One Very Special Botcon Photo!

Day 41: Check it out! Check it out! Check it out! CHECK IT OUT!!

That's me! Me and my sister! Me and my sister in an awesome Prowl hat! Me and my sister in an awesome Prowl hat AT BOTCON!

I was cruising through the image gallery on Botcon's website because they had recently put up all their official pictures and I was beginning to miss that amazing feeling of being at Botcon. I was looking through the Saturday pictures, peering in the corners to see if maybe they had taken a picture and accidentally gotten Sarah and I in the crowd.

Nothing. Not even in the ridiculously long line that sprung up Saturday morning for general admission. (We had breakfast in that line and no, we were not in the back of the line. Yay! xP)

So I clicked on Sunday, my peepers ready to peer into more photo corners and then BAM! There we were! It was so cool that I ran up shouting, "SARAH SARAH SARAH!" I was so excited that she thought I was coming to tell her that Steve Blum had called or something. n_n; Which of course would have been cool,  but very very odd...

Anyway that's us! And it's cool! And totally unexpected! Which makes it even better! :)

And dang we've got long hair.....o.O

On the night before Botcon...

My vacation officially started this morning! At like...five-fifty this morning, but still. ;3

My sister and I were ecstatic to arrive in sunny San Diego and man is it beautiful. I mean, back home in Houston, you walk outside at your own peril. I mean you could soak your shirt in sweat without doing anything other than walking around the neighborhood.

And here it's so different! It's cool and breezy and the air outside the airport smelled just the slightest bit like salt water. :) It was really cool in every single way possible! And the land! IT MOVES! What is this land undulation that I see before me?! Is the ground broken? Is that why they have so many earthquakes around here? And what are these 'hills' that people keep talking about...

Oh! Oh! Oh! And guess what we just did! Guess! Guess! Guess!

We just got back from watching the Transformers movie (the live action one from 2007) in the hotel rose garden (they have rose gardens! :D And the roses are the size of my face! o.O They're huge!) and five of the Botcon guests were there. Wheeljack and Shockwave's voice actors from Prime, Wally Burr and Jason Jenson from the G1 80's universe, and Glenn Morshower from the live action movies! They were taking pictures with guests before the movie started and it was such a surprise cause I didn't expect to see them there! I asked Sarah if she wanted to take a picture with them, but she was too shy. I wanted to get my picture taken with them though, but I was too nervous to go up and ask. n_n; We both kinda chickened out...

There were some technical problems with the movie, but it turned out to be even more awesome because of it. It started working just fine and people all cheered when Optimus started talking, but then the picture blinked out. :0 We could still hear it though, and my sister told me it almost didn't matter because she knew everything that was going on just from hearing what was going on. ;P I thought it was funny because I was doing the same thing.

Then the picture came back! Yay! Then it immediately disappeared and took the sound with it! Boo!

But then Glenn Morshower got up and said, "I'll just act out the rest for you guys. 'You will land or we will kill you.'"

XD It was great! It was...it was...it was so great I don't even know what it was! XD

The movie itself was awesome too. I know I've seen it a hundred times, but it was so much more fun when all the other people were cheering when their favorite bots appeared on screen, or when they were all reciting the best lines of the movie. Sarah said it was great being surrounded by 'our people'.

I laughed at her and said she was weird. But then I was forced to admit that she had a point, so...go geeky me! And yay for crowds of Transfans! Woohoo! It was fantastic! Let's go again! Let's go again! :D It was better then chocolate!

Well...okay, so it tied with chocolate. n_n;

And tomorrow morning we're going to get to go to the convention itself! YAY! Tomorrow we're going to get more puggle friends and Transformers and autographs and panels! Hooray!!!!

I also think that my lil sis and I may have ridden in an elevator with Steve Blum....but I'll have to get back to you on that. Needless to say, when we realized why the elevator guy may have seemed so familiar, we both freaked out. Made worse by the fact that we're not absolutely sure it even was him in the first place...

