Training story - sketch

      A while back, I had the opportunity to go to a very nice training that included a section on relevant case law. The teacher was amazing - super high energy, but not exhausting to introverts in the way that many high energy people can be - and actually got us excited about learning statutes and reading court decisions. At one point, they wanted to illustrate a couple cases that talked about communications privacy law, and asked for a volunteer to draw on the whiteboard at the front of class. Exactly zero people put their hands up, so, knowing I can at least draw a mean stick figure, I offered to give it a go. 

     The teacher asked for a simple house where you could see someone on the phone through a window, and then an old-fashioned phone booth down the street, and finally someone listening in on the call in the bushes nearby. Here's a reproduction of what I drew:

Silly sketch - Mooooood

      I miss making sketches; my perfectionism got in the way and made it a chore. So here, without excess fussiness or explanation, is a silly sketch. Enjoy.

Mood

      Today's sketch was supposed to be about how other people view crickets (peaceful, calming) compared to how I view them (tiny, demented insects screaming nonstop (which is disturbing to anyone listening)). After six hours of finding absolutely anything to do other than try to sketch crickets shrieking, I decided to let it go and this came out instead:

Addendum to spring

 

Spring!

Inadvertent life lessons

      My 10th grade Biology teacher, Mr. Ofsiani (more commonly called Mr. O), was one of those neat teachers that stick out in your memory. His entire classroom was covered in interesting things, from comics clipped from newspapers and hung on the walls to a skeleton hanging from the ceiling to the live iguana in the back of the room. He loved his subject and got excited about doing hands-on experiments instead of just going through the textbook and running tests. He was short, bearded, and completely bald, but he was also vibrantly engaged with life.

     The first quarter of his class was devoted to plant identification. Looking back, I'm not sure how he got this past the school board, but we essentially spent the first two and a half months of school filing into the classroom, taking roll, and then filing out again and going for walks in the woods next to the school. We did, technically, learn plant identification and I believe there was even a test at the end that gave you leaf shapes or bark pictures and had you give the name of the plant, but I learned more than just plants.

Old sketches for past coworkers

       The IT department at work has informed me that we are moving everything to a cloud-based solution. For unexamined reasons, I'm still curmudgeonly about that idea, so I took this opportunity to clean out personal stuff I have put on my work computer. Most of it is receipts, photos with work people, etc., but in the process, I ran across a folder titled "Sketches" that I'd completely forgotten about. It has photos of several ideas I'd sketched out at work on post-it notes for blog posts, but because they're about coworkers, I didn't feel right putting on the internet. Said coworkers have now moved on, and enough time has passed that I feel it's acceptable to put these online. 

     One of said coworkers was... enthusiastic. Thankfully not a morning person, so I didn't have to deal with any HELLO GOOD MORNING ISN'T LIFE GRAND nonsense right away, but once the day got underway, there was lots of energy to go around. Apparently, that wasn't just a work phenomenon - they came in one day and told me that their church had an Easter ceremony that weekend. The pastor was solemnly preaching at the lectern, and got to the point where they roll back the stone and find the tomb empty:

Crossing nice people (part 2)

 DISCLAIMER: still not a reference to anyone I know now.

Part 1

     Eventually, after having to smack enough chronic line-crossers in the face with shovels, I did figure out that I do not owe it to anyone to be that nice and accommodating. Allowing people to cross your lines, however, is only part of the problem. Another part is figuring out where your lines are and which ones you really care about if they're crossed. 

     When I was younger, I had a plethora of lines and - now to my regret - I was inconsistent in defending them. I could blame it on bad days, wavering self-esteem, changing ideals, what have you, but ultimately it was just that I didn't have very concrete lines or consistent consequences. 

Crossing nice people (part 1)

DISCLAIMER, because I know you guys: No, this is not a reference to anyone currently in my life. 

      When I was younger, I had a chronic issue with giving people 2nd, 3rd, even 154th chances. As a kid, we're taught to be nice, be forgiving, turn the other cheek, but I would let people get away with things that I really shouldn't have. For the most part, people - or at least a certain type of person - will keep pushing if you let them get away with something once, long past when it becomes obvious that pushing is leading to a problem. After all, they got away with it once, twice, a hundred and fifty-four times... why not keep going?

Working from home:

      Had a conversation with my dad yesterday about the pandemic and staying at home. He claims to be an introvert, but he requires far more social interaction than I do. Our discussion about how the work-from-home situation due the pandemic is going prompted this:

Sketches from 2019

      For stupid cat reasons, I have not slept more than an hour at a time for the last two days. I do not have the patience right now to make a full sketch, so here are two little doodles I did for a drawing class back in 2019. The first one was an assignment to play with texturing; I started at the edges but then got bored as I worked my way in, and turned it into a basket. Which of course then needs something looking in at you. Are they friendly humongous sloths that will free you from the trap you fell into, or horribly cute monsters that have come to feast on their catch? Who knows? 

