Stouffville, Ontario Canada (647) 962-1997 gwstudios@rogers.com M-F 8:30am - 2:30pm & 8:00pm - 11:00pm

Tag: life

Pay off the mortgage and the wife’s car breaks down.

greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment on Pay off the mortgage and the wife’s car breaks down.

This is the way — fuck.

Not going to catch any major breaks today I think. So no point dwelling on it. Luckily we live very close to our inlaws so we had a vehicle to borrow so I can run the kids to school, and my spouse can do her fundraiser donut pick-up for her high school. No car pooling for her today. It’s been a bit of a production, this whole week has been mental. Glad it’s nearly done. I’ve got roughly ten to fifteen pages left on my report, and all three girls have Girl Guides camp this weekend so the dog & I have the run of the house to ourselves! W00t-w00t!

Movies, movies, movies… Dog walks, wood splitting, pizza and more movies! Yeah baby. It’s going to be awesome for the first four to six hours. Then it’ll be too quiet, and I’ll miss the lot of them. Oh well. I do have a social event tonight that I am driving a few friends to. I’ll be long gone, home, and asleep in bed before they even think about heading home, so I’m not on the hook to return folks to their homes, like I did after game seven of the world series.

Anyway, aside from car trouble, what else is new around here? I’ve had a couple of high view days, numbers that would have really gotten my heart going back before I had that 1,500+ day in July. I had a good many double digit views a few times over the last couple of weeks. Still do not know what they are attracted to though. For the best. I’m a weak man, I know even if I didn’t intend to I would start to pander. This way I’m just free wheeling like myself, numbers be damned! Ha. Authenticity. Yeah – that’s the ticket!

I’m not sure if at the end of this calendar year I should celebrate just how well my numbers are, or mourn the fact that this could very well be the peak, and from here on out it’ll just be an anomaly I cannot for the life of me manage to repeat without manipulation, or bots, or some form of trickery.

I’d be happy if I could get myself to start writing more short fiction once again. I have to remind myself that it was, in all honesty, actually fun to do. Using those brain muscles, and giving my typing thumbs a real work out every single day. I’ve just lost my desire for dialogue is all – no biggie.

Have a grand Ole Friday, and an even better weekend if you can. Ciao Bella!

And coming in straight out of left field is…

greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment on And coming in straight out of left field is…

A ruptured right ear drum, complete with a bloody, oozing mass from deep inside the ear. Wonderful way to wake up before 6:00am today. So far looks like no associated pain. Waiting for a potential fever, or any other signs of illness. Whee!

Today is Friday, of all days, so here’s hoping you all get those weekend plans you wanted. Whether that means they are cancelled, or actually moving ahead this time, is up to you. Your fantasy, your choice. Stay bundled up in bed in a blanket watching whatever you like with a cup of something in your hand, or out crushing it in a bar with bottle service, you enjoy yourselves.

This week has been a pretty good one as far as Summer Break 2023 is concerned. Visited a mine where we found all sorts of Amethyst crystals, went to the lake for a brief 3 day stay, swam in the lake, hot tubbed, went tubing with the kids on what ended up being the windiest and roughest day on the lake. Shipped off the wooden moose on Monday, and got that out of my shop after months of looking at it every time I went in there. Kids even went to the zoo twice this week. We need to pace ourselves a little better. Or else we will be run ragged by the end of week nine. Will need to nap all day the first week the kids go back to school if we keep this up!

In other news, I have started book #15 on my 12 book a year challenge. I was disappointed- again, by Mo Hayder. **SPOILERS AHEAD** The Treatment was well written, well paced, but the ending contradicts the first pages of chapter one, so I don’t know if she had written herself into a corner, or used the wrong name/character in the end to be the big bad, but it was a let down. I don’t understand why said big bad would go about trying to expose their own misdeeds. As it made no sense for the early iteration of the character, nor for the big bad version of that character at the end of the book. I don’t think that a very late stage admission of schizophrenia solves the problem either. And a split personality was not mentioned, nor played upon as a theme either. Sad. The Ritual was a bit anti climactic in the end also, so 0 for 2. Shame she’s dead, the author that is. There were loose ends I’d want to see tied off, but no such luck now.