Hopefully tomorrow we'll find out! Or at least get the real Starscream's autograph... ;3

It's getting late, so I'll have to put pictures up here a little later. But if you want to get a little taste of Botcon now, you can check out my Twitter feed. I'm so excited about it all that I've been tweeting more today then I have in the past six months....guess I'm not exactly a micro-blogger. n_n;

The Botcon Quest Begins...

Day 39-40: It's time to party like an Autobot! Just deposited my graduation checks (finally...) and some prize money I got for winning second place in an essay contest (I'm still pretty excited about that :3). And you know what that means? I'll tell you what it means! It means that my sister and I finally went and reserved a hotel room for Botcon!

We're going to Botcon this summer!!!!!!! YAYYYYY!!!

Aaaand...this is how I feel about that. :)

So yeah, the highlight of my day. Now I'm just kind of praying that nothing goes wrong. :_ Because that would be...close to soul crushing really. I'm really looking forward to this. Now that I'm done with school, every time I think about my future it's like looking into a big blank space of nothingness. No purpose. No immediate goals. No point really....

It stinks.

So I guess it's just nice to have something really fun and nerdy to look forward to. And I get to share it with my little sister. n_n; If we keep going on like this we'll have something of a Botcon tradition. And things always seem to look better when you have someone to have fun with instead of just pallin' around with me, myself, and I.

That and we can freak out over meeting Gregg Berger (the voice of Grimlock) together. They haven't released the final guest list yet for the convention (so we don't completely know if he's coming) but we have great hope that he'll be at Botcon this summer. And I can't wait to see who else is gonna come! I'm so getting an autograph band! :D I think I'm going to bring the picture I got autographed last summer and add more signatures to that. ;3 By the end of I'll be proud to have it hanging on my wall for all to see!

And it's such a nice looking hotel too! Maybe it's because we reserved a room early - or maybe it's some kind of attendee discount Botcon's got going on - but it was the same price for the largest room with two beds as it was for a not-as-fancy-looking room with only one. So cool! Sleeping in style!

Now we just have to work on those plane tickets...hmmm......

Lanterns in the Sky

Day 38: Last few day's project finally done. :) I found out recently that those floating lanterns featured in Tangled are actually real. Well, maybe without that purple sun on the side...and there's no missing princess....or magic hair....but still! They exist!

It turns out that there's this big festival celebration in Thailand where they release tons of these things into the night. I found some photos of the festivities on shutterstock that are really stunning. I'll put one up below, but I didn't strictly copy any one cloud of lanterns. Just used them for inspiration really. :)

I think it turned out pretty well. I was uncertain about adding more colors into the sky because I was so taken with just the plain blue, but I think I made the right choice.

...I also may have been thinking about what Van Gogh said in Doctor Who about the sky being all different colors.....

n_n; Oh well. I like it. It turned out well. I want to make a bigger version (this is just a sketchbook sized one). I'll have to look at the remains of my Bristol pad, but I know it's bigger than a normal sheet of paper...I think that'll have enough room though for a good balance between up close, detailed lanterns, and background speck-lanterns.

I'm thinking about turning this into a pendent too. You know, like one you wear. It think it'd look cute smaller. And with any luck I might be able to sell a few and raise money for the ongoing Botcon quest.

That and if it's smaller maybe I won't see all those early mistakes glaring so sharply at me... ^,,^

It would also give me the excuse to add glitter! xP

 A reference/source-like/inspiration thing...

The Hummingbird Sketch

Day 37 - A sketch I did today. I was putting some photos I got from shutterstock to good use and having some fun with my art pens at the same time. The source photo is down below if you care to compare. Personally I think the bird came out rather well for a freehand try, but the stick?

^-.-^ Mrs. Mittens and I say Blech! to the stick.

.....although I kind of like how you can still see the greens, yellows, and reds I put in there to try and make it not look so flat (I only have the one brown and yellow and it needed something more)....

