Krampus Tree continued – What do I deserve?

So, two days later… TWO days later, Krampus finally returns. With a decoration.

“Where the hell have you been!” I shouted. “You said you’d be here tomorrow!”

“So you’re complaining that I’m early?” he said, cocking one hairy, scary eyebrow.

“No! I mean you said two days ago you’d be coming back tomorrow! Which would have been yesterday, only now you’re here today so you’re late!”

“Are you sure about that?”

I went over the whole argument in my head and had to admit, I might not be right. Today, tomorrow, yesterday, two days ago?

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been stuck here with this horrible Krampus tree for the last two days, and you said you had decorations for it. So, what did you bring me?”

Krampus stretched his arms overhead until his spine cracked three times. “Oh, this isn’t something I brought you. It’s something Santa sent you.”

Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a Flaming Lump of Coal.

Krampus tree!

A flaming lump of COAL?!

“Oh, that’s… lovely,” I said. “What did I do to deserve that?”

Krampus laughed so hard he started choking. “You have to ask?!”

So anyway, he farted a few times, laughed some more, and made lots more threats to come back… sometime with more decorations.

So yeah, flaming lump of coal. Flippin’ flaming lump of coal. Like I deserved this.

Yeah, I know. I probably did.

coal_20141227b

Isn’t it lovely?!

(The flaming lump of coal was made from bamboo felt, embroidered with DMC embroidery floss. I used a bit of rick-rack ribbon for the hanger.)

Oh Krampus Tree! A bad poem of misery and woe

I came downstairs this morning, certain something waited for me.
Something bright and festive that made me want to flee.

I found it on my kitchen table, as artificial as my hair.
Its pink and spiny branches caught me unaware.

But worse was him who brought it, this awful Krampus tree.
For Santa doesn’t bring such things, they only come from likes of he!

He looked just like Tom Hiddleston, which really ain’t so bad,
until I caught a whiff o’ him. That smell would drive you mad.

He stank just like an aged camel, a geriatric steed
that on prunes and beans and rotted fish too eagerly did feed.

“What horror have you brought me? Oh why this Krampus bush?!
Haven’t I been good this year?! Haven’t I busted my tush?!”

“Oh yeah, you’ve been all kinds of good,” the old goat said and farted.
“But I really like to pick on folks, and be honest, you’re black-hearted.”

“Not me!” I cried in my defense. “I’ve been good this year, I swear!
I swear it on my mother’s grave and the color of my hair!”

“Don’t lie to me,” old Krampus said. “I know just what you did.
You’re a Girl Scout cookie mom. Who are you trying to kid?”

“I didn’t kill no Girl Scouts! I didn’t threaten their mums!”
Then I sighed and confessed my sins. “Maybe I broke some thumbs.”

“But there were extenuating circumstances! Cookie payments were due!
I had seven thousand boxes stored in a garage made for two!”

“So I threatened all the parents and I broke a couple thumbs!
But they finally sold those cookies, each and every one!”

“A few fractured digits does not a Krampus coniferous merit.
Take this horror away from me. I swear I cannot bear it!”

“Nah, broken thumbs is no big deal,” Krampus did agree.
“But I don’t like you anyway, so you get the bloody tree.”

And then he started to sing. Oh gods, he sang a song!
It was all about the Krampus tree, and I had to sing along…

“Oh Krampus tree, oh Krampus tree!
You are so pink and creepy!
Oh Krampus tree, oh Krampus tree!
The sight of you brings weeping!
Your branches hold such awful frights!
For horror-days and horror-nights!
Oh Krampus tree, oh Krampus tree!
You are so pink and creepy!”

“There!” he smiled and patted my head. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?
It’ll be much worse tomorrow,” he added as he farted.

He put a finger up his nose and waggled his left thumb.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, with some deco-ra-sheyuns!”

Then off he flew with a belch and a fart. I wished that I were dead.
Instead I’m stuck with this stupid tree, and a creeping sense of dread.

What horrors will tomorrow bring? And how long must I bare
This miserable Krampus tree? Life is so unfair.

Krampus tree!

Oh, the horror.

Evil Dreams – The Never-Ending Marathon of DOOOOOOOM!

