I discovered a pretty good cure yesterday for feeling pathetic and it is this:

Put on your biggest sweatshirt. It should be chalky grey, ugly and formless, yet warm.

Go into the kitchen and get a sweet snack. I like ice cream in a cone, with nuts on top. A cone like this is especially significant to the occasion because the top is difficult to consume while the bottom is easy.

Listen to any version of “The Weight” you prefer (I like the one by Smith the most; you might enjoy the original) while eating your snack and doing nothing else. Repeat song as necessary.

By the time you are finished with the point of the cone, you should be feeling better. If not, just go ahead and eat another ice cream.

While I’ve managed to avoid most of the applications on Facebook, there’s one called Friend FAQ I couldn’t help but add. It sends a little notification to your menu whenever one of your friends answers a harmless Yes or No question about you, such as, “Is so-and-so reliable?” Sounds boring, but wouldn’t you like to know?

Anyway, you don’t even have to be using the application to receive a notification at first. If somebody answers a question about you, Friend FAQ acts as the siren in the night that urges you to join and see.

I’ve had six questions answered about me that I know of (if you want to hide the painful truth you can choose not to notify a person), and here they are:

Do you think that Jackie still sleeps with a teddy bear?
No

Do you think that Jackie is cute?
Yes

Is Jackie’s profile picture cute?
Yes

Do you think that Jackie has ever cheated on a test?
No

Do you think that Jackie parties too much?
No

Do you think that Jackie is greedy?
No

You need to “spend coins” in order to see which of your friends answered what, but I’m not about to collect any more fake money than I absolutely have to. (See, um: FarmVille.) So, I guess I’ll never know. But I can tell you that one of these answers is false!

It’s not the teddy bear one, though I do tend to cuddle up with my fists under my chin like a giant baby. It’s not that I’m greedy either, or that I party anymore on days other than holidays. The correct answer to the question in question is that I have indeed cheated on a test. I feel kind of bad about giving the wrong impression about myself (oh, and I feel bad about the cheating, too), but I guess that’s the point of cheating. My mom will probably flip.

Last week, Chris and I found ourselves killing time inside a pet store. We visited the pythons and the puppies, the gerbils and the guppies, and then, finally, a big, green $1,200 parrot. “Look at this guy,” Chris said, leaning closer. The bird lunged towards him. “Careful,” I said. The bird stared with his beady eyes.

I turned away, bending down to look at the two white finches in a lower cage, when there it was: a wolf whistle. I stood up. “Was that the parrot?”

Chris burst into laughter. “Yeah, right when you bent down!” The parrot was now bopping around in his cage, still staring at us. Staring at me, more specifically. “I think he likes your butt,” Chris gleefully announced. “Bend over again?”

I obliged—as you do—and the parrot whistled once more.

I know it’s just a bird. But that’s weird.

Can you guess what this is?

August 15th is National Lemon Meringue Pie Day, and so I celebrated by baking lemon bars. (Looks like a bubbly cheesy dish, though, doesn’t it? That’d be the eggs.*) I’ve never baked a citrus anything before, but I do love key lime and lemon meringue pies. I’d actually been planning on the bars for about a week previous to my knowledge of the holiday, and isn’t that just perfect timing?

Plus they’re totally delicious.

The recipe I used is from Smitten Kitchen (the version with less filling since the pan I used was super shallow), omitting the confectioner’s sugar. A dusting of powdery white sugar would help these to look more pretty and dessert-y, but I just want all lemon all the time.

* Speaking of eggs, have a look at these.

Lots of people own dogs in our new neighborhood. Seeing them daily makes me want my own, but Chris and I are waiting for a better opportunity to own a pet. I’m having a hard enough time taking care of my plants as it is. The one I mentioned earlier, my beautiful Splitrock, has already halfway rotted—likely because of my desire to nourish it with water. Too much water.* What is WRONG with YOU, the Animal Control officer will say.

Anyway, there’s a young boy here who owns a sleek little Chihuahua. Both dog and boy are the same warm dark chocolate in color, and very slender. I’ve never seen the dog on its feet, because the boy keeps the creature slung over his back like a yoga mat. Paws on either side of the boy’s neck, feet propped on the boy’s waistband—the dog simply hangs on, a wayward stole. I’m not sure if it’s out of fright that the dog doesn’t jump down, or if it really is a comfortable position. It looks natural enough to me, like maybe the dog considers the boy his chariot. (With cats, aloof as they are, there is less to guess about what they like and dislike.) Paris Hilton totes her Chihuahuas similarly, but they’re much smaller, and the way she cuddles them under her chin is more akin to the way you’d hold an ice cream cone. While wearing an animal like an accessory is not something I’d advise (same goes for building your dog collection a mini-mansion), this neighborhood boy and his pet look so much like a hero and his sidekick that it seems okay for now.

