Consumerism is a part of me. Le sigh!

Oh, right. The morning after I was right outside of Michael's (it's next to ULTA, which is bad for my pocketbook) they email me a new sales ad with storage boxes on sale. And a 40% coupon which might make their price for Golden Matte Medium cheap enough to warrant buying instead of getting from Dick Blick online. Sheesh! Guess I'll have to make another trip into town sometime before the sale is up... ;)  I may have put myself on a hold from buying art supplies unless it's a very intentional buy, but storage is still fair game when I have all kinds of stuff to contain. Right now most of it is strewn across my bedroom floor... reminds me of being a kid all over again! Yes, Mom, there's a pathway to walk at least! ;D

I never intended for my blog title of "Lootin' Shinies" to encourage me to post about things I obtain IRL. Only in WoW. Huh, did I do that subliminally to myself? Well then, at least it fits! However, I think I'm going to clean up the symbols around the title... or add more! Mwahaha!

Last night I got a free cup of coffee from Starbucks by turning in one of my empty bags from ground coffee. Starbucks is discontinuing this program and the newer bags allow you to put a star on your Starbucks card towards a free drink, which is fine because I rarely actually turn in the bags for a free coffee since I make regular coffee at home all the time anyway. But a special Starbucks drink every now and then after like 15 bags of coffee? Alright, I can jive with that. Anyhow, when I get hot coffee at Starbucks, it's always so freaking scalding hot that I let it sit awhile to avoid tongue burninating. Last night I decided to just bring it home and plop it in the fridge instead, so this morning I have effort-free cold coffee. Woohoo!

I must have listened to this song about 10 times yesterday, and woke up with it in my head. Between this, Treasure, and Daft Punk's "Get Lucky," my in-the-car radio-flipping has been pretty much the same three songs every time I go anywhere. Not that I mind - I dig high-energy, peppy songs like those!

Now, you could watch that video, or the uncensored version (complete with boobies!), orrr you could go for the adorable version with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots playing classroom instruments!

There is something about these guys jamming together that just makes me incredibly happy.

Between arting, writing here, reading more, and just generally being inspired, I feel alive. That's a weird thing to say, since obviously I'm alive if I'm typing this and all, but there's that inner glowing feeling of joy and serenity and excitement that only pops it's head up once in awhile. Thank you to whatever is causing it, because it feels pretty nice. I'm going to roll with it today and hope it sticks around for awhile.

QUICK, BLOG SOMETHING!

OH CRAP one hour left of 8/3 and I haven't blogged yet! D:  I guess that's what happens when I sleep in, then wake up and go out and about, then come home and eat and catch up with Boyfriend and then blog! haha! So, HI! :D

I battled the skinny jeans monster again today, in Kohl's, JCPenney's, and Target. Seriously, all jeans are skinny jeans now, it's just a matter of whether or not they are bootcut at the ankles. Can I just have some REGULAR jeans, please?! I am tired of losing my socks when I attempt to de-strangle my legs from these pants in the dressing room.

ULTA had a coupon for 20% off a styling tool that expired today, so I finally bought the hair dryer I have been eyeballing forever. Long ago, I decided I wanted it, then stupidly bought a travel one instead because it was cheaper. I immediately regretted it when I used it and it practically deafened me. I can't even stand to use it because it's just So. Freaking. Loud!!! But I'm hoping this New Shiny is much nicer... we shall see once I have a chance to use it.

I also got a brownie from Panera Bread because I had a free pastry on my card from my birthday!!!

Hee hee. But the best "score" of the day was at the library. *puts on nerd glasses* A whole bag of reading material to last me through the month, along with the audiobooks for the last two Hunger Games books and the Wrath of the Lich King artwork book (which I still don't know why the library bought but I am so happy they did! YAY!).

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Boing, boing, boing

This song has been floating in my brainspace since I heard it on the radio recently:

...and the video is delightful! There's something about that song that makes me unable to be in a poopy mood while it's playing. So naturally:

Today is day #2 of Effy's Blogalong in August! Weeee! If you haven't read her post today, get your butt over to her blog and read it because it's uh-may-zing.


EverQuest Next premiered at SOE Live today, and holy moly. I haven't played EverQuest in many, MANY years, but it still made me intrigued enough that I forsee myself spending many hours back in Norrath.

In other gaming news, this article is pretty sweet. It demonstrates the Kinect's ability to recognize and translate sign language. I love living in the future! There's a short video showing it's capability and I'm just continually fascinated with the ability of gaming peripherals to be used in ways that could genuinely help people.


Both yesterday and today I've been in a very floaty, loopy brainspace that's making it hard to output well in writing. Or talking. Or anything, really!

Nightnight :)

Blessed Lughnasadh! :D

I woke up this morning feeling much like this:

and then I remembered...

