For those of you interested in seeing art pieces I did for my holiday cards this year, I've uploaded the Arctic Animals Series and Ryn's Caffeine Bishen. :)

Peace and the Force,
--Indy

New pictures of Lilo the Blue Tongue Skink! Also, "she" is actually a "he". Now that I've had time to observe his behavior and stool, I can say with 99% certainty that Lilo is male. I'm not going to change his name or anything (not that he comes when I call anyway... lol). Mostly, I just make fun of him by calling, "Here, lizard lizard..."

Looking quite a bit trimmer these days. He clamors at the front of his cage to be let out to run around and hide under the furniture. For safety reasons, I only let him run around in my own room. While I'm fairly certain he can't get into the walls or under the floor there, I am suspicious of the rest of our old house. He will always have his funny jaw and toes, but nothing is infected nor does it seem to bother him at all. *shrugs* My little tiger lizard is staying active all winter this year, despite the fact that he doesn't ever want to eat... O_o Now, I get to worry whether or not he's getting too thin. *facepalm*

Enjoy the pictures!

Peace and the Force,
--Indy

( On to the lizard! )

Happy New Year, everyone! Wishing each and every one of you all the best for 2010. <3

As Kari pointed out to me earlier today, my presence on the internet has been somewhat sporadic for quite a while now. I've been involved in personal projects, including psychic development and herbalism, not to mention all the craziness of the holidays. I am still working, which is at once a blessing and a curse. My winning lottery numbers still haven't come through for me. Ah well, at least I am housed and fed.

I go through cycles, and my latest hasn't involved the internet much. My friends, I hope things are going well for you. Feel free to drop me emails or letters. I enjoy mail, and I do manage to check my email accounts as least once a week. In fact, I've become interested in the lost art of writing letters, so if anyone wants to start corresponding via snail mail, let me know.

These past few months, meditation, tarot, and herbs have moved to the top of my list of hobbies. I don't know if any of you are interested in those topics or other New Age philosophies. If so, I wouldn't mind having a discussion.

My latest venture is calligraphy. If I'm going to be writing journals, recipes, and letters, I might as well attempt to develop a better hand. So far, it's fairly pathetic. XD I'll keep trying there.

Hmm, that's all for now. Happy New Year, everybody!

Peace and the Force,
--Indy

Yeah, I'm a few days late... but I was busy! XD

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. Mine wasn't bad at all. I received some nice gifts from my family, and I think that everyone enjoyed my gifts. The only folks I didn't get to see on Christmas were my mother and her husband, and I'm going to be visiting with them tomorrow, which is my mother's birthday.

It feels as though I've spent the last week baking. I love making cookies, and Christmas is my excuse to make way more than any person could possibly eat. This year, I decided to do gingerbread minimen for work, then two varieties of shortbread wedges, cranberry-orange pinwheels, and decorated sugar cookies. My sister helped with the gingerbread men and sugar cookies, especially the decorating. The result is boxes and boxes of cookies that I've slowly been giving away. I'm wondering if it would be too 1950s to give my Mr. X a few... We went to Boston last weekend; I'll update in another post.

Other than celebrating family and eating lots and lots of sugar, I've been using my days off to finish some chores around the house and such. I'm just waiting for the end of the year so I can work on budgeting for next year. I have a big shopping list, and although I did get a few gift cards for Christmas, I'm going to have to do some careful thinking before I buy anything.

One of the chores I completed was going through my books and getting rid of quite a few. It's a space issue; I love the books, but I need to keep my collection so it fits on my bookshelves. There is now a very large stack of books in the corner. I was going to donate them to our town library, but they can't accept donations. They don't have any space either! Gah, if I ever win the lottery, I'm going to build us the best library money can buy... Anyway, I think there's one of those giant book donation bins at one of the churches on Main Street. I'll have to load up the books and run down at some point. *sighs* Farewell, my loves!

But I received new additions to my collection for Christmas! My sister bought me The Zombie Survival Guide, which, if you've known me for a while, you know is going to be my bible for living. The zompocalypse is just around the corner, people! She also gave me Stephen King's new novel, Under the Dome. Someday, I will have time for that monster. Possibly after I read The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume 1, with which my best friend TK supplied me. In addition, my father furnished me with two Michael Crichton novels, The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man, and DVDs of their original movie adaptations. So, add in the two or three books I bought that I still need to read and the two science fiction collections D. lent me, and I have quite the little reading list to complete. O_o It's easy to see why I just had to do a massive bookshelf cleaning.

I have almost saved up enough Amazon gift cards to buy a Kindle reader. You may be thinking, "Gosh, Indy, that's a lot of gift cards!" And you would be right. How did I do it? I signed up for an Amazon.com Visa, then charged everything that I could possibly charge without looking stupid onto that credit card. Perhaps, I even charged a few things that did make me look stupid. Anyway, the card earns points, and when you get enough points, you can redeem them for a $25 gift card to Amazon.com. Then, add in the ones I have received for my birthday and Christmas, and I'm pretty much there. So, you ask, why spend all that wonderful Amazon money on a mere Kindle?

Exhibit A: *points to bookshelves*

As much as I love the look, feel, and smell of a good hardcover book, it would be silly to think I could have every book I love in the tiny little cave I call a room. I will be satisfied with putting my favorite books on my shelves for perusal and hiding the rest in the digital vault of a Kindle.

It will become all the more tempting to buy those giant, hardcover, gilded editions of all my favorite books... I feel a sudden urge to learn the craft of bookbinding.

And rambling cease. Have a good week, everyone, and if I don't post again soon, Happy New Year!

