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My World

Here are a bunch of pictures, with comments. There are no nudes. I mean, I have nudes, I'm just not going to show them to you. Unless you count my cats as technically nude because they don't wear clothes. If so, there are LOTS of nudes.

The Kitties

You know how they say that the internet is mostly cat pictures and porn? So is my website, except for the porn part. Here are pictures of my cats. You can't crazy cat lady shame me. I have no cat shame.

I need a six-letter word that starts with 'f' and means 'cat.'

If I ignore her she doesn't exist.

You can't ignore me, bitch. I'm right here.

Feline literary critic:
I feel your character arc is weak and your narrative needs work.

Cutest kitten ever.

From cutest kitten ever to zonked out catnip sock addict. (Still cute, though.)

Luna showing off her interpretive dance moves. She may have had some catnip previous to this.

The paparazzi are so intrusive.

Get out of bed and feed us, you lackadaisical, indolent layabout. (I like my cats to have good vocabularies when I anthropomorphize them.)

The three cat graces.

Yeah, it was stupid to buy the cat a grand piano. The only thing she ever plays is three blind mice.

No, don't look! Just tell me if that cat on the other side of the window is checking me out.

Hairball? What hairball?

Maisie, imagining she's Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That's silly, I know, but it just fits. lol

I look down upon you from the exalted height of my superior catitude.

Does this kitten make my thighs look fat?

Luna thought Pele was her mother. Pele did not agree. Luna was not deterred.

The hell you say.

I made the cats a big screen TV by laying my tablet over the foot of the bed and putting a bird feeder video on Youtube.

Maisie if she had ever posed for Alphonse Mucha.

Digital Art

Lately, I've been working on prompt writing for AI systems, making me feel like a cool, cutting-edge person. Generally, the closest thing I am to cool is being kind of a nerdy weirdo who's done a few cool things in my life. Prompt writing got me into being obsessed with doing digital art on Midjourney because it also involved writing prompts. Midjourney is legitimately cool, unlike my occasional fake coolness. Here's some digital art I've done. I especially like the one of Karl Marx with the cat on his head. I call it Das Catital. lol. And, yes, that's Grigori Rasputin holding a kitten. I told you I was nerdy weirdo.

Bittersweet_A_haunted_lake_scene._Dark_water_with_moonlight_ful_03f6d546-04c9-4b5d-853c-a0

Bittersweet_a_woman_standing_in_a_garden._Beautiful_realistic_s_8c9abf5b-757a-4dbf-b53e-26

Bittersweet_very_stark_black_and_white_landscape_with_a_huge_ar_e367bfac-c0f1-4966-8b9e-d0

Bittersweet_tree_of_life_gustav_klimt_very_ornate_very_detailed_cf13ed9a-df79-49b0-94e8-e7

Bittersweet_tree_of_life_gustav_klimt_ornate_detailed_solid_pat_14fd7bcd-cf17-43fc-b132-4d

Bittersweet_illustration_in_the_style_of_gustav_klimt_a5cfe004-a062-46cb-a54b-07c44f9bfd65

Art

Writing takes a lot of time. (I mean good writing. I can write badly very fast. lol) So I don't have much time for art lately, but here are a few things.

This is a mosaic mural I did in our kitchen.

Here's a closer image. That's our cat, Pele. I call this mosaic "Pele dreaming a garden." Pele's gone now, so it's really cool to have her mosaic portrait in the kitchen. Although our cat Luna looks just like her, so Luna probably thinks it's a portrait of her because cats are little narcissists. lol.

The mosaic in progress. I mounted it on polycarbonate and then fixed it to the wall, with the thought we could remove it from the wall and take it with us if we ever moved, but I'm not sure that's ever going to happen. lol.

These pictures were before I put the background of three kinds of tiny yellow tiles and beads in. It took forever and involved tweezers. I love my spider web and the dangling spider in the corner.

A close up of my stone portrait of Pele. The mural has a ton of freshwater pearls, a jade medallion, chrysocolla leaves on some of the flowers, and jade cabochons. I basically was just taking anything I could find and sticking it on there.

More detail. I made the tree trunks, vines, and table legs out of electrical wire. It worked great.

Detail

I made this crown for my dad one year for Father's Day. It's made of polymer clay, lab-made gems, strings of freshwater pearls, and my grandmother's old mink collar. I thought it would be cool to make a crown.

Crown detail. I threw some Swarovski crystals on the jacquard ribbon. I love sparkle.

More Celtic knotwork designs. I love doing Celtic knotwork. The copper leaves were made by pressing laurel leaves off the bushes in our backyard into polymer clay to get the leaf vein details. I wanted the crown to have a laurel wreath around it. I really larded the crown up with jewels. This project was a real pain in the ass, but it came out cool.

Grandma's old mink collar came in handy. My cat Pagan was pissed off, though, because she loved to play with that mink.

When my grandmother died, my dad made me take a statue of Jesus that was my grandmother's because she had written on it that we shouldn't throw it out. Dad wrote my uncle's name on it and tried to tell him Grandma left it to him, but that didn't work so I got stuck with Jesus. (Who at one time had fallen, causing his head to break off. Grandma glued it back on.) Continued on next picture. -->

Five years later, I decided to rehab Jesus, and even turned him from a fair-haired European depiction of Jesus into a proper middle-eastern Jesus with my Jewish husband as inspiration. I left Grandma's writing on the base, added a note to my dad, and mailed Jesus (complete with Grandma's religious medals and plenty of Swarovskis) back to my dad for Father's Day. He loved it. When he died, I got Jesus back. Cont. -->

I promptly mailed bejeweled Jesus to my cousin with instructions that she had to keep it forever and hand it down to her daughters, since I don't have kids and Grandma's Jesus needs to be carried on to future generations. I'm confident both my grandmother and my father in the afterlife, if there is one, are finding this hysterically funny. And I'm sure Jesus has a sense of humor, too.

