My Homeschooling Place

[Note: this paragraph is a tangent, and is quite skip-able. Skip to the 2nd paragraph for the actual content for today's post. The paragraph is staying because I like rambling and this is my blog so I can ramble here to my heart's conent. =P] I'm back after a short break. My mom was visiting some last week, and we were busy sorting and cleaning out stuff, so that's where last Wednesday's and last Friday's posts went. You didn't miss much. I haven't made a lot of progress on anything art-wise lately. XD I've been on a big purge-all-the-things and an organize-all-the-other-things kick. Ostensibly by simplifying things I am hoping to make it so I can have more time overall to work on art projects. Right now, I feel like I spend way too much time trying to keep up with basic chores around this house. Okay, so realistically, it will never be that clean considering six people and four cats live here, but my goal, right now, is to streamline things so that a reasonable state of cleanness can be achieved with less time and effort. So, I'm reorganizing things so that everything has a place (this is the organizing part). If I cannot find a place for something, I am getting rid of it (this is the purging part)--you can imagine after 13.5 years of marriage, my husband and I have collected quite a bit of stuff, not to mention the 20.5 years of stuff before getting married. XD There are a few things I can't find places for now that I really really want to keep--a lot of my books are falling into this category right now--and those things are getting boxed up, labeled, and put in a special place in the garage for the time being. My books will come out eventually, but for now it will just have to wait. I plan on converting my oldest's bedroom into a library as soon as he leaves for college (<5 years away now); I'll put a fold out couch or something in there for when he comes home to visit. He's okay with this since he's actually more bookish than I am. =P

Anyways, back on topic. I spent a lot of last week working on the reorganizing/purging project since we had the week off from school. The focus was mostly the room I use for homeschooling stuff, and sorting clothing since my boys seemed to be having trouble figuring out what was theirs and what was their brothers--given all of them have very small waists and no butt to speak of even the 12 year old can fit into the 6 year old's shorts. The school area is a big focus for me because it's one of those places that gets a lot of use and gets really messy really quickly, and I spend a lot of time cleaning it up. I got new shelves for the school area last week that suit the area much better than the shelves I had there before. The old shelves have been sent up to my oldest's bedroom (step one to making his room into a library and in the mean time I'll let him store his books on it =P). I'm not 100% finished getting everything back on the shelves. I did manage to throw out 2 giant trash bags worth of stuff and box up 2 large plastic buckets worth of books we probably don't need out right now. The idea is that if there's less stuff, there's less to pick up, and if everything has a clear place, it's easier for the kids to help pick things up in the afternoon. A couple of weeks ago, I also invested in a drop leaf table. I put fuzzy felt things on the bottom of the table legs so I can move it easily. This way the kids have a place to work at, but when we aren't doing school, I can fold the table up and slide it out of the way.

So, here's some pictures of the progress on the school area. There area still some things I'd like to do, although it's starting to get into the cosmetic changes as opposed to practical changes. For instance, I want to recover the red chair, and I'd also like to paint the bottom half of the room (you'll note there is a random piece of molding going across the middle of the wall--that came with the house, and I'm disinclined to go through the effort of removing it).

 The chair I want to recover. It's a 3rd generation hand-me-down and is super comfy; it's just not my color. This corner probably needs the most work, but mostly just in straitening things up. After a couple of weeks of use the book boxes there on the left get kind of messy.

 The new shelves...

 The kids' computer area plus the drop-leaf table stored away.

The drop-leaf table when it's pulled out.

Crazy Month Is Crazy

I completely forgot to post this yesterday. I'm not too surprised considering what's going on here. This post is to give you guys an idea of what this month is going to look like, and why work on art projects is going to be kind of hit or miss.

