Jobs got me busy

Oh, friends, I thought my life was busy.

I was wrong.

However.

The reduction in stress levels due to now having an income more than balances the scales.

I have very little time, but I feel overall pretty great.

I've noticed a slight increase in 'grumpiness' at certain times... often directed at Joshua for his tendency to create more mess than he cleans. I know the real reason is self-frustration at not being able to keep the place cleaner myself, even though more help would be really nice.

-------------------------------------------------

I spent my first paycheck on a birthday gift for my sister, Artrage, printer cartridges, and debts. lol

The next one will probably go to bike repair and rent. But hey, being able to pay my rent is way better than not. And better for Joshua, too. Yep.

Current Projects

Other things I have been doing lately?

Reading about Jokka and doing sketches of them because I'm going to be designing some book covers in the near future...

Designing tons of sales fliers at job #1. Job #1 is pretty fun and gives me lots of opportunities to practice minor photoediting stuff in photoshop, and is training me to do decent layout projects really FAST. Which is already helping me with other design projects. Cool!

Job #2 has me working on the quirkiest printer I've ever dealt with. Fortunately I have a long history of coaxing printers to heed my bidding. I got to design a book cover in 40 minutes this morning, basically first thing when I got in. (That's rare, most people have their covers designed before they get to me. More's the pity. I see a lot of centered text and Papyrus...) I think the client almost cried with joy when she saw it- that was pretty cool, I gotta say.

School is fun.
Taking public speaking as a (required) class. I've given two speeches now, one more to go. It's not as awful as I thought it would be, but good preparation takes longer than I would have expected. On the other hand, practicing writing speeches has given me a lot of food for thought regarding writing for comprehension.

Speaking of writing for comprehension, in Type 4 we were assigned designers to research and make a book about them. When I finished the rough draft of my essay to be the body text of said book, my teacher returned it with a ton of corrections (it was an extremely rough, draft), but said it would pass a college board as an outline for a college thesis. Which is cool. Probably because I had to extrapolate a lot. There's a lot of 'this is what he did' info available about Robert Venturi, but not a lot of 'here let me connect the dots for you and put it together in an accurate picture of his actual impact on postmodernism and architecture.' So I did that. And now I'm also illustrating it. Because I'm crazy, I guess.

My web 'class' is fun, too. I guess I abandoned a couple homework assignments, but since I'm taking the class as basically an extracurricular thing (I'm not enrolled, I'm just showing up and participating), it's letting me get most of the benefits of taking the class and basically none of the stress associated. Awesome. The first half of the course was a lot about information architecture and content strategy, which is totally relevant to my interests. And now we have progressed into coding for WordPress. Which I have seriously gotten the hang of. A bit more practice and I could seriously make a thing of it.

Oh gosh I bet there are more projects I'm working on and I just can't think of them at the moment. I try to poke at illustration work, too. I've got several variations of an illustration underway for Fishy. A few others I try to poke at when I can. I've been asked to do something for a comic anthology I hope to participate in. I did a pretty cute vday pic for a couple friends (mostly because Jorge is a marketer and is therefore aggravatingly persuasive...)


(Click for biggening)