’s a boxing-based program that features two ‘air boxing’ and three ‘weight-training’ videos per week for six weeks. So far I really like it, and I’m surprised by how many calories I’m burning on the boxing days, considering that it’s pretty low impact (any lower-body movement is mostly shuffling, stepping, and the occasional squats and lunges). It gets a big thumbs up from me because too much high impact stuff murders my legs right now, especially my pathetic old knees. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back into higher-impact stuff eventually, but right now having a high-calorie-burn option that doesn’t involve a lot of jumping around is a lifesaver.

That said, I only actually did two of the videos last week, partially because of the stuff going on, but also because I could hardly walk after the ‘leg day’ vid. Sweet jeebas, my thighs were sore! That’s a good thing though, I suppose. 😛

So, long story short, I was sickened by myself enough this past weekend to bully myself into eating more realistically going forward, and now that I can walk without crying again I’ve moved on to video number 3 in ’10 Rounds’. Wish me luck. Like, all of the luck. I feel like I’m probably going to need it. XD

Creativity

First of all, I just want to say that I’m actually genuinely confused to be sitting here, typing this, about to tell you that I only finished one piece of art this past week. I honestly could have sworn that I did more than that. I even picked up a new sketchbook early last week, with every intention of working on a few more DTIYS sketches. And yet…here I am, telling you that I only finished one piece of art this past week. And it was one that was already mostly done. $:\$

Anyway, I guess there really isn’t much for it. I worked on my Season 2 Celebration pic by finishing up the coloring. I had every intention of shading it as well, and in fact I did try to shade it as well…but it wound up looking horrible because I am so absolutely awful at working out where shadows should be. Sooooo. Yeah. I deleted the shading layer and just went with the flat coloring. I’m still more-or-less happy with it, but I’m definitely going to work out a better plan of attack for the next piece I do.

ANYWAY (again), here’s the finished piece:

On the writing side of things, I must confess to not hitting my Pacemaker.press goal for the week. I definitely tried, but I hit a bit of a block midway through the week, and then we spent the weekend with family so I wasn’t really getting anything done there. All in all, though, it was still a pretty decent week for word count. Pacemaker wanted 13,553 words, and I finished off the week with 10,518. Nothing to sneeze at, for sure.

Because of the block – which hit me a bit like a brick upside the head – I didn’t get much done in the way of the WIPs that I should be working on, but I have seemed to manage to break the block by asking for prompt ideas on Twitter. I got several fun-sounding ones (which I’ll definitely be saving for later), but one in particular really grabbed and shook me, and I now have about three quarters of a short-story done, which I’m quite pleased with. Once I finish the other quarter-ish bit, I’ll go back over to the more important files and see if I can get my brain working on them again.

Down-Time

Reading:

You know what I’m gonna say. So just shut it. 😛

For your information, though… One of the fics I read last week was ‘A Time You May Embrace‘, and it gets an enthusiastic recommendation from me. It’s a longer-short (about 25k words) in which Heaven and Hell decide that Crowley and Aziraphale will wed in order to form a ‘merger’ of sorts between the two sides. C & A are flabbergasted by this, though they do end up working out that, yes, they do both want to get married…they’re just not willing to do it the way their former sides want them to. (Warning for eventual smut…:D)

I also finished re-reading ‘The Trouble With Being a Demon‘…which is honestly a 143k excuse to have the show versions of the bois and the book versions of the bois all fucking one another in a variety of ways. That said, it’s a lot sweeter and more emotional than I’m making it sound. *cough* If you enjoy smutty stuff, a bit of humor, and some EMOTION, I definitely recommend it. Plus I also adore the artwork the author (as well as others) has done for it.

Playing:

I’m thinking really, really hard, but I don’t think I played a single game last week. I’m finding that really difficult to believe, but no matter how hard I bend my brain, I can’t come up with anything. Remind me to sit my ass down and relax with something fun some time this week.

