...I just realized I have over 10,000 pageviews. When did this happen?? I just want to thank you guys so much for the constant support and for stopping by so often! I'm really glad to have such a great network of friends who are always there for me... it means a lot, especially in the past year, when things have been more rough than ever. It's really great to stop by dA every day and see the comments, the replies, the faves and the watches... to see the journals, and read what you all are up to... to see all of your deviations and watch your writing and artwork progress, and to know you all have done the same for me. I'm just so glad to have all of you around. It's been an honor, guys, and I hope to keep it up for as long as I can.

Now... I personally believe that Christmas is a time of making a public celebration of how much you cherish the people around you, and pretty much showing off to other people how awesome your friends and family are. (It is also a time of packing your face with whatever goodies you can grab, but that's beside the point.) It is my belief that a gift wrought by someone's own hands is worth more than expensive gifts, because it is clear that this gift more than any other comes straight from the heart. So, I like to make picture gifts. I don't make one for everybody each year (because they take so friggin' long to do), but I try to not let anybody get shortchanged. ^^ I just thought I'd post a list of the picture presents I've done this year, just so you all can see them if you missed them!

For *Nortstar...
This is her Transformers fan character, Starlight. The phrase that sticks out most to me in her bio is that she is "exactly like the Twins." So, I drew a picture of her being mischievous. XD


For ~CanYouHearMeMajorTom...
This one was for *DarthPooky's Secret Santa exchange. I was assigned Major's request of Javert. I've never drawn him before, but The Quast is the Javert that I'm familiar with! XD


For ~booklover323...
She got me hooked on Pandora Hearts, and I wanted to return the favor by giving her a break (OHHH, I MADE A FUNNY) and showing Emily some holiday cheer (OHH, ANOTHER FUNNY.) (...the doll's name is Emily, just like the girl I made this for.) (...LAUGH, DAMMIT.)


For *DarthPooky...
Jen's done a few fanartz for me, so I wanted to return the favor! This is her OC, Lorenzo. He also loves acting to a point where it's hard to separate himself from the characters he plays. Here is him, rehearsing for an audition!


And for my brother Sith William...
I have to say, I am most proud of this one. It took 10 freaking hours and I'm pretty sure he jizzed himself. It's him and Seto Kaiba, summoning the Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon, with the help of a card of William's own creation...



Also, on another note... sadly, costume production has been put on hold until further notice (WHICH HOPEFULLY WILL ONLY BE A FEW DAYS). Our sewing machine, which is literally older than I am, has run into a few problems eating its own thread. We cannot figure out what is causing this so we're just getting a new one. YAY. In the meantime, I'm getting some RIT dye for Siege's vest, we're trying to find the best trench coat pattern to use for the Kaiba jacket, and I'm hunting down 2 specific children's trading cards on eBay. OMG ISHIZU, MY DECK IS OFF THE HOOK. WHEEEE!

_{[this is why Birde should never frolic]}

I hope you guys have all had happy Christmahanukwanzaakah, and I hope you all have happy new years!! Thank you so much for sticking around... dA has been pretty much the only bright point in my life for the past several months, and I have solely you guys to thank for it. So... thank you. Thank you.

Hopefully today will be better for everybody than yesterday was for me...

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS, THIS IS WHY I LOVE DOGS.

Okay, so I cut myself shaving Wednesday night, and there was blood like everywhere. I cleaned it up with some wet wipes and tissues, and put on a bandaid, everything was dandy. But um, yeah I'm living with the poodle still. You know what she did yesterday morning? You're gonna love this.

First thing she did was eat a crapload of her food. Then she decided that kibble wasn't enough and she wanted to eat something a little more exotic. SO... she tipped over the bathroom trash can, rooted around in the garbage, pulled out the wipes and tissues that I'd used last night, and CHEWED THEM UP. I HAVE NEVER KNOWN A CAT TO DO THIS, GUYS. Tip over a trash can and lick bacon-grease-soaked napkins, yeah. Tip over a trash can and PULL EVERYTHING ONTO THE FLOOR, and then CHEW on things that are not edible? Not so much. This, needless to say, made for a very unhappy Birde. But I cleaned it up and started working on Christmas drawing gifts such as Javert, Starlight, and Kaiba. The dog, her tummy now satisfied upon ingesting half the contents of the trash, skipped over to the rug at the top of the stairs, where she laid down and went to sleep.

Or... so I thought. About an hour after that fiasco, I got up to go get some dark grape juice (which is, next to mall soft pretzels and white-haired bishi boys, my one and only vice), and I discovered a HUGE PILE OF BARF at the top of the stairs.

Tallulah, in her infinite wisdom, had decided only after eating it that HUMAN BLOOD wasn't exactly such a great meal after all, and threw it up all over the place. But it wasn't just blood-soaked tissues that she'd barfed up, remember, because she'd eaten that huge friggin' meal just earlier. THIS GIVES ME RAGE OF THE BROOKLYN VARIETY.

