Sunflower Bouquet

Eventually-- I estimate in 9 years when I'm out of debt-- the tattoos will commence. I might like cartoons, but what I put on my body I would prefer to be at least pretty realistic. I've been thinking a lot about sunflowers lately- they've always been my favorite flower- though what I've seen out there in the way of tattoos didn't suprise me. (Meaning, about 80% of the ones pictured online were frighteningly ugly.)So I've taken note of a lot of styles I want to avoid. Such as the chopped off thick stem look, as well as the "I'm a sunflower yet I have apparently been mutated to have one third the amount of usual petals and the remaining ones have all gotten fat". (tattoo by John Dorr. Sorry John Dorr.)
This one looks like it's done in pastel, which in and of itself is kind of cool, but I wish there was some alternative solution to making the yellow petals separate from the skin other than the section of blue sky. No black outline could have been nice... if not for that damned blue halo. (credit)
This one. Evenly placed petals with a plop of dog doo in the middle. I promise, that's all there is for the things I need to avoid with a vengence.
Good: randomness, detail, more than one shade of yellow. Note how the petals aren't all identical. Note the lack of shit. (by Selina at Tat-2-Theils)
This one is by far my favorite of all the ones I've seen. The green adds some interesting color, the detail is gorgeous, and the outline is present enough to make it nice and solid but not around everything, which I think tends to make things look like they've been traced or are from right out of a coloring book. (tattoo by Malia Reynolds)Same tattoo, more developed. <3

How My Heart Behaves

Whatever happens happens for a reason.
(motherly advice)
credit

Bed Bug Safety

So Benjamin isn't plagued by bed bug reproduction, we (or rather, I, as the bed bugs are my responsibility) gave them condoms. Looking back, I should have chose a different color for that condom, because now it looks like a carrot.

On a side note, the female bed bug lays around five eggs a day. Continuously.

Boys

Most of the time, at least. The rest of the time they do silly things that make you love them.

Also, Laverne and Shirley is one of the best shows ever.

La la la Dancing Hamster

I added a dancing hamster friend for good measure. I want to tweak more, but it's 2 AM. I'll leave it be.

Reads: Two Sedaris' and a Meyer

Rating: 2.998 out of 5
I read Naked prior to reading Barrel Fever, and was definitely confused for a moment when I realized that the stories were not all true little ditties from David's life. I found the back portion of essays to be much more enjoyable, as they were both true and not as wacky (I mean, still wacky, but a better kind of wacky).

Rating: 4.002 out of 5
As the vast majority of these stories from the lovely David Sedaris came from a time when hitchhiking was not an uncommon occurrence, it spoke straight to my love of the '70s. I only wish I had been one of his sisters so I could have turned out even half as kooky as Amy. (On a side note, to anyone who wants to research the book Naked online, be sure to add "Sedaris" after the word "Naked" before you click to search on Google Images. I could have linked you to a lovely array of porn, but I was trying to keep this post somewhat kosher.)

Rating: 4.79 out of 5
I definitely preferred this one to the first in the series- sure, it had the same number of horrible cheesy adjectives, but there was a hell of a lot more Jacob Black goodness. And the way the heartbreak was described was amazingly accurate. My problem now is getting a hold of the third and fourth books as the reserve lists at the library are incredibly long and I refuse to buy two in hard cover when I already own two in paperback.

Highschool Movie Star

A boy I went to high school with is starring in an independent film that just got accepted into the Edinburgh Independent Film Festival! Alright, so I didn't know him that well, I played in the pit while he sang in the spring musicals and he's a year younger than me, but I feel my town is small enough for me to claim a bit of fame for him and promote the hell out of this- it's really exciting to see him in a movie-movie. Like, with editing.

Watch Harry in the trailer! (He's the morose blonde boy.)

Pretty in Pink

Don't get me wrong, I love the south. The weather, the people, the tendency to refer to every single type of pop as "Coke". But I could live without the giant bugs (and I do for the most part, because I live in Wisconsin). Apparently, Benjamin found an honest-to-goodness call-the-fire-department-to-kill-it millipede in his bathroom a few months back and neglected to tell me. Now I'm paranoid that the poor boy is going to be eaten alive while he sleeps.

I'd rather he be surrounded by these cute monsters, the Shocking Pink Dragon Millipedes. So what if they can shoot cyanide? They're PINK.

Plate Rainbow

Benjamin saw a Wisconsin license plate in front of him on his drive home from work today, so I looked up Arkansas license plates. They're boring, for the record, even more than ours are. Ours, however, do get the lovely "America's Dairyland" on the bottom. (Which, when you're Benjamin and think the motto was "America's Happy Dairy Field", "America's Dairyland" is rather mundane in comparison.)

(License Plates of the World)

Phallic Foul

When I'm not working at Starbucks, my lovely employers get great pleasure in shipping me off across the food court to work at Food Avenue, aka Target's hot little hell hole. I'll be perfectly honest, I don't hate it as much as I say I do, but it can get boring as all get out between the swarms of tiny children asking for ICEEs and pulling inaccurate piles of change out of their pockets.

I amuse myself by being anal. Which, truth said, is kind of pathetic, but my manager appreciates it. I cleaned the cookie oven, which was sparkling to begin with. I dusted the main oven, even though it was upwards of 400 degrees and every time I sprayed sanitizer on it, a loud hissing noise would sound as it sizzled right back off again. I even shoved innumerable batches of frozen chicken strips through my pristine oven, even though they expire every hour and no one really orders them to begin with.

I was plopping down another tray full of chicken strips when a particularly interesting one caught my eye. It was crumbly and golden brown and generally misshapen just like the rest of them, but it's misshapenness had taken on an excellent quality of being a prime diagram of the erect penis (and testicles, to be exact, or else I could go crazy and say all the long chicken strips were penises and that Target was trying to tell me something).

I was lucky enough to have a family of four walk up at the exact moment I discovered my happy little chicken friend, and was forced to apologize for my giggling. I'm sure they thought I was either way too pleased to be inhaling popcorn grease fumes or that I was simply insane. Either way, I cooked the sucker with the rest, and then, because I'm a good employee who didn't want a little three year-old girl to be forced to consume it, I shoved it in a popcorn bag and brought it home with me.

Dinner, anyone?
(I think the curve makes it quite realistic, myself. This isn't one of those fake porn chicken tender penises you see all the time, this guy is the real macaw.)