Paarrr Taaayyy...

Hubby and I went to buddy Justin's 30th birthday party. His wife, Bonnie, thought it would be a great idea to rent a kids BOUNCE HOUSE for the backyard. Booze, crazy friends, and a bounce house. OMG, we had more fun than adults should be allowed to have.

I'll post a couple photos here, but a bunch more can be seen on my MySpace page, CLICK HERE.

And these photos here don't do justice, there was a bunch of people there and it got crazy. These are the mild photos, and Bonnie has some wild pics from later that night.

Bonnie and me about to race (she won)

Bonnie's ruthless playing westlemania with Justin, I'm telling ya that girl's tough!

Slide on the other side, Bonnie and her sis Whitney

more to come...

As the night went on, and many drinks were had... and the clothes were torn off...

Umm, Bonnie, where's your HEAD???

Birthday boy Justin

By the way, Bonnie and Justin were our neighbors until this last fall when they bought their house in Trophy Club. Some kids got it all!

An image of brotherly love, Jason and Justin. More drinks were had, and then the wedgies started. This one was almost atomic.


Bonnie also hired a gaming company to set up Blackjack and Texas Hold'em tables, complete with dealers. Hubby played his game of choice, blackjack. I was hustled in poker by the card sharks below.

Justin's dad visited, and I lost count of the friends that showed up.

Stay tuned... photos from a party we attended this weekend coming soon...

Homework painting...

Yes, you even have homework for painting classes. Our project was to paint a "Walmart Baroque"... baroque is a style that features a high contrast in lighting (like a spotlight being shined on a spot in a dark room), and we were supposed to use objects that could be purchased at Walmart. Alright, I cheated a little since Lennox stemware aren't generally in the glassware aisle at Walmart... but the instructor didn't really care.

By the way, this painting isn't finished yet, it's still a work in progress. I still need to paint in the label on the bottle, and make other adjustments to it. But, we had to take our homework to class today for a critique... and our instructor stole my painting to display it on a wall in our building.

I'm calling the painting "Spiked Pears". And FYI that's cream sherry, not wine. And I kept having to buy new bottles of it to paint, as I kept running out of the sherry. HA HA

In the next photo, you can't see the variation in colors at the top of the bottle... crappy cellphone camera made it look all white, but it's not really like that. Grrrr

Oh, and this is the first time that I've ever attempted to paint glass and reflections.

One of these days I'll finish it and somehow have it photographed with a decent camera. Until then, this will have to do!

College notes...

It's official... or almost anyway... I filled out the online application to University of North Texas, to enter Spring 2009. I should be more than finished with my core curriculum classes at TCC by then. Now UNT just have to approve the application. I know, I know, if they let me in it just goes to show they'll let anybody in, right?

As long as they have the money, that is.

Speaking of which... I've spent a good part of this spring break week looking up scholarship info. Such a pain in the butt. It ain't easy finding scholarships in a niche that I fit into... I'm not hispanic, black, or a current high school student (sorry for the lack of politically-correctedness). I'm also not going into the nursing field or aeronautics. I thought there might be more scholarships for women, but the few I've found have requirements that I don't match. There was one I may be able to apply for, for women over age 30 or something like that...

UNT has a Transfer Student scholarship... but alas I waited too long- all scholarship applications had to be in by March 1. DAMN! Damn damn!

The department at UNT that I'll be entering is the School of Visual Arts (SOVA). They even have a scholarship that if you win you have to keep a blog about your first-year experience as a student. That could be fun. But again, I think I'm too late for that.

Anyway I'm still looking. Plus, I should still qualify for the Pell grant or state grants, it'll cover some of it.

Oh yeah, and loans. Dirty four-letter word, student loan. That's a last resort.

But for now, just another 9 months and 8 classes to go to finish at TCC. I'm looking forward to switching schools. Then the real fun begins.

Spring Break!

Woo hoo. Those words just don't mean the same as they did as a kid. It used to mean vacation, trips, fun, running around with friends. Now it just means a break from school work, more time to catch up on housework.

By the way, I should mention Hubby won an award at school... his psychology teacher thinks he should major in psych rather than engineering, and she saw to it that he won the Student Achievement Award from the Psychology Department. It'll be a small money award, but we're hoping it will also look good on applications for scholarships, etc. Anyway, I'm proud of the teacher's pet!

I've been hung...