On the bright side, my mommy showed me how to thread the sewing machine and set me up with green thread. So I can now re-sew the green polo for my Bakura costume (I had ordered a size small, but this was small in men's sizes, so I need to put in new side seams to make it more form-fitting). Hopefully this means I can also sew a new hem line in CJ's Malik vest, to make it bare her midriff. THE POWER OF HER MIDRIFF COMPELS YOU.

So yep. I hope everybody has a happy Christmas! And I hope everyone who got a gift from me enjoys it! (Kat, I'll have to give your gift to you in person... and Jen and Emily, I'm working on drawings for you two, but I'm just too wiped right now to finish them. They'll be up asap!)

Sooo... oh this is SUCH FUN I CAN'T EVEN DESCRIBE. BUT I WILL TRY.

I'm house-sitting for one of my art professors until Jan 10, and OMG ISHIZU this place is off the hook, but um... they have a miniature poodle.


Don't get me wrong, I love animals, but... there are some animals that I don't love to live with. Most dogs fall into this category. You could definitely say I am a cat person, and not a dog person. See while cats are calm, and keep to themselves, and don't need to be let outside to urinate, and will sit quietly in your lap, and calm down considerably after they're about a year old, and might lick you maybe once a month, a DOG is super excited all the time no matter how old it is, and will flail onto your lap and flop about like an epileptic and snort nasty breath right in your face, and dogs HUMP all manner of things (even though this is a girl dog), and shoot arcs of pee in the air when you pet their belly, and LICK EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME. What's most charming is they will bend over and lick their pee-parts and then bounce up and licklicklicklick at your FACE. AIN'T COOL. Cats have discretion, cats have dignity, cats have pride. Dogs? Dogs want to lick and hump and pee. Preferably all at the same time. And they want you to LOVE THEM while they do this.

...yeah, so dogs are really cute when they're not living in my living space. When they ARE living in my living space... oh god. It's just... it's so fun.

And to make matters MORE interesting, we got hit with a snowstorm yesterday. For those of you who don't know, Birde hates snow. Now I'm surrounded by it, two feet deep. And since I live in East Jesus Nowhere, there are no snowplows that will come anywhere near here. No chance of the snow melting due to high traffic, cars or pedestrian. I had to shovel a patch in the back yard for the dog to go pee in. BUT. Oh, these guys are regular brain children, I tell you... they keep their snow shovel in a shed on the opposite end of the yard. Sooo... I had to walk THROUGH snow two feet deep to get to the shovel. Seems sort of stupid to have to walk through the very thing you're trying to avoid! Anyway, I shoveled a patch for puppy to pee, and shoveled a path back to the porch. Unfortunately though, she hates snow almost as much as I do, so she still won't go outside unless I friggin' throw her out there, so she still has to pee most of the time. So she's right in my face going YIPYIPYIPYIP YAAAAA YIPYIP all the TIME.

Oh, and you wanna know the best part? Tantrum's alternator is dying. (Tantrum is my '93 Ford Escort. He's a stick shift, which makes me very proud, and also makes for a lot less crap to keep track of because everything is manual and not electric!) So I got my mommy to drive me here, leaving Tantrum at my house about 10 miles away, and got hit with this massive snowstorm. I mean, T doesn't handle the snow at all anyway, but this means even if there wasn't snow, I still would have no way to escape from the friggin' poodle. >_<;;

The plus side is, I AM FINALLY OUT OF SCHOOL FOR THE SEMESTER. THIS MEANS COSTUMES. I've got my sewing machine from home, and I've pinned a couple artifacts of clothing, and they're ready to be sewn and de-sleeved and re-hemmed and cut off at midriff level. My white wig still hasn't arrived from the opposite end of the globe, but since I'm not at home, that doesn't really matter anyway. At least I can get Baku and Malik mostly done. I'm completely unable to work on Kaiba because I need new materials in order to do that, and to get new materials I would need a CAR, not to mention roads that are actually drivable... but eh, trifles. XD

I also managed to commit petty theft Thursday night. I'm gonna make the Millennium Rod & Ring out of fiberglass casts, so I need clay to make molds, right? So I figured, "The 3D art studio at school is always open, I'll just pinch some clay out of there. There's always a half-used bag sitting around somewhere, I'll just go in and steal it when no one's looking." (We're not supposed to use school-provided 3D materials for personal projects.) So I wait around until the studio is empty, and I go in there and... no already-open bags of clay. So I think, "Okay, I'll just take a whole bag then. There's always a half-open box with one bag in it." I go over to the boxes and... no half-open box. Well. Now I figure, "I'll just open a box and take one bag of clay out, nothing out of the ordinary about that." So I cut open a box (all the while, glancing around like a schizo, waiting for someone to barge in on me) and go to pull out a bag of clay, and... it won't budge. It's packed in there so tight it won't give an inch. (THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID.) So... now, thoroughly facedesking in my head, I figure, "Okay, last-resort time. I'll just take the whole friggin' box."

