Happy Fluffy Friday!!

Or, Happeh Fluffeh Friday if you speak LOLspeak! :)

Some websites and blogs that feature cute animals (such as my favorite, DAILY SQUEE!) have special weekly posts including "Fluffy Friday."
I don't feel that I've given enough mention to Dear Tosh, Baby Kitty, Pretty Girl, Tosh.0,  or her whole other slew of nicknames, in my blog.... so here's a special Fluffy Friday post, just for her! :)

Reunited!

When we started packing up and getting ready to move, I de-activated most of the items in my Etsy shop since I wasn't sure when I'd be able to find them again.
Last night I was so excited to FINALLY come across a few items I have been missing (and just in time for Chreeeeeeestmas!).

Butterfly Box- $15 + shipping

One of the items is this upcycled decoupaged Baltimore Checkerspot Butterfly Box! It's a slide-top wooden box and I've just re-listed it in my Etsy shop- have a look if you've got someone on your shopping list who loves flowers or bugs... or the state of Maryland! (The Black-Eyed Susan is the Maryland state flower and the Baltimore Checkerspot is the state butterfly.)   :)

Want! Want! Wednesday- the Pollinator Tree!

It's **DECEMBER** and that means it's almost CHREEEEESTMAS!

And in proper holiday fashion the catalogs have been starting to arrive like crazy, supplying plenty of fodder for upcoming holiday-themed Want! Want! Wednesday posts! Plus they worked perfectly since Want! Want! Wednesday is all about silly things that I don't need and am not going to pay this much for.....
but I like the idea of them.

(Although at the end of the post I will add, there is hope for those of us who love the items I'm featuring this week!!)

This week's Want is a Pollinator-Themed Christmas Tree! It must be the trendy new thing this year because I found decorations in not one, but TWO catalogs! Observe....

The first set of ornaments was in a catalog by a company called Grandin Road.

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

While not all strictly pollinators, these garden-themed ornaments are simply adorable, no?

(I am not sure where all of the other ornaments on this tree came from; I wish the catalog had them all.)
I do wish there were some bees! That's one thing I haven't been able to find... a bee ornament. I've been thinking about making some.


But in this little collection you get 25 ornaments for $99. Actually not a bad deal! That's about $4 an ornament. So this Want is actually obtainable.


The direct link to these items from their website can be found here:
http://www.grandinroad.com/jump.jsp?item=42281&maincatcode=null&subcatcode=null&itemID=31019&itemType=PRODUCT&path=1%2C2%2C474%2C6382%2C7946&iProductID=31019




I got another catalog in the mail yesterday from a company called Gump's which, honestly with the prices of some of the stuff, I have no clue how they got my info or why they sent it to me. Even their website says "Luxury Gifts..." but whatever.

(click to enlarge)

Super cute, right? There is even a grasshopper!
You can see their entire ornament collection here:
http://www.gumps.com/HOLIDAY+SHOP/Christmas+Ornaments/

Now I'll let you in on the best part of this week's Want.
It IS obtainable!

I saw the first set of these ornaments a week ago and didn't buy them but couldn't stop thinking about them. Then I went into an AC Moore with my mom this weekend and.... there they were. Not these, specifically, but *some* bug ornaments! There were butterflies and dragonflies and all were 50% off, so each was $1.99. I picked up 10 of them and figured even if I have to just do a very little tree, I'll be able to have a Pollinator tree this year.
At the Harris Teeter store down the street, they were also doing a sale on ornaments and I scored two glittery hummingbirds! Yay for more pollinators!

So if you love the idea of a pollinator-themed Christmas tree this year but the items here are out of your budget, just keep your eyes open for deals all around you! Looks like bugs and birds are the new thing!

Happy Decorating!! :)

How-To Tuesday: Autoplay Music on your Blog

HahAhAhaHAhaAhaHAhaahahhaaa!!!

Did you really think I was serious?

