And I was like, “I’m gonna paint that all Norman Rockwell stylez.” Because I miss painting. It was fun. I super love using using my Instagram as a documentation of process.

But everything is the Loc-Nar, for me, so. The feeling sort of changed.

I do love how this turned out and I decided that since the original is just getting filed away somewhere I might as well make it available to get as a print at Society 6, if you are a creepy fuck who likes to spend money. Or a wonderful person. You could be a wonderful person who likes to spend money too.

Even though we break the “no-grain” rule with some regularity, simply not having specific foods (like: cereal, loaves of bread and, as of this year, tortillas) in the house has gone such a long way to prevent too-easy meals and snacks from being relied on. It creates a space where new food habits are built.

A special bonus is that we’ve effectively stripped all my comfort-binging foods from the house. This simultaneously prevents me from indulging and sneakily re-teaches my insides what “full” and “too much” are. So when I give myself the gift of enjoying a box of cereal for my birthday I’m very aware of not only how awesome and deliciously textured it is, but when it’s time to stop refilling the bowl.

And, since I’ll have gone through this box rather quickly, nonetheless, I also am very aware why I don’t keep it around. It’s like seeing an ex at a social function. Sure, you get along pretty well and look at how you both avoid Those Topics and yeah, it’d be nice to bang again but outside of that controlled environment you know it would end in tears and torn-out weaves.

So yeah, cereal knows exactly how I like it but can choke its opinions on politics, y’know?

I used to sculpt a lot, with polymer clay. I still have a good bunch of polymer clay, but most of it is old and pretty much useless (the problem with an attic being your studio, there’s a lot of extreme temperatures). So when I got the bug to sculpt some things some months ago, conditioning clay that had a 50% chance of turning into a texture I liked wasn’t really something I wanted to do. So I checked the proportions (1 part salt to 2 parts flour, enough water to make it a “dough”) and made a batch.

It’s fabulous stuff to work with, silky but with a good body, sticks to itself with water, the only draw back is how it takes FOREVER to dry, in or out of the oven. From some of the feedback my snaps on Instagram got I gathered that a lot of folks must have played with it growing up.

One of the reasons I got into papier mâché was that it was a media that didn’t cost anything. I needed to make “art” for school, there are copious free weeklies around a campus and I was baking bread so there was always flour (which is stupid cheap in bulk, anyway). I’ve spent maybe 15 years just collecting junk to make things with, the home craft media of papier mâché and salt dough fit perfectly into my world-view of making things out of what you’ve got (sewing is where this breaks down for me, ohhhh fabrics and notions, you dirty temptresses).

I miss sculpture a lot, it’s what I relate most media to, from sewing to painting. Which, I guess that’s obvious in how a lot of my sculpts turn out. I pretty rarely start with a plan, it’s all enjoying the process of making something.

Anyway, my point is this. I’ve never seen anyone waste their time playing with clay. I’ve seen fabulously ugly beasts formed lovingly, shapes built and destroyed in endless cycles, the surprising genesis of something amazing. But always there’s something, never nothing, even if you junk it all at the end.

If you’ve got a free evening and a bit of flour and salt on hand (ideally at least a quarter cup of flour), give it a try. The worst thing that could happen is you add too much water and end up with soup. But if you only add a little water at a time you’ll be fine. I mean, if you’re doing this in your home, nobody will see the stupid stuff you make. You don’t have to prove skills to anyone, just let yourself play.

Based on The Pink, collected by the Grimm brothers. The original is an Aarne-Thompson type 652, The Boy Whose Wishes Always Come True.

One moment, I existed.

The moment before that I wasn’t even a thought. It’s a different thing, to not exist. It’s not all nothingness, that’s for sure. Nothing is something, if it’s the absence of it. It wasn’t all that jarring to suddenly be, but my mind was full with being around finite things, with just being. I wasn’t, then I was. I wondered if, from then on I couldn’t ever not have been.

The first words I heard were that I was so beautiful a painter couldn’t do my face justice. I didn’t know how to respond to that, for various reasons. Then the man who’d spoken patted a boy on the head and wandered off. The boy and I stared at each other. I wiggled my fingers and toes, not ready to look at them yet. I think we stood there a while, regarding each other. Something friendly broke through the boy and he took my hand and showed me around.

