It may or may not be as such, but I wish it anyway :p

If I weren’t painfully tied up with packing for the big move this weekend (the process of which has already begun), I might have been generous enough to make a new year GIFT for all my affiliates…but yeah didn’t happen–sorry :p

I demand that everyone congratulate me for selling my first puppy today *cheers* and heck technically I’m not even one of the sales people haha. Today was fun in the back, what little time I had to be in the back that is–boy was I singing my heart out to those little pooches. This one bulldog kept tilting its head in what was likely confusion and fear for my sanity, not much unlike the manner of reaction I got from my coworkers hahhaaha. But no it was good times, and you only WISH you could enjoy your job as much as I do ;)

I’m working on a new Lipsync video to add to my current pitiful collection of two, this one will be a bit different however…let’s just say it’s not quite as practical o.O The song, which I kept hearing on the radio and always intrigued me, I am now completely in love with, and it’s the first song of it’s…nature…to seriously stir me up. My emotion/expression/whatever the hell you want to call it that you’re gonna see in the vid once (if) it’s done is all genuine–I got so way into it you probably wouldn’t believe. I’ve just begun the editing process, I have about 5 good takes and hopefully the other few not so good takes have at least a little bit of footage I can throw into it. No fun effects this time, sorry…and actually looking at how much I’ve already said about it, I’m probably just going to update this post with it when I’m done instead of making a new one :p So be on the lookout!

I’m actually quite tired having only gotten about 3 1/2 hours of sleep last night and expending all energy at work, so I may retire for the night and pick it up tomorrow, but we’ll see ^.^

Something about my layout was really bothering me, but I knew it wasn’t the look itself, and finally I realized I just didn’t like having the entire sidebar on the side. So, as you can see, I decided to move a few of my navigation sections to the top of the content area, and I replaced the empty space with my lovely self-portrait that was previously at the bottom. For those of you with low resolutions–I apologize for the extra scrolling you’ll have to suffer, but for everyone else, I believe this will be much easier navigation for you.

Anywho, I have no real new updates for the site other than that, but I do believe I may have forgotten to introduce a couple hostees I added a while back. They are as follows:

Bad news and good news–bad news for me is I found out that because of America’s crappy economy making everyone and their sister try to get into the military, Basic Training is pretty much backed up until June, so I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. Obviously that’s good news for you because it means I’ll be around to actually do something with this site haha. It does suck that my building of a future is being delayed, but on the other hand, I DID switch jobs and am now working at a Puppy store which as you can imagine is so frickin awesome. Dude. Those little dogs are so darn cute. And my job is basically to bathe them all everyday. Seriously–you can’t do better than getting PAID to play with cute little puppies all day. I won’t disclose information about how/why I left my previous job because it was not under good terms, but basically I felt that I wasn’t the type of employee they needed anymore (a dedicated hard worker that actually CARED) and it wasn’t in my best interest to stay, so–I left. I don’t know how long I’ll be staying where I’m at since it’s supposed to be seasonal, but wish me luck in a longer term because I’d sure be heartbroken to leave.

The holidays are gonna be a bit busy for me, but I’ll try to update when I can. No promises, but I’ll try.

Thanks for dropping by, and I hope the rest of 2008 is ful of great merriment for you!!

I’m currently re-doing my photography section because of various reasons that you would find very boring for me to describe. I’ll have it back up as soon as these programs let me, but be warned that there will be a LOT less in it because I’m taking out the pictures I’m working on re-doing. I know you’re thinking “yeah right, you’re never going to re-do those gajillion photos” but I HAVE just finished 20 “yeah big whoop, 20 out of what, 400?” hey come on at least that’s SOMETHING. So when this is all fixed up, you’ll see them in Sky Scapes. They are SO way cooler now ^_^

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Alright, we’re back up, an pretty darn empty again, but here’s some of the newly renovated Sky Scapes I promised you…

You love me when you’re drunken
And forget me when you’re stoned
You love me when you haunt me
And you can’t leave me alone

You love me when you hurt me
As I’m bleeding on the ground
You love me when I’m leaving
As I’m lost and can’t be found