If I was going to do a post on "how to make music autoplay when someone opens your blog" I might as well title it, "The most efficient way to get someone to navigate away from your blog as quickly as possible" or  "How to instantly exponentially increase your bounce rate"

But seriously, I've been without internet for about a week now, AGAIN, thanks Verizon.
In the meantime I've been coming up with a bunch of fun haikus about Verizon and their internet 'service' (if you can call it that?) but none are appropriate for this blog so I won't publish them here because they'd just look like

Verizon &$#*!! &$(#
*$*#& Verizon (### *$##**@!!! 
*$!*#& Verizon.

So while my internet is working for more than three consecutive minutes (probably sporadically because they're fixing an outage somewhere in the area) I'm actually working on tomorrow's blog post, because I came up with it last week but couldn't post it AND. HAD. A. SAD.

But now you don't have to has a sad because I wrote a ridiculous blog post for today AND am writing a super cool Want! Want! Wednesday post with some very exciting goodies in there!

And in the meantime here is a silly Mantis.

No, I haven't been drinking, but am sort of on a burnt (on purpose) cookie and key-lime buzz.

A Productive Sunday?

Not sure how productive it will be since I slept in til 9:30; it's already 10:30 and I'm sitting here in pajamas and drinking coffee.

Nevertheless on a day like this I tend to get up and look outside and imagine a whole day of possibilities. That's what weekends are for, right? Pretty soon my weekends will become even more meaningful since I'm going back to work full-time as of November 1st. The longer hours will definitely not be fun, but I can't argue with having twice the paycheck... especially in time for the holidays.

So what's on the agenda for a day like this?

The first thing I'll do this morning while I finish my coffee is work on letters to my two representatives in the Virginia General Assembly. Remember my post about a new project I'm working on? That project is: I'm designing a new license plate for the state of Virginia. It will be a revenue sharing plate and the shared fees ($15 per plate after the first 1,000 are sold) will go to the Pollinator Partnership.

The theme for the plates is "Protect Pollinators" and I think I've got the design just about finished, but I need to get it approved by the Pollinator Partnership and get one of my representatives to agree to sponsor it.

BUT
Even if I have to change some of it, I can't help but want to share a sneak peak:

If either of my representatives approves it, then I can start collecting signatures of people who would be interested in having this plate, or better yet, actually collect the official license plate applications AND fees from folks. I need 350 by January 1st to get it approved. If I don't get enough, I'll probably have to work on it all next year and try again in 2012.

Wish me luck and please comment or contact me if you're a Virginia resident who would like a plate! And of course, I'll be posting more about this on my blog very soon.


Also for today....
I'll definitely be going for a run- I was going to go yesterday but my husband surprised me with a birthday trip to the Smithsonian to see butterflies! We even got to meet up with a couple of friends of ours who were in town for a race today. I'll upload some pictures when I find the cables that connect the camera to the computer.

I'm also hoping to get my desk finished today. I need to go buy some legs for it, and was planning just to use sawed off 2x4's but my husband wants something sturdier. And a sturdy way to attach it to the desk (which is 2 doors in an L shape). Makes sense, but will I be able to get him motivated to go out and look at hardware with me when some football game is on at 1 that he wants to watch? If not, I don't totally suck at building things and don't mind making an attempt at it!

New Project Idea!!

Last night on our way home from PA, I was chatting with my husband and we came up with an idea for an AWESOME PROJECT!

Awesome because it's going to combine me making art with my favorite subject matter- POLLINATORS!- with raising funds for the Pollinator Partnership!

I don't want to give away too much about the project because I'm paranoid of jinxing it or other applications of Murphy's Law ("anything that CAN go wrong WILL go wrong"). So for now..... I'll just give you some visual hints! :)

In the meantime if you're starting your Christmas shopping a little early, take a look in my CafePress Bees store for great "Bee Kind!" shirts, bags, and more! All profit from these items goes to the Pollinator Partnership! :)

Weekend Inspiration

I finally decided this week that it's time to tackle..... the office. The art studio. The office/art studio.
Remember this photo? Yeah I know... It's a kitchen, not an office, but still.

Last night I started the painting process. I'm pretty excited!

I spent some time yesterday looking online for inspirational photos of great craft/art rooms and found this site via the Etsy forums:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/CraftRoomInspiration

Be sure to check it out if you've got an art studio or craft room you're in the mood to reorganize! There are so many great ideas here. I've never had a real craft/art room before, so I really didn't know where to begin.  

