Bumming out with robots...

Last night I posted something to the Super Awesome Art Challenge. It's a retro robot, or a Retrobot, if you want to go with Adam's wordplay.

Check it out on Die Everyday for a slightly bigger version...

Jesse commented that it didn't look like something I would normally make, which is funny because when I finished I was a little disappointed that it looked so much like everything I normally make...

Go figure.

I'm tired this week. I've been very tired all week, for no reason, really. The weekend was pretty low-profile. I beat Fallout 3, to get ready for the DLC that comes out next week. I was hovering about 45 minutes away from the ending for a while, so I just went ahead and wrapped it up.

We went out with some friends, and had some over a couple times. But it was a slow weekend overall. I think we were bumming out pretty bad.

I borrowed Dead Space from a friend, and it's super amazing. That's about all I can say. I got it Saturday night, and I'm almost finished with it already. I love it to death. It's awesome. If you're at all a fan of the Survival Horror genre, play it. Maybe some day I'll go into detail about how Dead Space is more like the original Resident Evil than Resident Evil 5 was...

This week I've had to stay late a couple times from work. But one day I went home early because I've been feeling like crap. Nothing serious, just general crappyness.

Yeah.

Picture time.

I finally got around to posting all the pics from our trip to Texas. They're posted at the date we went on the trip, so click the link to find the post...



I also posted the underwater snorkeling pictures from our trip to Hawaii. That was 4 months ago. Developing honest-to-god film is a hurdle.

Batman.

I can't believe it. Just one week Andy passed away, we somehow lost Batman, our chinchilla, last night.



It happened very quickly, she went from seemingly healthy to terrible within a few hours after we noticed any symptoms at all.

Friday afternoon, Lindsay noticed that Batman seemed lethargic. She called the emergency vet, who instructed us to schedule an appointment at our regular vet the following morning. We went out for the evening, and when we checked on her at midnight, it was obviously things had gone very wrong very fast. She was barely conscience.

We immediately rushed her to the emergency vet. She was placed in an incubator to keep her warm and give her oxygen. The doctor outlined a 48 hour plan of action, after which we would have to move her to our regular clinic. We said goodbye to her, and it was heartbreaking to see her in such terrible condition.

We left at around 2:15 in the morning, after saying our goodbyes. I knew she was in serious trouble. Before we made it back to the house, the vet called to let us know she had already passed.

I can't believe it happened so quickly. Batman was 7 years old and in pretty great shape. The vet wasn't sure exactly what was wrong, but it was likely complications caused by an injury she received a few month ago when she broke her front teeth hopping around her cage.

We're both obviously pretty devastated to loose another beloved friend. She was a great pet and showed a huge amount of intelligence, personality and affection. And she was the cutest.

I will miss her so, so much.

Spring time is Hip Hop.

I got together with the old crew I used to work with on Wednesday. We did a few product lines together before the whole program was axed. It was a good time, and despite the ranges of age (25-65, probably) everyone is still pretty close. Lots of hugging, laughing and fun.

The week at work has been long and exhausting. Not much actual work has been going on, but a storm is raging. The company is changing hands, and a lot of shakeups and decisions have been stalled, postponed and debated. It's tense when people careers hang in the balance.

But Thursday marked the final announcement of the change, which was followed by wine and cake and gifts. All that, and we only had to sit in a state of angst filled limbo for a month or 4. The changes are over yet, but most people can rest a little easier, now.

I walked out of work and discovered it was like 75 degrees that night. So nice. The weather changes everything. I was filled with energy, and I had to pump the summer jams. Springtime = Gang Starr, Salt N' Peppa, party jams.

Winter = more Rock, Summer = more Hip Hop. I don't know why, but that's how it is.

That night I went out to Fuji Ya with Becky, Lindsay and Lindsay mom, and I went home and drew while pumping the Game. Cool & Dre beats = Summer, that much is certain.

I ended up with a strange, slightly heartfelt drawing. I had the urge to do something a little more complicated than the normal doodles I do.

Oh what the heck, I'll post it, too.



Normally I don't, just because if I posted everything here, what's the point of the other blogs?

Trouble Brewing...?

Monday was strange, but not entirely bad. The only strange part, I guess, was a not-too optimistic company wide meeting at work...

