Happy Birthday To Me

Yesterday was my birthday. The best part about it was that when I logged into Facebook, it said I had 14 new notifications! That's because Facebook reminds all of my friends that it is my birthday so they can tell me happy birthday. I felt so loved.

As has been tradition for about the last 5 years, we broke out the Christmas tree, set it up, and decorated it while eating Papa Murpheys pizza. The pizza part isn't a trdition, but the tree part is. Look at what a lovely family we were:





Do you think Matt and I look like total dorks in this picture?







This is what it looked like to our jealous neighbors who might have been spying on us.




Even grumpy ol' Miss Heart came back inside from the cold and got into the Christmas spirit- after taking a warm bath with Roxanne and changing into some Christmas panties and a dress. She'd better not even think of touching any of those wrapped presents under the tree- as you know, Miss Heart can be awfully naughty.

Dr. Sketchy's November- Bijoux Lemieux Posing for Dr. Sketchy's this month was the exotic and glamorous Bijoux Lemieux. She has posed for Sketchy's before, but is always a treat. I was more pleased with my photographs of her, than I was with my drawings- you can view both of them here. She had some extraordinary costumes and fabulous poses including the sword on the head balance, which she amazingly held for the 20 minutes pose, which I think would have given me a headache.

Above, you can see that my African friend, Traci, is enjoying herself at Dr. Sketchy's. This was her third time coming with me, and I think I've gotten her hooked! She shared her markers with me and paid my entrance fee... I realize I can't expect this from her all the time.

Above you can see the display and judging process going on. Vivienne Vavoom (in the red shirt) hosts the event. Freshie (in the navy blue) plays the tunes to inspire good drawings. Bijoux (in the skirt) is checking out the drawings of herself.

I especially enjoyed a fun little excersize we did for the first time this month. For one of the ten minute poses, we would pass our drawing to a new person every minute. By the end of the pose, ten people will have worked on one drawing. This is what the drawing I started with ended up like. I hope we do this again next month, because I really liked messing with other people's drawings.

What our baby would look like...
ok, I've waisted enough time on the computer today...

Poster Contest

Jesus is a Friend of Mine...

If you watch this video, you are guaranteed to be singing it for the rest of the day, possibly to the annoyance of others around you.

Part THREE of THREE:

Stuff that Matters:

Water For Christmas

I am a strong believer in thrift shops.
I hate being advertised to- it makes me feel like I am being duped. I hate buying new things- there is a ton of perfectly good old things out there. Packaging bugs me- I know how much it costs to print something at kinkos, so when I throw away packaging, I just mentally imagine something else I could have printed for the cost of the packaging that I just threw away.
This Christmas I got permission from everyone in my family to give only second hand, homemade or otherwise incredibly thrifty gifts. Everyone is in on it, and we agreed to all keep our gift under $5 each. This way, we are not participating in the Christmas consumer frenzy which turns consumers into the consumed, all while wasting a whole lot of money for the sake of a tradition. Typically, we would have spent $10-$15 per Christmas gift.



Here are some examples of what I have found to give so far:
For Milo, my 5 year old nephew, who I am fairly certain won’t read my blog and spoil his surprise, I am giving a toy drum and a batman padded vest. For the two items combined, I spent less the $5.

I have been wanting to buy my son, Rocket, a automatic baseball pitcher for a while now- mostly because I get tired of pitching for him, and if it were up to him, he would be hitting a ball with a bat 24 hours a day. A couple months ago, I saw one on sale for $30. I seriously considered buying, considering that they normally cost around $50. But I didn’t. Last week, at the local Goodwill, I found the exact same baseball pitcher, in like-new condition for $4.99, and even has working batteries in it! I just need to buy the balls to go with it. It is now hiding in a very very secret location, waiting for Christmas morning!!!! (DON’T tell him!!!)
I can’t feature many more thrift shop Christmas gifts on my blog, because I can’t give away any of my secrets before Christmas. But, believe me, you can find some really nice quality gifts for a fraction of the price of normal stores.
By cutting the cost of gifts for Christmas in half, I’ve freed up a lot more of the budget for more important things. If you think that recipients will be put off by receiving a used item, I suggest supplementing it with a card from Water For Christmas explaining that because you didn’t aid the commercial craze of Christmas, $5 was given to provide life saving water for one person for five years. I don’t know who would want to return that gift. That comes to a total of $10 per person, and depending on how many people you are exchanging gifts with this Christmas, you could save dozens of lives of real people. Ask yourself- is the alternative really worth it?? Also, be sure to tell people that you'd rather have “water for Christmas” too.