How do I store/display all my paints in a useful and practical way? 

How do I keep my paper cutter, mat cutter, and self-healing-cutting-mat out in the open enough to access them easily when I need them, but keep them out of the way so as not to clutter up valuable desk space?

Since I have no right to be completely selfish about this whole thing, how do I integrate my husband's desk and super-awesome awards he's gotten from work into the office/studio without making him feel like he's in 'my' room, but instead in our office?

When we first started the house-hunting process I had visions of a little room off the back of the house with a separate entrance where I could paint, make a big ol' mess, and invite clients to view my work in a private studio setting. That's a pretty specific requirement when you're under a time crunch and looking for houses in the DC area (where they move pretty fast). I decided to drop that from the priority list and focus on other things instead- things more important to family life (the kids being furbabies for now).

We ended up in this perfect not-so-typical split-level with 4 floors. I love it. We've talked about the possibilities of adding on a garage (with a sun-room on top?), and/or small sun-room/art studio in the back. It might happen one day.

For now our office/studio is a room in the back of the house among the other bedrooms. It's got one regular window and then one GIANT window.

As of about 9:00pm last night, the office looked like the mother of all disarray went in there and threw up after eating a hearty meal of boxes, art supplies, and shelves. All the random extra shelves and furniture were put back there with the thought that I'd find something crafty with which to fill them. Then add in all the paintings and computer accessories and the cat's litterbox and this desk I've had since I was 10 years old. Yes, 10. The poor 20-year-old-particle-board desk sags terribly from the weight of my old CRT monitor circa 2000 (which just got replaced this year with a lightweight LCD). Pieces of it are falling off. I knew it was time to replace it.

Well now.... this is embarrassing.

The horrific cell-phone-photo seems appropriate for something that's already such a mess, n'est-ce-pas? So there's the old desk, and yes, the litterbox, and the state of the office as of last night.

Sadly, that's an improvement from what it's looked like for the past 3 weeks.

Before I started the painting process, I begged my husband to take the door off the hinges (he thought I couldn't do it myself?). Why? Because I had plans for it. Ohhhh yes.
The doors in this house are super old and super gross and dingy and have holes in them and we want to replace them with nice 6 panel doors since that's a pretty cheap and very nice way to improve a house. I decided that one of those ugly doors was going to become MY NEW DESK. Economical, eco-friendly, practical, my husband said it looks like crap but it's for arty stuff so crap = ok! Then who cares if you get paint or ink all over it!? Happy Birthday to ME!

The very first class I attended at my college was Drawing 101 and in that studio the teacher's desk was a door with two file cabinets underneath it. I thought that was the greatest idea ever and it stuck with me. The doorknob was still on that desk, but we took the doorknob off last night so I can run wires from various electronics through the premade hole.

I'll eventually add actual legs to it (ok, sawed off 2x4's), but I had some little shelving units that I thought would be perfect to put under the desk to hold it up. Also you can see my old desk under there, since where else was I going to put it? Eventually I dismantled it and piled the pieces up on the other side of the room. I also took the hutch off the top of it- no need for that any more, and it makes the workspace feel so... closed.

I'm so in love with the door-desk that I'm going to add another one on the wall to the left to make a wonderful L shaped desk. That one will run under the GIANT window and provide a great space for drawing or other crafty things :)
There is room for my husband's desk on either two of the other walls, so I don't feel toooooooo guilty for taking up so much space.

Now everything's in a huge state of disarray once more since I had to move EVERYTHING so I could start painting, but I really hope to have it almost done by the end of the weekend or early next week.
I'll be sure to post more pictures of the process!
What a great way to have a fantastic HUGE new desk without having to buy anything!

How to pack a painting for moving

How to pack up a painting:
Step 1:  Lay some bubble wrap or some sheets of white packing paper FLAT on the floor or on a table- a flat surface. (You can also use: Sheets, towels, blankets, fabric...  You can do a layer of paper and then the fabric for padding if you wish. The layer of paper will help protect from any fuzz from the fabric sticking to your painting.)
Step 2: Carefully take the painting or artwork off the wall.
Step 3: Lay it down FLAT on top of the bubble wrap or packing paper.

