Exquisite Turmoil

Well, he’s moving along. I decided against the brownish red on the ears as I just couldn’t find a nice way to blend them into the skull (I suppose I could have greenstuffed on tattered skin but I feel like painting today, not greenstuffing), so I ended up going with a pinkish/white as per the more solid muscle wall (that being the muscle still clinging to plates of bone). As of right now, the fur needs to be touched up (it’s chipping like crazy, which is very strange on a plastic model) and perhaps some fun work done on the teeth. A bit of blood, perhaps? Also, taking suggestions on the bones. They’re looking rather yellowed in the picture, even if they don’t look quite that yellow in person. Do you think that I should highlight them up to be more white, or leave them as they are?

I’ve decided to give the Varghulf a small rest, even though he’s so close to completion. He’s just not “clicking” with me at the moment, and I think that if I take a few days to paint something else I’ll be able to see him with a fresh perspective when I pick him back up. I’ve decided to continue progress on the Dire Wolves in the hopes that they will give me some ideas (as they are using similar colors to his wings and the cuts on his back). With the Varghulf, it is mainly the fur that is eluding me, so I’m praying that completing a Dire Wolf will spark some form of idea.

Anyway, here you can see the further progress I’ve made with this Dire Wolf. His fur is completed for the moment, as are his muscles. I’ll be painting the bones next, and then we’ll go from there. I’m pondering painting the ears and any hanging skin that I can find in the same reddish brown tones as the Varghulf to see if I like the reddish brown together with the black fur (and, if so, I’ll try out black fur on the Varghulf). If not, then I’ll do the ears a whitish color to blend in with the exposed bones, but in a slightly warmer tone. Only time will tell! Dun, dun, dun…

Bwahaha! I have managed to convince my darling husband that I really need a pink 8GB iPod, rather than a silver 4GB.  My beautiful new iPod of pinkness should be arriving sometime this week, at which point I will return the silver one to Walmart (and have actually only spent like $5 more) and gloat over my luckiness.

Yep, that’s me — I am the proud owner of a one-track mind. I’m not even sure that women are capable of having one-track minds. I’m pretty certain that our minds just multi-task naturally. Perhaps I should call myself “male minded”, then?

In any case, I picked up the Nike+ insert for my shoe today, as well as an armband. The armband has actually been returned already (I wore it for about twenty minutes sitting at my desk and my hand started to feel clammy and I got dizzy when I stood up), and I’ve ordered a belt from Amazon. Hopefully that will arrive soon, as I’m sure it will be annoying to run without any convenient way to carry my iPod. I imagine that until the belt arrives, I’ll just put the sensor in my shoe and let Dan carry the iPod and I won’t bother listening to any music.

I popped the sensor into my shoe today, actually, and took a five minute stroll around the kitchen (no one to watch Alex so that I could go for anything resembling a run =/) to see how it all worked. You can actually see a little readout of my “workout” on the right side of the screen. It’s pretty cool, although I will say that the road to Nike Plusness has been paved with peril. It took Dan quite a while to get the website tracker thingee working due to some unknown (to me) error and, additionally, the iPod and Nike+ didn’t really feel like playing well together. After getting everything hooked up (which was very easy, just plug and play), iTunes decided that it didn’t want to talk to nikeplus.com and kept throwing errors which spontaneously fixed themselves after about my 500th try. Also, once I recorded a run on my nano iTunes ceased to recognize it when I plugged it in to my computer. Finally I just got fed up and rebooted and it seemed to fix the problem, although I have no idea why (since I definitely rebooted after patching iTunes and my iPod last night).