I've been stocking up on lovely photos from shutterstock when Dad doesn't use up all the downloads on his subscription, looking for ones that I could practice my sketching skills. But most of them, I notice now, require more colors than I have, so maybe I should start thinking about expanding my collection. :)

Of course....that requires money, which is a bit of a problem. I've been looking around for a job, but it's so much more difficult than I had first thought. D<

I have applied for some blogger jobs I found....and I'm so nervous I won't get it! The two I really want stop accepting applications today, so hopefully tomorrow or early next week I'll get a phone call. I want it so bad! If only because I have no idea what else to do if I don't get it.... u.u; I'm trying to save up so my sister and I can go to Botcon this summer and I still need a couple hundred dollars.

So, yeah...I'm crossing my fingers and praying real hard, but right now the only thing to do is wait and see. I have a possible plan B with maybe trying to sell some resin necklaces with little collages or Transformers or Disney things inside....My sis and I are going to hobby lobby today because she wants some fabric to make a Prowl pack for the convention (She wants it to look like she has doorwings. It sounds so cute and nerdy!) so I thought I'd look around to see how much the settings cost. I dunno. Maybe it'll work. Maybe I'll be fortunate enough to find some kind of paycheck before the end of the month....I don't know.

*Sigh* Well. At least my little hummingbird looks decent. I'm rather fond of him. Although I wonder if maybe I didn't over correct with the colors when I was cleaning up the scanned version...oops. n_n;

The Birch Forest

Day 36 - Ooo! 26 hits in the last hour or so. Very impressive! Thanks guys! I guess you like the new background...

Which is fill with one happy thing and several sad...

I am a bad author. I'm sorry readers, but at this moment I am. I promised I'd get up the next chapter of my online Transformers story Friday or Saturday but...yeah, didn't happen.

Friday was an interesting day (and not in a good way). Saturday was just busy. And Sunday I was just tired. :(

Sorry.

....sorry sorry....

Sorry  And I should really stop apologizing shouldn't I?

Anyway. My lil sister set up a bake sale this last Saturday. It was just her and her friend running the little table, but they had three different kinds of cookies, two kinds of cupcakes, apple pie wraps, and lemonade. And all of the sweets were homemade. All of them. Even the apple pie filling!

O.O I still can't believe it actually. It all tasted so good!

And she made $41 total! In one day. She's saving up money so we can go to Botcon this summer in San Diego. I'm so amazed and proud that she did all that in one day, but I'm also sad because it means my 12 year old sister is doing better at saving up money than I am.

I just don't know what to do with myself ya know? I mean, I've never thought about life after college. Not in any specifics anyway. It was like graduation was the unreachable dream. Something you keep striving for for years but in the back of your mind you secretly think it'll never actually come to pass.

So life after college is...empty. All the jobs I come across all want things like 'certain type of degree I don't have' or '3-5 years experience in our particular  field' and pretty much a dozen other things that I don't have. So what the heck am I supposed to do? All I want to do is go to Botcon! T.T

Dang. I've made myself sad....sorry. Help? What do writer-wannabees and artists actually do once they're released out into the world? o.O They go mad! That's what they do! Mad and cause trouble and die before they're thirty.

^-.-^ Mrs. Mittens is telling me to stop lolling about in self-pity and go do something useful...

The Long Road Home Excerpt

So this is has to do with my Transformers fanfiction called The Long Road Home. I haven’t updated in forever so this is to let all my readers know that I haven’t fallen off the story or anything and that I have been writing these last three months.

So, if any of you out there are interested in really cool (if I do say so myself) Transformers stories, then feel free to drop by my Fanfiction.net profile. The link is the middle circle at the top left of the page. Just hold your mouse over the circle with the two stars you see up there and click the very center. If you hold your mouse over that it should say something like ‘My Writing’. Hope I sucker some of you in. :) I always enjoy hearing from new readers. <3

The Church Garden

First block in of my church garden painting

Day 31-35 : Yay! With this set of pictures I have finally cleared the month of December in my picture a year quest. To bad it's March....

