To those that left all the support in my last journal, again thank you. I’m sorry I did not respond but I read every comment at least twice and the support was more than appreciated.
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I apologies for my absence here the last week. I see people have kept busy while I disappeared and I have quite a full in box to catch up on. It’s been really hectic on this side of the internet.

My mom brought me a flyer yesterday advertising a local art show this summer for professional artists. Any one can enter but only certain pictures will be picked. It is a 15 dollar entry fee weather you get in or not, and I’m thinking about trying to do something for the competition. I doubt I will get in, as I go to this art show every year and it is always awesome, but I still am thinking about trying it. I’m thinking I’ll paint a girl with a balloon or something like that.

In other news, I think I’ve gone in sane working on my novel. I’m in the beginning stages still but I have about 30 pages typed on scene ideas and characters. My next move is to write out the plot stage for stage so that I can keep things straight easier.

I want to thank all of you for the support and thoughts. Mikey took a turn for the worst this morning. I watched him passed away about an hour in a half ago. I don't think he was in any pain.

Please understand if I don't respond to the rest of th comments in this journal.

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I had the worst feeling the last few days. I’ve felt something wasn’t right. So I came home to visit with mom and dad. Maybe it was the tone of my parents’ voices when I spoke to them, but I had the feeling something was wrong.

It turns out my cat Mikey has had a stroke. This will be the third one that we know of. His first stroke happened about 3 years ago. The second was last summer. Each time it’s been like he needed to relearn things, but each time he’s also seemed happy and comfortable. Each time he has made an almost full recovery. The difference now is that he hasn’t hardly eaten his kitty kibble in the last 4 or 5 days.

Mikey is comfortable right now, he’s laying next to me with his head against my leg and purring. He is afraid to be left along right now and if he things anyone in the room is getting up he’s yelling and trying to follow, but he cant. This is breaking my heart.

We don’t have money for a lot of vet bills and if we did, I think I know what they would say. Mikey doesn’t seem uncomfortable, or like he’s in pain. Until he does, we’re going to play it by ear. If we’d listened to the vet the first time this happened he wouldn’t of lived the last three years. I keep telling myself that. It’s so hard to know what the right thing is. I can’t think….

In my attempts to get back to my drawing I’ve found that I’ve been doodling cartoons of my very obese cat, Mikey. Some of the cartoons crack my family up. They might lead to bigger better pictures. (So far, at least, one is being made.)

In other cat news, a friend of mine has a cat that is having kittens in a month. I don’t know all of the details, but we might be taking one in. Mikey is staying with my parents as he is too old to be moved somewhere, and too naturally paranoid. I don’t want him to make himself sick with stress. We almost lost him a few years ago when we moved because he stressed himself out so bad with the strain of just being in a new place and had made himself very ill. He’s healthy now, just fat. Lol

So we are slowly getting ready for a kitten. We’ve got a few name ideas set aside but figure we’ll wait and see if the kitten names it’s self.

Also, if anyone is interested, I’m slowly putting together a novel for myself and myself alone, It probably will not be sold anywhere or finished at any time soon, but if anyone is interested, I’ll post small excerpts up as I finish them. So far things are only just in planning stages and I’m working on developing the mane characters that are based highly off of my and my best friends though with different names.

P.S. Kim Harrison’s book, ‘For a Few Demons More.’ I’m now waiting to buy the paper back of her latest release ‘The Outlaw Demon Wails’ while reading Harry Potter and skimming through Jennet Evonavich’s latest, Plum Lucky. (No. I must hate books.)

First off, *Eyes bug out at all of the comments in my last journal.* You yell out that there's a art theft and it's amazing how many people come running. It's been a long time since I've gotten that many coments on a journal. Also the winner of my 20K, well no one sent in the screen shot so if anyone is still interested I might still dosomething if they snap a screen shot of either 20,100 or close to that. If not, we'll just wait till 30K or something like that. No biggy.

I've been wondering this for a long time, but if I were to start offering commissions here on line, would anyone be interested in commissioning me? It would probably be basic things like portraits at first.

I'm doing ok, but in my search for a steady job that won't ask me to change my college schedual, things are starting to get tight.

As far as a few changes go, many of you have watched my art work for a few years and may sense these changes coming. I want to be an illustrator and have used DA as a way of teaching myself what I like to see, what works in art, and not to mention it has been great to get feed back. Telling me in my work what works and what doesn't.

As it is, my gallery has become a farely eclectic fantacy place. I don't draw strictly dragons or horses or blue pocadotted flying giraphs chasing cubes with wings. The problem is that my gallery lacks what is really needed in the world and level of art I want to reach.

So as a resualt fo me spending hours, sitting on the floor of Barns and Nobel with a stack of book in the childrens' section, I've realized I need to brauden my horizons. particularly with images of children. My pixy and ladybugs [link] is hopefuly only the befinning as I work to build new pieces of my portfolio.

I just noticed that My gallery is getting close to having 20,000 page views. I'm currently pritty busy but if anyone is lucky enough to grab a screen shot of the 20K page view, I could probably arainge some line art or a little simple color work done.

In other thoughts, I've greatly admired the people who post things about how to do different things. This doesn't necessarily have to do with art. For instance I've seen journal on taking care of pet rats. or training horses. If I posted a walk through in my journal, would anyone be interested and if so, what should it be about? If you post something here I don't know about, I can try to help you find out about it or at least find other people who know and can answer questions.

(Edited art theft alert)

I was browsing the journals this evening when I saw a warning out on journal. This [link] is someone’s unicorn page with many images that I recognize from this site. If you’re on dialup it will take a long time to load.

Please check it out and let people know if the site is using an image you recognize.