Step 4: Carefully fold the bubble wrap or packing paper around the painting.DO NOT BALL UP THE EXCESS! Keep it all very nice and flat. (Pretend you're wrapping a pretty gift for your mom. "Mom! Aren't you impressed with my wrapping skills? See? I told you I can be good at something!")
Step 5: Tape it together neatly.
Step 6: Place it into a box and tape the box closed.

How not to pack up a painting:
Step 1: Shove a bunch of packing paper down into a box.
Step 2. Take the painting off the wall and shove it in the box. Smush the paper.
Step 3: Fold and cram a bunch more paper around the frame of the painting and along the sides and top.
Step 4: Make sure you have excess paper to ball it up and shove it in front of or behind the canvas.

In the last 2 days I unpacked 3 paintings and two of them are damaged pretty badly. Paper- many, many sheets of folded and balled up white packing paper- was shoved around/behind/in front of the canvas and as a result I've got bubbles in my canvas the size of my fist. I'd like to find the person who packed them and give him a new hole in his head the size of my fist.
I am confident that I would be acquitted by a jury of my arteest peers.

My advice to any artist who is moving is to be sure and pack up all your own paintings. Don't make the mistake that I did and think "The movers are PROFESSIONALS! They know what they're doing! They can probably do a better job than me because THIS IS WHAT THEY GET PAID TO DO!"
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehappythoughts!!!!

I'll be looking around online for some advice on how to fix the canvas- a few products have been recommended to me by artist friends. I might call some local framing/art restoration shops and see if they can do it for me or what they would recommend.

After I get them fixed- if they can be fixed- I'll be sure to post about it so that anyone else who runs into this problem can find a solution and not cry about it like I did.

EDIT: I left the canvases sitting out and after a couple of months they, pretty much, went back to the way they were. If you look very hard you can sort of tell, from some little cracks in the paint, but they are not a total loss.

Mural finished!

It feels so great to have this done!
Right now I've just got this picture from my cell phone, but my friend is taking some pictures with her real camera and will send me some soon. You get the idea though- this was such a fun project! I can't wait to do more :)

Also as you can see if you're reading this, I did a complete re-design of my blog yesterday. I'm still tweaking it a little, but what do you think?

The Fish Nursery Mural... Part 1

A month or two ago a good friend of mine asked if I'd paint a mural in her nursery. She and the father-to-be had picked fishing as the theme for the decor and she just found out she's having a boy.

Paint a room full of fish?! How could I say no??

She had a family member paint one wall of the nursery a rich shade of blue and that was to be the designated mural wall. Made my job pretty easy since all I had to do was fill it with feeesh! :)

When I arrived to start the project, I sketched out a few ideas for different styles of fish to get an idea of what she had in mind. I knew she wanted colorful fish, but was she going for exotic tropical style fish, or less-flamboyant local fish? She chose the latter, so no angel fish or parrotfish for this nursery. (Some of the fish would still be somewhat tropical looking though, due to their bright colors...)

I sketched out the fish on the wall in chalk and the two of us began to fill them in with white paint, to use as a primer. On a dark wall, a bright color like white or yellow or red requires lots of layers of paint, and the white underneath helps keep the color nice and bright looking.

She informed me that Daddy, being an avid fisherman in Southern Maryland, was adamant that there be at least one Rockfish included in the mural!

I drew him chasing after a school of little feeder fish. Poor baby feeder fish!! So cute! So tiny! So tasty!
Here's a close up of the feeder fish after they were filled in :)

 

These are two of the more tropical-looking fish. Having some colorful fish works well to balance out the more neutral fish like the Rockfish.

This picture shows 2 full days of progress on the mural. Not as far along as I had hoped, but doing many coats of paint over a dark wall takes a lot of time.

I added in another Rockfish (two's better than one, right?) and the great thing about them is that when you enter the nursery, they're totally the focal point of the room.

Daddy is happy :)  and I think Mommy is, too!