As for me, I want a bigger dog who will run around on his own four legs and drink lots of water.

* I’ve always erred on the side of too little water with my other succulents, so this comes as a sad surprise. I’m not sure I can use what’s left to grow as a cutting.

I just bought the creepiest looking plant, called a Splitrock:

It’s a member of the Argyroderma species from South Africa. In winter it’s supposed to flower, producing a silky daisy-like bloom that’s usually either purple or yellow. Cool and totally strange, right? I picked the smallest one of the bunch because the other, larger ones with more leaf segments (like these) sorta scare me.

Chris and I have been busy packing for our upcoming move to the Virginia coast, so I haven’t really had the time to think about my website. I keep interrupting myself to do other things, like organize my shoes and stuff yarn skeins into boxes—anything to get through the process. My computer appears to be experiencing its own setbacks, too, with this happening every so often:

Letters disappear, randomly, from dialog boxes and menus. I’ve always considered it a glitch with the system font, but last time even the text inside Firefox started disappearing. Has this happened to anybody else? Ever? When it happens to me, I “repair permissions” on my Mac through the Disk Utility. I think of it like “defragging” on a Windows machine, even though they’re dissimilar in the way that repairing permissions takes a couple minutes and defragging takes, like, two days. Anyway, when my letters disappear, I repair permissions and then I restart my laptop. I only have OS 10.3.9 so maybe that’s where the issue is centralized, but I’m not upgrading until I get a new computer. I don’t upgrade well: I still have a second-era iPod that’s heavy as a brick.

So naturally, I’m very nervous about moving.

Triscuits have a distinct pattern that appears woven at first. Yet if you look more closely, the wheat strands aren’t criss-crossed at all, just layered on top of each other in a parallel fashion and crimped for texture. Biting into a Triscuit against the grain creates crumbs; biting with the grain creates none.

There are things I wish I could do better. One of them is blowing my hair out with a round brush, and another is gardening, because I think I might have over-pruned and killed the lavender plant I’ve only had for eight months. A more serious thing I wish I could do better is appreciate myself. I know, gross, but it takes a near lifetime to figure out, doesn’t it? First you’re in school and you’re receiving grades and joining cliques; then you’re out in the world and you’re trying to find a mate and a career. Everybody else around you is somebody who is not you, and sometimes their lives seem better because of that fact. It can be hard to deal with sometimes, this stupid envy.

But outsides are no match for insides, and besides, I’m having a pretty good time right now. I’ve earned lots of things I’ve spent my life preparing for, including a husband who is totally, eerily awesome. I’ve even been styling my hair differently—foregoing the blowdrying because it’s too hot to do in summer.

So, yes. I’m still hangin’ in there.

It seems I update so infrequently that WordPress chooses to log me out of my weblog account every week. I’m unable to come up with much in the way of an interesting story (I like to think of my longer posts as interesting stories) because I’ve been sorta busy. Not super busy; only sorta.

I just finished some illustrations for a new client (YAY), which I’ll post to my portfolio soon. I’ve also been working on new ideas for myself, liiike: patterns! I figured out how to make a clean pattern repeat, so that’s what I’m excited about right now. My first pattern is going to be beavers building dams, because duh. Here’s one of the little guys:

Now it’s time to go and listen to the thunder and rain again. When it storms it’s like I’m under a spell.

You know those beautiful sketchbooks that some people keep, with detailed drawings inside of them that might as well be framed?

Well—of course—I don’t have a beautiful sketchbook. I don’t have a sketchbook at all, really, because my sketches look like this:

Small, and very scribbly. To keep them together in a big ol’ bound book would just be ridiculous and sad. (Can you even guess what they are? They’re meant to be for two separate images but I kinda like what’s happening there between ‘em.) I used to be embarrassed, but I’ve finally accepted the fact that I’m an ugly sketcher. These pencil scraps are just a way for me to get an idea down quickly—and that’s all. No collages or fancy nonsense, at least not anymore. (It might help that I’m out of school. Professors who demand sketchbooks usually aren’t prepared for mine.)

Sometimes part of a sketch will actually make it into the final version, though. For my most recent drawing, I quickly sketched the mermaid’s hands like this for placement (click to biggify):

… but after creating that rockin’ keytar, I decided I liked her hands—so they stayed. It makes me happy when this sort of stuff happens, because you can’t really plan it. A drawing remains a sketch to me until the very last steps. So… it’s cool if my first step sucks, right?