Anway, I‘m making a couple of paintings for my church for Easter Sunday and yesterday I finally got started. :)

Stick-Formers Unite!

Stick-Jackie Waves Hello

Days 27 - 30: I present to you a whole bunch of Stick-formers! You've already met Wheeljack up there. And of course down below is Mirage. Stick-Grimmy's having a bit of a pout because he's kinda miffed about his cute little curly-que arms. But I think they're adorable! Say hello guys!

*Fancy tea slurp*

Stick-Grimmy Unamused

I'm a big fan of the Starhorse's work (another Transformers fan) and she posted some stick-formers over at her blog Spoiled Robots on tumblr. I thought they were adorable and in a moment of "Well what else do I honestly have to do right now?" decided to try my hand at some of my own. Some of the eyes (and all of the hands) came out slightly derpy...but I think Grimlock there is my favorite. :) And now that I have some decent pictures of them in black and white, I'm going to have to find some time to give them some color. Hooray for color! :3

Oh, and Jazz and Bumblebee here are having a dance party. I should snap some photos of them to use as blackmail at an undisclosed later date before they realize that they can't really dance. ;3

Dance party! Dance party!

I WON I WON I WON!

Just won 2nd place in an essay contest! THERE ARE NO WORDS FOR MY EXCITEMENTATED-LIKE FEELINGS!

XD - EMOTICONS FAIL TO CAPTURE MY JOY!

YES I AM AWARE I AM SHOUTING, JUST TOO GIDDY TO CARE! x3

For Those That Feel Hopeless....

...For those that feel hopeless...

...

He is so tired. Day by day, hour by hour, the ring grows heavier. She knows each step he takes brings her closer to her deathbed and so she fills his heart with a sorrow so heavy that it now drags him down to the broken ground. His heart aches in his chest from the weight of it and his voice rasps quietly against the shattered white stones as he realizes something.

"I can't do this, Sam."

Across from him, also taking shelter from the Winged Nazgul amid  the white stones, Sam looks up. He knows what Frodo means.

"I know." He tells him, sounding as if he might finally break down and cry. "It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here."

Only there is no use wishing they were somewhere else now, he realizes, and crying will help even less than wishing.

"But we are." He says in a stronger voice. "It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?"

Frodo has been wondering the same thing and he hopes that Sam has an answer, because he cannot see the way out anymore. All that remains now is the weight of the ring where she rests, deceptively small, against his chest. He cannot even remember the Shire anymore...

But Sam doesn't know any of this, for which Frodo is glad. Otherwise, he may have stopped speaking right there, with that question hanging between them like an axe.

"But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow." Sam tells him in voice filled with hope. "Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something."

Frodo's not sure if he believes his friend, but he has to know the answer. He has to hear what they're supposed to be holding onto. He had a feeling he knew what it was before, but now he cannot remember what it is...

It is all he can do to speak and even then his voice is weary and threadbare.

"What are we holding onto, Sam?"

Sam doesn't tell him right away. Instead he leans over and grabs Frodo under his arm and helps pull him back up to his feet. He steadies him when Frodo threatens to fall with the weight of the ring and he does not let go of his shoulder as he answers, blue eyes very bright.

"That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for.”

...

E. Aster Bunnymund's Warren

Day 26 - So the day that was supposed to be the day after Christmas isn't too soon to post something Easter related is it? ;3

As you may or may not have been able to tell from the title, this is the home of one E. Aster Bunnymund. But you probably know him better as the Easter Bunny. :3 He just made his newest debut in Rise of the Guardians, but it turns out that a series of books came out first (I don't know why I'm surprised since pretty much everything is based off of books nowadays. I'm not complaining exactly, just wondering why I'm surprised.)

Christmas Flashback

Day 25 - Okay, so it took me forever to put up this next picture because if I had kept up with a picture a day thing then Day 25 should have been Christmas Day. Only, ya know, I fell a month behind. xP Blah...