Well I guess I've reached a milestone... three of my artworks are now in a local gallery. One of the three is the pic I use as my avatar, the drawing of Peace Rules:

It's a small gallery with artisan jewelry and artwork by local "undiscovered" artists. But, this summer the gallery owner is moving the shop to a new location at a large development being build in our town called the "Arthouse"... they're art-deco apartments with galleries and shops underneath (as that seems to be the latest trend in commercial developments around DFW.) The plan is to draw upper-scale clientele to the Arthouse area... so when the gallery moves to that location my artwork will be going with it. It's probably a good place to start out.

Plus, the gallery sends out a monthly email newsletter, and they're putting me in as one of the subjects in the next one going out.

So anyway, thanks to Hubby for talking to the gallery owner and arranging this, I'm now on display. :-)

Weathermen blew it again...


Here are some photos from 2:30pm today. The first one I call...

"No accumulation expected"

(as the weathermen said this morning)

At this point we'd only had maybe an inch fall, but now they're saying we'll get 2-5 inches total. It's huge fluffy Colorado-like flakes falling. It may stop for a while later, but then a second wave is supposed to hit later tonight.

We were in painting class when the freezing rain started, finally our instructor kicked us all out and said "GO HOME!" We were on a roll with our painting, darn it! Oh well.

Hubby just stuck a snowball in the freezer. My reaction is, "Umm, why??" Like frozen water is rare or something? Like the freezer isn't already full of ice?

And his ruler on the car is showing 3-1/2 inches so far.

March is in like a lion...

Here we are in March and have had two snow advisories in one week... global warming my ass!!!

Gatorade anyone?...

This has got to be the funniest football commercial I've ever seen in my life:

Which hemisphere ARE you in?...


I came across some quizzes on the Web that I took out of curiousity... tests that are supposed to show if you are a left-brain or right-brain type of person. (There are links to take the quizzes yourselves if so inclined... and bored) Just like any of the Internet "I.Q." tests, they're really subjective to the way the test is set up. But, I took the tests anyway just to see what they said.

This first one had mainly "yes" or "no" answers, which I don't give much credit to since I tend to see things more in a grey area. I don't generally deal in extremes, I'm somewhere in between "yes" and "no". Regardless, here's my results:

Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz The higher of these two numbers below indicates which side of your brain has dominance in your life. Realising your right brain/left brain tendancy will help you interact with and to understand others. Left Brain Dominance: (10) Right Brain Dominance: (14) Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz

So, as you see it says I'm slightly more right-hemisphered.... supposedly the "creative" side as people view it.

The next one was less extremist, as the answers were on a sliding scale. You could chose to what degree that you feel the questions were like you or unlike you. So, the results were a bit different:

Brain Lateralization Test Results

Right Brain (54%) The right hemisphere is the visual, figurative, artistic, and intuitive side of the brain. Left Brain (62%) The left hemisphere is the logical, articulate, assertive, and practical side of the brain

Are You Right or Left Brained?
personality tests by similarminds.com

"Left brain dominant individuals are more orderly, literal, articulate, and to the point. They are good at understanding directions and anything that is explicit and logical. They can have trouble comprehending emotions and abstract concepts, they can feel lost when things are not clear, doubting anything that is not stated and proven.
Right brain dominant individuals are more visual and intuitive. They are better at summarizing multiple points, picking up on what's not said, visualizing things, and making things up. They can lack attention to detail, directness, organization, and the ability to explain their ideas verbally, leaving them unable to communicate effectively.
Overall you appear to be Left Brain Dominant"

So I'm slightly more left hemisphered?

Okay, so I tried a third test. Unfortunately I couldn't copy/paste the results of the third one, it wouldn't let me. But, it gave the most interesting questions and seemed to have the most scientifically-based logic to the layout of the questions. It gave the most thorough analysis and you could go back and look at the meanings of each answer of each question. The link to the test is here:
http://www.planetpsych.com/zInteractive/brain.htm

It said what I thought all along... I'm actually "middle-brained"... both analytical and intuitive at the same time. Messy, but organized. Logical, but artistic. And it said I was very visual, no surprise there.

All this ultimately came up from a conversation with Hubby. I couldn't help but notice the irony in the two of us... he's going to school to be an engineer, and yet to me he's more the creative "think outside the box" idea man. But I'm going to be an artist (supposedly the "creative" type), but I've always been more of an engineer type of thinker. I always thought it was strange that for being a so-called artist, I could only deal with REAL objects, and could only draw realistically. I struggle with abstraction. And I'm not one of those weird eccentric artists, I'm more down to earth.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting. Had to share.