Feeling slammed and mellow at the same time... is that possible?

Well, it's been a busy week. Midterms are going on right now and everyone I know is feeling like their brain has been burnt to a crisp. I'm home feeling hideous, and I know I need to go to class tonight. I'm not feeling it at all, but yeah...

Marek is curled up in his little self-made nest on the couch. He's lucky.

I'm excited for break. It will be nice to go home for a few days and see my parents for the first time since Christmas when they came up for a few hours and helped me move furniture. Mom is almost finished with the bathroom renovations, and I'm sure she's relieved.

Other than that I'm doing the best I can to just keep a level head and get through the next few weeks. I'm sure there will be a lot of stress, but I'll live. Now I just need to get over the feeling of being used by some people I've become acquainted with in the last few months. I suppose it just means the year is off to a rocky and undecided start. Hopefully that will pass and things will become more concrete and successful.

I keep trying to remind myself that I have to provide for me first, before helping others, but somehow that always gets turned around. It's funny though, the people at the core who know me best still give me support and the care that I really do need, even if it's in a roundabout way sometimes. I'm grateful for them, because even if there are arguments or things taken the wrong way, it always turns out for the better after you have a chance to explain your actions.

Hopefully in the future I'll learn to be slower to trust, and more decided in my actions, and learn even more patience than I've learned in the past couple of years.

*sigh*

We were supposed to start cyanotype/van dyke brown process stuff tonight in alt process, but yeah... it didn't end up happening... I got one piece of hot press watercolor paper coated for each process, then said screw it and went home. The only drawback to our lab is that we have 3 computers and 4 printers. One doesn't work, and the other three were occupied all night... I should have thought ahead and edited my photos at home, but what can you do? Sometimes other stuff happens during the day and it gets a little bungled in the end.

I think I'm going to go in on Friday afternoon and work, since the time Cathleen and Johnny are coming was Thursday and not Friday... fine with me. If I work on Friday, I don't have to worry about being anywhere at night for a class.

Marek has been mopey today, but he seems a little more chipper now... of course... before bed. Yay. He's been chasing a toy around and sliced my ankle when he got too excited... it's time for a pedicure I think. He's doing his routine where he tears all over my apartment at warp speed (I'm not kidding, lol) and plays with every toy he can find. It's super cute and I wish I could get it on video because it would probably win some award, or at least be a hit on youtube for five minutes. Heheh.


I feel bad that I haven't been updating this much in the past couple weeks, but I've been either busy or in dark places, trying to work things out for myself. There has been a lot of stress from several different sources, and when things like that are going on, blogging is really the last thing on my mind, and sometimes I might think oh, I should write a blog, but that rarely ends up happening.

I should go to bed soon, I have a lot to do this weekend, and even more to do next week... and tomorrow I should probably do some stuff too... doing stuff is good...

St. Patrick's Day night is the Hatchet/Witchaven/Vanlade/The Tards show, so I have that to look forward to after my art history class.

I really think it should be St. Patrick Stewart day, and everyone should wear Star Trek uniforms... it's only fair. I mean really. Screw green.

Ok, I'm going, I'm going :P

Pfffferffersons

Ok, not ignoring my blog, but my brain is fried and I'm exhausted...

In happy news, I got my student status changed and got a good amount back from my taxes, so I can save money for Gamma Ray shows later this year. :)

The weather has been weird and Marek's a little weirder than usual, if that's possible, but we're making it.


I'm glad spring is finally here, even if it's still a bit chilly :)

More new images

Ok, here are a few more new ones. I'm not too happy about how this inserts photos, but eh, I'll live.

Some of them might be a bit large, so click on them to get the full effect. This blog program cuts things off at a certain point and it's a bit of a pain... I'm thinking of switching to Wordpress, but I don't really have time at the moment to go through all of that.

First, this is another of the Marie Antoinette series, I'm pretty happy with it. I've been trying to figure out how to get the mottled effect for a while and I think I finally have my own version of something I really like.










After that, I decided to do some messing around on the scanner, just with very simple self-portraits. This is one I did a while after the usual 'smush your face into the glass' type stuff, and I really like the ghostlike effect.








This was the next one, which started out as a face scan, and I messed around with levels and color balance, then remembered some photos that I didn't use in Spring of 2009, so I put one to good use from an iced over pond at Loose Park.










This one is a closer section of the same image, but with different color balancing.









I'm pretty excited about this last one. It started off with a scan where I thought, why not do a rolling scan of my face, sort of like I've seen on some Discovery Channel show about mapping faces. I just rolled my head with the movement of the light bar, which was a lot trickier than I thought it would be, and it turned out insanely weird looking. I messed with the levels and color balance, did some overlapping of the same image in different opacities and blending methods, and then used a photo of a crazy tree trunk to get the wood effect... this kind of reminds me of something like mutant Treebeard, or even The Fountain... which was quite a weird movie...

And as always, thanks for looking, and please leave comments if you have any ideas or suggestions :)