I don't know why the previous post didn't show until now - I gave up fiddling with it a long time ago. Guess it just needed an extra kick in the pants. Ah well. Here's the new stuff.

Happy Halloween, Merry Samhain, a marvelous Pomona, a helluva Dia de los Muertos, and whatever else you want to call it. :)

First off, here's hoping everyone has a good Halloween. It's definitely a personal favorite holiday, that's for sure. No family guilt-tripping or trapping into a gathering I'd rather not be at, talking to folks I'd just as soon not see. No, Halloween is all for fun. And even if I don't get invited to parties or go anywhere much, I have fun just walking around in the costume and scaring the pants off folks who walk around a corner and bump into me. *chortles* It's funny. I wore my minotaur costume at work last year, albeit briefly, but I've had four or five customers at work ask if I was going to do that again this year. Kind of nifty.

Dem bones, dem bones... I know it's been a while since I updated - I'm not dead, really, just been busy. School and work eat up the days, and though yes, I'm doing well in school, it still feels strange. I'm both happy and unhappy with it. My test scores have been high - surprising to me, really. I guess I'd forgotten that I could do well in school. The lack of math (well, not completely, but lack of a math -class-) has helped immensely with that, I have no doubt. I'm a bit angry at myself though. I don't feel like I'm retaining near as much as I should be. Appropriately enough, though, I -have- had a good time, of sorts, memorizing not only the skeleton, but the bits of the bones. And I mean -details-. For example. A femur? It has a head, neck, greater trochanter, lesser trochanter, trochanteric fossa, intertrochanteric crest, lina aspera, shaft, lateral condyle, medial condyle, lateral epicondyle, medial epicondyle, intercondyloid fossa, trochlea, and patellar surface. And I know where/what all those are! It's a little insane. Don't even get me rolling on the skull. Because it can't be just a skull, no, it's got bits! Its bits have bits!! And believe me, that's not everything. Thankfully, I didn't have to memorize every single crack and groove. Just the major stuff. Well. Sort of. It was a damn long list, and I think I got out of about half of it. Whew. Leaving me with just a... slightly damned long list.

For a while, I was going to title this update - when I got 'round to it - Baaa-raaaaiins... for the simple fact that, just when everyone began doing zombie art and zombie posts, I was dissecting a sheep brain. Did an eye too, the other day. Very interesting stuff. The inside of the cerebellum is called the "arbor vitae", the tree of life, because the grey and white matter forms a treelike, branching pattern, visible when you cut it in half. It's actually rather beautiful. I know I was surprised. All of us (us meaning the four in my group - me and another did most of the slicing and dicing) were. Kind of as one, we leaned in, and went "Ooooh", and it wasn't a disgusted noise, it was an awed one. Fascinating stuff, definitely. Probably a good thing I didn't take Jewelry-making this semester. You all -know- I'd be crafting up a Cranial-Inspired jewelry line. The Tapetum Lucidum - or a part of the eye called the choroid that lines the inner cavity - is similarly beautiful, iridescent green and blue and yellow. Its function is to reflect light to aid with night vision - it's what gives that glow effect when light hits animal eyes at night. Only people and pigs don't have it. I think we got robbed.

The good news, though, is that I've taken some time for fun things. I went to the NorCal Ren Faire, a couple times, and enjoyed myself immensely. Spent far too much money, but got some really cool stuff. A leather pouch big enough and with a long enough belt to actually serve as the front half of a loincloth for my costume, among other things. Found out I can't throw a javelin to save my life, but I'm not bad with the throwing axes. *grins* I bought a really cool silver spiral that you wrapped in your hair and it hung there, almost like a small braid, but completely free. Didn't find any good pants to use for my costume though, that was a bummer. I'd hoped to be able to wear something other than jeans and at least add a -little- bit more to my minotaur costume, since I can't afford to try and make any hooves yet. Ah well, a bit here and there will help. I'll just keep plugging away at it.

It's not all been wine and roses, but then, it never is. The ankle has been on and off better, then worse. And joy of joys, I get to have a root canal next week, with more to come that's got a price tag like you wouldn't believe. I got a speeding ticket that I have to go to court for next month, and that's gonna cost, possibly three hundred dollars or more. Not that I was doing a hundred, it's just the average I hear quoted for tickets nowadays. I lost the cool hair-spiral thing - not three days after the Faire! - working at Kmart. It slid right off my braid sometime during the shift, and of course, was lost forever. I was so angry and sad. Still am. The store is getting busier and busier - I'm getting more and more irritated by children screaming and running around and the parents who don't do a damn thing about it. I'm catching more folks trying to take stuff, too. I had a total of seven recoveries in one five-hour shift the night before last, and all together they totaled up to a little over $60. Some of it was accidental, some on their part or on ours, but the rest was blatant attempts at theft. Sometimes I really just have to shake my head at people. *snorts* Or restrain myself. I was checking a woman's receipt Friday night, when her smaller child - couldn't have been more than five or six, carrying a package of wrist bands and a balloon, walked up, hit me, and called me the devil. Among other things, but I'm not fluent enough in Spanish to have caught it all. And did the mother do anything? Even apologize once it was over? Nope. So you will all have to forgive me if I took a little bit of perverse pleasure in asking the mother for the receipt for the wrist bands, which hadn't been on the one she showed me, and when she said she hadn't bought them, taking them away from the girl. I lived up to my new bumper sticker - which reads "I make little kids cry". But I sure didn't feel sorry about it. I had to literally seek out a nice kid to get me in a better frame of mind, because brats like that make me want to slap all the little demonspawns through a wall.

Obviously, I'm never having kids.

I could also mention things about the hurricanes, and the murders, and all that stuff... but I'm sure everyone knows and has their own sentiments. The stew of horror, empathy, sympathy, and anger is getting to be the norm every time I watch the news or read the papers. Much as I dislike feeling them, I suppose it would be worse not to. That means I'd have started to get used to it. I hope I never do.

On artses and things. I really got to get these sketches scanned if nothing else. I haven't been able to -finish- a damn thing, but I got a lot of sketches! I don't know if it's a matter of time, school, or what, but nothing I start has been actually finished. Maybe I'm still afraid of screwing it up by trying to shade. Who knows. But at least when I have stuff to show you it'll be good stuff! Really!

At the -very- least, I MUST draw a zombie sheep storming the lab to get its eyes and brains back. *snickers*