May birthdays ...

charitylarrison: May 3rd. Artist of Busted Wonder.
chris_oh/robotic_voice: May 4th. Cool guy and sometimes comic artist
chamonkee: May 10th. Super cool comic artist (whom I am waaay behind on reading, sorry!)
bannman: May 26th. Artist of les Enfants d'Ailleurs in France and contributer to Flight in the US
inover_myhead3: May 28th. Some woman named Sydney
clahey: May 31st. An old friend I went to school with.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EVERYBODY!!!

edit to add"
tedprior: May 29th. Mini-comic super genius!

I was talking to a friend on LJ Talk and he told me that he came out of the closet when he was 13. This amazed me. When I was 13, I was still hoping a radioactive spider would come and bite me. I never grew into my identity until I was in my early 20's, I could not imagine 13. I did not even know I was in the closet back then. I was still stuck behind the wall. When I was 13, I had long hair, ripped jeans and ran around acting crazy and manic to hide the fact that I was really depressed. I had no idea who I was or where I was going. Although I liked art class a lot.

A question for anybody ... Where were you with your identity when you were 13-years-old?



Also, what IM service do you use and why?

Today is 365drawings's birthday.



Carl Albutt is a very unique and innovative artist. Above is a sample of his work however you can find more at his site, http://www.carlitojuanito.co.uk

I am in trouble. I am falling in love with my job! However, there is very little chance that I will be there three weeks from now, when the book goes to print. Damn.

I have worked as a temp at four different staffing agencies within the last eight years. I know the procedure. When any given company has a big project, is busier than usual or whatever reason that companies need extra help, they go to staffing agencies because they do not have the resources to hire in a full-time employee. I have had temp assignments that have lasted as long as two years and as short as one day. It is true that working as a temp is a bit stressful. The company you are being sent to can end your assignment any day or even at any second. Over the years you become accustomed to this kind of situation. A temporary worker has have to start each day thinking it could be their last. You do your best not to get attached to any company or any employee. I have been at so many temp assignments that I have trouble remembering them all. If my memory is correct, I have been at about nineteen different assignments and never once have I been hired in. No matter how hard you work and no matter how much they like you, the company will never hire you in. If they could do that, they would have actually hired somebody in the first place, not call a staffing agency. You learn to except this and you keep your expectations down. Your job is to go to any given assignment and do the best job you can and when it ends, you go to a new company and do the best job you can there. But do not get attached to a job.

This is why my current situation is a problem. I really love this current assignment. I am working at newspaper that serves the LGBT community. My project is putting together their annual directory of local businesses and non-profit organizations in our community. Basically, instead of the yellow pages, it is the rainbow pages. If you can imagine, this is the most open atmosphere I have ever worked at. Nobody is there to judge you and you do not have to feel like you have censor your words. I cannot tell you how much of a relief this is. The people there are really nice and actually show appreciation for the work I do. The staff is an interesting collection of people and there is usually interesting conversation in the lunchroom. That is, when I have time to take my lunch. For most of the day I am stuck in my little corner working my butt off. I love it when it is busy. It is a healthy kind of stress, feeling accomplished and productive. I am actually doing work that is challenging and creative. I enjoy putting together files together for a print publication. I have also gotten to design advertisements from scratch. I am also doing job tracking and communicating with our clients as well as the printer. I feel like my skills and experience as well as my artistic abilities are being fully utilized. In almost every aspect of the job I love and feel it is a really good match ...

... except that I am a temp. My time is finite there and I am setting myself up for a real heart ache when the assignment inevitably ends. I want to stay!

We have had a lot of outages with internet. Cable/internet was down for several hours on Saturday, almost all day Monday and Tuesday. I am not sure what was up on Saturday, although Monday they disconnected our service instead of our neighbor, whom is moving. This also messed things up since we have Voice-Over-IP, so we did not even have phone service. So updates will have to be bulleted for to keep it quick.

• Friday, started feeling sick. Had a fever and tummy problems at work. Came home and rest of family sick too.
• Saturday was Summer's birthday. She is now five-years-old! We had a small party at grandma's with uncle Allen and Sydney's friend, April.
• Saturday was also sheenapr's birthday. She is a super cool girl whom I hope had a good day.

• Sunday, Sydney was suppose to clean while I took the kids out of the house. I took them to University's of Michigan's Detroit Observatory (in Ann Arbor) which had a free tour (suggested donation). Then I took them to UofM's Exhibit Museum of Natural History. Then we had a quick snack before going to the weekly Artisan Market that takes place in Kerrytown. After the market they played in the field behind Community High School (right across the street from Kerrytown market). Then we went over to Little Caesars Pizza where we collected our free order (they messed up our order the previous week so we got our next pizza free). It was a very long day.

• While I was off keeping the kids busy and out of Sydney's hair, Sydney started cleaning the kitchen and spilled on some oil on the floor and hurt her back. She spent an hour and a half lying on the floor watching TV before I got home.