I had a dream last night that I was visiting my aunt in Pennsylvania, but I had to leave because my Girl Scout troop was about to run a marathon all the way back to Virginia. The marathon began in my aunt’s drive way, and the girls had already started running, so I had to race out the door to keep up. We were running up and down in this really hilly neighborhood. I was following the last, youngest girl in the troop when I started to fall behind. She turned a corner and disappeared. When I got there, the road went in two directions, and I saw people running one way, so I followed them, thinking they must be part of the marathon. But the further I ran after these people, the stranger the surroundings got. We left my aunt’s nice suburban neighborhood and entered into a sort of post-apocalyptic landscape that looked like a cross between Mad Max and a camping trip in the Grand Canyon. By that point, I could see that the people running ahead of me weren’t Girl Scouts but senior citizens, which was probably the only reason why I could keep up with them. I realized it was getting colder too, which had to mean we were running north, which was away from Virginia and not towards it. It was getting darker too. As evening fell, the senior citizens arrived at an abandoned recreation center where someone was hosting a holiday party/rest-stop for them. I stumbled in after them, only to be told that I wasn’t allowed to be there. I tried to argue with the hostess, a stern-looking woman in horn-rimmed glasses who looked like a nurse my mom used to work with. If she would just let me use the phone to call my aunt, I knew I’d be okay. But the hostess refused to let me stay and I couldn’t find a phone. I tried stealing a glass of punch and some of the food from the buffet that had been set up, but I think I got caught and was kicked out. I’m not entirely certain though, because at that point, the cats started meowing and they woke me up.

Yes, this is an actual dream I had last night. I have dreams like this every night, and many are even weirder and more detailed than this one. I figured if I shared them here on the blog, you all might get a laugh out of them, or demand I seek psychiatric help. Or both.

ACW Episode 257! To be a bum, or not to be a bum…

Webcomic!

Click on the image above to see it bigger!

Oh. My. Glob. I have been working on this webcomic since Thanksgiving, and I thought it would never be finished. I’m going back to 4 panels for the next webcomic, I swear. Six panels is a lot to do.

Anyway, the irony of this webcomic is that about the time I started working on it, I also started putting in more time on house cleaning and the laundry (though I will NOT do any ironing unless it’s for a craft project). Thus that’s part of the reason why this webcomic is late. I did get up off my lazy butt and clean the house.

Like a lot of people, I find myself constantly caught between cleaning the house or doing other things that are just as (or even more) important. I realize I can’t do everything all the time, and so I swing back and forth between one and extreme and the other. I can clean the house, but not get a lot of work done. Or I can do the work, but the house looks like a garbage dump.

It’s the same for everyone else in the house, too. The kids can get their homework done, but by the time they’re done, there’s not really enough time for them to clean their rooms. And by the time the weekend rolls around, they’ve done so much work, they need time to just relax and play. And Hubster… he works hard all week. He manages to do a lot of the major chores around the house that only come up a couple time a year – paint the porch, clean and seal the deck, etc. And he also keeps up with the lawn. But that’s about all he’s got time for as well.

What I finally decided to do was come up with a list of the minimum that needs to be done each day to keep the house livable. I listed the chores that I’d ideally like to get done each day. And then I try to do at least a little bit toward completing each chore. I may not completely get that chore done, but doing a little bit toward it each day certainly helps to keep things manageable. I might not get all the dishes done, but at least there aren’t dirty dishes scattered all over the house. I might not get the whole house vacuumed, but the downstairs looks good. And at least the laundry gets sorted, washed, and dried. If anybody needs anything, they can pull it out of the hamper.

And then iron it themselves.

Yep, I can live with that!

Evil Crafting – Princess has another use for Perler Beads

Believe it or not, I have been very busy working on things for the blog. But everything is still in progress, so I haven’t been able to post stuff yet.

However, Princess came up with something that I really wanted to share with you all. Remember how overjoyed I was to discover the Perler Bead/Geek connection? Perler Beads are PERFECT for recreating 8-bit graphic images, and there are TONS of patterns online for all my favorite cartoons and sci-fi shows.

But Princess came up with a totally unique use for the beads. She had to make a diorama about the nitrogen cycle. Apparently cows play an important part of the nitrogen cycle, so we had to go to the craft store to buy a little toy cow. And to show why cows are an important part of the nitrogen cycle, Princess decided to use Perler Beads. Here’s a picture of how she used them.

Moo...

Do you see the Perler Beads?

Mooooo...

How about now?

Moo poo!

There they are!

Yep,  my kid turned Perler Beads into moo poo! And just so you know, she got an A on her diorama 🙂

Evil Crafting – OMGPERLERBEADS!!