This is made from PMC, which is pure silver suspended in clay. You can mold it into anything you want, and after you bake it in a kiln, it ends up being .999 silver. I blackened the silver with liver of sulfur. The collar part is woven leather cord. The gems are synthetic white sapphires. I was going through a modern punk phase. lol.

This is a silver and olive freshwater pearl choker with copper-highlighted Celtic knot embossing. I made a matching Celtic cross pendant that hangs from it, but I wore the pendant separately and put it somewhere. I can't find it at the moment and I'm too lazy to spend any more time looking for it right now. lol. When I find it I'll post a picture.

Here's some closer detail on the knotwork.

This is a table I made. I didn't photograph the whole table because I didn't want to move the mail organizer off of it that is filled with stuff. The sides of the table are covered with hammered copper strips that I hammered myself on an anvil because I feel one should suffer for their art. lol. After I made it, I decided my Islamic diaper pattern looked like an argyle sock. It goes great with the mural, though, and it sits next to it. I grouted it with sparkly grout and used gold tiles in the design. The tiles haven't held up as well as glass ones do, but it looks kind of like an ancient mosaic as it gets a little beat up and the copper trim on the table gets more patinaed.

This is a hamsa blessing I made for the entranceway to our house. It's made of very complex knotwork and also incorporates a Jewish star design, Celtic cross designs, and some Islamic design patterns. I was just learning knotwork when I made this, so I broke the total design into discrete pieces. If I did another blessing like this one, I'd probably connect all the pieces together and make it even more complex. But I love it just the way it is. I made it as colorful as possible.

Detail on the painting.

More detail.

This was originally a tabletop. When we redecorated the room that it was in and got a new table, we hung this tabletop in the loft as a piece of art. It kind of has a stained glass church window vibe hanging up there.

This is a purse I embellished. I did the beadwork trim with the interlocking chain pattern. The purse has a lot of knotwork, and one of my favorite snake designs with an apple. (I have a thing for snake motifs.) I used Jacquard Lumiere paints on the purses in this gallery and on the Jesus statue, too. They're great for fabric and leather, but you can use them on ceramic and hard surfaces, too. They're very hard-wearing and they stay bright and beautiful. I've used this purse a lot over the years since I painted it and it still looks great.

The other side of the purse with more beadwork. I added cultured pearls to this beaded trim that were from a necklace my mother had when she was a teenager.

This was a cool project. Silver PMC pendant of ivy leaves on a plaque. It's hard to see in the photograph, but I pressed ivy leaves into the precious metal clay to get the leaf's veining and make them look like realistic leaves, and then I made beaded ivy leaves (one side is variegated ivy) twining down a tubular beaded "chain."

Larry

This is my husband, Larry. I love him. You probably didn't think I had a husband because I put the cat pictures first, but that's only because he's kind of a private person. So I stuck him down here at the end where nobody will look unless they manage to not get bored to death looking through the cat pics and some of my weird art projects. We've been married for 21 years. I met him in an AOL chatroom in 1998 (before all the online dating apps) and left my hometown of Buffalo, NY to move to Virginia and be with him. Which is kind of weird, because he's originally from New York, too, but the cool part. I'll let you know if it works out. lol.

This is Larry's favorite picture of himself. I don't know why. It's the only time I've ever seen him wear a cowboy hat. But hey, he does look cute, and now that I've put his favorite picture up, I can put up my favorite pictures of him.

This is my husband taking a selfie while out of sight, I, the girl from Buffalo, am actually shoveling all the snow. Later, he took a video of my shoveling to send back home to Buffalo where he expounded on the advantages of marrying sturdy peasant women with muscular thighs that can do things like shovel snow and pick cabbages. He's very funny, which is why I let him live.

Okay, I lied. I guess I have seen my husband wearing a cowboy hat more than once because here he is wearing a black one as if he has an evil twin. Hmm...maybe we'll have to explore that scenario sometime.

Remember my mentioning Larry talking about cabbages a few pictures ago? He seems to have developed an obsession. He used to bring me sweet treats, but now that we're being healthier he sends me cabbage pics from the grocery store. lol.

Bok choy is also a cabbage.

Now vegetable pictures from the store has become a standard, weird joke. Here's Larry flashing me a big portobello mushroom. Notice the woman in the background who is looking at him and obviously wondering what the heck he's doing.

Here's a yellow pepper, safely presented.

And a butternut squash. Weirdo. lol.

Broccolini is my favorite vegetable, and look at that smile. Broccolini is delicious and ten times better than broccoli. That extra ni adds so much.

Larry and Pele, the cat he got when we first met because I had a cat and he wanted his own. Cute, huh?

The sketch I made from the last photo. I call it "cat nap" because I'm a writer and we're clever that way. lol.

Larry has a huge didgeridoo. You can see it over his left shoulder by the window. I've always wanted to say that, but it's a hard phrase to work into general conversation.

I made my Jewish husband wear a Santa hat one year so I could send pictures home to my family in Buffalo wishing them a Merry Christmas. Meanwhile, we stayed in Virginia and celebrated Christmas in the Jewish tradition by eating Chinese food and going to the movies.

Larry on Mushrooms. Or maybe I was on mushrooms? IDK, exploring your conscientiousness makes for a weird night.

Coming down from the trip. (I'm joking. The pictures were put through a filter program called Deep Art, which is very cool if you want to check it out.) But I will be refusing that drug test, anyway.