Email differences

     There is a significant difference in tone on emails between assistance/ executive admins when others are copied vs when it's just the admins. The admin for a company I work with very closely is always very professional and polished when we are "officially" emailing versus when we are working something out between just the two of us. 

Sylvia Bishop sketch 2 & short story

      I should probably title these a bit differently, but it works for now....

Sylvia Bishop sketch

      I've been wanting to get back to sketching, but let's face it... life right now is pretty dang boring with the pandemic and lockdown. I'm working on some projects, but it'll be a while before they make enough progress to warrant pictures. I mentioned on a social media site that I wanted to sketch again, and someone asked if I was taking suggestions. I figured sure, why not, except they then suggested "a badass dragon!" which my sketch skills are wildly not up to.

     It jogged a memory though... Back in 2018, I started writing a story about Sylvia Bishop - a woman who could talk to plants - based rather loosely on me when I was in my 20s. She would probably run across dragons eventually, right? And her life isn't locked down and boring. Would it work to do random sketches of her while I'm busy not writing that large story out? 

Bedtime

      Over the years, I have painstakingly established a bedtime routine optimized to get my brain to shut up and go to sleep as expeditiously as possible. It involves taking a shower at a certain time, singing calming songs in said shower, having a filling dessert so I don't wake up hungry at 2am, and controlling the ambient levels of sound, light, and temperature during this process to encourage restfulness. Magnesium supplements are involved on scheduled days, and the gentleman is kind enough to support all this by keeping things quiet when it's dessert time, even if he's staying up later. 

Sketches, again

     This year's been a little odd, for obvious pandemic reasons. When October rolled around, I was bound and determined to do SOMETHING to celebrate it, so I made a couple decoration type things, including these little ghosties that I freehand sketched on some old craft foam:

I taped them to the front door along with some leaves I'd done on fall color foam, and was pretty pleased with the results. I know the gentleman doesn't get into silliness as much as I do, so I asked if he was ok with leaving them there for a bit after Halloween; he said yes and mentioned that he missed my little sketches. I kind of missed doing them too, but time and life drama hasn't been conducive to taking sketch time. I had a bit of down time this morning though, so figured I'd give it a go:

Gaslighting recovery

     If you're not familiar with the phrase gaslighting (lucky you), it's a psychological control mechanism where the controller makes the victim doubt their own perception/ memory/ judgement, so the victim comes to rely on the controller's version of reality - to their own detriment. I ran into this phrase toward the end of my first relationship, in my mid-20s, and realized I'd fallen into it. There were too many occasions to count where I'd get upset because he didn't do something he said he would - or did something he said he wouldn't - and he'd convince me I was wrong, that never happened, we never agreed to that, whatever... and now he was hurt because I came at him with false accusations. It had been going on for so long that I inevitably backed down, apologized, and internalized that I had a terrible memory.

     Eventually, he made a mistake and tried to tell me I was wrong about something I had an outside witness to; that and some other occurrences gave me the strength to get him out of my life, but I carried that now-familiar doubt of my own memory into other relationships, and fell back into the same trap. Even as I went through my BA and got solid grades while working part-time, I still believed I had a horrible memory - my brain never picked up on the doublethink there.

     I finally started questioning and rejecting that self-doubt when a couple things coincided: my gentleman has pointed out several times that I'm pretty good at keeping mental lists of things, and the concept of "mental load" became vocalized and acceptable to talk about in public (somewhat, but that's another topic). It's taken a couple years, and finishing an MS with great grades while working full-time, but I've gotten to the point where I no longer doubt my memory or interpretation of reality.

Well... much...

Classes and sketches

     Found a little specialization thing on Coursera, where I've done several French-language courses just for the fun of it, on cybersecurity. I knew next to nothing about it, and it seems to keep popping up in conversation, so I figured I'd learn a bit in all my spare time. Although it does require a fair bit of note-taking, there's also some time during the lectures where one's hands are unoccupied, a dangerous thing. Found a sketch pad and a pencil just hanging out near my desk and...

Painting

     So they've been painting the new kitchen for the past few days, and apparently they're using a special kind of applicator for a special flecked paint, which is REALLY LOUD. Again, my brain went other places... (it really did sound like something roaring).

Decency and a new kitchen

     Our work kitchen has been under renovation for the past month, and it's finally nearing completion. We've been using a meeting room as the break room, which has serious limits on what can be prepared, due to lack of running water. As the new kitchen is finished, however, one of my coworkers sent an email to the "company mother" asking her to send out an email on "helpful tips to keep our new kitchen sparkling," since there are some.... less than clean-minded folk who work here.

     One of the suggestions was "how to and how not to use the ice machine," as people would constantly pull out the ice tray on the old machine and rummage about with their bare hands, then not put it back in properly, so no more ice would be made. My mind, of course, took it in entirely a different direction:

You wouldn't think you'd have to specify this, but it might not hurt to do so....