But what do I know about writing eh? Not much. She made a living at it, had the book made in to what I can only assume was either a sterilized white wash, or a horrendous book accurate car crash of SA trauma by child predators of both sexes. Either way, no thanks. Not watching that.

Haven’t picked up my children’s book to finalize my last handful of drawings yet. I can feel the weight of the languishing project on the back of my shoulders. I fear it will take another 8 full hours or more to complete those last few pages. I need to break that into smaller chunks and try thinking of it as just a page at a time. Story is written, edited and finalized. Just being a slow hand with the artwork. I’ll post the pdf here once it’s done for all six of you to see. Ha. Or maybe I will add it, and Book 2 to my amazon kindle unlimited library, and see if I can sell one copy of each book to be consistent. Though I did scratch that itch when I wrote and published the first book of collected short stories. Far more people followed along and read them here for free than have done so on Kindle Unlimited. Go figure.

The Remote. An exercise in patience and general futility.

greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment on The Remote. An exercise in patience and general futility.

It started when the battery cover became loose and would just slip off dropping both batteries, constantly. Then the button for the number seven (7) stopped working completely. Then my eldest spilled an entire glass of juice over the remote and it initially went dead for 24 hours, but I saved it via a bowl of rice. Now we have an uneasy truce where it kinda sorta works most of the time. But otherwise you may have to over shoot and come back to the channel you want, or go at it via the guide (which is my preferred method) but that only lasts as long as the guide button remains, the selection button keeps working, and the page up-page down buttons unbusted. Soon to be yet another item that needs replacing with only an option to upgrade to a more expensive version. Our communications bills only ever go up, never down.

Lord help you if you try to use the thing if you aren’t exactly in line with the receiver. You can click, fuss and shout all you want. Hope you like sit ups to move where the signal wants to be. Or sit off to one side to remain in the signal path indefinitely. First world problems, if that. More an annoyance.

A lovely warm Saturday to look forward to. We have some movies to cuddle up to this afternoon. I’d like to sneak out to get some polish on my shelf unit, but it could wait until Monday if it had too. We’ll see how everything shakes out.

Eighty six bottles of beer on the wall, eighty six bottles of beer…

greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment on Eighty six bottles of beer on the wall, eighty six bottles of beer…

You take one down and pass it around now everyone’s in on the felony charge. Misery loves Company, but the inmate game loves a rat.

Thursday! Can you believe it? What a week this day has been huh? Wow. So they’re gonna drop mask mandates every where eh? Including in the entirely unvaccinated kindergarten class rooms and day care centers. Whose bright fucking idea was this? Gods be damned idiots run this province I tell you. Idiots, of a low class caliber. So now what? I gotta make my wife and kids sleep outside because my immune system isn’t up to snuff? Odds being what they are, I’ll have to be the one to move into my own private bubble, with the med’s, and the chronic illness, and the lingering, compounding sickness it brings with it. Triple vaxed or not, I don’t want COVID-19 in this house, for any members of my family. What’s a guy to do, eh? Sweet Cheese & Rice! Motherfucker.

So I had ordered the new Spiderman movie, originally slated to be out on March 15th, now bumped back to April 12th. My new book arrives next week, so it’s been a book less couple weeks. I tried to start another book, but my hearts not in it, so it’ll have to wait until I am done with John Scalzi’s new monster book. Looking forward to it, don’t cha know!

Almost Friday, then the weekend, and then kids are home bound for the March Break week. I forsee some zoo trips, skating, tobogganing (if we hit a temp trough, and not a heat wave!) We got out to play ball hockey in the driveway on Sunday, which was pretty awesome. Fourteen degrees and sunny! Sweaters only! So nice. Then we had a wind storm, then freezing rain, then hail, then snow. Holding around zero, with tilts up into the single digit positive numbers by 3:00pm some days. Clocks also leap forward on Sunday, so we have that to look forward too – again.