I became aware of charity:water through Jody, who is heading up a gigantic campaign that she is calling Water For Christmas. $20 is enough money to provide one person in a third world country water for life, so in essence, $20 saves a persons life- what $20 piece of merchandise could be as valuable as that?

This is what I am asking of you:

1. Cut the cost of your Christmas giving to friends and family by atleast half, and then supplement it with a Water for Christmas card which tells how much money was given to Water for Christmas and exactly what impact that makes on real people. Click on the photo for a larger resolution version to print or message me and I will mail you printed versions ready to give. Click on the icon to the right to make your donation and to read about this incredible organization.

2. If you live in the Colorado Springs or Denver area, come to a Christmas present wrapping party hosted by me and my mom. Incase you are not aware, my mother is a professional present wrapping artist, which means that if she wraps a gift for you, it will be the most beautiful gift you’ve ever seen. Even if it weren’t supporting a worthy cause, it would be worth forking money over for! If you’re in the Springs mark your calendar for December 20th. If you are in Denver, mark your calendar for the 22nd. We hope to wrap over 200 gifts, in exchange for donations. More detailed information about this, as well as pictures of beautiful presents, to come.

Stuff that Matters: Chapter TWO of THREE:

The Pathetic Planet

As you will notice, this is chapter two in my "stuff that matters" series. However, blogger is not very condusive to succesive blogging, as it posts the most recent post first. Thus, in order to read my posts in the intended order, you must make sure you back track and read "chapter one" first, if you have not already.

In a gigantic grand stadium, there is a gathering of galaxies. Among the hundreds of billions of galaxies gathered there, there exists one particularly freckled galaxy, and on that one galaxy, is one tiny freckle, so miniscule that we must look at it under a microscope in order to see its features. It is round, and blue, and brown and green. On one side of it gathers a peculiar breed of people….

These people are hard to understand. They are complicated and babble about things like “economics” and “politics”, but none of that is understandable. What we do know is that they are wealthy. Of all the wealth that exists, they have almost all of it. But they have just as many real needs as all the rest of the people that exists. And after they have taken care of their needs, they still have a lot of money left over. And everyone wants that money. So some of the more clever ones among them, create more needs for those people to spend their money on. They come up with gadgets and toys like toe separators and onion choppers and flying saucers. Then they take pretty pictures of them and mail them to the other people, who look at the stuff and decide if they want it or not. They record beautiful people using the beautiful stuff and then show it on televisions so that the other people can decide whether or not they want the stuff. And they spend millions of dollars to package up the stuff really fabulously, even though the other people are just going to throw away the packaging, into their trash bags that get put into a trash truck and taken to a big trash place where all the trash accumulates- billions of dollars of trash. And when the people get tired of the stuff they bought it goes to that place too- the trash pile. But inevitably, not all of it makes it to the trash pile. Some if it falls out of the trash bag, or the trash truck, and eventually ends up in a gigantic floating island of trash in the middle of the ocean, where there is also a community of billions of dollars of trash.

A special time of year is coming up. It is called Christmas. At this time of year, these people get extra excited about buying the stuff for other people. In fact every one of these people is expected to buy a thing for everyone else. They will spend 450 billion dollars buying each other really pretty stuff, so that everyone will know that everyone loves each other. Each one of these people is estimated to spend about $791 dollars, to keep this “stuff trading” tradition going. The extra thrifty ones may spend about half that much and they will be very proud of themselves for finding stuff for cheaper prices. And most likely, within a year, most of that beautiful stuff will have found its way to the ever growing trash pile, and at that point the people will start searching for new, prettier stuff.

But on that same little world, not too far away, across an ocean, past the trash island, exists another type of people. They don’t have the same wealth as other ones, but they have the same basic needs. They need what every person needs to survive- clean water. And when they don’t have clean water, they drink dirty water, because that’s all they have. But the dirty water that they drink to survive is killing them- 42,000 of them die every week after they get sick from drinking the dirty water, in fact, it’s the most common reason anyone on the planet dies. About 38,000 them are children. Children who are loved by parents, brothers and sisters, and friends. $20 is what is would cost to give one of them clean water for the rest of their life- but they don’t have it. $20 is what it would cost to save a life. But they don’t have it, so they continue to die.

These two peoples know about each other, but they can’t see each other. The ocean between them is too big, and they can’t see that far. So on one side of the world, the stuff cycle continues, and on the other side, the death cycle continues. And, I have to ask, how could a good God let this happen? How could a good God look down on this planet and see a mother holding her child as he dies, and know that she is experiencing the most excruciating pain anyone can experience, and let that happen?

More on what you can do to help this seemingly pathetic planet coming soon…