Flipping the calendar...

Turning the wheel...

It's August! O_O

Lunasa! Lunasa! LUNASA!!!

 

I can't say Lammas without thinking of llamas and, well, llamaaaaaas! so we're going to go with Lughnasadh, or the simplified spelling of Lunasa which I really like because it looks like luna/lunar/the moooooooon.

But really. I haven't really ever had a big "thing" with Lughnasadh. I recognize the holiday, but I don't really ever feel the holiday, as much as I'd like to. I feel excited because it's a holiday, but when they are holidays based on an agrarian society and nature and I mostly stay indoors with my luxuries of technology..? I guess that's a goal I can work on in coming years! The times I've had a vegetable garden, I felt the changing of the seasons at this time of year a little more than usual, but even then, this is known as The First Harvest. I was harvesting stuff looong before August 1st (or whenever the astronomical [astrological?] 15 degrees Leo is) here in Virginia.

So, what's a girl to do to make the holiday seem, well, holiday-y?

I have never made a loaf of bread with my own hands. I could do that. Not this year, but maybe next year. :)

I could eat freshly baked bread with local honey. If I had any local honey. Or freshly baked bread. Whomp whomp.

I already have listened to this song like a madwoman (and you should too!):

Story time! When Kellianna was making this album, she had a Kickstarter-like project and of course I backed it because, well, I was going to buy the album anyway! So now I have a signed copy that I treasure and display prominently on my bookshelf like a big ol' nerd.

I try to really only listen to this song around this time of  year. Mainly because it's one of the few songs for Lughnasadh! but also because it ends up getting stuck in my head for a week straight, and then I keep re-listening in an attempt to get it out of my head, which prolongs the duration it's stuck in my head. I guess I should have warned you of that before I told you to listen. Sorry, not sorry! ;)

An easy thing to do to celebrate, and a "duhhh!" thing at that: Get outside. Check out what nature's up to these days. I did this and came back indoors with the attitude of I LOVE ALL THE THINGS. The sky, the horses, the fields of corn and whatever the heck other crops are growing in my area, the green still lush all around here. Heck, I even love the lizard that tried to get into my garage. Shoo, leezurd, you don't belong in there! In my area of the world, it seems that butterflies are emerging and in learning to fly, they act totally drunk. Hey... Drunk Butterflies would be a cool name for a band (so says Trent Lane).

So, I tried going introspective with it. I attempted to answer the questions Joanna Devoe posted on her blog, but realized I haven't really "planted" anything to "harvest" this year. Foo. But it's a good blog post that definitely made me think, and could incorporate into my Wheel of the Year planning in the future.

A big task I could try eventually is to learn wheat weaving. I have this random memory of doing this at some point long, long ago, but I couldn't tell you where or when or how. Selena Fox has posted pictures of her wheat weaving collection on Facebook and I'm just so drawn to them.

Another activity I actually managed to do was to post some stuff to my Lughnasadh board on Pinterest. Yay, pretty pictures of pretty things! Pinterest is the new Vision Board, dontchaknow.

So, all in all, I'm still a little "meh" about this cross-quarter holiday, trying to figure out what it really means to me. Maybe I'm not supposed to know yet. Maybe I'll figure it out someday. Maybe I never will. *throws hands in the air* Who knows!

 

I think that about sums it up. Maybe this one's just about the food for me. :)

"We are sad to report the victim died from leg suffocation."

Skinny jeans.

Super skinny jeans.

Jeggings.

...all proof that I am too old for the Junior's section.

Well, maybe I could pull them off, if I had no shame. I'm skinny. But in the same way I can't tolerate high heels for the fact they ruin my feet, I can't tolerate fabric squeezing the blood out of my leg veins - although now that I write that, I wonder if skinny jeans would be a good exchange for people who need leg compression socks?

I found myself in Ross, similar to TJ Maxx and Marshall's in the way that it's the organized thrift store for new things, also known as The Treasure Hunt for Grown-up Cara Who Has Zero Patience to Go Through Thrift Store Racks Anymore. I spied a pair of jeans in my size that had a big sticker-tag down the pant leg: "WANNA BETTA BUTT? these jeans are cut to make yo ass look fantastic!" ...or something along those lines. Of course I tried those babies on! And yes, they transformed my pancake butt into Nicki Minaj butt. Amazing! But my legs. *cringe* Oh lawdy, my legs! Now, the jeans I wore into the store I consider skinny jeans. When I bought them I thought they were sooo skinny and looked weird compared to the flares and boot-legs I had been used to. But compared to the new style of skinny jeans? They may as well be 34" JNCO elephant pants (a term my mom lovingly coined JNCOs when I wanted them as a teenager!).

 vs.