Watching:

There wasn’t much in the way of viewing last week either, but we did watch the final ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ movie, and my brain is only slightly less gooey than it was when I watched the original series back in the day. The movies definitely have a more upbeat ending, and there are a few concepts that are absolutely represented in a more logical manner, but there’s still quite a bit of “What the literal fuck”-ery. Basically, don’t watch this one unless you’re happy to establish your own thoughts, explanations, and conclusions as to what has happened and what things mean. If you’re looking for definitive answers, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

Other than that, the only thing I can really recall watching last week was a couple of episodes of a show called ‘A.P. Bio’. It’s a comedy about a philosophy professor who gets knocked down to teaching high school biology and dedicates his life to destroying his academic rival. It’s pretty funny, though it hasn’t really hooked me in that ‘I must binge this!‘ kind of way.

So there we have it. Another week, another report, and another Summer behind us. I don’t mean for that to sound as depressing as it does, I swear. lol Here’s to another week!

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! ❤

Plans & Goals 2021: Week 34

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! ❤

Plans & Goals 2021: Week 33

Ladies and gentlefolk, do you know what is a recipe for disaster?

A 40th birthday party. A 40th birthday party is a recipe for disaster. And I say that in the most loving, enjoyable way possible.

This past weekend was my eldest cousin’s (on my mother’s side) birthday party, and I was obviously going to attend. It was a good time, and as these things often do, it alluded itself to a rather magnificent hangover. Not the worst one I’ve ever had – my guts stayed firmly inside my body this time around – but certainly not the easiest morning-after I’ve had. But, I suppose, if you can’t make yourself violently ill in honor of you and the people you grew up with storming ever closer toward old age, what’s the point, right? Right.

In other news, the kid got the splint off her hand, and all is looking well. She had no pain making a fist, so she was declared good to go, although she was encouraged to stay away from anything high-impact for another three weeks while the bones continue to fuse. I don’t see that being a big problem since the two main things she wanted to do upon regaining use of her hand was to draw and play video games.

In other, other news, hubby and I will be doing something rather exciting in a few days from now. I don’t want to go into too much detail because I don’t know how much I’m really allowed to share, but suffice it to say that it involves being interviewed for not one, but two documentaries that will eventually be aired on actual television channels. Obviously we’re incredibly nervous and excited! Given the topics we’ll be discussing, it should be a ton of fun. Wish us luck!

And now that I’ve gone on a little bit, here are the deeds of the day (i.e. what happened last week):

Health

I’m not even sure what to say about this, to be honest…

Okay, so, dealing with the negative side of things first, I’m pretty sure I haven’t done any proper exercise since I finished the ‘Morning Meltdown 100’ program. I mean, I’ve gone for a few walks, a few swims…but that’s pretty much it. I have yet to return to an actual exercise program, and I can already tell that it’s affecting me negatively. I really have to get back into something, but I’ve just been so busy lately that I haven’t been able to convince myself to dedicate to anything. That’s no excuse, but I’m sure you know what I mean.

On the eating side of things, it’s actually a more positive outlook. After a few weeks in a row of being rather awful, I’ve more or less gotten my bad habits back under control. I’ve been eating a lot of fruit, restricting my portions to more reasonable ones, and have been doing a pretty good job of keeping myself from snacking at ridiculous times of night. Mind you, I could have done with a little more snacking on the night of the 40th birthday party, in order to space out the alcohol, but, uh…yeah. lol

On a related note, it’s really too bad that watermelon is normally so blood expensive, because it really satiates me for a lot longer than might sound normal.

Creativity

You’re not going to believe it! I actually have art news to share this week!