I learned we were children, of about the same age. He chattered at me about how he’d been stolen, his mother framed for negligence and locked away. The castle and grounds we walked had been asked for by the captor and wished into existence by the boy. It turned out I’d been wished for as well, to be a friend and playmate.

“I’m glad you turned out pretty,” he told me.

So we bided time, living a lazy existence not really worthy of itself. We rode horses, I gathered flowers while we walked the gardens, I took up needlework. I liked needlework, because I could pretend to create things, when I was really just transmuting thread into designs, flat fabric into dimensional, purposeful shapes. My work scattered around the house, marking the passing of time as a runner laid itself across the table, a cloth appeared over a basket of bread, doilies insinuated themselves under vases and knick-knacks.

I realised early on that my own position in the castle was on par with the aprons I made—we both were fancy things created to ease the wear of daily life on more valuable things. I listened to the prince talk and did not ask aloud why we lived here with his abductor when he knew his mother lived in punishment for the supposed death of her child. Sometimes the prince said he missed his father, but I don’t know if he meant it.

There were no servants. Meals appeared, rooms became clean when you looked away, dust never collected and the gardens tended to themselves. We didn’t see much of the man; he was always out hunting, or studying maps, or flowers, or something.

There were originally no books in the castle, because the prince didn’t care for them. The library had false shelves lined with sheets of pretty-coloured spines. The man had the prince wish him books, once, but their insides were blank. Perhaps the prince was being petty. Perhaps if the man had wanted specific books, the boy could have wished them. His wishes seemed to take care of themselves. I had a heart that beat, I ate and eliminated. My anatomy was a female’s, though the prince when wishing me, had been fully ignorant of what that might consist of. I was like the books though, empty. I never bled with the moon. The man asked once about it, I wouldn’t have known it was a missing function otherwise.

So we lived and existed. The prince told me he loved me and I told him I loved him. I doubt he meant it more than I did, but he seemed to believe what was said. The prince mentioned his father more regularly and the man became more anxious, spending more time hunting.

One day the man found me alone and told me to kill the prince. I told him I could not, that I saw no reason for it, as the prince had never harmed anyone. The man threatened my life and left. When he next returned from hunting and saw the prince and I playing dice, the man held my gaze, mouthing again his threat to my life.

He repeated his command the next day before riding out. When he’d gone into the woods I asked the prince to wish me a deer. He did it without question. I butchered the animal, cutting out its tongue and heart, setting them on a plate.

“You could have just asked for those,” the prince commented, turning the plate so a ray of sun lit the blood like jewels.

I shrugged and we went about our day until the man was due home. The prince hid and I held out the plate to the man as he entered, removing his gloves.

“You’ve killed the prince as I asked, then?” He did not take the plate. We regarded each other a moment before the prince emerged from his hiding place and swore at the man, whose face turned white.

The prince wished the man into a dog and fed it coals, but it did not die. Looking at the beast sobbing on the tile, the prince told me he was going to return to his father, the king. I hesitated joining him, for I’d never been off the grounds of our wished-for home.

But the prince wanted me, so he wished me into a flower, put me in his pocket and went on his way. I didn’t know of his adventures in travelling, or what kind of flower I was, or if the castle continued to exist after we left it. I found out most things later, but not what happened to the castle.

Being a flower was not like being a human and it was also unlike not existing. There was still an “I.” I was a flower. As flowers measure it, I was a flower for a very long time.

When the prince wished me human again I was standing on a table and the first words I heard were that I was so beautiful a painter couldn’t do my face justice. I looked at those seated along the table and lining the walls. At my feet sat a tired old man with a crown. The prince stood next to him. The dog who had been a man was not there. All the rest totalled more faces than I’d seen in my existence.

Four more strangers led in a woman whose eyes held nothing behind them. From the prince and king’s conversation with her, she was the falsely accused queen. The little family talked there at the head of the table while all the court looked on, straining their ears. I remained standing on the table, but no one seemed to notice.