This weekend I'm heading back down to finish the mural and will post pics once it's complete!

Back Online, for real!

Got our interwebz hooked up today in VA and let me tell you.... it is slooowwww. Harrisburg had some nice DSL for sure. The one phone outlet in this house that works is in a weird place- some random little cubbie in the wall back in the pantry!? So we're getting a wireless modem and in the meantime I'm using our old one that works, sometimes, sitting by the edge of the pantry.

Heh.

Artsfest was this past weekend, and what a beautiful weekend it was! Such a gorgeous weekend to be outside and I gave my booth a makeover with some tropical looking blinds, but haven't yet found the cable to hook my phone up to the computer to show the pictures I took.

Still working on decorating the house. I'm realizing that in order to feel inspired in the office/studio, I'm going to have to make it aesthetically pleasing. There's just no way around it. I don't want that to mean "I have to go buy all new fancy stuff! PRETTY ROOOOOOOOMMM NOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!", I plan to make use of what I have and buy as little as possible. Partly because I am broke, but of course also to not be wasteful and keep things as eco-friendly as I can!

I have a lot of random furniture in there right now. The giant Epson is on a TV stand and my particle board desk that I've had since I was 11 is sort of falling apart, but maybe some screws or nails will hold it together for a while longer. I've got a lot of other random sized shelves all over the place too, for various printers/paper/art supplies.

So I'm looking for some inspiration. What can you show me? Do you have any favorite blogs where I can see some craft-room inspiration? Or maybe there's a photo-set on Flickr that I have yet to find? Do you have a link to your own craft room you can show me? Leave a comment.... I'd love to see and get some ideas :)

Paint Samples

Blogging at 1:00am left me too tired to include color samples in the last post... what a cop-out! This is an ART blog, I can't get away with that!!

You want PICTURES and you want to see COLOR!!!
I aim to please :)

I played around online with Behr's painty-tool-thing. On the Behr website, you can enter in a specific color name and then play with pictures of rooms, put it on the walls, etc. Of course computer monitor colors vary, so they may not be 100% accurate, but you get the idea!  I couldn't color the furniture in the photos, so you'll have to use your imagination until I can post real pictures of the actual rooms... but at least this is something, right?

Here's the Master Bedroom in Honey Moth: (I love that name, don't you?!) 

The color of the nightstand in this photo is the color of our wood floors. Our bedding is the greenish color in the upper left color palette and our furniture is close to the dark brown in the upper left color palette. Our trim is white like in this photo.

This is the guest room in Light Mint:

Yeah, I know, same photo... hehe. Behr's site didn't have a whole lot from which to choose!
We decorated this room with maps, hence the color palette that I chose. The trim is white,  and we've got a big framed map with pins in it of the places we've been. Right now it's only North America, but maybe next year that will change and we can get a world map. We've also got a globe and some other fun map-y travelly stuff.

Here is the office in Honeydew: (in person this color is much brighter!)

Pretend it's not a kitchen. I didn't see any office sample photos that would resemble mine, this was the closest I saw! It will have darker green (that color is called CATERPILLAR!) and bright blue accents..... maybe... hopefully.
...Ideally!

Here is (sort of) the dining room in Cheerful Hue: (I think that was my husband's favorite color name!)

In the color palette, the tan is the color of our couches (the dining room is big enough for a table and chairs on one side and then couches/a TV at the other end). In the color palette, the green looks about right for our table and chairs, but in the actual picture it is showing way too bright! It's really a dark-green-stained wood table and chairs. The red is a terra-cotta tiled floor, closest I could do in this photo.

And here's an idea of the dark teal that's in most of the house that we love:

Like the others, the colors in the palette are more accurate than those of the room. The walls are a little darker than this, the wood is a very dark cherry. The furniture will be dark brown, and there will be lots of green plants :)

So there you have it! Some idea of colors. I'll be haunting your home-improvement blogs in the next few weeks to get lots of ideas... I'll be sure to keep things updated.

And now off to get ready for ARTSFEST!!!
http://www.annmariegarden.org/

Hope to see you there :)

Iiiiiii've been PAINTING!!!

