Regina Noctis

Someday, I’m going to this. I’ve been eyeing it for two years. Tickets to it aren’t bad. That I could do. The harder parts will be hotel and food, as well as getting over my absolute hatred of driving to and in LA. There are some folks I’ve met over at MonkeyFilter who live in LA, and I considered asking for crash space, in return for the bribe of cooking, and possibly a ticket to the party. But the one time there was a meetup of the LA Monkeys that coincided with time off from school, I asked if anyone would be willing to put me up for a day or two, and I would quite happily cook them an amazing meal or two in return. This got a thoroughly underwhelming response of absolute silence. Not even so much as a “sorry, no room.” I don’t take well to being absolutely ignored. I’d rather be outright turned down, politely or rudely, than ignored. So I know better than to make this offer.

Hey, , get hooked up with some manner of making money and go to this thing with me. Save your pennies. I won’t make you wear the bells you usually put on with your faire garb and then start calling you a ding-a-ling. I promise. *innocent look*

And what about you, ? It seems like a Miss Mom kinda thing to me. I remember some of the costuming you’ve done at cons. I’d think that you’d have something amazing already made, or that you could create for this.

? ? (assuming you can afford the trip down from Seattle then)? ? ? Miss Sometimes? (I was going to use the lj user link for you too, but I love calling you Miss Sometimes for some reason.) Hey, , maybe you could join whatever group I manage to get together for this thing there, since you’re in the LA area? , I know you can’t make it, but I’d drag you there if I could. Same with you, .

And if your name isn’t mentioned, it’s probably because I’m half asleep while typing this. I’d love to go there with every one of you if I could. With enough of us, we could take the place over!

For the first time since he went to prison, we heard from my cousin. He made some small attempt to be conciliatory, and say the things that he thought would get him back on better terms with my grandmother. And it doubtless worked, because she minimizes or completely forgets anything he does to anyone, including her. I didn’t hear the whole thing. I walked in while the letter he wrote was still being read to my grandmother by Mom. At least he can’t call. Intake, the part of the prison where he will serve his sentence because it’s higher security and it’ll be less likely that he’ll get his ass kicked, does not have phones for the inmates.

The whole letter, even in what the psycho considers a conciliatory tone, was pretty crazy, based on what I heard. And the very end pretty much guarantees that no judge in Delano will fail to grant a new restraining order, since the last one got invalidated. And my mom has finally reached the point where she believes she can do what’s necessary to keep John away, instead of bowing to my insane grandmother’s crazy wishes.

At the end of the letter, John talked about how the other day he was daydreaming about being at my grandmother’s funeral. Everyone was there, all the family all dressed up and gathered around the grave. And he went to his car, took out an AK-47 from the trunk, and mowed every one of us down.

Not just psychotic. Also a fucking moron, giving us a death threat we can wave in the judge’s face. And the moment he violates the order, back to jail he goes. As often as it takes.

I should transcribe the letter into a private entry here, in case my grandmother decides to try to protect him by throwing it out. Something to do tomorrow after class.

But for now, bedtime. I have to get up in 5.5 hours to get ready for school. Got an ongoing project there. The drawing class is teaching the other students how to do perspective, and giving me my five millionth perspective project. Just as when we hit perspective in digital arts, I’m tired of doing the same old thing. Everyone does some room in their house, or a cityscape. Mine is going to have just enough stuff going on to prove that yes, I can do perspective on paper just as I can on the computer. But this is not going to be obviously all about perspective. It will be far from the main focus. And if I can get even close to the final image I have in my head, it may be the best piece I’ve done so far since I went back to college.