 

I tried them on twice, just to be sure. I also tried on two different sizes and the legs were equally as O GAD O GAD I CAN'T FEEL MY LEGS in each. Dilemma: choose between fabulous butt and discomfort, or regular butt and jeans I can actually walk in? Well, adult-Cara thinking won out because I didn't buy them. I lamented to the dressing room attendant of this fact, saying, "I'm too old for that!" She asked how old I was. "29." "And you're still wearing Blizzard shirts." Oof.

I was wearing my "Garrosh wants YOU!" t-shirt because for some reason I've gotten into the teenage-Cara style of jeans and t-shirts as my main style and the adult-Cara mentality of not giving a crap what I look like. Okay, maybe I give a little crap. Hahaha. I don't wear clothes that are 10x too big on me anymore. I at least try to get clothes that fit me remotely well. But I can still get away with wearing clothes of a younger style, even t-shirts with cartoonish designs on them, because of how my body is shaped (um, like a stickly, curveless teenager). So this is what people talked about when they said looking young would benefit me as I grew up! I'm 29 going on 19, it seems. I wonder if, by the time 30 rolls around next year, I will dress "my age?" If those fabulous Calvin Klein dresses I tried on are any clue,... maybe. ;)

Oh, and can I just say, it's awesome to have a girl randomly comment on my gaming-related attire like that? Usually it's dudes who are like, yay Warcraft! which is awesome too, to find people in real life who like the same game as me. But to realize "girl gamers" are not as unique as discussions on the internet would make one believe is pretty freaking sweet.

Shopping, sweating, sugar, and unexpected sharing.

Yesterday after posting, I thought to myself, "self, you sound like a lazy blob." So putting my blahs out there on the intarwebs got me motivated to get off my butt and do stuff. Yay! Nothing really important though, just puttering around town window shopping (and a little actual shopping, I admit - those $2.50 family-size bags of Twizzlers at Target were not going to pass me by! I'm a glutton, too, by the way). But I left the house and walked around stores enough that my feet hurt by the end of the day, so I'd consider it a success!

It felt good to get out and about, and I realized that yes, indeed, it is summer. I bought some sodas at the Dollar Tree and then went to a store next door, and once I got back in my car to take a drink of said soda, it was hot. HOT. Ughhh, gross! I realize I've written about drinking soda both yesterday and today. Huh. It makes me feel like a soda-chugging fiend! But I really don't drink soda much, mostly as a treat here and there. Coffee and tea are my teeth-ruining vices of choice. ;) 

I have been trying to stop impulse buying, and admittedly, I've been much, much better about that (Twizzlers aside). But the silver-y stickers at the dollar store were calling me. I think stickers will forever be one of those "who care that I'm almost 30, these are SHINY" things that coerce me into exchanging money for their happy-making factor. These were packaged as stickers for your wall, but I know if they don't make it onto my walls, I will definitely use them in my art journaling. I have a "thing" for silver as a color, along with pretty much any other metallic. Shiny shiny shiny. Maybe that's why I also have a thing for nail polish..?

Another impulse buy: An ice cream treat, one of those cake-covered double-layer chocolate and vanilla doodads on a stick. *Jeff Dunham joke* On a steeeek! I devoured that thing in my car like I hadn't eaten ice cream in weeks. Oh wait, I hadn't. ;)

While I was enjoying the heck out of that delicious cold sugary goodness, a lady waved at me while I was sitting in my car. "Oh no, I made eye contact! Oh no, she's coming over here! Oh no, what if she's trying to rob me?!" screamed my brain, as I assume it would for any other sane American living in our era. I opened the door and she started on about a pamphlet she was holding regarding God and the like, and as I skimmed it and listened to her voice I asked what denomination she was from. Jehovah's Witnesses. (I had a feeling, but I wasn't about to assume.) "Oh yes, I have gone to the Kingdom Hall many times, I am familiar with your religion!," I explained. "But I am pagan so I have already chosen my religion."

The exchange was surprisingly pleasant. She asked me a couple things about my beliefs and I found them both easy and challenging to describe - easy to talk about my own practices, but challenging because paganism is so eclectic, I didn't want to say anything that made sweeping generalizations about all pagans to give her any kind of wrong ideas if she came across any pagans in the future. Her questions that struck me as interesting were: "So it's science-based?" and "Do you believe that's all there is in this life?" Now, I'm assuming she had zero interaction with, or knowledge about, pagans. Maybe she does. But if not, those being the questions someone would ask about it, I found interesting. Truth is, you could ask everyone who considers themselves pagan those questions and get a different answer each time! (For those reading this who have no idea what I'm talking about, consider "pagan" similar to "Christian" in the way that it's a term that encompasses many, many different ways of thought under a general similar idea.) She thanked me for being honest about my own beliefs (I guess many people let them babble instead of engaging in discussion? or are plain ol' rude?) which I wasn't expecting. It made me appreciate kindness and openness, even if she got back in her car and drove off thinking, "wow, that hippie girl was farkin' crazy and is totally going to hell." ...or so I imagine!