The queen died some days later and the king soon followed. The prince became king and married me, I accompanied him on walks through the gardens, or stood by his side in court. I went back to my needlework.

I wonder what will happen to me after he dies. Will I keep existing? I have asked, but nobody knows if the castle we once lived in still exists even though it stands empty and the prince has forgotten it. If I stop existing, with the things I make with my hands still exist? Will the little cloths that cover the chair arms still protect them from dirt, the lace still keep the sharp legs of vases from scratching the woodwork? I worry that if the king dies, the things I have done will come undone.

I never actually wanted to live in Portland. I just knew it’d be a better choice. Like I knew it was a better choice to wait longer and save more before moving to L.A., even if it meant Chase moved down there a couple years before I did.

I think the last time I was in California I was 16. Maybe even 15. Somewhere around then my dad’s family stopped being my family and there was no reason to go south. If you’ve grown up in Oregon, California is sort of looked down on. That’s where the rich live and they don’t know how to drive and they move up here and steal our land and you can’t bring fruit with you forgodssakes.

Like anything adults looked askance at, California gained an aura of the forbidden. Not that I didn’t shit-talk it, which Chase straightened out pretty quickly. He did it the same way he made me stop making fun of Led Zeppelin: by making me actually listen to them. He told me about where he grew up, south of San Diego, and I added to my childhood memories of Northern California campgrounds and the overwhelming maze of San Francisco. California became a place, instead of an idea.

It’s the opposite of everywhere I’ve ever lived, dense populations, desert and south, beaches not coasts. When Chase and I drive through the country around where we used to live I look at the trees and the dense, black-green coastal range, wondering what life will be like without them. I don’t think I’ll miss the trees. There are plenty of trees.

There’s a lot of hate for Southern California, as though it were a bizzaro-world Pacific Northwest and therefore a nemesis. It’s too different, too crowded, too hot, too expensive (though rent-wise, really, it’s about the same). I have to justify my plans to semi-strangers and hope that they see the deadness in my eyes and stop wondering why I just don’t like it here.

I had a conversation once with someone about why he was in New York and why I wanted to move to L.A. It really came down to wanting to live somewhere you’d like to live when the world ends.

Not that I expect the world/society to cinematically end in the place of my choosing, but really, the thesis is sound. I’d be pretty bummed if it turned out I never got to leave the PNW. Sure, I think it’s a great spot for post-apocalyptic fiction, but not for me.

I lied. California is still an idea. Hasn’t it always been? It’s a world of artifice, but everyone is in on the construction, their imaginations and dreams as much a part of the skeleton as poured concrete and palm trees.

I think there are two kinds of people, at least as far as this exercise goes. There are the ones who read West’s The Day of the Locust and think “god, what a terrible place.” And then others read that short, sharp story and feel a noose tighten around their guts, dragging at them.

Here’s the thing. I could settle comfortably in the PNW or I could push myself and struggle and grow in L.A. I’d rather fail than settle. And—this is crazy—if, after some years I find that I long to once more reside in the verdant, motherly and non-judgemental embrace of where I grew up, I could always move back. It happens.

It probably won’t.

We alternated upper and lower body circuits, she’d out-lift me for upper but she ended up hurting herself trying to match me for lower. Every evening we’d go on a two mile run. I loved it. I’ve always been a closet jock, physical activity is super fun for me and lifting stokes the fires of my machismo.

When we still lived in the suburbs and I had a four hour public transit commute, I donated enough to the university to get a “free” gym membership to their student facilities, which weren’t fantastic (the setup was still the same as that summer I went every day) but I was also paying way less than if it was a real gym. Besides, all I wanted from it was access to an elliptical machine.

I’ve got some hip issues that mean running on pavement is not the best thing for me anymore, but the elliptical? I can sprint on that fucker. The joint issues I was having then went away and then we moved to the city. That was great. I could walk to work (about three miles round trip), keeping up a level of activity. I walk really fast, enough to sweat and probably at a speed just below a jog if I could figure out what a jog is.

