Last night I discovered a sale on plane tickets around the country that was good through today (for $30, $60 or $90 one way, depending on the distance, and for travel dates between september and november). After thinking about it rationally over the course of today, I concluded that even though I reallyreallyreally want to go to California and I keep obsessing over it to the point of being way annoying... $180 round trip, once you add in taxes and everything else, isn't all that much cheaper than what most other sites list. But! $60 round trip to Tennessee seems pretty hard to beat, so I think I'm finally going to visit Miss Lindsey there!! Yaaaay~! Now I just have to decide on when to go! Eeeek, my first plane travel (excluding that one time when I was 2)!!!

But I'm still on the lookout for cheap tickets to CA :D I just have to figure out things like... lodging, transportation, blah blah blah. My awesome brother would be happy to go with me, but did you know they charge an extra twenty-some dollars for a rental car per day (basically, double the price) just because you're under 25? i think that's so dumb!!! It would be cool to just go with buses and whatever... but there's just so much in CA! I don't know if we could see it all! Awww! I have relatives and people there that I might maybe could convince to let me stay with them, but it would probably be a good idea to communicate with them in advance rather than buying tickets with no definite plans in mind.

Well, someday! At least thinking about the practical things like this is one step closer to actually doing it!

Oh, we had the second art-day at our camp-thingy at church today. We used charcoal! to illustrate the part of Psalm 23 with "the valley of the shadow of death." (we are doing a bunch of illustrations for different parts of Psalm 23 that will eventually be made into a book for each kid to take home at the end of the camp!) Everyone made awesome awesome art and a great smudgy black mess and had fun fun fun! I continue to be impressed by the awesome ideas the kids have and how they execute them—like one kid who drew himself going into a dark cave, only the drawing was from inside the cave so everything was dark except the opening to the cave behind him was bright light. It was so cool!!

Anyone know that one song, "I am slowly going crazy, one-two-three-four-five-six-switch! Crazy going slowly am I, six-five-four-three-two-one-switch!"? I'm not sure where I learned it from—might've been one of those kids shows I watched when I was a kid. I like to sing it to myself every now and then...

I'm feeling a bit stir-crazy tonight. Like I'd like to hop on a plane to California or something. Hahaha. Ha. (waaah~ I don't mean to be repetitive, but I had some relatives and friends ask me about the editing job (I didn't tell many people because it seemed so uncertain, but there were a couple) and it reminded me... and all the new licensing announcements CMX made this weekend are so awesome. I had a dream that CMX offered me a job as a housekeeper in this Victorianesque mansion that their offices were in, which was owned by a princess who also lived there and it had this gorgeous view of gardens out the front windows and they offered me free room and board there too (reading over that now, it sounds remarkably like something right out of a shoujo manga) and it was sooooo cooool and I seriously thought if I could stay asleep long enough I would eventually really get an email saying it was true!! *sigh*)

But I am working on drawings for the second Kayli book, which I have been procrastinatingly working on for like the past half a year or something, seriously. Now I'm bribing myself to get it done with the promise to buy more Skip Beat! volumes depending how fast I can work, which, in combination with the deadline my mum imposed on me for the end of this week, might actually get me to finish it once and for all in a timely manner (the drawings. then I'll have to come up with something else for the paintings. good thing there are so many volumes of Skip Beat!........). I like the drawings I've come up with (much more than the drawings I had come up with a couple months ago) buuuut... it's hard to convince myself to keep going. The story is a bit bland. So it's up to me to add exciting and interesting stuff. Which... can be a good thing, I guess. Forces me to use my imagination. I think I'm getting better at drawing cats! (for the amount of cats I've drawn for all the years of my life, they're surprisingly tricky) But I'm still feeling intensely bored with my surroundings, and it's making it hard for me to want to do aaaaanything that requires effort.

Oh! My current music is a song my brother made! Using a fancy music-making program on his computer! He's made many songs by now and they are all really cool. I have such awesome brothers!