When I do crafts, I always make sure they’re evil crafts. Especially when I’m doing crafts with kids. The one thing I hate about having kids is that no matter where they go – school, church, the local Y, a community fair – there’s always a table set up with “crafts for kids!” Those crafts are always crap. Coloring sheets, cotton balls stuck to popsicle sticks with cheap glue sticks, and those glob-awful craft bits of “craft” foam stuck to paper plates colored with washable markers to make what I think is supposed to be some sort of puppet but ends up being a snack for my cats that eventually gets thrown up all over my carpet.

So yeah, I hate lousy kid crafts.

As I am a Girl Scout troop leader, and as such, I am expected to be an expert in crafts and to share said expertise with the girls. So when we have troop meetings, I always try to come up with something good. Or rather, something EVIL.

One thing Girl Scouts do is make SWAPS. SWAPS stands for Some Whatchmacallit Affectionately Pinned Somewhere. At least I think that’s what it stands for. Girl Scouts make and trade these things and I’ve seen girls with vests and sashes and hats and shirts just covered with little pinned-on doodads. Some are fantastic! Some are… eh. I decided this year my girls were going to make the “fantastic” kinds of swaps.

So far this year, we’ve made a flash-light swap that actually lights up (and you can replace the battery and bulb when needed!). We experimented with lenticular portraits, but it’s really hard to make those small enough to be wearable, if you do them the old-fashioned way. This past troop meeting, I decided we’d do one for the winter holidays.

For the winter holidays, I wanted a way to make little snowflakes that the girls could pin on their vests. I wanted the snowflakes to be durable, so paper was out. I also needed to be able to teach the girls how to make the snowflakes quickly, and the process had to be fairly simple to follow. After browsing through the craft shop for a while, I stumbled across the Perler Beads display, and a little light bulb went on over my head. I was able to get a big bucket of beads for a low price, along with the plastic peg boards, and I went straight home to research snowflake patterns.

What I discovered, however, was a new crafting addiction!

You see, when I went online to look for Perler bead patterns, what I discovered was that Perler beads are a great way to recreate 8-bit graphics. As a digital artist of a certain age (I’m 45), I cut my teeth on 8-bit graphics, and seeing all those Perler bead patterns made me giddy like you wouldn’t believe.

But then I saw the patterns for 8-bit versions of my current favorite cartoon characters (Adventure Time, Regular Show, Gumball) and suddenly I was ecstatic.

And when I saw the Perler bead patterns for 8-bit kawaii cookies and donuts? You could have heard my screams of glee in the next state.

Here is a quick sample of what I made.

Perler Beads

OMGPERLERBEADS!

As you can see, I made a snowflake, an 8-bit shrimp sushi, and a kawaii cookie.  Those 3 snowflakes on the bottom are a little experiment.  I popped a couple handfuls of the beads in a silicon cookie tray and baked them in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. I had to flip the snowflakes over in the tray a couple times to get the melted beads to even out, but I liked the results.

My iron doesn’t heat evenly, so I’m going to replace it before I do any more Perler beads. But in the meantime, I’m already planning an evening of making Minecraft Perler bead ornaments with the kids and some of their friends. Oh, and the Girl Scouts LOVED working with the Perler beads. Some of them made the cookie I made below, some of them made snowflakes, and some of them made a blocky version of Olaf from “Frozen.” But they all LOVED working with the beads.

I have a few other evil craft projects in the work at the moment. I will share them with you as soon as I can get some good photos of the work in progress 🙂

Move It Mama Monday! Yes, Girl Scouting Counts Toward Mordor

This is just a quick update for today. We had another Girl Scout troop meeting yesterday, and once again, I was on my feet from the moment I got up until a couple of hours after the last girl headed home. It was an exhausting day, and in spite of my intentions and my efforts to get out the door for just five minutes to walk, IT NEVER HAPPENED.

But I was on my feet all day and constantly moving, and I have been walking every day for the last two weeks (I even took a nice long walk with the Hubster on Thanksgiving — in a GRAVEYARD!). So I decided that working hard all day on Girl Scouts, whether I’m inside or outside, counts as a successful day in the Walk to Mordor.

So there.

I’m hard at work on the next episode of the webcomic, so it should be out in a couple days. It’s another long one, but I’m working on it as fast as I can. You should see it soon.

What are the rules for the Weekly Art Challenge?

So I decided to do this weekly art challenge at the beginning of last month, with the idea that it would force me to do more drawing that I had been doing. Well, I was right about that! In the last month, I think I’ve done some drawing or digital painting every night.

But I haven’t done what I initially thought I would do – turn out a new drawing every week.