Then my work moved and it was back to the bus. So I figured out a commute that got me three miles walking, with some bus in between. But the weather got shitty, my job got more administrative and more often than not I was walking just a mile and a half. And apparently that combination of things was enough to bring back the joint issues. So I did my PT and after I’d finished all my sessions my other damn leg started being slow to react and other terrifying things. Ooh, plus my shoulder was getting pretty fucked for no reason. Good times.

So I finally did something I’ve always wanted to do. I crunched some money numbers and joined a gym. I picked Snap Fitness because there is one close to where I work, they have no start fee and my insurance gave me a slight discount on the monthly payments, which were already cheap.

The branch I go to is owned by an adorable young couple, I have 24 hour access, I could go on and on about how the whole thing is laid out the same way you would a gym on a space ship and the only bummer is they don’t have overnight lockers. But mostly? They have machines that adjust to my size with useful pictures of proper form and what stretch to do. They have an assisted chin up machine which holy mother of everything. And they have elliptical machines.

The first day I limped to the gym and could only do 15 of the standard 20 minutes I like to do. Lowest level. The machines were easier and I could at least be proud of myself for maintaining good form, going slow and still doing a number of sets and reps that I find acceptable. That was about a week ago. I’ve gone three times since as my plan is to go on my Monday/Wednesday/Friday equivalents after work.

Yesterday I ran easy for a full 20 minutes and the four minute cool down, I can probably up the level next week. I’ve gone up weight on the machines to an amount I won’t tell you but is almost a third my weight. I’m not limping, stairs aren’t terrifying, my shoulder still hurts but in the way that means it’s getting better. I’m not 100% but shit, I’m close.

What the sweet fuck? I mean really. That’s not a lot of work for an amazing amount of progress. One of my co-workers called the gym my vice (mind you, I had been saying that after the gym I get Starbucks and then have a cigarette because I like to live the lives I saw on TV when I was young) and you know, for me it is, in the best way. I’m even eating the cursed mana of bananas or yoghurt after the gym so my muscles don’t get sad. I hate both those things so much I swear out loud while consuming them. It makes me so damned happy to work out and I don’t really know why, but since I get all sorts of positive rewards for it, I’m not complaining.

On Chase’s part, his racial background means not the best ability at processing grains and complex carbohydrates. For me, having a high protein diet that intrinsically avoids trigger foods is pretty great. And really? I kind of love cooking and working within the bounds of no grains, no sugar, it’s a fun challenge.

You end up eating a lot of eggs (they’re cheap), veg and meat (natch). And almond flour. Gluten-free stuff isn’t really an option, because rice flour is still a grain flour and pre-made stuff almost always has sugar. But if you can find or make cheap(er) almond flour, things like crepes, dense breads and cookies—all that sort of nosh—are still within reach.

You gotta understand that nothing acts the way grain does. Dough doesn’t happen, everything is batter based, cooking times and leavening proportions change. But oh damn. There is some delicious stuff. These two recipes have become cornerstones of nosh. If your diet allows you to eat nuts, I definitely recommend these foods.

Almond Flour Biscuits from The Nourishing Home

These are amazing. The only variations I do here is sift the almond flour and other dry ingredients together (the rougher bits of the almond flour that don’t sift make for fabulous cracker crust) and use milk with a splash of vinegar instead of buttermilk.

The body of these biscuits is soft—too soft for hard butter and they’re prone to crumble—and melt-in-your mouth delicious. I’ve also made them flattened out to make a base for open-faced sandwiches.

Not Your Gramma’s Fruitcake, a poorly named but delicious fruitcake

I wanted to make fruitcake for the holidays and since alternative flours are perfect for dense breads, fruitcake seemed like a good bet. I brought a loaf in to work and got a lot of disgusted faces, since I guess fruitcake is horrible and why wouldn’t I bring in something gross to share with co workers? If you are overly influenced by cartoons and supermarket fruitcake, then let me reassure you that this version tastes good, especially if you just substitute your preferred fruits and nuts. Like I did.

For fruit what I did was a cup of chopped up dried Turskish apricots and half-ish cup currants that I soaked in hot water and a couple bags of Earl Grey. I like tea as a soaking liquid, rather than booze or juice, because it adds a fun complexity to the flavour. For nuts I used like a cup of chopped walnuts and nothing else because I’m weirdly picky. 1/8 cup honey instead of the maple syrup.

