Christmas Came Early

Hey y'all. Sorry it's been such a dry spell of posts. Just the usual happening lately. Hmm...some updates....I'm very excited that it looks like my friend Andrea from CA will be visiting in Feb. She hasn't been out to Austin yet, and I'm so looking forward to it. She's an old high school friend that's now an architect in the bay area. We always joked that she'd design my house for me, but that didn't quite work out, since my house was built in '79. ...... I watched Thank You for Smoking at Mike & Annette's house and I really liked it. I didn't know what to expect, but it's all about a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, and it was funny! We laughed quite a bit, and at the end realized that I don't think you ever see anyone actually smoking. Check it out. Good movie. ..... Yesterday Matt and I went to the Annual Gem and Rock show. I went last year cause I'm fiddling with the idea of making a coffee table and putting pretty slabs of agate/quartz/whatever on the top. I had purchased some stones last year and never worked on it. I bought some more this time and now I have enough to make the actual table and have a few left over to test out how I'm going to set the stones. Don't know when I'll get around to it, but hopefully within the next year. After that we went to a car show. I'd never been to one, and it was really cool. It was at the Austin Convention Center and all the big auto makers had their new models out. We were there pretty late so it wasn't too busy. We were able to check out and sit in everything without feeling rushed. Matt's looking into getting a new convertible, so we focused on those. We checked out a bunch, and it's amazing the design decisions some companies have made. There were some really stupid ideas with cup holder placements, glove box sizes, and back seat configurations. Luckily, I didn't see anything that was calling out to me to buy it. I'm happy with my Corolla. I did check out the new model to see what they changed. Strangely, everything was the same as my car (a 2003) except for one feature that I really like - the odometer, speedometer, gas gage area (what is that called?) on mine has a white background with dark green numbering. So, at night it's all lit up and it makes driving at night a little safer because it's a light in your face, instead of being all dark, like most displays. But, it looks like in the new model they went back to dark background with white numbering. With the amount of night driving I do, and all the long-distance driving I do, I really love my white display. I think it's a great safety feature and don't understand why they would change it. Glad I bought my car when I did!

Anyways, about the post title: I finally put up a Christmas tree this year. I have a ton of panda ornaments (cause, you know, I've collected pandas since I was 5) and I bought a fake tree last year, but was too worried about the cats. This year, I'm thinking hell with it, if they knock it down, oh well. Here's a pic. This actually isn't all my ornaments. I didn't put out about 15 of my most delicate glass/ceramic ones, just in case the cats do get into it. It's damn hard finding panda bear Christmas ornaments! Damn teddy bears take over everything!

My favorite ornaments are those that have a panda bear instead of the usual teddy bear. For example, these two below of the firefighter panda and the toy box.

Another happy event was I received some artwork that I'd commissioned over a year ago. There's an artist whose website I found years ago and really liked her style of drawing women. I was fiddling with the idea of a drawing of a fairy reading a sci-fi book..you know..mixing sci fi with fantasy. At first I was thinking about it as a tattoo, but knew it would have to be too big to see all the detail. It would've had to be a back piece or really big on my leg or something. I've realized that I don't want any more tattoos on my back cause I'd rather be able to see them, and I just wasn't really 'feeling' it as a leg tattoo. So, instead I thought it would just be cute and whimsical as a framed piece. I gave her my idea and preferred colors, but she came up with the majority of the final rendering. She sent me both the original graphite drawing and the version she colored in photoshop. I really wish I had some artistic talent. I love how these came out. If you click on the picture it comes up bigger and you can really see the detail.

Here is her website.

http://www.artisticcompulsive.com/Art%20Pages/ArtBWalters/BrennaWaltersArchive1.htm