In any case, I am really looking forward to getting a chance to go for a jog tomorrow (I won’t call it a run, since what I do is definitely too slow to be classified as running). Hopefully my parents will be up for watching the kids so that we can actually log a few miles. I wish I had a babysitter =/

I really well and truly have the greatest husband ever. Either that, or I married the greatest sucker ever. It didn’t even take a day of looking sad to net myself a new iPod Nano! Now I just need to send my sweet darling out after work tomorrow to get me a Nike+ sensor and receiver and I’ll pretty much be set! Dan has pointed out that I don’t really need to wear an armband since the the 3rd generation nanos are solidstate or something, I can wear it on a belt around my waist and not have to worry about it bouncing around too much. Now I just need to figure out how to put a Nike+ tracker on my website or something so that I can feel shamed into working out and running faster, since everyone will be able to see it!

Time to stop procrastinating and get to work! I have to admit, not having internet completely killed my desire to do like.. anything. By the time my family finally all went home, everything was just like blaaaaaaah. I didn’t manage to get ANY painting done and for the first time in so many years that I can’t even recall how long (definitely more than seven years, maybe more than eight) I found myself glued to the television. I’ve never been a big TV watcher and I’d say that over the entire duration of my marriage to Dan, I haven’t watched more than maybe.. 48 hours of TV (movies and this internetless period discounted).

I think that last week alone I probably watched 40 hours. Maybe more. Definitely at least three hours a day (two hour long episodes of What Not to Wear every day and an hour of Celebrity Fit Club). It kind of makes me sick thinking about exactly how much TV I’ve watched lately. I’ve learned absolutely zip (unless you count the fact that I now know Tempestt Bledsoe is an annoying cow) and haven’t done anything productive at all. If I’d spent as much time painting during this period as I did watching TV, I could have easily finished my Varghulf, my dire wolves, and probably a few of the Blood Knights that Dan bought me for my birthday. So anyway, here is my solemn vow. I’m done with the TV. I’ve been addicted to Celebrity Fit Club like crazy and the last episode of Season Two played today, and they’re starting in on Season Three tomorrow (reruns, of course), and I’m just not going to start watching.

On a less annoyed with myself note, Dan and I have been pretty good about working out lately. I’ve been on a running kick the last two weeks, which is a really nice change of pace. I don’t exactly hate cardio, but I’ve always hated running. I’m an asthmatic and whenever I start running and I start getting short of breath, I begin to have fears of an asthma attack. Quite honestly, I haven’t had one in an extremely long time and I’d about wager money that it is a childhood affliction which I outgrew. I went through basic training, for example, without ever having an attack (I concealed it when I enlisted, actually, since they wouldn’t take me with asthma) and I haven’t had one since that point (and that would have been in 2001). I think that it’s been a bit of a convenient excuse not to run and just stick to walking and extremely pathetic jogging for a long time.

Anyway (and yes, I know it’s pathetic) I’ve done a continuous .5 mile run a few times now, which makes me feel all happy and good. Dan and I even did a 3.5ish mile run / walk to Subway the other night which felt very rewarding. I won’t lie, it was more walking than running and it took somewhere between 45 minutes to an hour, but it still felt really good.

I’ve developed an obsession with the Nike+ system right now and am currently attempting to wheedle Dan into getting me set up with one. The only problem is that I don’t have an iPod nano, I have the 80g video.. and the Nike+ iPod thingee is only compatible with the nano =/ I could get the sportband instead, which doesn’t require an iPod at all, but I just can’t make up my mind as there are pros and cons to either system.

iPod Pros

• Listen to music while running.
• “Power song” button to easily select a song that really gives you a boost when you need inspiration.
• Vocally informs you of things like current distance, pace, calories burned.

iPod Cons

• Need to buy an iPod nano or see if my father will trade his new nano for my video.
• Don’t currently listen to music while running on the street since I always run with Dan and he’s in good shape and just yammers and rambles for the entire time (which is, honestly, more interesting and distracting than music — or it might just be that I’ve conditioned myself over the last six years to tune Dan out and daydream once he starts talking, which is extremely effective at taking my mind off of running).
• Need to wear an armband to hold the iPod. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, however… I have an armband for my video and when I wear it (even just barely tight enough to prevent it from falling off) I feel like it cuts off the circulation in my arm and I get dizzy (probably due to my ridiculously low blood pressure or anemia). It’s possible that the smaller, lighter nano will not cause this problem but I’ll have wasted a large sum of money if I go this route and discover that I can’t wear the armband.

