Hey, if anyone cares, I ain't goin' be round here no more. If I want to succeed in my academic pursuits, let alone my overblown artistic ambitions, I've got to stop spending time on frivolous net pursuits. Therefore, I am now blocking Youtube (my #1 time wasting enemy), deviantart, xkcd, questionable content, megatokyo, scarygoround, etc. If I get bored, I can write, take pictures, read an unassigned textbook, or fiction, art magazines or political magazines or literary magazines. Sure, I do these things already, but not enough in proportion to time-wasting net use. Or I can even work on improving my car's handling or work more to try to make enough money to buy a heavily used sports car. But none of these things require sitting in front of a computer screen for hours upon endless hours. And thank God for that.

If you got something to say, email me at tanfakatanacat (AT) yahoo (dot) com

Ahh, it feels nice to be putting stuff up again, even though I've still got a huge backlog of photos which I may or may not decide are worth putting up.

I would love your comments. The more detailed the better, when it comes to constructive criticism. I of course welcome praise, but it's only useful in boosting my ego, not making me a better shooter.

I spend most saturdays doing my job, cleaning and preparing my church for sunday services. Depending on how slow or fast I'm working and what sort of challenges pop up I occasionally end up working past midnight. For the last month, in fact, I've usually finished between 12:00 and 2 am. But tonight I turn(ed) 20, and I guess that made me a little more motivated than ususal, because I finished the tasks that have taken up to 10 hours (on reaaly really bad days) in less than half that time and by about 10:25 I was in my car bumping some old school Public Enemy and shifting to reverse.

Now in the parking lot behind the church you have to park between these deadly little stuccoed (the better to grip your paint job, my dear) pillars that have cost many a poor parking person dearly, and today it seems my luck was up. As I excitedly accelerated out of my space, turning in the direction that I knew held a blue dumpster and a thin pole that had probably dented hundreds of cars. I peered through my fogged back window as I turned, trying to see the pole. Apparently, I hadn't already cleared the first obstacle, the column. With a wrenching shudder and a hideous thunk I scraped free of its clutches. I mentally crossed my fingers and continued backing up, determined to ignore it and examine the damage when I got home. As I drove forward, still in denial, an unnerving scraping sound brought me to my senses.

I got out and walked around the front, and found my whole front end on the ground! The bumper and grill were draggin from the left edge of my car, and completely flush with the ground on the right. My left headlight and both blinkers were dangling from their electrical cables. After taking stock of the damage and consulting with home base (the progenitors) I went scouting for some sort of thin strong cables and came up with a roll of electrical wire.

As I was figuring out how to best wire the bumper back onto my car two moderately inebriated figures approached fresh from the pub to check out the damage. After they learned that I had been leaving church, rather than than having drunkenly slushed my bumper off, I "endured" the most gentile and good natured teasing I've ever heard. After I mentioned that ironically, I'd smashed up my car on my birthday hour the girl gave me a great big hug which made me feel a little better (from stunned and apathetic to moderately fuzzy) and then the guy took a look at the blinker that didn't want to fit back in. He decided it needed tape to hold in place, which I'd already decided, and they set off back to the pub in hope that someone there would probably have a roll of duct tape in their pickup or something.

I wired it up.

Knowing that mildly inebriated people -although well intentioned- may not be entirely reliable, I then set out to find my own tape. (To deviate mildy from chronology, I think I may have tried to open the hood before I went to tape up the lights.) After I finished using up my 2nd roll of mostly used duct tape and resorted to packaging tape, a familiar minivan rolled up and a friend and co-worker rolled his window down and his eyes up. For the next hour we trouble-shot and problem solved and once we had everything wired and taped down tight more or less in their proper locations we picked up Dell Taco and just chilled for a while.

I don't look forward to paying for a replacement bumper, or installing it, but I'm actually kind of glad I had such a memorable evening. Tonight I was forced to stop coasting through life and think on my feet, to experience every moment fully in the now. There was no opportunity for disconnect, the only way is to roll with things, accept them, deal with it, move on. The damage is unfortunate, what it taught me about cars and automotive design, curious. What I remember most happily is the simple interactions I had with kind-hearted people tonight.

hmm there's so much more I could say if it wasn't so late, and I'd have said it all much better too, but it's not and I din't so I think I'll stop right here:

Hey devwatchers, any of you who actually look at my page. I have news. I may begin updating soon. I have taken many pictures, and drawn many drawings since I last uploaded, and I think it's time I stop being lazy and start posting (and drawing) regularly. Just because flickr is easier doesn't mean I should abandon devart, I think?

EDIT: Also, I need to clean out my devart account so I don't hate it, and this means going through my deviations and moving anything to scraps that doesn't "cut the mustard," as some people surely say. So, if anyone browses through my gallery and espys a piece or 5 that doesn't really look like it should be in my main gallery, please drop me a comment on it and I'll think about scrapping it. I want to keep at least some sort of continuity of finished pieces from my first posts till now so I can see improvement/change, so I might keep some older finished pieces for that purpose. Otherwise, though, fire away.

If you have any well intended constructive criticism to go with it, that would be even more appreciated.

FINALLY: I'm going to start going through my friends/watch list and start removing people whose stuff I never look at (and vice versa). Don't worry, if I've left you a comment (or vice versa), you probably ain't gonna get cut. I need to make deviantart usable again so that I can find deviations from certain people and comment/view them without wading through THIS: | 2,267 deviations, 1,036 messages

Because that is simply unacceptable.

Yeah, so I've been doing a bit of drawing today. Hurrah, it feels really nice. Even better than drawing alone, I also snuck in some unexpected writing in the "descriptions" of some o the sketches.

Scrapses! (Because I am out of practiz!)

The Soldier: [link]

Dear UNdiary: (few weeks old, but good. Visual poetry, sort of.) [link]

Crucible: [link]

we're not scared, fear mongerers (Crucible detail, with a different point of view for the story aspect) : [link]