2 packages frozen artichoke hearts, thawed
½ pound Ricotta cheese
1 egg, lightly beaten
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese
6 thin slices Italian dry salami, finely chopped
½ cup fine, dry bread crumbs
6 tablespoons cold butter, cut into thin slices
butter for greasing casserole

In a bowl, mix together the ricotta, egg, Parmesan, and salami. Butter an ovenproof casserole dish large enough to hold the artichoke hearts in one layer, then put in the artichoke hearts. Spread the ricotta mixture evenly over the top, and scatter the bread crumbs in an even layer over the ricotta mixture. Lay the slices of butter on top of the bread crumbs, and bake the casserole in a preheated 375 F degree oven until the butter melts, the artichoke hearts are hot, and the top is golden. Serve hot or cooled to room temperature. Serves 4-6 as a side dish.

(crossposted to , , and my journal)

But I have this same reaction every time I realize that the semester is almost over. Well, except for one time, but I was in the midst of a high-stress breakdown at the time.

Where did the time go? I’m not ready for class to be over. It can’t be only three more classes, and then it’s finals week!

I want MORE.

I guess I’ll just have to keep working like a fiend over winter break. Keep right on covering my grandmother’s dining room table (the only place I really have to work) in charcoal dust, pastel dust, eraser detritus, and India ink.

I’ve absolutely falling in love with pastels. I’d tried, years ago, to work in oil pastels. They seemed like they’d be somehow easier than pastels. Almost like adult crayons. But I hated them, and I figured pastels would be even more fussy and annoying and difficult.

I was wrong, however. I took to pastels from the first moment I picked them up, and they’re so easy. My main area of expertise used to be ink, but pastels is even more “transparent” in application. They feel more like a direct extension of my eye and mind than pretty much anything else I’ve ever worked with. It’s also the first time I’ve been completely comfortable working in color. Even with the digital art, I’ve always felt a little awkward choosing colors, shading, etc. I’d always been a stark black-and-white pen-and-ink kind of girl. Particularly black ink linework with stipple shading.

I also used to work small. My largest pieces tended to be not much bigger than would fit on 8.5″ x 11″ paper. All semester, we’ve been working much larger than that – 18″ x 24″ – and something finally clicked. My art teacher/mentor back in high school, my teachers on my first trip through college pre-hand injury, used to try to get me to work bigger, and I’d wind up with something small down in one corner of some big sheet of paper or piece of canvas. If I did try to work big, I could sometimes start out okay, but soon would have everything completely out of proportion as I worked smaller and smaller the longer I was at it. A conscious effort on my part to work larger would usually, at best, wind up maybe the right size to fit on legal size paper, and badly done at that. I couldn’t seem to get around the tendency, even though I was actively trying.

But now I’m working large, and in pastels, and I love love love it. As a matter of fact, if I wasn’t about to go attempt sleep since I have to run into Bakersfield to get more art supplies in the morning, I’d probably go attack paper and pastels right this minute.

I want MORE!!

Lester Timofeev, 12-03-71 to 11-21-06

Dear and much-loved friend of mine for more than a decade. Master maker of borscht and babka, the perfect company to have if everyone gets snowed in for three days by an unseasonal blizzard, and the best person to hang out in an east coast diner with in the middle of the night.

Had surgery this morning, which went very smoothly, was recovering well and in good spirits in the ICU, and suddenly passed on from a massive coronary this afternoon.

Goodbye, Essah.

May your next life be long, healthy, and happy.

I wandered back into my room after dinner, sat down at my computer, and discovered I had a visitor. A small spider was on my monitor. It’s not one of the web-building types. Rather, it’s one of those free-roaming, sight-hunting spiders, like wolf spiders. It might even be a wolf spider. I can’t make out much in the way of markings, since the spider is backlit. All I see is a silhouette. It’s not a familiar silhouette, but it does remind me of some of the full-grown wolf spiders I’ve seen.