First: Done! with the final book for one of the series I illustrate last night/early this morning. It was both a happy and sad moment for me. Well, happy and sad and tired and worried and relieved and so on, because it was 1am and I also was co-leading the first day of the arts-and-sports camp at our church this afternoon. But the other woman who helped to lead it has experience as an elementary teacher, so she did an awesome job introducing the project to the kids, and I showed them cool things they could do with the paints (we did watercolours this week!) and then we wandered around and got to look at all the cool paintings the kids did. They are so great!! Seeing all these young artists work made me wish they would ALL grow up continuing to make art (I know some of them will for sure, though!). Kids are great :D

After thaaaaaaaaaaaaat I stopped by the bookstore on the way home (ohh, it is such a temptation to have that bookstore so close to our church) to see if they had any of this month's new manga. They didn't, not even Hockey Club!, so I will have to order that one (and apparently Kimi ni Todoke got pushed to next month? or else the store's computer listing is wrong... either way, booooo!). But I couldn't just leave with nothing, of course, so I bought Skip Beat! 7-8! And thus I turn myself into a full-fledged addict-fan of this manga...

( Skip Beat! (I don't think it's too spoilery? I never give much context for anything I talk about, but...) )

Thanks for putting up with me, everyone :D I won't do another manga-fangirl post for a while, I think...? The weather's gotten real cold all of a sudden! I don't know what the deal is but I'm wearing sweaters around the house and Mum wore a scarf outside when she met up with a friend this afternoon!! Man, Michigan. This what you call July??

Tonight my family went a little goofy. Or my mum did, and then my brother and I did with her. First they coerced me to play a game with them (my youngest brother is all about strategy games, and always always allllllways wins, and yet my parents seem to enjoy playing with him anyway (my mum whines when she gets beaten, but she still always suggests we play something). I usually refuse, but they were going on about how I would completely ruin an otherwise pleasant weekend if I didn't play with them, etc etc etc. So I agreed to play Blokus, and I lost smashingly! Hurrah!

After that dad wandered off somewhere and it was just mum and Derek and I, and mum asked if we remembered "The one time when we went camping and were sitting around the campfire..." ("Oh yeah, that 'One Time' we were sitting around a campfire while camping," Derek interrupted) "...and we played the game where you go around in a circle and say things you bought from the grocery store?" Derek didn't but I did, and then somehow we started playing it again, and all giggled and came up with silly things... and it went like this.

I went to the grocery store and I bought...
Apples
and Blueberry muffins
and Ice cream (noooooo it has to go in alphabetical order!!) okay fine, Cat food
and Dog food
and Elephant food... just kidding! hahaha Elephant ears
and Fish food (no no no enough!) okay Fiber Plus cereal (you mean Fiber "one" cereal?) I thought it was "plus." okay, Fiber Fortified cereal
and Gogurt
and Halapenos hahahahahahaha!!! just kidding, Hot dogs
and Ice Cream
and Jalapenos
and Kix
and Lemons
and (Marron! [as we noticed the cat curling up soooooo adorably on a pillow]) Mustard
and ... ... ... ... Newtons...? like fig newtons but... ... ... okay, well, Noodles made of rice
and Oregano
and Persimmons
and (Q-tips?) no, I have a better one! Quinoa
and Rice noodles (how redundant!)
and Salt
and Taffy
and (Unicorn food??) Umbrellas
and Vermicelli
and Worcestershire sauce [man, I totally had to look up how to spell that word]
and X-Men DVDs (why do they have those in the grocery store???)
and Yellow summer squash
and Zebra cake little debbies! (aaaaah, you WOULD!)

Now you all can go out and play this fun and exciting (and non-competitive!) game with your families and friends! Show off your fantastic (or terrible) memory and unique tastes!

A discovery! ...for the three people (myself included) who are keeping track of these things.

At the library, where I like to find manga I'm not interested enough in to actually pay for, I recently picked up the first volume of Never Give Up, by Mutou Hiromu, published by TokyoPop. I... did not really like it very much. The art style bugged me, for one thing. And the characters all made me mad at them, and the story was... eh, it just made me think of other series that did the same things better (there was a guy with light/untoned hair in a ponytail and sunglasses and he talked girly, and all I could think was "Go away, you're so not Maki!!!!" (I'm sorry, it's not this manga's fault that I've been spoiled by the awesomeness of Maki)). But I read the whole volume, and then I got a reward at the end! It was three extra pages, one drawn by each of Mutou-sensei's assistants! AND! One of them! Was Kurara-chan!!!!! Kurara-chan who was also an assistant for Hidaka-sensei! The same Kurara-chan, with the same simple but cute art and short bobbed hair! (but not the funny expression Hidaka-sensei always gives her, hee) The other two assistants were "Shinoyu," whose name I don't recognize, and Sakamoto Miku, another current HanaYume mangaka whose work I enjoy! I probably won't read more of this series, but I'm tempted to peak at the back of the books to see if I can discover more about the assistants!