I decided to try returning to the lofty origins of pencil-and-paper drawing to see if it would spark anything, and I ended up with two half-decent first drafts of ‘draw this in your style’ challenges that I should be able to digitize and fix up. The first was a challenge from an Instagram user who I, to be honest, don’t really know:

And the second is a challenge from ‘ObaGams’, who is one of my favorite fan-artists out there right now. I adore her versions of Aziraphale and Crowley, so I couldn’t resist trying my hand at this cute movie-theatre scene she provided:

I started digitizing the second one right away, but I didn’t get very far yet because by then my wrist was getting a little sore. While I’m here, though, I may as well share it:

I’m pretty pleased with it so far! A bit more cartoon-y than the kind of stuff I’ve been drawing in recent days, but don’t they look adorable? XD

Moving on to the writing side of things, I have to admit that I did not hit my Pacemaker.press goal for last week, though I’m not exactly disappointed with what I did pull off. Pacemaker wanted me to write 14,882 words, and by the end of the week I’d managed to pull off 12,567. Bit of a discrepancy between those numbers, but you definitely can’t be too upset with over 12k words. Honestly, the only reason that I didn’t get to the goal-point is because of the dangerous birthday party I keep bringing up. 😛

Most of what I wrote last week was for ‘The Prince’s Consort’, which is getting closer and closer to being complete. I’m on a bit of a role at the moment, which has been great for motivation. This proves to be my longest fic yet, as well. The published chapters currently add up to a little over 70k words, and I have eight unpublished chapters plus a handful of unwritten chapters yet to go. In fact, now that I’m really looking at the numbers, this may turn out to be my first fic that hits a word count of over 100k! Crazy-sauce!

Something else that I worked on last week, however, was a collaboration with one of my favorite fic-writers, AppleSeeds. She wrote an adorable fic, Angelic Whispers in which ASMR YouTube star Crowley, and ASMR Spa employee Aziraphale meet up and do a collaboration video, resulting in falling in love, of course. I ‘lamented’ that the story ends before getting to the sexy bits, so she suggested a collaboration-follow-up! Thus, Demonic Whispers was born, and I’m quite pleased with it. ^_^

On a note related to both art and writing, after getting a pretty good response to my ‘interest check’ on social media, I’ve decided to start formatting my finished novel-length fics as e-books, complete with cover art by yours truly. The art side of things is going to take some time and effort, but it should also be fun, and I love the idea of seeing my fics ‘published’. Wish me luck!

Down-Time

I’m going to start with video-games this week, just for fun. 😛

Firstly, I did continue along with a bit more ‘Pokemon Snap’. Nothing really to say about it; just that I am continuing to enjoy the relaxing cuteness of it.

Secondly, hubby has been playing ‘Arkham Asylum’ and ‘Arkham City’ recently, and I just wanted to mention that I find it amazing how well those two games hold up after all this time. I mean, I know that what he downloaded were the upgrades, but even still, that’s just graphical…the gameplay itself is just as it was in the PS3 era, and yet the games are still absolutely astounding.

Thirdly, I finished ‘Little Nightmares 2’ the other day. Fun, if infuriating, with a great storyline (which is saying something since there’s absolutely no dialogue). That said, I just wanted to mention…for a game that’s marketed more toward a younger audience…the plot is goddamn dark. Like…fuck. If you never have any intention of playing the games, I encourage you to read up on the lore just to see how goddamn dark it is. Sheesh.

You already know what I’m going to say about reading, soooo…let’s just skip it for this week, shall we?

WATCHING! Uh…what have we been watching lately? I really have to start scribbling this stuff down somewhere so I remember it later…

Well, we’ve been continuing to watch ‘IT Crowd’ with the kid, which never fails to please. And we’ve also been re-watching the ‘Angry Video-Game Nerd’ episodes at bedtime, because no matter how old we get the pathetically immature humor remains gigglishly, foolishly wonderful. (Gotta stay young, right?)

We also watched the ‘Demon Slayer’ movie last week, and were thoroughly pleased by it. Basically it’s just a really long episode of the show, but it also had an emotionally devastating ending that I totally would have cried over if I hadn’t been fighting it back on account of hubby and kid being heartless torments. 😛

I feel like I might be missing something somewhere, but I might just be misremembering because it was a busy week, so we’ll just end it there for now.

And I shall close out this post by stating that I can’t believe the summer is almost over. I need to either learn how to more efficiently use my time, or how to exist on significantly less sleep, because fuck if I managed to do even a quarter of the things I intended to have done this summer. 😛

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! ❤