I’ll be honest, we weren’t able to switch to this way of eating until both of us were making a little better money. But after three years of ranging between 90% to 60% grain free we’ve figured out how to make it work even when money is tighter.

Turns out? A decent amount.

January
Focus month: Branding Ma-Mé. I built and did the branding work for a friend’s site. It was super fun and I got paid for it! I like making other people’s ideas because I just like making stuff more than thinking of what to make.

Non-focus things made:
• I painted a painting that I then slid behind a bookcase, because I couldn’t throw it away, but why keep it?
• A TARDIS piñata for a dear friend. This has been re-Pinned on Pinterest about a million times.

February
Focus month: Airbrush! I have an airbrush and love it, but spent this month really learning it.

Non-focus things made:
• Rebuilt arbour in yard.
• Murder-wall anniversary present for Chase.

March
Focus month: Mending & old work. Cleaned a bunch of stuff, got rid of a bunch of stuff, a really great feeling.

Non-focus things made:
• I did get a wig that is now my web avatar wig. God, I love this fake hair.
• Wrote a short-short.
• Finished serialising the first draft of The Audacity Gambit.

April
Focus month: Chase’s show production, in which I showed you nothing.

Non-focus things made:
• Nothin. But I did start using Instagram.

May
Focus month: Embroidery. Which was fun, but not a lot produced.

Non-focus things made:
• Taught myself eggshell veneer.

June
Focus Month: Another writing month. Editing The Audacity Gambit and working on the second book!

Non-focus things made:
• Made a sky bison costume for a cat.
• Shot a cover for TAG’s Draft 2 Lulu print.

July
Focus month: Animatic. Which got extended, due to summer fun.

Non-focus things made:
• Swatched my insane nail polish collection.
• Helped manage my workplace’s move to a new place.
• Made Chase a hell of a cake for his birthday.

August
Focus month: Animatic, still. Which didn’t end how I expected. I decided to stop doing focus months.

Non-focus things made:
• Research for a friend’s Halloween costume.
• Ridiculous Adventure Time/Breaking Bad drawing.
• Modified a department store ball-jointed doll into a dryad.

September
•We bought a car, wtf.
• Built rig for San’s cape from Princess Mononoke.
• Wrote lots of TAG book 2

October
• Got my first hand tattoos
• Made Princess Mononoke costume.

November
• Worked on a thing I hope to show you guys soon.
• Made a ridiculous cake

December
• Shot photos of cats in both old west and Avedon’s In the American West styles as presents.

So, a decent amount of things, I think? And through all of it, trying to keep my nails sick.

Not a bad 2012, let’s hope for more in 2013!

A big chunk of October was spent making San’s mask and cape (from Princess Mononoke) for a friend. I am a huge costume nerd and since they never drew San’s cape as actually attached in any way, that’s how I made it. It took an interior frame and counterweights, but it can be worn comfortably and easily, without exterior rigging, and look just like it does in the movie.

I wrote, but not as much as I should.

I got new tattoos, as part of a slow process in making my hands look amazing (nail art and tattoos are probably the best combo) and myself less employable outside the west coast.

That was a good night. I got ink, some froyo then Chase and I went to see a pick-up (I mean, exhibition) Blazer game. That’s what we did instead of listen to the last debate, because that shit is easier to read about after. I like the crime-solving kind of forensics, not the speech ones.

Internet life has been a little weird because first an act of God ruined my mobile,

Then Chase’s, which I switched to (as he uses his phone mostly) decided to up and die. At the same time, The Old Reader happened. Google Reader was super important to me and I keep poking around The Old Reader feeling the same kind of discomfort as visiting the place you grew up in—it is very similar but not the same, the same people are there, but not all of them and the dynamic is just a bit different

Plus my computer is shittier and The Old Reader is slower, so the 70-100 posts I’d see in a day is too much for me keep up with. I want this part of my online life back pretty badly, but there are some trust issues.