Anyone out there want to share some writing tips? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

Seventy three feet below the surface,

greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment on Seventy three feet below the surface,

And i’m beginning to feel a lot like Hans Moleman. Short, shrivelled, thick coke bottle glasses and desperately in need of a kick to the balls to remain relevant in today’s media environment. Or was it a football to the testes that garnered him the win during the short film contest? It’s been so long that I forget. A lone “Ha-ha!” Booms out from the distance, as Nelson Mandela Muntz skitters back into obscurity behind a dumpster somewhere.

Yeah, so…. busy week I guess. A long feeling short week coming off the holiday Monday. Looks like Ukraine has a shit tonne of bad to look towards for the foreseeable future. That’s just going to be a horrific mess no matter what. You know what, I don’t really know enough to make any real qualitative statements, so I’ll just leave it alone, from a policy, or action view point. Just to say, I feel for Ukraine and its people. I hope they prevail, and that most of their people make it out the otherside alive and well. But, God-Damn!, what a mess.

Looking like white out conditions here. The starting temperature was minus twelve, plus whatever the wind chill factor is because she’s a tad blowy out there fellas. It’s fucken WIMDY, as the memes would say. Sad wind blown fox on a field of white .jpeg – as it were. It usually doesn’t snow once the degrees drop that low, but again, not a meteorologist. Studied weather, climate and ecology a little in university, just enough to be a useful idiot I suppose. I had a broad but shallow base to my post secondary education, excluding the Print & Web Graphic Design stuff. That was laser focused and very intensive. But that was from two separate Art Schools and not the University I attended as well, so – Nyah!

The last couple weeks have been busy with work, so my brain hasn’t occupied the creative writing space in a number of days. Next week won’t be any better in that front as I have the first of three big spring reports coming, and those will soak up some serious brain power, focus and wrist strength. Although, you know I’ll say that, and then will desperately need a break from it all and will write something. So who knows any more. I don’t think this second book will reach sixty thousand words, but if I hit forty thousand then cumulatively I’ll have done 100,000 which is like a short-ish full sized novel. Which is cool.

Strike that from the bucket list. Check! Just need to write and record at least one song, produce a comic book of 32-64 pages in length, and I will have a good chunk of my childhood dream projects completed. I’m a working artist, I own my own business, I sculpt reasonably well, I have made tables and wood working projects. Went to art school, but also did Soc & Business in university, traveled across Europe, got married, have kids, had a lovely old fat dopey mutt (until he passed away at 12 yrs old) and have worked on major campaigns for multiple big breweries, and have helped launch smaller micro breweries too. Do I wish we were rich beyond measure, sure, but we’re also not doing too badly either. Working for myself affords me the time to be with my kids, instead of leaving the house at 6:00am and getting home after 8:00pm, and being a grumpy shit. I do school drop offs and pick ups, I’m here for sick days and appointments. I fix lunches and breakfasts. I brush teeth and hair. I can do bath times and bed time stories. It’s rather lovely when you compare it to my days before kids.

The last frigid Saturday of January 2022.

greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment on The last frigid Saturday of January 2022.

We are all nearly one full month into the year now. Heading into an equally cold February, but with paid work on the docket, and a healthy family – thus far.  Had a morning with cartoons and helping to dress the kids dolls in new clothes. Attempting to trouble shoot a doll whose eyes no longer open when it sits up, and making everyone scrambled eggs for breakfast.

Doing a lots of nothing, looking at memes and thinking about how to approach some new work that came in yesterday afternoon. I have all the ground work laid out, templates, tables and colour palette, and a new design based off of their supplied brand style guide. It’s going to be a real looker when done. I just need to give it a good think so that I reads properly and I don’t have to adjust it a tonne later on. Think it through now, will save a lot on revisions later. Is my thinking anyway. Doesn’t always play out as planned, but I think I can do a little extra on this one.

As a freelancer I work as the projects come in, so my days vary wildly in regards to how busy I am. When it rains it pours, and then I get streaks of quiet time in between. Allows me to do alot with my kids that I wouldn’t have been able to do in prior roles. All the better for me!

Come on springtime sunshine, green grass, warmth, and flowers.