• Sunday night/Monday morning, all of the kids woke up several times. Summer threw up. It was not a fun night.
• Monday morning, I called in to work. After about twenty minutes, I splashed water on my face and then called work to say i would be in late and then went to work and did an eight hour shift.
• Today, was busy, busy, busy.
• Tomorrow is allida's and williamgeorge's birthday!

Okay, it was not that quick. At least I tried to keep it short.

So here is the deal. I bought a used iBook G4 when we got our tax money. Everything was happy for a while. Then the metal tip that connects the power cord to the computer broke off. First, I called to see if this was something that my warranty would cover. The answer was no. Consumer replaceable items are not covered under the warranty. No problem, I will just call up the Apple store and see if they sell the cord ... after all, how expensive can a power cord be anyways? Try $90. Well, I do not have $90 to spare when I live hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck. Then I called Best Buy and asked if they had a generic that would work. They basically told me that I was screwed. Soooo ...

Does anybody have a spare iBook power cord lying around? Or maybe somebody know where I can buy a used one? (Not the magnetic kind, but the round with the pin in the middle.)

Emily is doing fine. The two got home at 1:30 am last night. I was already asleep so I did not get the full story. However, she got a scan and she was okay so they let her go home.

I have not been updating enough as I never have time to go online these days. So my updates are in bullets ...

• Work has been BUUUSY! The deadline for advertisements for our annual directory was today, so everybody is sending their ads and their corrections at the last minute. Of the some 130 or so ads, only 55 are done and approved.
• Sydney has been busy. She was over at her friend's on Friday and Sunday. She had a bird fair on Saturday and her weather spotter class on Tuesday.
• We all went over for grandma's for dinner on Monday night.
• I got out of the house and had coffee with a local artist tonight after work.

and most importantly

• Emily fell down hard on her face on the pavement outside after I got home tonight. Sydney has taken her to the hospital to have her checked out. She stopped bleeding, although she is at high risk for further complications due to the fact she is on coumadin. Coumadin is anticoagulation drug given to prevent clotting of her Mesacava shunt. However, this also gives Emily a higher risk of death from brain bleeds is she has a head trauma. Basically, she needs a head scan when she has a bad bump to her head. She will need a CT, by the time they get around to actually performing the test, she will be home sometime next morning.

Here are two pieces that my five-year-old daughter recently put up on the refrigerator. I am actually impressed by the artistic quality in these.

First is a coloring book:



Summer colored this from one of those coloring books. The interesting thing is how she uses the two tone of pink and purple to create depth, lighting and shading. Look at the tower on the left where she presses the crayon harder for shading of the side wall and how she presses lighter on the front wall. Also notice the alternating diagonal lines on the domes. I am impressed.



Second is a freehand drawing with a black marker:



A lot of what Summer draws tend to be the same two themes. She does happy faces of family members with stick bodies. She does a picture of the sky, the sun, a tree and grass. This one went out of the ordinary of her usual themed drawings to something more story telling. According to her, this is a man trying to keep a balloon away from a bear who is trying to get the balloon.


Maybe I should start taking lessons from her. At least she draws more often than I do.

Alright, I suck at self motivation. So I am taking suggestions for a simple sketch/illustration. The key word is simple ... I do not want to have to draw Steven Seagal at the last super with ninjas, robots, pirates, zombies as his disciplines while the building explodes in a ball of fire in the background. Trust me, I tried drawing that and it is just too much for me to draw.

Drawing ideas anybody?

Bah, I missed adania's birthday yesterday. Esther is really cool and we went to high school together. I am sorry for missing your birthday. I wanted to do a drawing or something ... rats. Happy belated birthday anyways!

Just so I do not miss them, here are the rest of April's birthdays.
April 19th: sheenapr (Also the same day as my oldest daughter, Summer's birthday!)
April 23rd: allida
April 28th: 365drawings

Happy birthdays people!

I should post to tell people what I have been up to.

I have a temp job I have been at for just over a week. I am working on a directory which will be distributed in June. Right now, I have been focusing on ad support and ad design. It feels like I spend more time e-mailing clients than I do working on the ads, but I going through them pretty quickly. We have 25 ads approved just this week. I worked on the design of this one advertisement on Friday that I really like the look of. I think I will have to put it in my portfolio. Come to think of it, I have not updated my portfolio in a rather long time. I do not want to jinx it, but I must say I really like this company and enjoy working there. It is kind of frustrating being only a temp all the time.

I am worried about money again. Damn, it just comes and goes so quickly these days. Both the car and the van needed work. What is worse, both of our automobiles could use more work, but we had to pick what will just keep them running for the time being. Some how rent will have to be paid too. Sigh. I hate worrying about the bills constantly.

After work on Wednesday, a cool local artist and her husband were kind enough to have coffee with me. It was nice to get out of the house and have an adult conversation. Especially when I am between temp assignments, adult conversation is hard to come by. It sometimes feels that all my wife and I seem to talk about these days are parenting and bills. Here's to a new job and new friends for keeping me sane!