As you may recall, last week, I posted that we got an offer on the house. The house has been inspected, and we have a list of repairs to make--all of them fairly reasonable. Starting now through the end of the month, we will be working on fixing things in our house. Also, later this month we will be packing up and moving everything (again), although this time it won't be so bad since a lot of our stuff is still in storage and won't have to go anywhere; we'll just be packing up what we kept and adding it to storage. Still, I hate moving and packing, even with less stuff. >_<

So, the first reason why this month will be crazy is we're going to be moving and doing a bunch of repairs to the house. The next reason is Anime USA. This coming Thursday, we'll be driving up to the Washington D.C. area, and spending Friday through Sunday running a table in Artist Alley. On that note, I am still trying to get the Sailor Moon mecha pilot bookmarks finished for the convention. I have today, and maybe Monday, to get those done. @_@ At that point, I have to take stuff to the printers, so I make sure I have time to cut out and laminate everything before we leave for the convention.

Oh yeah, and if that wasn't enough craziness, I'm pregnant. =P Seriously. XD This explains why I've been so tired over the last month--those following me on Twitter might have noticed the number of naps I've been taking or nights where I've just gone to bed super early. All in all, that's not a bad thing, and the real craziness for that won't show up until the spring, but it does affect my energy levels, so I probably won't be pulling the all-nighters I normally do before a convention, which means I may not be finishing all 15 of the bookmarks I wanted to have done--#5 will be done today; I might try for 10.

Keeping all that in mind, I'm going to try and keep working on art projects, but it's probably going to be a fairly slow month. I'm hoping December will be better--I'll be chilling at my parents temporarily while we save money for a down payment on a new place to live, so the moving and house stuff won't be an issue. There are also no conventions on my schedule for December. There will still probably be low-energy days, but I think I can work with that. December, I'm planning on a new "What Would ___ Do?" set. Twelve new prints and badges featuring different games and characters from the first set. In the next couple of weeks I'll probably put some polls up for some of the games where I'm having trouble picking which character I want to draw from it. =)

No News Is Good News, Right?

Yesterday, I posted a belated WIP (sort of) post. The inspectors came. Things ended up weird, but I'm not sure if that's really bad yet. They came yesterday morning, and I came back to the house 2.5-3 hours later and no one was here, so I thought they were done. I dropped off the cats (we always try and take the cats out of the house along with their litter, food dishes, and stuff when someone comes to the house to look at it) then left for an impromptu trip to Misenheimer because my husband's car was having issues. When we got home last night, there were lights on that I know weren't on when I left. There were other little indications that someone had been here. Nothing was missing; it just looked like someone had been poking around. I've talked with my agent and we think that they came back to check some more stuff. I felt a little bad that the cats were here when whoever came back; not that I really think our cats are that bad, but there are four of them, some people are allergic, and their litter is messy, so it's not the kind of thing I like leaving out for people to see--at least people who are looking to maybe buy our house. I'm a little irked that we weren't told that someone was coming back to the house, but I don't want to make a huge deal about it--I really really want these people to buy this house. I am ready to move on past this stage in my family's life. I just hope the cats didn't deter them--I love my kitties, but I can't expect everyone else to feel the same way about them really. I haven't heard anything back yet, and our agent said we probably won't until they're done with this inspection, the termite inspection, and any others they order, unless there's something the buyers have a major problem with. So, no news at this point sounds like good news.

Anyways, our house stuff isn't all that "on topic" for this blog; it is something that is a very big part of my life right now, though, and it will indirectly affect what I can get done art-wise. Now to share some thoughts on something more on topic. Yesterday during my drive, I was thinking about the Sailor Moon Mecha Pilot bookmark set I'm supposed to be working on for Anime USA. Spending days in the car and being sick for most of this week--still sick and really not liking it for that matter--are not the best conditions for productivity. Still, driving can be a good time to reflect and think about projects. This is a good thing because if I can get a clear idea of what I want to draw in my head before I sit down with paper, I will finish a project a lot faster. The result of my thinking yesterday is that I got some really awesome images in my head for the set, except they won't fit on bookmarks. I don't really want to turn them into badges, but I also don't really want to do the larger 8.5 x 11 prints either. I am thinking of doing smaller postcard sized prints of them and also adjusting the images for the bookmark set that I'd originally planned to do. I'm still thinking about this, but I like the idea. Actually I really just like what I want to draw, and the post card size suits the images I have in my head. =P I'm really excited about this set right now, and I hope to have at least the Inner Senshi done by next week's WIP post. =D

