I'm there. The last stretch. The problem? I'm about three rows short of the full pattern. What does this mean for you? Probably nothing. I can hardly tell 939 from 310 underneath a sun lamp, why should you be able to on a scanned image? Anyhow. Enough of the attitude.

I marked where the planet is, and where the edge of the pattern is going to be. Honestly, it should go down about eleven more squares, but as you can see the cloth runs out. Yeah. My fault, way back in '06. We're down to two colors. 939 and 310. Faaaaaantastic.




Pinky

Since it's now the second week of summer and I feel like I should be getting back to school soon already, I've picked back up The Space Project. It's been sitting in my closet gathering dust for, like... since I started it, and I'm going to safely say that it's been waiting at 80% finished for a super long time. Put in an hour tonight, and plan on doing more after I've had some sleep.

I literally have ~900 squares left of color, and the rest is all black. A whole ~6700 black squares.

Trying to be a trooper! Up to 179 1/2 hours!


In other distracting news, we've finally picked up a copy of Oblivion, and may I say that it is g-o-r-g-e-o-u-s! I'm blown away by the fact that the same people who could make Fallout 3, a wasteland of brown dirt and black trees, could make such a lush, deer-filled, stunning green scenery. And not just is it fracking beautiful, it's also fracking huge. My brother and I spent a good three hours last night simply trekking from one side of the map to the next! The downside is that we got a used copy, and the disk is really scratched up, leaving many areas liable to simply freeze up the game until we can get a new one.

I highly recommend it. Uh... I think that's all I have to say for now.


Pinky

A special feature to <-! This piece is absolutely stunning, I can't show it off enough. LOOK AT IT! The colors!

Before I go into my family rant, I just wanna announce that I'm free for the summer! Wooooohooo! Only one more year of high school to go!

Now for the crazy family talk.

This has been quite an ordeal. On Saturday I went over with Grandma Cherie, who I will call Grandma, to her parents' house, Great-Grandma Ginny and Great-Grandpa Arthur, who I will refer to as Mamo and Grandpa. You don't know their history, so I won't expect you to understand when I tell you that they have ALWAYS been like this, and aren't just senile.

Grandma took me over there to get some papers so that she could fill out the forms for full-time in home care, because they've already kicked out the Hospice workers. In order to qualify for it, you need to have less than $2,000 in the bank. Well, Grandpa has slowly been taking out pretty large sums of money from the bank and giving them to Mamo to put into the safe. Grandma sent me in to get it, and when we finally got the key together there was... well, quite a bit of money missing. Mamo says she has no idea where it is, Grandpa gets ticked, and Grandma and I get outta there before it's too late - long story short.

Monday, yesterday, Grandma gets a call that Grandpa is in the hospital. She goes over to the house and there's a coffee cup covered in blood that Mamo has no idea about, and claims the blood is just coffee. Grandpa, meanwhile, was at the hospital getting stitches in his head and his hand... you can assume what happened, but of course Mamo has no idea about any of it. Grandma gets out the safe to go over some of the bank notices that were in there with Mamo, and in the safe is what money is left. Grandma leaves the room not five minutes and Mamo comes running down the hallway all panicked that the money is gone and "why are they doing this to me?!" craziness. Look, the house is locked, and the rest of the money is hidden not ten feet away in a cabinet that Mamo has never seen before. The madness! The bloody coffee cup is now un-bloody in the sink, also.

Over at the hospital, Grandpa hears from Mom that Grandma has taken the money back to her house so Mamo won't loose it, and goes nuts on the hospital staff saying he wants to go home and "how could they try to tear us apart like this". Helllllllo, he's just been bashed over the head with a coffee cup. He wants to go home?

Yarrrrrg. That was my craziness. I needed to get it out there. My great grandparents are freaking loosing have lost it. I believe it will be a murder-attempted-suicide at the end.



Pinky

You would think that with how much importance I put into the Time theme, I wouldn't be wasting any of it! The Cortney + Courtney Photo I finished, my first paid commission, is still waiting to be paid off. It's tugging at my heart to see all that work sitting, waiting, and not getting my payment for it. She should pay me when she gets her paycheck, but I don't know when that is. And she's a senior, which means unless Cortney (the one paying) gives Courtney the payment, I'll be stuck with an image that I wasted my time on. Perhaps one of their moms will buy it from me.

I've always believed that, in projects of time, you shouldn't pay the person until the work is done. Otherwise, who's to say they will finish at all? They already have their money. It's happened one too many times to people around me, usually in construction. When we, before we moved here to Arizona, were building our pool the workers were paid in advance to finish the job within a month. It took a year, and it wasn't done right, so we had to pay more people to come out and fix it. A reverse example is when we turned the garage into a family room and the guy vanished after he had finished the job and never showed up to get payed. He wouldn't answer his phone, emails, and nobody knew where he was...

I'm torn on this issue. I know I procrastinate, and I would certainly hate to be the customer who paid ahead of time and didn't see any work being done. Now I'm seeing that the work is done, and they have every mean to simply say they don't want it, and I'm out time and materials.

So tell me. Half now, half later policy? Payment in advance, or payment when the product is finished? Help!



Pinky

So I went to bed last night at 5 AM, not because I wasn't tired but because I was just so darned glued to the necklace pattern I've been working on. It's, admittedly, not coming out the way I planned (or the pattern planned), but none the less it's super sparkly and will hopefully come out enough to wear without wondering what's going on with it.

This morning, however, around 10, Mom comes in and wakes me up, telling me that Grandma wants to take me car shopping due to my birthday being this Friday! Well, heck, I'm totally out of it and agree. I go online real quick and make up a list of the cars I'm interested in, get dressed, and head out. First stop was a Mazda dealership, and they were really nice about everything, except for the fact that they weren't listening. We were asking for new, and were browsing through used to look at styles. They didn't seem to grasp the style concept though, and kept trying to get me to test drive stuff. I'm looking for physical features, here! Anyway, it being 95 degrees fahrenheit outside, and me not being able to be in the sun for more than five minutes, began to over heat. Wonderful! Mom says I was turning red and was probably going to pass out, herself included. We got back to the air conditioned car (ahhhhhh~) and was waiting for grandma to get back... turns out she was inside haggling them to give me the car for $15k, even though I had only said "maybe" to the one we looked at, hahah.

Anyway, now that you've read through all that boring stuff, I think I've settled myself on the Honda Civic, which is also under $20k. We're going to wait until we can pay cash to get it, but at least now it's down to just a few months.

If you've made it this far, chances are you may have not noticed that my Etsy link is now on the top of the page, instead of the redundant To-Do List link! Yes! My Etsy account is currently inactive as far as selling goes, but be aware that it is my intention to use it!

As for faves this week, I went on another Princess Peach spree. What can I say, I friggin' love that princess.


Pinky