Anyway, this is my younger sister and I after she opened up my present to her. Now I am rather pleased with it (because let's face it, it's awesome) but I made her a Jazz scarf.

Jazz scarf!

Not jazz as in music see, but Jazz as in the Autobot Jazz! She and I are both huge TF fans so when I got this idea (about only a week before Christmas I swear) I just had to make it for her. I was originally going to buy her one off of etsy, but like I said it was only about a week before the big day, maybe not even that... o.O

But I found this plain colored cream scarf that was super duper long (a requirement that Sis put out there) and it was really nice and soft (Bonus!) and I sewed on a big blue plain of fabric, then a red ribbon-stripe, and with a white number four on top. It's really cool! And she loved it so much! xD Yay! I think that'll be what I remember most about this Christmas.

Well, that and the power went out. That was fun....

And my Sis lo~oved it. She oh so lo~oved it! Oh yeah she lo~oved it! *Keeps on dancing in seat*

Yay! And now that I have posted my favorite moment from Christmas, I feel emotionally free to move on and post other, not-Christmasy pictures.

Well...maybe not-Christmasy pictures....just saying...

I Want To See It Again!

I am of the firm belief that stories are important to people. They influence the choices we make, how we chose to live as human beings. They can show us a new way to look at the world around us or they can reinforce what we believe already. No matter what form we hear them as -- books, movies, or oral tales told around the Thanksgiving table -- they influence us. They are important.

The most recent story that reminded me of this was a movie I saw the other day with my Dad and my sister. It was Rise of the Guardians, one of the newest Dreamworks films for last year. Now personally, I think Dreamworks have been doing a stellar job, both in their well known animation style and their storytelling, and Rise of the Guardians did not disappoint.



So I felt going into the theater that I would like the movie. I'd been itching to see it since it came out, but the timing was always wrong or no one else was in the mode to see it with me. And really, what's the point of going to a movie if you can't enjoy it with someone else?

Box Fulla Penguins

Day 24 - So we were putting up our Christmas decor last night and it made me sad. :_

So here is a box full of penguins. It cheered me up, so I thought that maybe someone else out there could use a box full of penguin-y cheer too. :)

Hope things are going alright wherever and whoever you are.

Highland Castle

Day 23 - Wow, so I really dropped the ball this time. It's been so long since I posted a photo that I forgot what day I was on and had to look at my blog to get it right. n_n;

Anyway, so Christmas was fantastic, New Year's involved diet root beer (yay! I don't drink full-sugared sodas because I'm a type I diabetic and they're just not worth the amount of carbs) so all in all things have been wonderful these past few weeks. I'm sad Christmas is over though, but I'm so backed up on my Christmas fictions that I think I'll recover once I get 'em all sorted out.

So my brother is amazing! He got me these awesome art pens for Christmas and they. are. Awesome! I mean I love them sooooo much! (Thanks again bro! Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!!!! :D) I just wanted some black pens in different nib sizes. And not only did he get me those, he got me some colored pens too! <3 And I love them!

This makes me feel super bad because I forgot to get him something. o.O I swear I didn't know what to get! He and Dad are ridiculously difficult to shop for. I thought he wanted some new headphones, but then Mom told me that he asked for a headset instead for his computer (and they told me those are expensive...) but then Christmas afternoon when I told him I was sorry because I didn't have anything for him that he did need some new headphones.

^-.-^ "Of course..." thinks I.

Anyway, so I've been playing with my new pens and this is one of my little sketches. I like how it came out (except that tree-monster! I hate that tree-monster! Dx). That bottom stretch of grass with the small rocks is my very favorite. It just looks perfect! :3

So...yeah. My brain has just crashed. I'm going to try and catch up on my photo-a-day quest, and there will probably be a handful more Christmas photos to make up for those days before Christmas that I didn't post. Just to let you know.

Hope you had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! :)