I met up with Chris C for dinner. We talked about friends, art, ladies, ladies and art, friends and ladies... But we eventually ended regaling each other with Halo 3 war stories. Finally, we both just agreed to go to our respective homes and play Halo together.

And we did. To add to our enjoyment, hometown friends CJ and Steve joined in the fun. We played a bunch of matches, and it was awesome. A few times it was super awesome. A couple times it was lame because we got trounced. But overall, awesome.

I finally decided I should do something productive and started to clean my studio. My desk is buried under a bunch of who-knows-what, so I started digging it out. I actually made alot of progress. I'm going to try my hardest to keep the house as clean as possible, since we did such a good job cleaning it the other day. But I say that every time.

Eventually I had enough of my own filth, so I sorted through some more Texas pictures, adjusting and resizing the ones I think I want to post. I'm basically done now. I need to do one final run-through, but I went through about 300 and picked the best 30-40 so that's pretty good.

Hopefully I'll post them tonight or tomorrow. That would be a treat.

Weekend Visit

My mom came up to visit this weekend. It was kind of bad timing, with having devoted the entire previous day to Andy and being emotionally exhausted.

Luckily, Friday night Adam came over to hang out and cheer us up a little bit. It was nice to have a good time. But he also kept us up pretty late, too.

I got up at 10 AM to clean. And we cleaned the shit out of this place... It's on track to be normal, but I always think that after we clean like a mother-eff.

When my mom got her, we went over to Yum! and got some awesome food. Lindsay went to work, but I took mom to the showroom at work to show her all the product from this season. Unfortunately, my security card was acting up, and the place was locked down tight. I know the place well, though, and knew how to take a series of doors to get around a locked one, so we were able to check everything out, but we also set off a ton of alarms in our wake. No one ever showed up to check it out, though, so it was all good.

We went to the Mall after that because my mom was looking for some clothes to wear the the wedding. I ended up buying 2 pairs of pants, a pair of shorts and an awesome jacket... She got a pair of shoes.

When we got home, Chris C and Lindsay joined us for the dinner at Longfellow Grill, which is where we had eaten with Adam the night before. It was awesome both times...

This morning we all went to Kohls to find a bunch of T-shirts Lindsay had designed. We were able to find 3 of the designs. I dropped off, and picked up, the last roll of pictures from Hawaii, the ones we took while a disposable camera when we went snorkeling. I'll post them soon.

Lindsay kept working and we went to Punch before mom left this afternoon. It was a quick trip, but that's fine with me. House guests wear me out really fast, so it's good not to push it, but it was a great time while it lasted.

Andy.

This Friday we said goodbye to Andy for the last time.



His diabetes combined with liver and kidney disease was finally too much for him, and during the night he had a terrible seizure. We found him early Friday morning, and we both cancelled everything and ran to the vet. He fought all day, but the damage was done. We spent the day at the vet with him, but he passed near 5 pm.

It was a long, difficult and exhausting day. We already miss him a lot, but after 17 long, hard-fought years, it was pretty much inevitable.

Andy was a trooper. He happily took his shots of insulin and fluids via IV everyday, pushed back from the brink of death more times than I could have hoped and even at his most old and frail, put up with baby Oliva's constant wrestling and biting. He may have been a pretty weird cat sometimes, but was always the nicest guy imaginable.

We both love him a lot and took his death pretty hard. I know you have to expect this kind of thing with pets, but it doesn't make it any easier...

Maybe in Heaven I'll have Rhythm.

I got Rhythm Heaven for the DS the other day. I'm really bad at it. Lindsay is really good at it. Just like Elite Beat Agents, Space Channel 5, Rockband or any other game where you need to be able to keep time to be any good.

But it's fun and cute! Enough said!

Call of a hard-to-spell name...

I've been playing a bit of Call Of Cthulhu. It's a game for the original Xbox based on an H.P. Lovecraft book. I don't know much about Lovecraft and I've never really heard of this game until they started talking about it on Rebel FM's Game Club podcast.

Right away, the game intrigued me. Basically, the game is a creepy first-person detective adventure game with fantastical elements set in the 1920's. Great, sign me up. I ordered it off of Amazon after the first Game Club episode.

As the podcast series went on, I found out the game is royally broken. It starts out strong, but then graphical and gameplay glitches start popping up, bad game design decisions hit hard at the halfway point and, in some cases, people were just unable to complete the game, thanks to crashing.