Now, part of my telling her I am pagan comes from that being the label I generally use when describing my beliefs to others. But I admit, part of it comes from someone else saying that in their experience, using the word "pagan" put a stop to the proselytizing quite quickly. Not that I wanted her to go away, but I didn't want to waste her time! Lately I have even been pondering if I should even still consider myself pagan, because I follow the writings of a whole lot of New Thought style teachers these days as well as kind of floating along the spiritual wave of incorporating whatever I come across that resonates with me into my own life philosophy. But today I learned: the quickest way to realize what your own beliefs are is to have to describe them to someone on a hot day with a melting popsicle in your hand.

Blogging Challenge!

I'm joining in with Effy Wild on her August Blogalong!

In which I tell myself, "No excuses, play like a champion!" (Related: Wedding Crashers is one of my favorite movies.) Lately I have felt like I have nothing to say, nothing interesting to warrant posting a "real blog entry" about. Pfft. Excuses. I have plenty to write about, if I would only just show up. Even if it's just word vomit, so to speak.

So I sit at home, in front of my computer, drinking a cup of slowly-cooling English breakfast tea with a spoonful of sugar and a splash of whole milk. Yup, whole milk. If I'm going to bother drinking dairy, it's going to be the good stuff. It was a toss-up between that and heavy cream, but I'll save that one for strong coffee later.

My "work area" is cluttered, dirty, and well-used. Bottles of nail polish, tiny post-its, notebooks, a bottlecap with a dragon on it from a funky huckleberry flavored soda I drank weeks ago. I had no idea huckleberry tasted so good! Or was that the sugar in the soda? Hm. I've never seen a real huckleberry, to my knowledge, but apparently they exist - so says the internet. What else? Tic tacs from Grandma, a "dust destroyer" container of compressed air that ends up getting used more to scare the cats with the hissing noise than actually cleaning computer innards. A hairbrush, a cat hairbrush, a glue stick, a rarely used headset. Happy mail from Book of Days ladies and birthday cards and a Williamsburg tourist magazine on my PC. Scissors, tape, a USB flash drive. Things. I collect things. Like a messy magnet, they come my way and plop into my daily surroundings and stay there till I get too overwhelmed and feel the need to clear space. Till then, they are little friends that remind me of who I am and what I enjoy doing. Is that a hoarder mentality? Maybe, but I do try to clean when the dust gets too bad, so maybe not.

I feel like this summer hasn't really been summer-y, to me. I have stayed inside most of the time, venturing out with my air conditioned car to air conditioned stores when need be. I've avoided getting sunburnt by not even going into the sun most of the time. I feel for those who don't have air conditioning. I'm spoiled with it. But without it, I'd be miserable. Me + heat = a big fat NOPE. I contemplate if moving out of the Tidewater, Virginia area would allow me to have better summer experiences, but I know there are pros and cons no matter where you live. Here? The pro is beauty. I can look out my window to -green-. Plants and animals surround me. Even though I look out the window to a hazy sky that screams HI, I'M HUMID!, I can still look out my window at the trees. I can still hear the birds chirping merrily. I can watch the squirrels battle each other in the backyard for yummy goodies, and the deer chomping down my sorely ignored hostas in the front yard. Sometimes I see a pair of white ducks float by and watch gleefully, knowing they're serene on top and paddling like crazy under the water. Those are the pros. The cons are many: ticks, mosquitos, humidity as mentioned, potential for sunburn, pollen of all kinds to irritate my allergies. Nature's little annoyances.

And yet, the motivation to improve on the inside of my dwelling space while the outside feels "off limits" is not striking me, either. I have a habit of buying everything I need for a project, then setting the stuff aside and being distracted by something, usually via the computer and internet. It's too easy to just sit and read and play the day away. Even things I enjoy doing end up getting forgotten and ignored. But as much as some may think that the actions of an addict, I know it's of my own choosing, not from any chemical dependence in my brainstuffs. When my body feels like crud the majority of the time, it's either sleep or plop in front of the computer. It's not that I can't do things, it's that I don't want to, because I know I will feel like crayp afterwards. And I'd rather not feel like a pile of doodoo if I can help it. Now, if I had Samantha Stevens style magic nose twitching abilities, my house would be totally spotless and picked up and remodeled and AWESOME. All that's missing is the energy. Oh, energy. I see children running around and wonder how they have so much, and where mine went. I guess that's a sign of adulthood, eh?

So, yay for being human, with all my flaws, fears, and excuses. I'm constantly working to overcome mine. How 'bout you?