Plans Changed (Works in Progress No. 1, Vol 8)

Yesterday, I wrote my WIP post for Wednesday. All it needed was pictures. I've included the original post below just because--I wrote it, might as well put it out there since I put the time into doing it. =P I've been sick, so after writing the blog post, I'd curled up on the couch and dozed while answering questions the boys had on some of their school work--I've been having them work on subjects that they can do more independently since I got sick; we'll catch up on the subjects that require more of my attention once I start feeling better. It's days like this that I love how flexible our schedule is. So after my nap, I had planned on getting pictures, adding them to the post, then uploading the post. It should be pretty clear from where this is going, that getting pictures did not happen, and it wasn't just the pictures that didn't happen. With the way things are playing out, pretty much everything I wrote in the bulk of my post is now wrong. Gotta love when life does that to you, but in this case, I have no complaints, and here's why.

To start with, my nap ended up lasting into early afternoon, when I woke up to my cell phone. It was my real estate agent calling. If you recall from my Moving Update post back in early July, we had to move back into our old house. My husband has been dealing with a very long commute, and there have been a lot of days where I've had to travel with him (with all the kids in tow) because a lot of our life still functionally exists closer to where he works. This move was to be temporary, we hoped. We would stay in this house until it sold. I'll admit we haven't been overly optimistic. The house went up for sale in early June 2010. However, we got an offer on our house over the weekend, and yesterday, our agent had gotten in the official paperwork where the buyers accepted our counter-offer. So yesterday evening we spent with our agent going over and signing our half of that paperwork. The buyers are very enthusiastic, which is encouraging to me. They're having the house inspected today, which meant last night, we spent a lot of time cleaning things up. Technically, whether the house is clean from clutter or not should not really matter for an inspection, but there are two reasons why we were doing this: 1) Face it, a cleaner house will make a better impression on someone overall; it is my opinion that if the house is cluttered and messy, then the house does not look well cared for, and the inspector will be more likely to find things wrong with the house. 2) We found out from our agent that the buyers will be accompanying the inspector through the house; these are the people we want to keep happy so that they don't pull out, which they can do at any time in the next three weeks--technically four weeks, but after three weeks, we get to keep their earnest money if they do, which makes it less likely that they'll back out then.

Needless to say, at that point, thoughts of getting pictures for my blog were gone from my head. We've been stressing over trying to get things cleaned up here, which although they weren't bad, there was still clutter that comes from me having been sick over the last several days; I haven't been as on top of regular chores as I would normally be. Even this morning, there's still a lot of little things that I need to take care of. On top of that, to start clearing things out, we packed up and sent all the Halloween stuff and scrap fabric for my husband to take back to storage on his way to work this morning. Included with the Halloween stuff were both the Jack and Sally costumes, my Mae costume, and my Gothic Panda costume. It kind of makes it difficult to get pictures of costumes that I don't have access to anymore. XD With all the stuff going on with the house right now, me being sick (I am feeling a little better today, but not close to 100% yet), and art for Anime USA coming up, we decided that fixing the Jack and Sally costumes did not need to happen; we're not even going to bother with costumes at Anime USA this year. My goal now is to take things easier and hopefully get better soon, focus on keeping the house cleaned up--it's not sold yet, so there could still be showings, plus outside of the inspector coming today, there will also be an appraiser coming out at some point this month, and try and get that bookmark set I'd planned for AUSA done. Sadly most of those things aren't quite as fun as the projects I'd like to be working on, but sometimes the stuff life dishes up is more important. I think right now is one of those times.

Overall, I'm not going to complain. After almost a year and a half with this house for sale, we finally got an offer, and it was a reasonable offer. You have no idea how excited I am about this. I'm trying not to worry and stress too much about all the things that could go wrong between now and closing (Nov 28) because worry never helps anything really. If all goes smoothly, we will be moving again at the end of this month. I may hate moving, but this is one of those moves that will be a good thing in the long run.