In other news, today I bought some fabric that I hope to try and turn into a yukata. It is a simple light green print and it is adorable! I hope I can make it!! If I manage that, then I will move on to more complicated(?) things like 50s dresses and frilly skirts. Kyaa~!

Oh, and also, I didn't make it to JAFAX after all. I'm sorry to anyone who was hoping to see me there...!

The sun was very sunny today! The ground was moist from all yesterday's rain, I found new rosebuds on my miniature roses (one of the plants looks to be dying, but the others are just thrilled to be alive! i'm hoping the one will make a miraculous comeback!) and we've worked out a stake-and-netting arrangement to keep the robins out of our strawberries, so we are enjoying the bounty of the season. Mum made a delicious goat-cheese-and-egg tart with lots of yummy herbs for dinner, using more of the yumminess to be found in our garden. Francis (our parakeet) was rather loud today, though. He gets into these moods sometimes...

Hmm. Last night I got caught up with reading Sket Dance. That's right, a shounen manga! Right out of Weekly Shounen Jump, even! I would like to take this moment to recommend it to you all. I... can't really remember when or why I started reading it, but I've loved it from the first chapter I read. I guess it's sort of a comedy/gag-manga... mostly episodic stories about a trio of students in a club (the Sket-dan) who help out their fellow students/teachers/etc with various tasks. It is incredibly hilarious, with lots of references to various popular manga and all sorts of other things. One of my favourite side characters is a would-be shoujo mangaka who is constantly destroying any fourth-wall she can get her hands on when she shows up (like sending off thought-narration-bubbles that everyone else can read, climbing out of her panel and turning the page for you the reader, etc... as well as just poking fun at all the silliness that is to be found in shoujo manga♥ I laugh my head off every time she shows up!). Beyond just her though, all of the characters are just so funny and sincere and altogether charming (and bizarre). I love how they interact with each other and get along and form friendships (that's really a big deal in shounen manga, huh? friendship and all) I really don't read shounen manga these days so I can't compare it to other series, but Sket Dance just has such a good heart, I think. I've cried more than a couple times reading it (proving again that the best stories use a good dose of humour mixed with bittersweet); there was a story-arc covered in the chapters I read last night that had me in tears. It was very therapeutic and refreshing, somehow. I would absolutely love to see this manga licensed one day, so I can buy the books and reread them to bits. But who knows... it seems like a rather obscure series even among manga readers. But it's so worth reading! Everyone, check it out if my description sounds interesting (or even if it doesn't!), and let me know what you think if you do read it :D

(I know I know, if you read manga you probably have a million other series you've been meaning to check out as well, and I do too! but one more recommendation can't hurt, right?)

Aw shucks, I didn't finish this in time to have an entry-every-day-for...howeverlongit'sbeen! Oh welllllll...

This will be short.

I just visited CMX's site and they had the cover/summary up for the first volume of Oh! My Brother (aka "With!!" in Japan. on reflection I realize that just based on something like internet-searchability, something like "with" would be very very difficult to find results for). I'm excited to read it :D

But the other thing this made me think of was, "That's coming out in October! So is I Hate You More Than Anyone 8!!! I wonder if the cover to that is up yet?" And it was! And so I read the summary, which I expected would be the same as the summary in the back of 7 Hate... but it was different! Different in that it was even more devastating! AAAAAAH Makiiii!!!!! How could you?! Nooooooo~!!

*sigh* I don't want to wish away these precious warm-weather months, but I am incredibly anxious for October... In the meantime I'll just try to keep myself comforted with the incredibly sweet cover illustration.

(but if I got a job with CMX, I could read it sooner! bonus!!)

Hmmm... tonight I felt like I should update with something, but I don't really have much to say. Usually something will happen and I will think, "I'm totally writing about this in my lj!" (that sound silly now that I write it out but...) but today that is not the case.

I did get some stuff done today. Mum called me at 9:18 and woke me up because the person at work who had begged me to switch my morning shift with his tuesday night hadn't shown up. But it turns out he was just late (he's been having this problem a lot lately, it seems). But that got me up nice and relatively early, at least! I had a list of things to-do with heart and star bullet points, and I was able to colour in all but one heart and one star, so I guess those are my goals for tomorrow.

