It’s been a very interesting week. I spent most of my time playing World of Warcraft which isn’t really shocking. The day before New Year’s Eve my gesso arrived so I stretched and primed two of my canvases. I only had a 1″ paintbrush so it took me forever (sigh) but it was a really great feeling to be doing that again. Then on NYE I spent the entire afternoon painting in my room. Unfortunately, though, the house is all closed up so the smell of paint thinner was ghastly and choking. My dad sternly told me I wasn’t allowed to paint inside anymore because of the smell and I snapped at him in frustration. I had to take everything out in the garage and we had to open all the windows to air the house out. :-( It was really cold so we had to eat dinner with our winter coats on. Dad knows how much painting means to me so we discussed other options such as sectioning off part of the basement (so the smell didn’t get into the heating system) and having a window open with a fan to take the smell outside. That seemed okay to me, at least better than being totally banned. Eventually I told him they make an “odorless” paint thinner so I ordered that plus a painting medium that didn’t have paint thinner in it (and a larger gesso brush.) Hopefully that’ll take care of the problem with smell…though the ventilation is another matter. I’ll make something work though, I must.

In any case, I spent about 3-4 hours on the painting, working extremely quickly to get the base coat down. I’m pretty surprised I was able to do that much in that time, but it was going so smoothly. :-) When Mom asked me if I’d had fun despite the smell, I said “It’s the most fun I’ve had since I got back,” which nearly put me in tears. It’s so important to me and the subject matter is so dear to my heart that every strong emotion connected to this is heightened just that much more.

So I was pretty frustrated when I left for the evening, but I felt a bit better knowing I wasn’t completely out of hope. I met up with Alisha at her apartment, and she, Rachel, and I celebrated New Year’s with booze, Conan O’Brien, and Total Recall. I only had a little bit of vodka left (not enough for a mixer) so Alisha told me to just dump it in a glass of wine and have it that way. It didn’t sound like a terrific idea by any means, but I didn’t want to waste it, so I did. Not too long after that I was seeing double, which has never happened before. I calmly went to the bathroom and threw up, then came back out and felt really tired. We all went to bed after that and I awoke the next morning with a bit of a headache but it wasn’t too bad.

I drove home and played some WoW and then TR called and wanted to get together. So I met him at a Chinese restaurant and told him all about my trip. The roads were getting pretty bad, and by the time we left the restaurant, my car had a thick coating of ice over it (it was raining and then freezing) which I had to scrape off. I cautiously followed TR to his apartment (which I hadn’t seen yet.) We watched his new A Perfect Circle DVDs and then some Tool videos. I remembered that I’d left my phone out in the car so I went out to get it and saw that the roads were only getting worse, and since it was already dark out I didn’t want to risk driving back. So we watched The Exorcist and I spent the night there. In the middle of the night TR burst out laughing, which woke me up, but it was hilarious so I didn’t mind. He lives right next to the train tracks though, so the trains woke me up several times. It wasn’t very restful sleep, let’s just put it that way. The following morning we went out to breakfast together, which turned out to be really nice since I never do that. I told him more about the trip and about starting to paint again. After that he showed me a bunch of places he did vinyl lettering installations around the city (for his old job) and then I headed home again.

It was really nice to see friends again as the last few weeks have been very lonely and I’ve felt pretty cut off from socialization beyond my family. It was difficult going from being totally surrounded by devoted friends all the time to not seeing anyone besides my parents. :\ It’ll be a bit different now that Jon is back from California, but over Xmas it was pretty tough.

I took my days off from work on Monday and Tuesday this week and basically spent the entire time playing WoW. I played it so much that last night all I dreamt was me being in PVP battles. I was completely restless. sigh Also, I got Return of the King extended cut so I watched that with my parents on Monday night. Tuesday my Spaced DVDs arrived from England, so I watched some of that. I think the second disc is busticated though because I can’t get past the menu. Not sure what I’m going to do about that. sigh

The WoW servers were having some majorly funky issues last night so I quit in frustration. It’ll be nice if they’ve fixed it by today. Also, my new art supplies should be arriving today so hopefully I can paint some tonight. Yaay, painting!