Peace and the Force,
--Indy

I'd like to blame longleggedgit for introducing me to this website, but as soon as I got through recording her a birthday message, I started giggling over the idea of Tenimyu done chipmunk style. KIMERU's "You Got Game?" was a likely target.

So, uh, enjoy?

Would have been so much funnier if I could get the outfit to look like Seigaku's uniforms. XD Ah well, I'll take what I can get.

Any hideous chipmunk requests? Or, even better, comment back with your own!

*cackles evilly*

... of course, this could all just be blamed on the fact that it is past midnight, and everyone knows that you shouldn't feed Indys YouTube past midnight.

*SHIFTY LOOK*

Okay, I'm all for spreading Christmas cheer, but this morning, I logged in to LiveJournal to find 88 messages in my inbox. For comparison, I usually have somewhere between 0 and 10. And about half of those messages were about snowflakes. I'm looking at you, lauriegilbert and longleggedgit! XD

Besides the inbox full of snow, there is plenty of other cheer circulating. I've finished my Christmas cards, and I'll be mailing them Monday. I did a series of ink and colored pencil sketches of arctic animals for most of my friends, since I didn't receive many specific requests this year. I only hope my cards cooperate with the post office machinery...

( TV Eats My Brain )

So, I still need to put up the tree and wrap presents... and bake billions of cookies. But I think I'm getting a handle on the holidays. Which is good, since there are only 13 more days 'til Christmas! Gear up, people...

Peace and the Force,
--Indy

There isn't too much going on lately. My sister and I are getting geared up for Thanksgiving, and after that, it's a slippery slope into the holidays. I've mostly been reading in my spare time (no, I really have no ambition).

( Harlan Ellison et al. )

( American Gods )

( Holmes, you've done it again! )

( Agent Pendergast: Literary Junk Food )

And... wow, I need to get to bed. O_o Feel free to bombard this post with book chat. Hope you all had a great weekend, and good luck with your weeks! Happy Thanksgiving ahead of time...

Peace and the Force,
--Indy

I've been meaning to make a post for a while, but it keeps getting pushed back for various reasons... Let me try to remember everything I was supposed to post about!

( Virus Rambles )

I have more cheerful things to report as well! My new laptop charger came in last week, and it's working just fine. I haven't gotten much done yet, but at least, I'm back on track hardware wise. And... that's about it. XD

( Reading Rambles )

Feel free to bombard me with comments/thoughts on the books above. <3 My friends list seems to be filled with well-read individuals, and although our tastes are not an exact match, there seems to be a certain amount of intersection.

Will make another, friend-locked post about social activities as of late. Basically, I went to Salem, MA this past weekend, and it was good fun to wander the streets and occult shops. Yay! Then I got sick and spent many days sleeping and drinking tea. Bah! And now... back to work.

Peace and the Force,
--Indy

As many of you know, I've been working on Halloween dragons for Bishen Realm for over a month now. I was mostly doing sketching and inking. Although I colored a few, I was saving the majority for this weekend. So, of course, something had to go wrong. It's a universal law. Things never go smooth.

( A Tablet Tale ) Anyway, the half-finished pickups are here. View the horror of my unshaded outlines! *scary music! Rar!*

Life has been busy besides the dragon arting. I went on a date a few weeks ago (finally. There goes my recluse record). Still no second date yet, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Last weekend, I went to the Museum of Science in Boston to see the Harry Potter movie exhibit. Chock full of movie props and nostalgia. Has it been long enough to be nostalgic for Harry Potter movies? Even if the series isn't finished? I think so. Yesterday, Anjali's parents visited for the afternoon. They were in Boston visiting Tanya, so it made sense for them to take a bit of time to visit the Cape. I keep saying they need to come for a couple days so we can give them the day tour of Cape Cod. Maybe this summer...

I'm sure many other things have been happening. If I remember any of them, I'll let you know. XD Other than that, it's the same shit, different day routine. I need to stop looking at YouTube though. Although this is frickin' hilarious. XD I like NEWS, but come on, who hasn't thought that sort of thing at least once while watching their PVs.

I plan on wasting today seeing Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant and browsing YouTube browsing fansites finishing Ams's dragon outline. *shifty look*

Finally, to all of you who started NaNoWriMo last night, GOOD LUCK! <3 ^_^

Peace and the Force,
--Indy

So, I have five Halloween entries over at Bishen Realm so far and at least one more on the way before the October 18th deadline. I have exactly one finished, and while the second may be at the coloring stage, the rest are pitifully stalled. This year, it isn't the arting that's giving me trouble, it's the development and design aspects. Although I must say, I am very happy with the concepts I dreamed up for Uny's and Quis's dragons. (Every year, the dragons get less and less 'Halloween' and more and more 'whatever the hell I feel like!'... Part of me does not mind this. *facepalm*) It's just going a bit slow for my taste. I fought with Uny's for about two weeks between figuring out what it was and getting it sketched and inked. Quis's took me about a week to get an idea, but once I had the idea, I got it sketched, inked, and base colored in about a day. I need to do all the shading and detailing still, but my eyes are going to die if I keep making them stare at the tablet. I've switched to trying to come up with a concept for Shard's entry. We seem to be in a holding pattern.

My ideas tend to spring upon me randomly. Quis's showed up at work one afternoon, and I had to wait until Friday evening to sit down and sketch it. ... Perhaps Shard's will show up soon. *calls upon muses!*

Oh, Mighty Muses, especially Halloween Muse, who insists on dressing as though it is an Amy Brown fairy, bestow upon me many great and powerful dragon concepts.

Say thank ya.

So... what's everyone else up to?

Peace and the Force,
--Indy