But I'm ok with that. Everyone seemed to agree that the game was great up until the Escape from Innsmouth segment about halfway through the game, and if it would have ended right then, they would have been happy. So that's where I'll quit.

And so far I like it. Lindsay seems to really like it. Dark, creepy, story-driven games always get her attention. Which is funny because suspense / horror movies aren't her thing.

Getting up early means something different to everyone.

This weekend I forced myself to get up at 10 am everyday. That might not sound early, but for me, on a weekend, it is. That didn't stop Lindsay from sleeping in until the early afternoon everyday. It also might have made me feel crappy all weekend.

Thankfully I was awake Saturday morning when my new DSi came in the mail. I got the stylish blue one, and it's pretty cool. I charged it and messed around with the features and logged onto the DSiWare store. If you log in before a certain date, you get a free ten bucks to spend in the store, so I put it right towards Art Style: Aquia and Bird and Beans.

Aquia took a bit to click, but once it did it became a pretty good little puzzle game. Bird and Bean is a mini-game from WarioWare expanded upon a little bit. It's cute, fun and cheap.

When Lindsay did finally get up, we went out the lunch with Becky at Roat Osha. It's becoming a regular place to eat, its really good.

We went to our accountant's office and signed the last of my taxes. All done. With days to spare.

After that, we drove around Uptown looking for an office/apartment. I played Ninja Gaiden on the DS while Lindsay called different places. We were driving around long enough that I actually beat the game (I've been playing it over the last couple weeks, but I did beat the last few levels in the car).

The office is for Paper Bicycle, and the apartment is for Lindsay's parents for when/if they partially move here.

Sunday we got up in time for the buffet at Ghandi Mahal, an Indian Place just down the road on Minnehaha. It's awesome. Totally awesome. Chris C came with, and after wards we went to the Tea Garden and worked for a few hours. I made a logo some the Chamber of Sustainability, to help out my brother. So I didn't get to make anything awesome like I'd hoped...

Not Earl Grey.

Last night Adam and Lindsay met me at Yum! right after work. The last time I was there was right at the beginning of my month-long sickness. So I haven't been craving Yum! lately because in the back of my head, Yum! = Nauseous Bad Time.

Of course, that's entirely not true.Yum! is awesome.

While I was waiting for everyone to arrive, I worked on a drawing I started a while back that's totally weird, not in a good way. But I have a self-imposed rule that if I draw it in the Moleskin, it get's posted to 24 in the Life. Regardless of quality. Which means sometimes I hold back and keep redrawing over and over until I have something I don't hate 100 percent. I'm not quite there yet...

I went home and downloaded the new Halo 3 Mythic Map Pack. I jumped into matchmaking for one quick match and got humiliated. It's been a long time since I played, and Halo always takes me slightly longer to get back into the groove than something like CoD4 or Killzone 2.

I was doing absolutely terrible. Playing capture the flag on a map I've never even seen is a bad idea but the worse was yet to come.

It was a 4 on 4 match, and a couple of minute into the game, something happened that caused my 3 teammates to drop. So it was me against 4. I didn't really realize it for a minute or two, I just knew I was getting my ass handed to me.

Finally, I looked at the scoreboard to see if we'd gotten a single point. I noticed that my teammates were gone, and I quickly realized that 3 of the guys were just hunting me down over and over while the 4th just ran the flag.

Right before the final point was scored, the three hunters converged on me and killed me instantly. In the 5 or so seconds while you wait to respawn, I sat and watch not one, not two, but THREE dudes all stand around and Tea Bag my dead body.

Welcome back to Halo.

Back in Action.

I'm back from Texas! Huzzah!

I've got a lot of pictures from the trip, and a few words written down. I'll post them when I get the chance to sort through everything...

There's should be a couple good pictures, at least. I went a little crazy with my new Nikon D-SLR camera and took more pictures than necessary.

We ended up getting back into town mid-day Monday, and I spent most of the day cleaning cat litter boxes, getting things back in order and helping Lindsay with a project. Not all that fun. I did go out to Baker's Square with Chris C, so that was cool.

We woke up in Austin on Monday morning somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 am and spent a good part of the day flying. Then cleaned and worked all day and went to bed late.