The first week, I completed 3 digital paintings. Just in the first week! But then I tried working with an app that didn’t give me the results I wanted, so I ended up with an unfinished doodle and since I didn’t like how the app in question handled, I decided to abandon that picture and move on.

Weekly art challenge - unfinished monster

Abandoned sketch. He started out cute, but the app wasn’t cooperating.

Then I started work on the current painting, the “Zombie Portrait.” I’ve spent a lot of time on this one. The pencil sketch alone took at least a week. Now I’m slowly getting the painting part of this done, and since I’m doing this as a painting instead of a sketch or cartoon, I know there’s no way it will be finished this week.

But does that matter? Is it against the “rules” if I don’t turn out a new image every week for the “weekly art challenge?” I don’t know. I started out with no more specific a goal than to draw or paint something every day. So I think if I do that, I think I’m doing pretty well.

Anyway, here are the latest images of the work in progress. I’ll keep working on this one until it’s done, and then move onto the next piece!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cynicalwoman/15307397193/

The almost finished pencil sketch for the “Zombie Portrait…”

Weekly Art Challenge - Zombie Portrait

And the current painting in progress! Ta-daa!

Move It Mama Monday! Why I LURVE the Yoga Studio App

Welcome to that special hell known as “Don’t gain 50 bazillion pounds over the holidays!” I both love and hate this time of year. I love it because everything is so festive and the smell of cookies and fancy flavored over-priced coffee is everywhere! I hate it because everything is so frikkin’ festive and the smell of cookies and fancy flavored over-priced coffee is everywhere along with magazines and commercials and ads to remind me not to stuff my face and gain any weight whatsoever over the holidays.

Seriously, have you looked at the cover of women’s magazines during the holiday season? The articles featured on the cover are always about the latest most fantastic holiday recipes that use twenty tons of cream, butter and sugar. And right beneath those are the articles that exclaim “You can lose 500 pounds in just 5 DAYS!” (The rest of the year, these magazines only feature non-holiday recipes that use twenty tons of cream, butter and sugar, and they tell you that you can only lose 495 pounds in just 5 days.)

Anyway, that’s the atmosphere that permeates the holidays every year. And because everything is so busy this time of year, it can be hard to make it to the gym or even step outside for a simple walk, which makes the whole “EAT EAT EAT LOSE WEIGHT LOST WEIGHT LOSE WEIGHT” message even worse to deal with. To combat the artifical sense of guilt that I know this message is trying to instill, I make sure my favorite yoga app is cued up on my iPad so that can stretch wherever I am and do it in short bursts during commercial breaks no matter where I’m watching holiday specials on TV.

And what is my favorite yoga app, you ask? It’s Yoga Studio. Yoga Studio comes with pre-made yoga routines (lasting anywhere from 10-60 minutes) and lets me make my own routines using either individual poses from their pose library or short routines that I can string together in the order I prefer.

But the thing I love the most about Yoga Studio is that I can choose what music I listen to while I do my yoga routines! And I don’t mean choose from the very limited and ear-bleeding options of wailing desert flute or wind-chimey, brain-dead mood music. I can actually make a playlist from the music I have on my iPad and listen to that while I do yoga! You have no idea how much that matters to me. Really, I can’t stand the typical music most yoga apps and videos and classes play. It makes me want to slip into the corpse pose and kill myself.

So what music do I have on my Yoga Studio playlist? My current playlist starts with Imelda May’s “Oh My God, It’s Good to Be Alive!” and then goes straight into “Rehab” by Amy Winehouse. Next up is Gin Wigmore’s “Man Like That,” followed by the Kongos’ “Come With Me Now.” Yes, I prefer pulse-throbbing, heart-pounding, rockin’ and rollickin’ music when I practice my stretching and deep breathing. Because that’s the kind of gal I am.

This is the app I used over Thanksgiving break while we visited the Hubster’s family. I was able to set up in the guest bedroom and stretch my groove thang for half an hour, then go stuff myself with delicious food, then take a long nap and then repeat the whole cycle all over again. I did go for a daily walk, although I didn’t get in the usual 30-60 minutes like I do at home. But still, walking! I will eventually complete that “Walk to Mordor” quest.

I don’t know if using the Yoga Studio app helped me keep off the extra pounds over Thanksgiving break, but honestly, I don’t care. Like I said, the best thing about the app is that I can load the music I want to hear on it. And I made sure to turn up the volume nice and loud so I never had to hear about how I had to stay rediculously slim and trim while stuffing my face this year. And that made me very thankful indeed 🙂

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! I’m gonna stretch out and take a nap now.