BUT not art. I've been painting our new house! I got to go pick out colors last week and let me tell you... after we closed on the house last Thursday evening, before going to sleep that night, my husband said to me, "Why don't you go to Home Depot tomorrow and pick out some colors of paint that you like?"
Do you really think a girl like me could sleep after a comment like that!? NOOOOOO!!! I felt like a tiny child on Christmas Eve.
Tomorrow I'M GOING TO GO PICK OUT PAAAAAAAAINT!!! OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG

And so it began. The busy-ness and sleepless nights.

Of course I didn't sleep. I got up the next morning all giddy and stopped at a Home Goods for the helluvit, found some ridiculously cute and colorful cannisters for our boring white kitchen, then grabbed a coffee and headed to THE DEPOT!

Our main room is a dark teal and so is the hallway, so pretty much every color I picked was going to not have to clash with it since it's everywhere. I ended up picking out all pastels since the rooms are small and I wanted to brighten them up. I picked out 10-15 swatches, hung various ones in different rooms, and when my husband came home we finalized our selections. I picked out a limey-green for the office/art studio. That's the only room I wanted to make nice and bright :) My friends and family were shocked at my color choices... since my art is SO bright, they expected bright colors. The office will be bright, but it's still a very light limey green. My husband found it hard to believe that wouldn't look terrible with the teal, since the office will be at the end of the hall and the first thing you see back there when you look up the stairs. But I assured him that lime and teal totally go together (and almost picked those as our wedding colors since he loves green) and after I held up the swatch next to the white trim and teal wall, he was a believer!

So what did I pick? These are all Behr paints, but it's late and I'm too lazy to go find pictures/swatches online and post them.
Master: Honey Moth
Office/Art Room (what my husband has now deemed "The Bug Room"): Honeydew
Guestroom: Light Mint (it looks more blue than green though)
Dining area: Cheerful Hue (a light yellow).

The guestroom and master bedroom are done (after me, my mom, AND my husband all pulled an all-nighter on Monday night- we were just TOO FULL of paint-induced-energy!!! Maybe Behr adds caffiene into their paint?!), and I took some before pics. Once we get things unpacked and set up, I'll post them along with the after pictures :)

Butterfly Nerds

I just got a photo/text message from a friend out in CA- it was a picture of a Queen butterfly she saw the other day. Some back-and-forth texting ensued (or if you're REALLY into butterflies you would've considered it sexting?) that made me realize spending a summer at Hershey Gardens' Butterfly House (last year) turned me into kind of a butterfly nerd.

I'll now do my best to start the process of turning you into a butterfly nerd, too.

I bet you know what that is.
It's a Monarch!
If you already knew that you're pretty awesome!
This one is a male. You can tell by the two black spots in the center of the lower wings. The females have thicker black veins in their wings and don't have those two black dots.

Photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson

I bet you know what THIS butterfly is, too- even though you may not know you know! It's the Monarch Impostor: The Viceroy! Almost everyone's heard of "that butterfly that tries to look like a Monarch when it knows it isn't." They are right! That's what it does!

How do you tell the difference? Take a look at this butterfly and the Monarch above. Even though their wings are in slightly different positions, you can see the defining mark. A hint: Look at the lower wings.

If you didn't find it yourself, it's ok, you're still awesome!
The bottom wings of the Viceroy have a black line that goes through the middle of the lower wings across the veins. That black line is how you tell the difference! You can see it on both sides of the wing.

Sometimes a butterfly's wings look completely different on the top side (the side that faces the sky when they fly) versus the bottom! A perfect example is below.

Do you know what this guy is?
It looks quite similar to the Monarch, but this butterfly is actually called a Queen. It has no dark black veins running through the upper wings like the Monarch has. It's also more brownish in color. When a Queen opens its wings, the top sides of the wings are just the rusty color with black along the outer edges- the veins are not prominent at all, as seen in this photo by Korall:

 Photo by Korall

For more neat things about Monarchs, have a look at this site:
http://www.livemonarch.com/monarch-facts.htm

This is the Monarch Caterpeeeeeeeeellar! It's yellow and white and black and stripey. Plus you'll know it's a Monarch Baby if you found it on Milkweed! A lot of people confuse it with the Swallowtail Butterfly Caterpeeeellar. I've done paintings of both now, so I consider myself the expert on all things caterpeellar. Ok not really, but doing the paintings in addition to time at the butterfly house was quite informative!