It has kept me amused for a while now. Since it’s a sight hunter, it’s been chasing my mouse cursor all over the monitor. If I stop moving the mouse, it wanders over to some of the things it thinks it sees, like the browser buttons, and kind of pats at them to see if they’re something edible. It’s currently tracking my typing as I write this. I know that there are certainly a number of people I know who wouldn’t be able to deal well with this, since I seem to know a number of arachnophobic people. But my “pet spider” is turning out to be quite a source of amusement for me. I wonder what it would do if I let it catch up to the cursor. Would it try to pounce? Or would it just pat it a few times, and then wander off? Maybe I should find out. But meantime, I’m making sure that this little spider isn’t out of shape. It’s getting plenty of exercise chasing cursors and type across the screen and back.

Bloody hell.

I’ve noticed that I have a pattern where everything stays on an even keel for a while – nothing fantastic, but nothing particularly going wrong, either. At least, that’s how it goes when there’s not something like my psychotic cousin around to guarantee months or years of nonstop stress and awfulness. This will either be broken by a whole bunch of things going perfectly, and I decide that I am invincible for a while. Or else everything seems to start going wrong for a little while. I seem to be in the everything going wrong all at once stage. There were all the events of Halloween. In addition to that, my grandmother passed out in the kitchen and we had to call 911, but she was awake again and refused to go to the hospital to be checked out. There have been computer problems, and it looks like we’ll have to go buy some new hardware for my mother, because things are beyond repair, and it just happened out of the blue this morning. I slammed my bad knee into something while trying to maneuver around something, knocked the kneecap out of alignment, and then got it reseated but am still in a lot of pain. The ear, at least, has improved. None of the sudden loss of hearing on that side followed by sudden bursts of pain. Whatever was going on with it last night seems to be gone now. That, at least, is good.

I’ll be getting up early to pick up the car before I head into Bakersfield for class. Just like I did Tuesday morning. I’m taking my ear feeling better as an omen that the current spate of everything going wrong at once is over, and everything will start to go smoothly again. Maybe I’ll even hit an upswing, like I did around the time I got myself into the basic drawing class and discovered that I could use my hand again after all this time. I think I’m due for everything going right for a few days.

If everything does start going right, please remind me not to start announcing out loud that I’m invincible. I’m convinced that it only encourages the universe to prove me wrong again. :p

Now, I’m still feeling some exhaustion from the whole accident stress thing, and I’m not feeling the simultaneous wide-awake feeling I get when the insomnia is bugging me. I’m going to go take advantage of that. Hey, that’s another good thing! Two good things in a row. Things must be on the upswing again.

I’m not yelling. I’m not angling for apologies. I’m not even irritated, much less angry. But I figured I’d better say something now, thanks to the increase in the number of these I’ve been getting in the last few months.

I get charged for every text message. Yeah, every one, whether sending or receiving. It’s a part of why I’ve said several times that they should be used to contact me for important stuff, or if something needs to be passed along and someone doesn’t have my cell number, especially when I’m out of town. That’s why I set up the LJ portal to send me text messages also. A few text messages once in a while aren’t a big deal. But I’ve lately been getting a much larger number of texts, and they are by and large just silly things that weren’t on a need-to-contact or important-stuff basis. Some of them have even been pretty thoroughly incomprehensible to me, particularly there’s a length limit on what I can get and people are exceeding it.

I appreciate that people have thought of me. I’ve appreciated it when I got something that gave me a smile just when I needed it. But I’m not the one paying the bill, and the person who does pay the bill would really prefer that texting be reserved for things that I need to know, or to make arrangements, or things along those lines. Thank you to the folks who were thinking of me, and who gave me something to smile about when I needed it. But it does need to slow down, regardless of that.

Thank you.

I feel drained and tired after all the car-related stress of the day. But because I’m stressed, stress-related insomnia has kicked in and I feel very wide awake in spite of feeling drained and tired.

This is ridiculous.

On top of that, I’ve developed a nice little pain in my inner ear. Bloody stupid ear infection. It doesn’t hurt nonstop, but when I move my jaw wrong, it flares up and makes up for the lack of a dull, continuous ache. It hurts.

Someone shoot me now, before something really bad happens rather than just all this pretty damn crappy stuff.