It's been a weird week or so. Lots of friends and relatives having odd physical, family and/or mental problems, all at the same time. Afflictions include (but are not currently limited to): kidney stones, polio-like symptoms, a hand that suddenly doesn't work at all, and a maybe-near-nervous breakdown. Fortunately, no one I know has more than one thing afflicting them... :-/

So I've been doing a lot of the "support system" thing for my friends. I've got lots of practice with it lately, so it's an easy role to slip into, it seems.

Luna is currently perched on top of my computer case, making little whiny sounds. I think she likes the slight vibration of the hard drive under her belly. Cute, weird little thing... :-)

Professor Elemental. Crazy, man. Just crazy... :-)

Haven't updated for a while. I've been rather busy these days!

Anyway, my occasional creative muse hasn't been asleep. Here's some renders I've done over the last few months:


A render of Wonder Woman, of course. I found the costume for free on renderosity.com. There's at least 4 "Wonder Woman" costume models for Victoria 4 out there... this is probably the best one I've ever seen.


A second DC Comics character: Power Girl. The costume was done by the same modeller who did the Wonder Woman suit. I know, I did a Power Girl model a while back, but when I tried out the new suit, I also decided to redo my Power Girl model, too! :-P


Here's a third DC Comics heroine... Starfire, from the Teen Titans. The costume is also from the same modeller, but I also had fun making the character, too. Took a while to get the skin and eyes the right colors!


Here's a little steampunk-ish render I put together for a lark.


Finally, here's a render of the doomed Melnibonean hero from Michael Moorcock's fantasy novels, Elric, holding his demon blade Stormbringer. I discovered that bleaching Michael 4's skin did some pretty wonky things to the program. Any colored light would immediately color the skin. I tried to make this render more atmospheric, but any colored light would make Elric's skin the same color! I'll probably play with this particular model again in the future, see what other deviltry I can come up with... :-P

• My mother turned seventy yesterday. We had a birthday party for her last weekend... both brothers showed. It was a good visit. However, I have to collect several things to take with me next time I'm down there way (which will probably be Thanksgiving)... their Internet connection is still via phone modem, so if any upgrades will be done, they will have to come via a flash drive.
• Fall is here. We had snow over the weekend, and the farm market in Kent ended the last weekend of October. Still, I have a few things left over from the last market, including a bit of good Colby cheese from down around where I grew up and a jar of honey from near here.
• I was supposed to go to meetings for the leadership forum and the IT advisory board I'm part of this week. Both have been postponed by exactly one week. Odd, how completely different organizations have exactly the same scheduling problems.
• Work is.... work, I guess. We have more change coming in the next year or so... the company is going to establish a "corporate headquarters" in Kent, and all the offices in Portage & Summit counties will be consolidated in the new Kent building. Or that is the plan. So we get to start to make plans how this works. Meanwhile, I get to deal with the usual headaches at work. shrugs
• Still trying to be responsible. I think I'm doing a half-decent job at it. Just have to try to make sure I don't screw things up!

At a friend's suggestion, I just got done reading Stephen King's Pet Sematary. Having never read it before, nor seen the movie.

Creepy!

And as always with King novels, very well-written!

All in all, a worthwhile horror tale. Good way to ramp my way into the Halloween season!

I zipped out to Washington DC over the weekend with K to do the tourist thing. It was nice. Hot and humid, and tiring, and heat stroke-inducing, but nice.

Work's been busy. And weird.

The office was closed on Monday in observance of Independence Day. So I come in on Tuesday morning at the same time as my graphic artist, R. The two of us walk in to work talking. And he tells me "Oh yeah, I'm a father now". Which was a surprise, because he never mentioned... to ANYONE AT WORK... that his wife was expecting. For nine months. Apparently, the only reason he remembered to tell me this was because he suddenly realized that he might want some days off from work to help his wife and newborn son.

*shakes head*

We're in the middle of preparation for The Hush-Hush Project. Which is taking up quite a bit of my, and my department's, brain cells right now. While at the same time we try to keep putting out the ads, and preparing the photos, and sending the pages to press just as always. It seems more and more like juggling fire, knives and chain saws. At least the Hush-Hush Project will be over with in a few weeks, and then we'll only have to pick up whatever pieces are left over afterward. In theory.

And, at the same time, I'm apparently a major figure in my leadership class' project steering & marketing committees. When I say "major", what I mean is "the only one who actually has know-how in the graphical/advertising field". I have been led to believe that the committee will take full advantage of my abilities. We shall see.

Also, it has been like a sauna in Ohio pretty much all week. They say the weather should break tomorrow. I look forward to that. We'll see, though.

Celebrated the Fourth at cervantes143 's place, along with the Usual Suspects. Very warm, but otherwise very nice day.

Although I seem to have done something or other to my back... it's aching. I'm supposed to be doing all sorts of physical activities to participate in a "Walk the Talk" challenge at work... we're keeping track of our physical activities company-wide, to try to promote a more active, healthy lifestyle. Stupid body! You're supposed to be an active participant in this!

Stayed away from the theaters this weekend... not willing to try to fight all the Twilight teenyboppers. Instead, I've been catching up on the programs I keep track of; I'm now current on Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (good anime series... you can find it on Funimation's website or on YouTube), the Boondocks, and almost up to the season finale of Fringe.

Owwie. Back's being a pain... time for some ibuprofen, I think.

So. Yesterday was a long and hard workday. Lots of special projects to keep track of. Plus a catalog to send to one of our print shops... which no one seemed to know how to handle, so I ended up having to do detective work to discover where it was to go and how it was to be handled. Plus a long managerial meeting full of hush-hush stuff that gave me more special projects to work on.

By the time I got out of said meeting it was after 5:00 already. Because it's also the days leading up to the Fourth of July, we've got a lot of extra work crammed into the workday so we can get a day off on Monday. So I came back to my desk expecting all sorts of things that would keep me in the office until at least 5:30...

...and I received a message that I was to call my lead paginator... the guy who comes in at god-awful-early-in-the-morning to make sure the early morning papers get sent to press. So I call him... and discover that his car died the Final Death, and he has no transportation, and Oh Yeah, Boss, you'll have to come in at 2:30 AM Friday morning to cover for me.

So. I did what I had to do at work and hit the road. Got home around 6:00 PM, made some food to fill my empty stomach. Then did my best to convince myself I was actually sleepy and could fall asleep. Ended up going to bed around 9:00 PM.

And promptly got a phone call. From telemarketers. Trying to sell me a subscription to the newspaper I work for. Needless to say, i told them no, since I could theoretically wallpaper my apartment with the number of copies of the newspaper I see every day.

Got up at 1:30 AM. On the road by 2:00 AM. Got to work by 2:30 AM. The newspaper assembly process was abnormally smooth. Witnessed no ghostly presences (the office is very old and allegedly haunted, but I've yet to see any evidence of this). By the time my first scheduled help showed up at 6:00 AM, I'd already sent 172 pages to press. The publications all got to press safely. By the time the rest of my crew made it in, I'd organized things so that we'd be able to get all that extra stuff needed for the holiday weekend done, no problem.

Now I'm home. I have that feeling I used to have all the time while working night shifts in the pressroom... too tired to do much of anything, too tired to focus on much of anything, and yet too strung out to actually go to sleep. Bah. I'm going to watch the sun go down, then I'm going to crash.

Occasionally it's good to have a day like this, just so I know that I can still handle the crap when it hits the fan. Just so long as this doesn't become habit. :-P