Sportband Pros

• Displays run information on a watch interface so that you can see your progress without needing to listen to it (which would be convenient if I want to listen to Dan instead of music and still see my progress).
• Wears just like a watch and isn’t particularly heavy (I’ve picked one up in a store), and also functions as a watch (as in.. tells time).

Sportband Cons

• Provides no music if I ever manage to work up to a fast enough pace that Dan can’t just ramble with impunity while running with me.
• Costs $60 as opposed to $30 for the iPod addon (meaning it is more expensive if I decide that I want to swap iPods with Dad).

Anyway, that’s all that I can think of for now. Now to hope that I actually get some time to run today. It is curriculum night at school, so I’ll need to head up there. I won’t get a chance to run beforehand since we don’t run until my mother gets home from work (5:30) since she watches the kids for us while we go and I always feel bad asking her to watch them once it starts getting lateish (since she is always in bed by nine and sometimes by eight). Guess I’ll see how she feels once we get back from curriculum night.

Yes, folks, I have internet again! And I can’t think of a thing to say! It is, honestly, much easier to blog when you blog every day. I can’t seem to collect my thoughts to come up with anything to put to the keyboard. It’s not that things haven’t been going on while I’ve had no internet, I just can’t filter through it to figure out what to write! I’ll try to get back into the swing of things tomorrow or something. For now, I’m just thankful to have access to.. everything.. again!

No internets yet, unfortunately.  I’m at my grandma’s house right now checking my e-mail, so I figured that I would give the scoop here.  We found another internet provider and faxed them all of our crap, and they called back to confirm — but now we have to wait for them to call again to set up an installation date, and who knows when that will be.  I’m sure I’ll drop by here again once I have more information, and I’ll be sure to post so anyone who happens to be interested will know when I am expected back.

Hopefully not too long from now!  I’m having blog withdrawal.

So, apparently as of tomorrow I will likely have no internet for some time. It seems that Sprint is discontinuing microwave internet service in this area (and there is no cable / DSL out here in the boonies) as of… tomorrow. Our “landlords”, such as they are, decided not to inform of us this fact until it was too late for us to find a solution to this problem before the internet actually cuts out.

I’m not sure what time we’ll be losing it tomorrow, nor when we’ll get it back (especially given that we will have no internet with which to search for another provider x.x), so this may be my last blog for an unidentified period of time. People begin arriving tomorrow for the big party and remain until the sixth or so, and I find it unlikely that we will have much of a chance to research internet options while anyone is here visiting.

Soooo…. this is goodbye for now, and hopefully not for too long!

Well, after some more fiddling and cursing, I think I’ve gotten the eyes to a point where I am happy with them. With the pictures blown up like this I can see a spot or two on the lower rims where some clean up is needed, but they’re mostly done. The skin is pretty much done (although I may consider highlighting a bit more reddish once I’ve got the fur painted).

The fur, of course, still needs to be done. I thought that I was fairly pleased with the color of it, but once I painted the skin in the red tones, I decided that the fur really doesn’t match. Dan thinks that I should take the fur more toward white (to tie in with the pale wings), so I’ll give that a shot tomorrow and see what I think about it.

Other than the fur and a whole lot of touching up (this thing chips if you sneeze on it, I swear), there isn’t too much left to do. The talons and teeth need to be painted (they’ll be a dirty kind of ivory, with a darker color at the base), and the bony protrusions of the back need color as well. I haven’t decided if I’d like to go ivory like the talons, or the reddish-brown of the wing bones. That will also need to be decided after the fur is finished, I think. If the fur gets really light, the back bones will pretty much have to be red not to look washed out, but I almost think that they’d be better off white since there is already so much red on the model. Ah, decisions, decisions.