You love me when I’m crying
But I can’t cry anymore
You love me when I’m dying
But it’s not worth dying for

You love me when you hate me
You don’t even know how
It was only then you loved me
Don’t say you love me now

Alright well I have some good news and some bad news and news that isn’t really news so much as me rambling. The good news is I’ve finally gotten off my lazy butt and decided to do something with my life, and I’m in the process of joining the United States Air Force. I know what you’re thinking: What the heck is an artist doing joining the military? Well, there’s both simple and complex answers to that, which I would happy to divulge later in this blog when I’m not trying to hurry up before running back to work for a couple hours. I know what you’re thinking: Why are you working on Thanksgiving? There’s only a simple answer to that: Time and a half.

The bad news is…I’m in the process of joining the United States Air Force. This of course means that at some point next year, possibly sooner, possibly later, I’ll be going to Basic Training for 8 1/2 weeks, during which time I will have ZERO computer access and next to no communication. So no updates, no fixes, no ability to help out my hostees, nothing. I know what you’re thinking: DAMN YOU!

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Alright I’m back from work. We have over 40 animals boarding, holidays are always packed and quite annoying, but I’ll admit this one was easier on us because all but a couple dogs are only fed SID (once a day) rather than BID (twice a day) which means a LOT less to do in the afternoons. And only a few medications to give out. Since there’s going to be 13 baths tomorrow and 22 on Sunday (I pity the fools that work Sunday, sure glad I don’t, muahahaha), I thought I’d make things even more easier on us by getting most of the nails trimmed and out of the way today, but it proved to be a nuisance so I only did about 15. And let me tell you–tiny dogs sure know how to put up a fight. Took all I had to get some of them squirmers pinned on the groom table o.O

Anyway, back to Why the Air Force? Well, seeing as how this is my blog and I hardly ever post in it, I may as well give some back story and tell you a bit more about myself in the process…

A year ago and before, I was an entirely different person than I am now. I had no dreams or aspirations, no confidence, no social ability, and fears of everything from finding a job to learning how to drive to going to school to…well…anything to do with anything outside my own four walls. I wasn’t depressed mind you, I was just sorta stuck in this other world and couldn’t get out. I had started trying to dip my toes in the water so to speak, but I progressed so slowly that I actually WAS moving backwards.

I don’t know how I managed to live that way for so long, if you could even call it living, but over the summer it really started to take its toll on me and I knew it couldn’t stay that way forever. Something had to change, and I knew–everyone else knew too–that the only thing holding me back was me. I think I had to see myself as nothing before I decided it was finally time to become something. And in a very rapid succession, everything I never imagined possible began to be quite possible after all.

I’ve always been known to do the unexpected in a sudden and inexplicable manner, and the past few months have been no exception. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I finally got my driver’s license which was a huge step for me. I’ve also managed to break through my social barriers and have learned how to be part of the human race. I used to always hate being in groups, even if it was all people I knew, because I would always sort of sit on the side and zone out. I still have that tendency because, well let’s face it, I’m weird, but I’ve become much more outgoing and I’m not afraid to speak up and speak out no matter whom I’m with.

Another small improvement was taking on some financial responsibility. I used to be a total penny pincher and stress over trying to save as much money as possible and feel guilty every time I spent any, but now I’ve chilled out about it and treat myself (to the good stuff) from time to time because I’ve earned it. I got myself a computer desk because it was stupid for a geek like me not to have a proper workstation (and my back was suffering for it), I bought a bed frame to get me up off the floor (…my back was suffering for that too), and after ages of wanting an MP3 player to rid me of my CD-burning annoyances and obtain the ability to carry my ridiculously large music collection with me wherever I go, I bought a Zune along with a sports arm-band case for when I work out. Yes, I said work out. Which brings me back to the Air Force. Again. Well, technically I didn’t come back to it the first time, but yeah, you know what I mean.