Summer's preschool has been on spring break all week long. That also included the playgroup that the twins go to. The poor kids have been coped up in the house most of time. Today we treated them by going to the petting zoo at Domino's Farms. There seemed to be less animals than last year. Abby missed her nap and seemed to be scared of most of the animals. She still managed to have a good time. Emily also managed to find every mud puddle.

Why am I posting this on a Saturday night? Nobody is going to read this.

It seems that in about three weeks, the next step in the Democratic party selection for Presidential candidacy is in Pennsylvania. Which makes me think ... isn't a considerable size of Pennsylvania pretty much Amish country?

Do Amish vote?

If the Amish do vote, do they have a demographic? Do Amish tend to lean in any direction vote Democratic, Republican or third party?

How does the average Amish keep up with the latest election news? I mean they do not have TVs or Radios ... do they still read newspapers?


Does it really matter anyways, because the Amish probably do not read the internet. Furthermore, these two boneheads will keep bickering it out until June regardless.

Yesterday was ericcockrell's birthday. Eric was this cool comic book artist who went off and got a family and then stopped posting. Are you still alive?

Tomorrow is sirive's birthday. Ive Sorocuk is the master of awesome tiny little comics that are in your face and rude but sometimes cute too.

I have not been updating here in the last few days much. I usually try to keep posts about being sick as short and to the point as possible. I realize that people will read such posts and say, "yeah so what". We have all been sick before, nothing special about that. I am mostly better. I went to work on Friday. I was uncomfortable being ill, but work was nice. I got a compliment from one of the sales team. As for the rest of the family, Abigail had a day a fussiness, but was back to normal. Sydney seemed sick during the weekend, but looks to be improving. Our Summer seemed to have a different tummy problem last night, but otherwise well. It appears, whatever ailment that hit us, Emily did not get sick (watch out, because I said that she will probably get sick).

I have not been drawing. I just have not felt up to it. Along with having the stomach flu, I pulled a neck/shoulder muscle on Friday night. Quite literally a pain in the neck.

Well, Abigail just woke up feeling warm, saying her head hurt and then she threw up. I guess, since Abby has it too, I was not having a bad migraine nor was it something I ate for lunch. Of course, this means that the rest of the family is going to get it too.

So I went to my new assignment today. The work was nice, but around 3pm I started feeling sick. I got a massive headache (the worse I have had in a long time) and I felt like I was going to throw up. I asked to leave early, some how made it home, vomited and slept four hours. Way to make a first impression, eh?

Today is Anthony Woodward's birthday. awcomix is a great artist originally from Australia and is recently hanging out in Canada. He has some awesome mini-comics, zines and sketch art. I was going to do a illustration for him as I do with most birthdays, but today ended up to be a horrible day. I never gotr the time to draw it. Sorry Anthony. I have to say that again as I got some awesome mini's and art from his 99 doodles project that I have yet to review here. Sigh. Which is a shame, because Anthony is one of the nicest guys I have met on livejournal. You will get your due, Anthony, I promise!

Feeling a little cabin fever. I need to get out of the house more often. Except, I do not have many local friends anymore. Anybody live in SE Michigan area?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, David Recine!!! March 21nd:


Illustrated by David Ano (me), after David Recine. Pig is Copyrighted by David Recine.

I “meet” davidcrecine in early 2004. I was doing an online comic anthology called Your Comic Here. I had been doing a webcomic for about a year, but it proofed hard to update my site on a regular basis. So I stole the idea from Greg Stephens to do have a comic “contest” and have people submit their one-shot comic to be published on my sites. Many people never had a website of their own sent comics to be published, others sent comics to promote their own website. Either way we all had fun. Recine was one of the artists that sent not one, but two comics to Your Comic Here.

David Recine was a student at the University of Wisconsin -Eau Claire back in 2004. He drew a comic strip called The Towny (later changed the title to Murky Waters) for the college student newspaper, “The Spectator” as well as a self-published a poetry and comic zine, “Fanboy”. Recine was also working on a series of comics named after the main character, “Pig”. In March, Recine sent me “Pig Goes Fishing” an eight-page story. He followed up with a two-page story with “Pig in Space”, which I published in May. Recine was a pleasure to work with and his stories had such charm. It is my belief that he has drawn at least five Pig stories, although I am uncertain of the place of publication (most likely printed in his Fanboy zine). The Pig comics took the best of Carl Barks, Walt Kelly and Chuck Jones into an all ages story that was smart and fun.

After college, Recine took on the impossible task of publishing the end all collection of mini-comics in “BAM! Big Ass Mini” in late 2006 (see also my review of the book, here). While I belief this book should be on every book shelf every comic reader, it turns out that a 600 page anthology with over 60 artists is quite a task to assemble. Many of the staff disappeared and Recine ended up doing most of the work himself. Regardless of the stress it produced, BAM! was a labor of love.

Currently Recine is living in South Korea, teaching English as a second language. There are rumors that Recine might be working on a new project, however after BAM! he might take his time.