It's that time of the week again, except this time I don't really have much new to post. I'm currently working on trying to be not sick anymore. I've had this nasty cold/flu thing for the last couple of days. About all I've been capable of is dragging myself out of bed just to curl up on the couch and go back to sleep. XD

However, I can post some not-so-great photos of the mostly-finished Jack and Sally costumes. I need to make some adjustments to the size and shape of Sally--only a little, it actually came out really close to what I needed, and considering I only spent maybe 4 hours on what you see in the pictures, I think that's excellent. I also need to go back and add the black stitching lines on her dress. If I'd really like to do things right, I'll also want to pick up a wig, but eh... that's low on my list of priorities right now. For Jack, I want to completely redo the collar thing and the cummerbund. Inspiration for the adding a cummerbund comes from the Disney character version that you can find walking around the parks this time of year. It's a good idea because honestly, with the proportions of the coat and the way pants fit normal people, the white shirt under the jacket will show around the waist. A black cummerbund neatly fixes that problem, except the one I put together last minute only sort of work and needs adjusting. The jacket needs some minor adjustments to the back--it puckers just a little where the tails connect to the main part of the coat; it's not super noticable, but I know it's there and it annoys me. I also didn't like how poofy the collar piece came out--only partly intentional. The only material I had on hand to try and fill it out was fiber fill stuffing. I'd like to take the stuffing out and replace it with floral wire or something along those lines--something much less poofy, but could still help the collar keep its shape. Of course, I'd also like to actually get snaps or something on the collar, since right now, it's just held on by safety pins. Now, I am technically planning on making at least most of these adjustments by Anime USA because I'd like to take these costumes there. Of course, my plans did not involve me getting sick for half a week, and new art for the art table will be taking priority over these costumes.

Week in Review: Countdown to the end of July

20 days till Otakon.... You've got to be kidding me. That's less than 3 weeks away. *insert panic* Combine this with the fact that our lease ends July 31, the last day of Otakon. I won't go into details but there's an approximately 50/50 chance we'll be expected to be moved out of the house we're in by that day, and we won't know for sure for another 2 weeks whether we're leaving or staying. *insert more panic*

So yeah... I'm more than a little stressed right now. That said, this is going to be a fairly short blog post for now--I can't even remember what I'd planned to post today. XD Since we might be moving, my husband and are going ahead and going through things and "packing". We're cleaning out and getting rid of--throwing away or donating--anything we don't need or can't use. While we're doing that, we're boxing up stuff in a nice organized way, at least as organized as I can manage. This is really a good thing whether we move or not because I've really been needing to go through all the junk we've collected over the years--I confess to being a packrat, and there's a lot there we really could do without. Also, since we don't own this house, there is a lot of stuff that has to stay boxed up because I don't have any place to put it at the moment--it's worth noting that we had an option to purchase this house in our rental contract so that when our old house sold (it hasn't yet), we could turn around and buy this house, and then I could "remodel" the extra room in this house to be a proper workspace for me where all those boxed up supplies would have a home. So, in this case, just because it doesn't have a home, doesn't mean I don't need it--in fact, it's been a royal pain because there's a lot of stuff I do need but can't find because of the mess of boxes in that extra room. Anyways, sorting through everything and re-packing is a good thing whether we move or not.

On top of all that, we're still preparing stuff for Otakon; it's definitely turning into something awkward given the lease situation. I'm still going though; I paid for the convention and the table, plus I have baby-sitters arranged for the weekend. I'm not sure how much of what I planned I'll actually be able to get finished before the convention. I still want to work on stuff; it'll help keep me sane with all the stressful house stuff going on. =) However, July is probably going to be a lite month for blog posts. I'll still try and post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; I should be able to keep up with the WIP posts at least, but the other posts might be a little on the short side, and if I disappear for a day or two, you'll know why. ^_^