Before last month, if you or anyone I know had EVER mentioned the idea of me being in the military, I or anyone I know would have laughed their heads off. The idea of someone like me becoming part of something like that was absolutely ludicrous, much like suggesting that Paris Hilton join the national trignometry club or [name of famous race car driver] joining a professional ballet company. When I first started telling people I was considering it, just about every one of them was completely shocked, almost to the point that they thought I was joking. In fact, if I hadn’t told my mother ahead of time “What I’m about to tell you is not a joke,” then she would have rolled her eyes at me. And when anyone asks “What on earth made you decide to do that?“, the truth almost actually is that I just woke up one morning and decided to. Not much unlike any of the other changes I’ve gone through lately.

I’ll admit that much influence has come from recently developing an addiction to watching NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Services). Even though the show is really just about solving crimes, it’s always related to military personnel and/or locations, and it really started to get me interested in the armed forces. My best friend is planning on joining the Navy when she finishes college next year, and her dad retired from Navy, so I started talking to them about it, although when I learned about being squished up on a ship, that’s when I began looking at the Air Force instead lol. They’re supposed to be the wimpiest anyway, which works good for wimpy me, haha.

I was too scared to go talk to a recruiter so the idea kinda sat around for a couple weeks going no where, when by chance I found out that a friend of mine was in the process of joining the Air Force already. He went with me the first time and the guy turned out to be cool, not all superbad and intimidating like I expected. He had me take a practice ASVAB test (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery I think is what it stands for, your score on that determines what jobs you’re eligible for or if you can even get in at all) and he was mighty impressed that I managed a 90/99. Heck I was impressed too, I’d been out of school for over 3 years and wasn’t even prepared. He talked me over the enlistment process and bits and pieces of everything else. I had never really understood the whole career aspect of it, and between that, the free schooling and housing and food, full medical coverage, ease and affordability of traveling the world, ability to retire at a young age, and several other benefits, I decided I definitely wanted to go for it and I got an application.

At home I started doing a lot of research on my own, and the more of a challenge I saw that it was going to be for me, the more I wanted to take it. The following week I turned in the application, and soon after I went to take the official ASVAB. My recruiter was certain that with my score on the practice test, I wouldn’t even need to study anything, but I bought a book anyway and read over the areas I wasn’t familiar with. Despite how tired I was the day of the test, having gone to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert the night before and staying up ridiculously late, it was a miserable afternoon and the test seemed harder than I expected, so I was worried like a maniac that I didn’t do as well as I had hoped I would. The next morning at work, I was moping around all miserable. After a couple hours, I called my recruiter when I knew he’d be in the office, and I didn’t even believe him when he told me “96“. 3 points from a perfect score. My frown turned upside down and I was screaming and crying with joy, running and jumping around all the rest of the day. It meant I qualified for any darn job I wanted.

It took a couple weeks to finally find a day to schedule me for the full medical exam at MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station), but it finally worked out to happen on Tuesday. It was a whole day of self-challenges in itself, since I had to get over fears of pissing in a cup, getting blood taken, and the oh-so-yucky “female exam” (which thankfully was more of just a quick “looking over” else I probably would have ran right out of there). Passed everything, so I’m a fully qualified applicant for just about anything in the military.

All that’s left from here is pick a job, sign the contract, and swear in. The programming jobs look really interesting to me, seeing as how I AM a programmer (yes, HTML coding counts), but for those I have to take this “EDPT” test or something or other to see if I qualify for those. I’ll be Googling that shortly, because–come on–being a hacker and cracker in the armed forces would be BAD ASS.

Jenny in the military. Hmph. Who’d have ever thunk it.

Whatever job I land will determine when I ship out for Basic. Could be January, could be June, no one can say at this point. In the meantime, I gotta start working out (bought running shoes too) and yeah, that’s ANOTHER absurd phrase to use in the same sentence with me. Jenny working out. *Shudders*. I even dropped my hours at work to part time so that I could really apply myself. It’s going to be scary, but that’s why my Zune is gonna help me get through it. Yey for 11,300+ songs. Anyways, as soon as I know a date, I’ll let you know, since that’s obviously going to have a big impact around here. I’ll have an Open Hiatus set so that people know that they may knock but no one’s home.

