Cabin Fever - and Other Craziness....

With the Holidays over, and neither of us working, we've been going kinda stir-crazy being in the house all day. We really need to get out and about more; I'm thinking we might take the bus into the city Saturday and check out the Riverside Park. Jenny hasn't seen it yet, and it's been so nice lately. Otherwise, let's see, what's been going on....?

The last couple of days have been relatively productive (atleast when you add in the "not getting up till Noon" factor). We got caught up on dishes (2 loads) and laundry (3 loads), and got a lot of re-organizing done in the dining/living room. I've successfully re-written my resume, and today I sent off my application to Northwest Andrology. I've still got a couple of cover letters to write, and plenty more resumes to send off.

In not-as-cheery news, Jenny's grandfather's wife passed away after fighting Alzheimers for quite some time. The funeral is next Monday morning up in Sandpoint; we'll be driving into CdA to meet up with Jenny's folks and then driving up with them.

The maintenance people came by and changed out our fluorescent lights, but the ledge in the hallway still needs to be cleaned off. Looks like we're just going to have to borrow the parents' ladder and do it ourselves.

I did finally dye my hair (and Jenny trimmed it up for me), but it turned out red instead of blond. I'm happy with it, tho; I probably look better as a red head anyway. I don't have any pictures yet, but we did get our pictures from Halloween back. We dressed up as Peter Parker & Mary Jane:

Arts & Crafts

So, I'm trying to get myself back into drawing every day, no matter what. I really want to work on expanding my portfolio beyond superheroes and Warhammer art, in the vain hope of one day getting a real illustration job....

I've had this Graphic Illustration book for about 6 years now, and never really looked at it; turns out it's from 1982, but it's a very cool handbook that walks you through various techniques and "real world" scenarios starting with basic assignments and progressing from there. Since it doesn't look like I'll be going back to school anytime soon, I've decided to work my way through the book, doing all the suggested assignments and exercises, hopefully building up my skills along with my portfolio.

The exercises start out super simple, and the first one I did today was to draw a portrait of someone's face 3 times: from your memory, from life and from a photograph. My intent was to draw 3 pictures of Jenny.... (Click the Image for a Larger View)The first one, from memory, ended up looking like an elf. Not really what I was going for. The second one was drawn from her sitting next to me, and came out looking better, but not as much like her as I would have preferred. The third picture was drawn from the photo of her dressed up as Mary Jane for Halloween (which explains the long hair, if you're wondering), and was pretty much dead on. I'm really happy with this one, since it's been forever since I've drawn anything "realistic."

Well, once again I told myself I was going to enter Tokyopop's Rising Stars of Manga contest, and once again I have done nothing. The due date is tomorrow (Friday the 13th), and I had completely forgotten about it even existing until a week ago. Next year, right?

There aren't any Draw-Offs going on over at Digital Webbing that have piqued my interest; however the deadline for the Runes of Ragnar Essence of Odin contest has been extended, so I might still get an entry in for that one. I had every intention of entering when it was announced, and then stuff kept coming up and I never sat down and worked on it. I finally started sketching out ideas the other day, but I thought it was due tomorrow so I had written it off, but apparently I can't read my calendar correctly since it's actually due on the 22nd. Here's the thumbnail I settled on:

Jenny's been crocheting up a storm, working on a big blanket which is about 4'x6' right now. The plan is for it to be about 7'x6' when she's all done. She also just crocheted a hat for herself with cute little cat ears:

I guess that's about it for now. I hope to keep this Blog updated more frequently now, and to include more of our photos and artwork. We also are trying to get back into gaming again, and we'll probably post up pics of our painted miniatures from time to time as well.