Tag Archives: prccess gif

Skook WiP #71

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Greetings and salutations! It’s wonderful to see you here again. And wonderful to be seen.

These Days …

Speaking of seeing, I’d planned to have my first cataract surgery on Tuesday. I scheduled a week off from work for recovery. We put in a lot of work last week moving our previous housemate to her new apartment and rearranging our apartment to be available for a new housemate so that I wouldn’t be tempted to do anything physical this week. I had the date for the surgery but not the time. I was tol that the surgery center would call me with the time. At first I wasn’t told when they might call so I called a couple of times in previous weeks to get that time. I was told I needed to wait. They are short staffed and the surgery calender hadn’t been worked out for May yet. I was told that someone would call me two business days before the appointment.

Two business days was April 29th. Halfway through the day I got tired of waiting and called them. I was told by the doctor’s office that they would send a message to the surgery center to have someone call me. And no one did.

On Monday morning Sarah tried calling but couldn’t get through. I called during work breaks and got shuffled around but finally spoke to the surgery center. My name wasn’t on their list of patient scheduled for Tuesday. I called the doctor’s office, again, and was sent to the scheduler She checked. Yup. I hadn’t actually been scheduled.

The scheduler was apologetic. I sighed and got new dates from her. I think she was surprised that I didn’t rage at her. I didn’t see the point. Yelling at her wouldn’t have gotten me an appointment.

One of my frustrations here is that I don’t have a way to check their surgery schedule and no one I talked to checked for me. They made the assumption that I was scheduled and the surgery center would call me when they had a time. I sent the doctor’s office an email expressing my frustration with this situation and got another apology from the scheduler along with assurances that she would personally call me when my surgery time was determined.

Hopefully that will happen.

In the meantime this is my Long Week, the six day work week that occurs every six weeks because of our rotating days off. So I’m tired.

Mugshots

This weeks process gif is of a bookshelf of Cthulhu Mythos tomes. I think of this as the metal version of the books. I suspect that the books, if they actually existed would be more sedate looking. But what would be the fun in that?

As usual, this design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store and on all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Here’s Licking at You!

I get a lot of ideas for designs while I am delivering mail. Most of them fade away after a few minutes. This one stuck with me until I had a chance to draw it.

This one is only on schtuff in my Redbubble store. It didn’t fit well on a mug.

That’s it for this week. I hope you are well and living your best life.

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #62

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Greetings!

Today is not the Apocalypse. It might feel like it but it’s not. At least, it’s not the one pop culture keeps insisting that it is.

From Wikipedia:
Apocalypse has come to be used popularly as a synonym for catastrophe, but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation.[7] It has been defined by John J Collins as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, in that it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”[15] Collins later refined his definition by adding that apocalypse “is intended to interpret present, earthly circumstances in light of the supernatural world and of the future, and to influence both the understanding and the behaviour of the audience by means of divine authority.”[15]

The divine sends messages. Whether we get them depends on whether we’re tuned to listen.

These Days ...

Wake up around 3 am. Drink two cups of coffee while internet scrolling/uploading designs/completing designs in Photoshop/doing marketing stuff. Wake up the house. Make and eat breakfast. Get into the uniform. Drive to work. Sort mail. Deliver mail. Have lunch. Go back to delivering mail. Return to the station and sort the undeliverable mail. Shop on the way home. Have dinner while watching something entertaining. Work on art. Get ready for bed. Sleep.

Repeat.

There are variations each day. I work on different designs. We have different meals. On days off I cook or spend more time on art or we run errands together. There are doctor visits and trips to Costco and. lately, trips to sell books at Half Price Books.

The routine could be comforting. It could be boring. It’s both. Of course. Life is rarely just one thing or another.

I think about Apocalypses regularly because our culture seems to be obsessed with them. Mostly it seems to be obsessed with the end of the world version. Pop culture has been feeding us different varieties of doom for decades. At least one of our dominant religions thrives on reminding us that we are in the End Times. The pandemic continues. Russia invades Ukraine. The song says, “No one can convince me we aren’t gluttons for our doom”.

But …

People still have children. People still make plans. Start businesses. Go out in the sun. Fall in love. Engage in life as if life will go on. That’s one of the harder things for me pay attention to when I’m feeling/thinking like I’m stuck. Life is not black and white, either/or, good/bad. It’s a mix. It’s a continuum. Once upon a time, realizing this was an epiphany. Now it’s something of which I have to remind myself.

Stories of doom and hubris and failure and survival are valuable. They’re also easy. A story, we are told, requires conflict. It’s not a story unless someone is disagreeing with someone else. Nonsense. I do think we need more stories of cooperation and caring and carrying on. We model ourselves on what we can see. We follow the examples we are shown. Or we resist them. Or, most often, we do a little of both.

What am I talking about?

Mostly I’m reminding myself, again, that life is complicated. The thoughts that my brain feeds my consciousness are only as good as the inputs my brain is getting. If most of what l I’m seeing is tedious doom then most of my thoughts will circle around that doom. Different perspectives are needed. It might be time to see the world as a cat does. Or a bird. Or a tree. Or as another human does. Preferable a human who isn’t stuck in the same spiral I am.

The divine sends messages. “We are complicated. Our lessons are complicated. Be at peace with complication. Remember to dance.”

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features two things everyone loves – pirates and pandas. I’d like to think that I was the first person to think of combining these two flavors but, after I’d finished this design I took a look online and, wow, there are a lot of other versions of the idea. I do like my version the best.

This design is available on mugs in my Zazzle store and all sort of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Colors Out of Space

Below are the second and third illustrations I did as page fillers for Midnight Echo #6. The black and white version is what appeared in the magazine. The color version are new and can found on schtuff in my stores.

That’s it for this week.

May your apocalypse be epiphany.

May you find joy in complexity.

Remember to dance.