I'll be back soon, I promise. I've been dealing with some pet health issues, which sadly have not gone well. The cat has gone into kidney failure, and we're going to have to put him to sleep tomorrow morning.

A new project!

First off, let's all pretend that I took a better photo of that sketch. Someone (Smee) was "helping", and I got frustrated.

But yes! New project on the horizon, in which I will make several toys, and also display envirnoments, to represent different eco-systems and biomes. That's several toys per system, representing creatures real and imaginary, as well as plants and inanimate fixtures. Then each eco-system will be accompanied by a written piece, meant to be both educational and poetic.

I think this is going to be awesome. It plays to all of my nerdiness, both scientific and artsy. It'll be a long term project, worked on between things people are actually paying me for. I'm hoping that by the time I'm done or close to done, I'll be established enough that someone will give me a show where I can display it all at once.

Food!

It's been a cooking day, among other things. I have a big pot of black beans bubbling on the stove. Some of that pot will be eaten tonight, and the rest will be saved for the big pot of chili I'm making on Friday. I love chili. Love it deeply. I have a lot of different kinds of dried beans in my cupboard, so I'm going to cook up a different one each day, and then at the end of the week a bit of each will go it the chili. It will be magnificent.

I've also made scotch eggs, which I'm waiting to cool enough for me to eat one. I haven't had one since I was a kid, and I didn't like them then. But my tastes have changed, and I suspect I'll love them now. I'm on a major hard-boiled egg kick at the moment, so a hard-boiled egg wrapped in sausage sounds magnificent. If they have indeed turned out, I'll post my recipe.

They are testing alarms in my building right now, as they have been for the last hour or so. I am gritting my teeth so hard they may snap.

More later.

Wow. I am really sucking at this blogging consistently thing. To make up for my prolonged (and totally inexcusable- I wasn't in outer space or the hospital or anything) absence, here are some commissioned pieces I couldn't share before.






Perhaps I will go back to the blogging every day thing, as that did actually get me going for a little while.