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 I admit... I find it ridiculously fun to say "caterpeeeellar."

*AA

Oh no! Not has a sad....?

After recently watching a bunch of Aqua Teen Hunger Force episodes (the disc was in the DVD player and it's the only DVD the movers didn't pack!), I noticed that- similarly to a happy face = instant cute, you can also immediately feel sorry for something if you add a sad little pouty face.

Check out poor Meatwad here:

Awwwwwww.... soooooooooo sad!!!! :(

Poor sad worms! I think they are doing it. I wonder why they're sad. Maybe in worm-time, it's like 4am, and they've just gotten back from the worm bar. They went home together, thinking it would be fun, but each of them knows deep down they could do better than this, and just hooked up with the first worm who paid them any attention because they've been pretty lonely lately... And even though that 35 minutes of drunken flirtation was a bit of an ego-boost, in the long run, this will do nothing for their already low self-esteem.
Poor low-self-esteem-having worms!

Awww poor sad swamp! Just because no one wants to play in you because you stink and are probably full of alligators... well... that algae sure seems to be having a good time! Yay! See? You're a nice home for algae, it's living it up! Don't be so hard on yourself!

Ohhh, poor you, sad mold! Why so sad? Because so many people are allergic to you, and you ruin all the food? That when people see you just sitting there, minding your own business on an orange or perhaps a half-eaten loaf of bread, they get pissed and insist the food has now "gone bad" and JUST THROW YOU AWAY?
Think of all the people you're cured, with your penicillin producing self. 

Aww, look here at the poor Virginia Disclosure Laws! They are sooo sad that our contract was written with not one mention of them whatsoever.
"FINE, don't think about US! Just pretend we don't even exist! ...No one listens to us anymore.   I bet if we made ourselves big hefty heaping line of asbestos fibers RIGHT HERE and snorted it up through a rolled up dollar bill and immediately got cancer and died NO ONE WOULD EVEN NOTICE!! HMPH!"
Little laws.... I promise that if we ever have to make another contract on a house in Virginia, you won't be neglected! We didn't even know about you til 4 days ago!

Is Sad Spaghetti sad because it's going to get eaten? Well, that's what happens to spaghetti.

I can't possibly even imagine why any of these items would be sad! ...They've got front seats to an episode of The Sopranos!

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Just Add Cute

I just realized something. You can make anything- ANYTHING- cute by just adding a face.

Observe:

Art Studio: temporarily closed!

In case you haven't been following along, I'm moving!... this weekend. Probably. Maybe. Ok, I have no stinkin' idea what's gonna happen at this point. But I do know that the art studio, for the most part, is all packed up. No more paintings. No more prints. (For now.)

(However, if you're just dying for a print from yours truly, they're available here at imagekind AND you can even get them framed for really super reasonable prices!)
http://SamanthasArtStudio.imagekind.com

So... about the move.


A few weeks ago, we found out the house had mold. The seller agreed to have it remediated.... fine. I guess.

Yesterday was the day that the house was scheduled to get its mold inspection. At this point we haven't gotten the results, but during this inspection, the mold inspector found something eeeeeiiiiiiiiinteresting in the basement. Something that had been... overlooked before.

Can you guess? Oh come on, Just guess.


Yummy... delicious... fraying... falling apart... asbestos insulation on the ceiling.

You can imagine my reaction.

See how it says "Party all the time", but Eddie looks waaaay too serious to party? I bet he wrote "Party all the time" when he was caught up in the euphoric excitement of buying his first house, then right before they took this picture, one of 'his people' called up and was like "Uhhhh, Eddie? Just found toxic carcinogens all up in your ceilings man."


So after doing all this fundraising to help cure cancer, I'm about to be the proud owner of a cancer factory!!! That's right, so if you know anyone who could use some extra cancer in their life.... just send 'em on over.