Umm... THESE BOXES WEIGH FIFTY EFFING POUNDS.

The box is so heavy I cannot sit it on the dining room table, because it will literally crack. I'm telling you, next time you wanna lift weights, use boxes of clay. Much more effective. The trip out the garbage disposal exit in the back and down the service ramp to my car was really, really fun. I'm just really glad this idea occurred to me during finals week and not any earlier, because I'm PRETTY SURE the 3D classes might have noticed fifty freakin' pounds of clay go missing. But at least I have clay, and I'm making progress... pics coming soon, I hope!

Okay, but in spite of all the RIVER OF GOLDEN HONEY-LIKE JOY that I'm swimming in at the moment... something amazing has happened.

Remember my poem "twenty little projects"?


I believe that everyone should publicly tip their hat to their favorite inspiration at least once. This poem, while telling the story of the past half-year of my life, pays massive tribute to a radiant young woman named Kelsey Rakes. You may have encountered her here on dA, as ~estallidos. She is my favorite poet, and my biggest inspiration for writing poetry. I shouldn't have to explain why; her works speak for themselves more than sufficiently. To explain why I love her would be to cheapen that love. Go read her work and be enlightened.

Well, the poem fluttered its way along the ever-changing winds of the intraweb and found its way to the hands of her friend, and without saying a word, Kelsey collected it. (You might think, "What, no comment?" No, no comment. She's Kelsey friggin' Rakes, she doesn't need to leave a comment.)
_{We did exchange notes though, me thanking her for dropping by, and her thanking me for writing it in the first place.}

My favorite poet has graced my poetry with a favorite.

...me happy ^^

OH-EM-JEE, ISHIZU.


...my Bakura sweater arrived. ^^


WHEEEEEEE!!



oh also if you're curious about OMG ISHIZU, watch this. Binky boy.

That's right, I've lost 8 pounds!

...in the past 2 days!



Yeah, not a good thing... and this is all due to a FANTABULOUS stomach illness that I picked up from somewhere. I haven't been able to consume anything more substantial than water in 2 full days now. Anything else just comes right back up. Needless to say, I'm hoping to just survive the weekend...

Despite this, though, I managed to be a GIANT FRIGGIN' HERO for my sister. Wednesday night was when this illness hit me, and it hit instantly, like I did not even see it coming. I thought it was just a migraine due to the snow. But no... it was the start of a stomach flu... anyway. Wednesday night was Fairfield High (my alma mater)'s winter concert. Fairfield has a tradition of of singing Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" from The Messiah every year, and the tradition is to invite alumni onto the stage to sing with the choir. The director, Mrs Mills, absolutely loves my three-time-District-Chorus-going first-soprano voice, so she pretty much insists that I be there to "make my choir good again for one song a year." But I had a migraine that was so debilitating I had already thrown up, and made me so dizzy I could barely stand. Light hurt, sound hurt, moving hurt. I couldn't eat. So, I was pretty pissed off that this migraine was keeping me from the concert, but I really couldn't go.

The concert started at 7pm, and I was in bed.

At about 7:30, I said to myself "OH FUCK THIS BULLSHIT. I'M GOING." And I popped a Vicodin, got dressed up, got in my car, and took off. I was already dizzy from the headache, and the Vicodin was kicking in fast, so driving in the dark was a LOT of fun, but I made it. I ran in the door and squeezed into my four-inch stiletto heels literally JUST in time for Mrs Mills to invite alumni onto the stage. My sister -- who knew I wasn't going to be coming -- looked up JUST at this moment, and nearly burst into tears. My mother, who was tape-recording the whole thing, DID burst into tears.

Immediately after the concert I just about died. Oh, my god, I honestly swore I wasn't going to make it. My mother was right along with me, having picked it up herself, so we were having a battle over the bathroom all night long. We got maybe 3 hours of sleep, collectively, while fighting very hard to just keep breathing. I experienced things I never imagined I would have to experience. I won't sicken you with details, but you can ask if you're THAT curious. It was easily the second-worst night of my life. The first was in April... a few of you will know what that was.

Now I'm still quite dizzy, but I just ate lunch without disastrous consequences (so far... I only ate about an hour ago and that does NOT mean you are safe, contrary to popular belief). My first solid food in 2 days... and I'm still about 8 pounds under my normal weight... fun. Fun stuff. Well, with the snow and the illness in tandem, I at least got to miss class for almost my whole last week!

-Addendum-

I held down lunch, and now have had a protein shake too... I really hope I don't spew that all over the place, because THAT would SUCK. But on a plus-note, a bunch of stuff for our Yu-Gi-Oh costumes arrived!