So I wasn't exactly feeling fresh when I returned to the office on Tuesday. I was dragging, in fact.

I went home and Lindsay wanted me to get diner. I went to the store, because there was nothing in the house, and I got the idea to make a fancy-ish meal for diner. I started cooking and everything was going swimmingly. But Lindsay didn't come home when I thought she did, so I tried to slow down the process, but it was too late. I tried to keep things warm, but eventually, things got burnt. And after that things got cold.

So when Lindsay finally did get home, things were burnt, cold and hard. But we ate it anyway.

By the time we finished it was probably 8:30 or so. And I felt tired. I made the decision I normally avoid. I went to bed early. I was in bed by 9:15 PM. I slept until 8 AM. I didn't sleep great. Lindsay and the pets were still moving around until 4:30 or 5 AM, so I was kind of 1/2 awake for most of the night, but still, it was way more rest than I usually get.

Today I feel alright. I don't feel AMAZING, like I was hoping. But I'm sure it did me good to get a little more shut-eye than normal. Even though I felt like I was missing something important. It's hard to decide to go to bed when you don't absolutely have to.

Texas.

So I've been in Texas since Wednesday. The basic schedule was this:

Wednesday: Fly into Austin by noon. Check into a hotel, then walk around exploring the SOCO area. Found ye olde-timey candy store, a cupcake trailer called Hey Cupcake! and a good place to eat dinner. So a success.


The sun shines bright in Austin.


I'm smugly satisfied with the tropical foliage.


hey, cupcake!


Lindsay eating candy? Go figure!


Austin nighttime.

Thursday: Explore the Downtown area of Austin until around 5 pm. Stop to nap on the lawn of the Capital. Get picked up by Lindsay's mom, and head to her parents huge house out in the middle of Hill Country. Get settled in, then drive more than 45 minutes to find a much-hyped restaurant that turns out to be Macaroni Grill.


Austin's Capital (the lawn)


Look, a squirrel with some Mexican candy! Who gave him that?


Happy to be in Texas.


Fell asleep shortly after...


Vietnamese food + Texas Capital = Lindsay.


I have nothing to say about this picture.


We snuck into the Hitlon to sit down and rest while we were adventuring in Austin...


We were unimpressed by the magazine selection.


A cat!


Mystic geometric symbolism.


Yehaw.


Like looking into a mirror.


Very studious.


Cowboy up.

Friday: Take a run through Hill Country with Lindsay's brother following on bike. Head out to Guadeloupe State Park to explore, and then to Cannon Falls. Get sick from driving through the hills in a sports car. Get home and help prepare for a giant party all night.


That water is gross!


Skippin' Stones.


Standing. ...yup.


Me and Lindsay's bro, looking for the Ladies.


Get out of those raging rapids!


I think we're supposed to be looking tough, or maybe exploring triumphantly.


Sexy time.

Saturday: Party day. Plan to take a morning trip to the Alamo for some reason, but don't, unsurprisingly. Take another run (alone this time) through Hill Country, and then work all day preparing for the party. Party starts at 5, ends at 11:30 or so. Go to bed exhausted.


Making cupcakes is a happy time.


Party time. Get on your bike.


Family time.


A camera in a photo? Meta.


This photo should be an advertisement for the good life.


Family time squared.


The cupcakes come out at night.


Too much cupcake for one dude.

Sunday: Head to Mission San Jose in San Antonio, an ancient, historic church. It was cool, except we had to stay for the actual Church thing... We downtown to see the River Walk (kinda lame) and the Alamo (also kinda lame, due to the fact that it was in downtown San Antonio, practically right across from the Hard Rock Cafe.) Drive an hour back to the house, switch cars and drive another 1 1/2 hours back to Austin. It's just Lindsay and I again. We go to a Japanese restaurant (where they had bubble tea), and work a little in the lobby.


Mission San Jose.


Lindsay and her grandpa.


Hey you dumb birds! That's my taco!


Lindsay and her bros.


Remember the Alamo! Remember? I was there, remember?


Oh, now I remember the Alamo!

Monday: Go to the airport too fucking early in the morning. Have a crappy flight back and arrive safely in Minneapolis. Hooray!

I should also note I was kind of sick the entire trip. Not terribly so, but just enough to make any time spent away from a bed / bathroom uncomfortable and annoying.


Cupcakes make everything better.