I've been wanting to try making dango one of these days. Last week the topic of gluten-free baking came up with my mum, and I mentioned rice flour as seeming like a popular alternative flour, and then decided to do some research on it. Looking up sweet rice flour led to the discovery that this is basically the same thing as glutinous rice flour, which is used for dango and mochi and things. And so I got it into my head that I need to try making these things. So now I just need to get out to the Asian grocery store and find some flour! I am very excited to try this, and you can be sure that when I assemble my ingredients I will share the outcome with you (I mean, with pictures and stuff probably... unless you live nearby and pay a timely visit :D)

Typing the word "colour" earlier on set off one of those mad desires to go colour a colouring-book-picture. So that's what I'm gonna do now! *drags out trusty Hello Kitty activity book that I am in no way ashamed to own*

A little story of frustration, with a happy ending.

( cut because I realized this post got extremely long )

Oh, I almost forgot but I had kinda intended to mention it—I made myself a bunch of new icons the other day. I was going to just replace my old ones, but after doing that I felt bad for my old posts that would all have the same default icon... so... I sold out and upgraded to the ad-supported membership level so I could keep the old ones and upload new ones too. Because of course I'm not going to pay for something on the internet! (until the point when I get myself a decent professional website/blog (no offense to LJ, I'm just really cheap)) But so, yeah, I have ads on my journal now. At least none of y'all reading have to see them, unless you're looking at my journal from my page rather than your friend page. Plus when you leave comments it shows up with my layout! Yay! I always dreamed of that!

So anyway, the new icons themselves are mostly art by Tadatsu Youko, who did a whole bunch of manga way back in the day, none of which I have read, but they look like they'd be interesting and fun. The icon I'm using for this post is from a two-volume series titled Okane tamemasu! (お金ためます!) which means... something about money; the original illustration is... well, here, let's have show and tell!

I can't help but laugh, seeing her overjoyed expression and sparkling eyes. I want to read this story!

The thing I like about looking at old covers like this is seeing the variety of titles that existed (as well as sometimes the repetition of fad-themes like sports, european beauties, etc...) I think most people know of big epic/dramatic titles like Glass Mask and maybe they've heard of the groundbreaking psychological works of some of the classic shoujo mangaka (Hagio Moto, Takemiya Keiko, etc), but I always enjoy a sense of humour in my reading material, so to me it's fun to see mangaka playing with silly or purposely exaggerated themes. And I just like seeing all of it, really. This is some of the stuff my favourite mangaka may have read growing up, which inspired them to go on and create the series they're writing today! What a wonderful cycle!

And then I realize how much like my dad I am, only with shoujo manga, rather than classic films and popular music and literature on every topic imaginable (at least, I comfort myself, my scope of interest is somewhat more focused). Aaaaaah, that collector-mentality will be my downfall!

It is so nice to glance over my shoulder and see that my cat has curled up on the bed behind me. Awww. I just wanna squish her with love~!

I'm a bit bummed though. My brother Brndn came back from the Caribbean today after a three-week stay with my grandpa who lives on a yacht down there, and I didn't even get to see him!! My family all went out to dinner with him but I was at work from 1-9 so I missed out. And I'm supposed to work all day tomorrow tooooooooo! *whiney whiney whine*

That's about it for now. We got more mini roses in at work tonight and they are sooooooo pretty ahhhh!!! I want more! But what would I do with them?? There is one that is a light creamy colour with a darker orangey-rust center. Its roses are pretty big, actually, almost full-size. Then there is another gorgeous one with yellow petals that darken to orange at the tips. Ahhhh~ So lovely! Then there's the houseplant buyer Jordan egging me on and convincing me I should buy more. We'll see if I can resist the temptation tomorrow... (if they last long enough to go clearance-priced, there's no way I could resist, but they're still full price (25% off with employee discount) for now...) Ahh, Lys can never be content with what she has. Always wants more pretty things to surround herself with... Though, at least with the clearance plants, it's kinda a confidence-booster to know I can get plants to grow even when they look sickly and sad. And of course there's the inescapable Dutch-ness (my brothers don't seem to have inherited this trait, though. except Derek, like whoa.)

So anyway. Hopefully I will see my brother again soon and hear all about his fascinating tropical tales!! At least I don't have too many hours at work next week, so I can focus (accidentally typed "ficus"... hmmm. I don't have one of those yet...) more on illustration work and gardening and stuff...!!