First off, happy birthday to my best friend Kat!!
(whose birthday happens to fall on NYE-- making the new year steal her thunder every single darn year)

If she is reading this blog entry and it is still the 31st, she HAS to close this out RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW since there is information regarding her birthday gift in this post. Ha.
If it is currently 2011 though, then read away, Kat!

In any case, a year in review-- I feel like I should be giving this entry more thought, but (alas) it is already the last day of the year and I'm pretty pressed for time, since right after work tonight I'll be going over to Kat's place for NYE/her birthday.

I haven't traveled quite enough this year, or had any other monumental life-event-type things. Being jaded is a side effect of growing old, I guess. All the traveling done this year have been local (east coast US), but I suppose I've really enjoyed visiting some new states and cities, like Baltimore and Washington DC.
Other than that... not too exciting of a year, though a quick one (seriously, how in the world is 2010 over already?). Continuing on with my studies-- I'm exactly halfway done with getting my MA, and continuing on with tinkering with my 'art' in my spare time. Spare time that I may not have very much of, since I'll be taking three courses next semester rather than my usual two (on top of working full-time).

With 2011 my resolutions are simple: keep schoolin', keep hobbying/art-ing.
I'm tinkering with the idea of setting up an etsy shop sometime in the future, but no concrete plan of action yet on that.     

My current pet project includes trying to do a linocut. Which is much harder than I remember. A few minutes of hunching over this thing, trying to cut this thing out, and I'm sore as hell (back, arms, hands-- I'm so out of shape). Plus, trying to not cut myself was proving difficult as well. I'll go slowly with this one. 




The drawing on the linoleum looks like:

And I hope for the final print (if I ever get to print this) to look something like:

Speaking about cutting stuff, for Kat's birthday, Sean and I chipped in on her birthday present, and got her a very very rare and old book (since she is a lover of old antique-y things). It's really old and

It cost a fortune.




Actually, no, just kidding. The book is a throwaway gift. It has a cut-a-way compartment: 

Which took ages to cut...
The gift is inside-- an external portable hard drive with a case (I also put a bunch of movies and tv shows she might like on the hard drive) :

Aside from cutting projects, I recently also tried to do a painting (I think I'm on a blue background-reddish positive space kick):

For size comparison (and truer colors)  :

Happy 2011, everyone!

First off, Merry Christmas everybody! (belated)

Wow, first real snowfall of the year (just one day too late!) and it looks pretty huge. Glad to be nice and warm indoors with some cocoa by my side. It's REALLY coming down.

Weather.com reports it to be a blizzard, and that we should be getting around 5-8 inches today. Man! Hope it won't be too much of a hardship getting into the office tomorrow.

I was supposed to work this past Friday (Christmas Eve), but came down with a fever the night before that I'm still currently recovering from, so I had to call out. Since then, I've been basically living in my bed this entire time, minus the occasional bathroom/water break. Up until last night, I had very little appetite and had a banana sustain me for almost 2 days. Fever as of Friday night was 103F, Saturday (Christmas!) 99.8F, and now it's pretty normal again. Still have a crazy cough and shortage of breath though.

If it wasn't for my ipod touch and the internet over the last few days to keep me entertained in bed with plenty of reading material, I would have gone insane. One can only watch A Christmas Story so many times without going insane (in my case, I watched it zero times-- even once is too much). Kat came over to my place after work yesterday (yep, poor girl had to work on CHRISTMAS DAY) and hung out with me. There were gifts. :D Apparently miracle berry pills DO work, and do make lemons taste sweet.

But, in any case, school's done for the time being-- until the end of January-- so I have a bit of down time to catch up on things I've been putting off and to start on new(ish) projects. So yeah- I know sometimes quite a bit of time goes by between updates on this blog, but I'll make a post before the end of the year with a wrap up of what I'm thinking about for the new year.

And I finally opened my secret santa gift! I got:

And my cats got:

A new ladybug catnip dispenser toy, haha. My cats LOVE catnip.

Thanks, Santa!

So it's that time of year where I've been neglecting doodling for other things... like schoolwork. I have to give a presentation tomorrow on my Flash final project, though it's not actually due until a week later. But still, I have to have something to present by tomorrow night.

Here's what I have so far:

The swf is showing up weird here though-- it's supposed to have a yellow stage, not white: http://755.dorisyen.co.cc/5h.swf

Although the more and more I look at the white stage, the more I like it...
Can't decide.

Ah well. The next step is to add some interactive buttons to this thing by tomorrow night.

In any case, the holidays are creeping up at an incredibly fast pace, and I've yet to do any shopping for anyone, really, save for some things from etsy for coworkers. :/ So yeah... have to get on that. Need ideas though.

I signed up to participate in Reddit's Secret Santa gift exchange this year and received this message last weekend:
 

which would normally be rather creepy, coming from an internet stranger and all ('how would an internet stranger know about my cat? ...oh yeah. I blog about my kitties all the damn time).
And I received my present in the mail from my secret santa a few days ago (will probably open it this weekend)! YAAY!

This thing has 17.5k participants from 90 different countries, and I consider myself lucky that I got matched up to be a Secret Santa for someone who actually seems like a pretty cool chick (an artist/printmaker), and that my own Santa (whoever he/she is) didn't forget about me and actually sent me something! (secret santa is as much about the giiiiving as it is the receiving, after all).
I sent my giftee a jar of Winsor & Newton drawing ink, pen holder, pen nibs, and some tubes of block printmaking ink. She should have received her gift by now-- USPS tracking says that it was delivered on the 4th-- but so far no updates indicating from her on redditgifts.com that she received her stuff. Hopefully the status will change soon.

I'll report back on what I/my kitties got when I finally do open my gift!