I’m working a couple goodies for my Music page to try and really convey what passes through my ears in a visually appealing way (cuz long lists are boring, I know), so we’ll see how that goes. Took me a week straight to fix the metadata tags on all my songs. Oh. My. Gosh. I don’t know why I’m so incredibly in love with tedious boring crap, but it brings me the greatest sense of accomplishment ever when I finally finish a task like that. I tell you what, I was so OCD about it that you would have slapped me. Heck even I slapped me I was so ridiculous. But it’s a beautiful masterpiece I tell you: Ultimate organization.

I’ve been taking a gajillion pictures but naturally have yet to do anything with them, so…sorry, lol. Lots of self portraits I hope to get up here, I feel like, for a personal website, this site isn’t very personal at all. While, yes, there’s a lot of my stuff in it, there’s not a whole lot of me. And it’s mine. So there needs to be. If you think you’ve ever seen me cocky–just wait. Oh but speaking of pictures, I realized my Lightbox script was completely BROKEN, so after a very frustrating hour of trial and error, I finally figured out what was causing it–a stupid incompatibility issue with this other Wordpress plugin that I wasn’t even using! So I chucked it out and everything’s working again and you can actually view my plethora of graphic goodies and such :p

To anyone who celebrates it, hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving! To anyone who does, eat turkeys anyway cuz they’re cool :D

HOSTEES: Try and figure out anything you might need from me BEFORE I go, because while I’m gone and have no one to man the CPanel, you’ll be completely on your own. I’ll up all the disk-space limits at that time though, so you won’t have to worry about maxing it out while I’m away and being stuck. Megan, who probably checks her site more than visitors do (hahahahaha jk), will at least be on top of my hosting server’s status, and if it’s ever down, she can find out why, yell at Dreamhost, and if necessary, e-mail you to let you know what’s up with it.

I’m still going to accept new hostees despite my inevitable span of absence, so long as they understand that they’ll need to get their site together before I leave and be able to handle themselves without me for a while. Apply at your own risk!

Hope you enjoyed it, whether you celebrated it or not :p Cheerios!

Because I am so incredibly cool, I decided to add a Self Portrait category to my Photography. At the bottom of this post you’ll find a couple teasers :)

After I’ve dropped so much weight over the past several months, I’ve become camera happy and am constantly doing photoshoots featuring…yeah…myself haha. Not only that but it’s been fun to experiment with camera angles and the macro lense, and then playing with color in Photoshop. You’ll notice I’m very fond of my eyes. They’re my best feature and no one can argue that so boom there they are for ya.

In other news, I hope ya’ll will congratulate me in successfully passing my driving test and finally getting my DRIVER’S LICENSE last Thursday, woohoo! I took a chance and did it on my birthday, and it turned out my fears and nerves were pointless because it was even easier than everyone already said it would be. And my picture even turned out awesome! It was the best birthday I’ve had in my life by the way, I got super presents and had a great dinner with my best friend and Joe’s Crab Shack, and it was a GORGEOUS day and night.

As for the future…I seriously don’t know if I’ll ever getting around to fixing my old photographs since I’m so bored with them (haha) but I can guarantee that new ones will keep coming. Traditional art–not likely anytime soon since I’ve lacked the time/energy/inspiration. And random whateverness? There’s a good possibility I’ll be adding that here and there ;)

Until next time, many hugs to my visitors! Unless you don’t like hugs in which case…too bad you’re gettin em anyway!

Finally legal, wish me a happy birthday!!

This is an incredulously joyous moment for me right now–I finally got off my lazy butt and figured out how to put video on my own site!! I mean I always knew how to do that stupid embedded Windows Media Player crap, but it was…well, stupid. I went and found a Wordpress plugin that lets you customize a flash player much like that of YouTube and stick a video right into a post. And since you already have to have flash to be able to use it anyway, I converted my videos to .swf format so it’s guaranteed they’ll work for you fortunate people, plus I managed to shrink em a bit to save on space and bandwidth (not that I NEED to save any of either, given that I have way more that I’m STILL ever gonna go through) but still keep them UBER-HIGH quality so YEY!!