But at least I started reading again. Weird that I even stopped for like, months, right? I used to read a book or two a week. Honest books too, not just pulp. But writing while reading is hard and I was reading articles and doing crosswords and I don’t know. It got weird. But then the wonderful Jon Morris of Oh That Paperback (and like, one million other things) sent me a box of beautiful mass markets and a handful of 1970s’ Analogs. And you can’t turn that down, not an addict like me.

From here it gets less fun and less pictures.

One morning a couple of weeks ago, my right leg didn’t wake up with the rest of me and it has stayed half-asleep since. Which is a little unsettling. Some would say terrifying and it’s one of those things where other people’s reactions make me feel like I’m conveying the issue badly. I’ll be all “It’s just numb and hypersensitive and yeah, from my lower back to all my toes but, hey stop freaking out. It affects ALL my toes, so it’s not a spinal disc thing.” But that doesn’t seem to calm people down. I can still walk on it guys! It’s just that when I put socks on it’s almost like I’m flaying skin.

Since even my distrust of doctors only extends so far, I finally went and got a general practitioner (the ONE doctor any of my friends could recommend, and he is fabulous), who gave me a referral to a physical therapist. And it turns out my PT went to the same school I did! Which, for med stuff, is actually a good thing. If I was looking for a chemist or a writer or something, that degree would be suspect. But PT? Totes. So now once a week I get to chat with a smart dude about Forest Grove and wine country while doing isometrics and trying to maintain a conversation while counting what set I’m on.

And then each night Chase does nerve bombardment stuff, because the best way to deal with nerve hypersensitivity is to harass the shit out of a nerve system. According to Chase this means drawing on my leg (somehow ballpoint feels like liquid fire, who knew?). It actually does work, though. And not just at proving Chase is a jackass.

While I was levelling up as an adult by having a doctor, I had my GP take a gander at the thing on my left arm. Now this is a little embarrassing. From somewhere I picked up the gut-deep reflex that health issues are the result of being a terrible person—for me, that is. My health issues are because I did something wrong. Everybody else’s are because the world sucks. So having what is probably a cancerous growth on my arm would be what? Punishment for the sin of pride or vanity, I guess? But that’s why I never took pictures of it, even though I document about everything else.

Anyway, he razored it off and that was rad. I watched because I really don’t mind blood. I don’t. I find surgical process fascinating and if I was bothered by blood my female human body would give me some pretty regular issues. No stitches for this, just slicing off a medieval growth, dropping it in a jar and laughing genuinely while using an electrocauteriser when I drew parallels with Luke (Skywalker, like I have to even specify) getting his hand cut off by a lightsaber.

Of course, then after the test results came back I had to go and get more stuff removed, because cancer is cancer, even if it’d take like 10 years for this particular one to make legit trouble. A football shaped cut was made around the scab from the week before, arcing long and wide to make sure that all the bad shit was cut out. I joked about the gussets Buffalo Bill cut in Silence of the Lambs, adding that “to my credit, I thought of sewing, then serial killers.”

I watched the process again, except for the bits where the scalpel first bit into the skin, because the combo of a blade pushing into skin until it cuts through just grosses me out. Also, the stuff right under the skin is pretty gross, but also very Cronenbergian, so it’s like 50/50 don’t look. And all was good (and crazy interesting!) until he started putting in stitches and I got hella faint. Which is super embarrassing, like most things where your body makes a decision without your brain.

They laid my chair back and I closed my eyes and got the doctor to explain involuntary vagus nerve action regarding fainting while I waited for my blood to work again. It is just a thing! A very annoying thing. So I didn’t even get to see how many stitches I got until I took a picture to send Chase at work.

At least it should scar neat.

It’s the 2013 Veloster. VELOSTER. From the first time I saw a picture of its stupid face I was taken. Then Chase showed me this banned Dutch commercial:

Yep, it’s got three doors. To fuck with Death.

Somehow, we thought the price we were looking at was for the base model. But it turned out that the car we were looking at online actually had a fancy package that added a crazy nice stereo and a sunroof. And leatherette seats. So we ended up with a car that gets at least 40 miles per gallon on the highway, in a low-moderate price range, that feels like a luxury car inside. And looks like a space ship, a little.

Oh, and there is a touch screen inside?

We named him Jeff.