You’ll find this new feature on my IllumiBritney page as well as my brand spankin new Lipsynched page. Not that you could really call the latter a “page”, so much as it just displays posts that will have videos in them, haha.

For those of you that don’t know this, a HUGE hobby of mine is lipsynching (bizarre I know) and I take great pride in my ability to look convincingly like I’m actually singing certain songs…unless of course I’m feeling goofy and just get ridiculous with it lol. Anyway, the first time I ever recorded myself exercising this amazing talent was with “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence, and now you’ll be able to comment on it, woo!

I’ve finally gotten around to making another one I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time, a song very close to my heart called “What Hurts the Most“, the Yanou Candlelight Remix sung by Cascada. I’m sure you’ve all heard the original by Rascal Flatts on the radio, and possibly even Cascada’s regular mix for it, but this version in my opinion best emotes the lyrics. I was originally going to go with the same concept I did for the first video, recording different sets of footage and stir-frying them together, but the final product bothered me immensely. Quick cuts simply do not belong in a soft/slow song.

I watched through the last take I had done, since I hadn’t done so anytime after I recorded it (just immediately sliced and diced to throw into the pot), and I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had nailed it from start to finish. I decided to toss out the other 8 or so from the project and stick with just this one, and I think it came out absolutely magnificent.

Now that I have these lovely accessories all set up for my site, you can be expecting more Lipsynchs from me :D

[EDIT 10-3-2008] - Finally went through rounds with affiliates: deleted broken links and those EVIL webbies who randomly stop linking me, left comments for anyone who allows it, and frowned when I realized the great number of those who don’t :p Lol, anyways, to all my current affies, love ya and you all are awesome!

During my comment spree I shared an almost-amusing story and I thought I’d go ahead and post it here as well since it’s relevant to the projects I’ve been handling…

Yesterday I went to my friend’s house to further our progress (and for reference sake we’ll call her Kimson, lol) so there me and Kimson were, sitting in our desk chairs in her office area, staring down the monitor for the 7th straight hour, tired, hungry, bored, frustrated, and basically starting to lose our minds. We were designing a flyer for this 1.8 million dollar home so the pressure was high, and our brains had become too fried to think up some text to go in the short blurb about it.

Now when me and Kimson get together to “work”, you have to understand that in order to keep ourselves motivated (and awake) we tend to uh…goof off a bit…and our “brainstorming” sessions often turn into complete nonsense, and the “ideas” we throw back and forth are usually spoken with “ghetto” dialect. So as we were trying to tie together some sentences about the separate family suite and about the energy-efficiency of the home, I thought of something she might say, and suddenly burst into laughter.

“What’s so funny??” she asked.
“We should put….*starts laughing more*”
“What are you laughing about??”
*tries again but laughter is the only thing coming out*
“Come on what is it?”
*regains composure momentarily, but fits of hysterics return*

After no less than 10 tries to say what it was I thought of, I gave up and typed it in on the flyer instead, while gasping for air saying “It’s…not even…that funny….”

Need a nap? I know I do.

Yeah. We’re crazy.

Anyways, I’d like to make a list of all the people that were gracious enough to inform me that my entire Photography section stopped working, likely due to a Permalink migration failure when I reinstalled Wordpress through my CPanel for easier future updates, and give you a huge thank you:

Yep, that would be NO ONE. Haha oh well, it’s all better now. But please visitors, if you ever find something on my site not working, TELL ME!!

Oh and I finally updated my movie list with all 1000+ titles that I imported from my ReelSocial profile. I wish I could paginate it and have thumbnails but they don’t offer that feature yet and there’s NO way i’m gonna do that manually, so a plain text numbered list is all you get lol.

And see, I told you I wasn’t lying…here’s snapshots of 3 projects I’ve been working on (out of several). Keep in mind that they have nothing to do with me personally, they were commissioned. I’ll have the above-mentioned flyer added here soon as well.

[EDIT 10-8-2008] - And here’s a new manipulation featuring…ME!!!